Fun Deck Fridays!

How It Started

During the Opus 6 season, I was desperately trying to qualify for Nationals. This led me to bounce around from virtually every meta deck: Mono Water, Earth, Earth/Wind, Scions, Turbo Discard, and Ice/Water Vikings. Sadly, I was a win away from top cuts at the LCQ, but still ended my season on a high note. I came home with a bit of apathy with the game and found it very hard to be incentivized to go to locals on Fridays. It eventually came down to only going if I knew either of my teammates would go. I would ask John every Thursday night or Friday, “You going?” We would usually give each other the same answer, “Yeah, but I don’t have a deck ready.” “Me neither.” I was pretty burnt out on playing the meta decks and I expressed that to John. He, being a good friend and sensing what I needed, proposed an idea: “How about I build you a deck and you build me one, and we’ll roll with that?”

I was very intrigued by the idea. I accepted it as a deckbuilding challenge. I knew who would be showing up so I decided to build an anti-meta deck that would beat them. The soft rule we had at the time was that we had to use cards that weren’t seen too often. I ended up building him a Water/Light deck featuring Ashe/Rasler, Opus 1 Cecil, Ultima the High Seraph, and Hraesvlgr. Ashe/Rasler is a very strong combo that was not seen in many Mono Water decks at the time, but is very difficult to deal with. Ultima is an interesting board clear for Water in case they fall behind and Hraesvlgr is a huge body that can recycle any character, or prevent recursion by wiping your opponent’s break zone. Opus 1 Cecil is an inside joke I have with John. He ended up facing Mono Lightning and Earth/Wind, so he perfectly countered Al-Cid combos with Ashe and Cecil. Then he countered recursion with Hraesvlgr against Earth/Wind. He went undefeated that night.

He built me an Earth/Fire deck featuring Dark Lord and Shantotto because of my love for the underrated fire card. It took me much longer to figure out the most optimal way to play the deck, so I ended up with only one win that night.

The Philosophy and Benefits Behind It All

John has a saying in this game: “Every card is good if you build around it.” I have the same philosophy, so it’s no wonder I wanted to work with him and be his teammate. These Fun Deck Fridays are a testament to that philosophy because we take cards that are not seen often and try to shine them in their best light. A big problem with this community and TCG communities in general are that they are overly critical and negative of every card. Unless something is blatantly powerful like Dadaluma or Wol, people will say the card is terrible. By doing this, John and I hope people can change that mindset even by a little. Oftentimes after the night is done people will tell us that they thought the card we built around was unplayable or bad, but now they see the card is playable.

Full disclosure, I am not a good deckbuilder. However, using Fun Fridays as a deckbuilding exercise, I have improved greatly. It teaches you how to build around a card and make the best shell possible for you to win against decks in the meta. You still need to create a powerful deck that wins, but you are building around a card that may not be on the highest power level. So, when you do finally build a serious deck, you already have the right mindset and process to do so. This game is also still in its infancy. I believe there are only a few good deckbuilders in the world. Even some of the decks that win Crystal Cups, Masters, Opens, Nationals, etc., I don’t believe those are the best versions of some decks. Many of those players win because they are good players and you always see them at the top anyway.

Many people consider themselves bad deckbuilders and don’t even try because they figure they shouldn’t waste their time when they can just wait to copy a good builder’s list. However, you just end up holding back yourself and the game as a whole when you fall into that mindset. Opus 6 was out for a long time before Ice/Water Vikings was unleashed. A Flandit deck won the LCQ over an Earth EX deck. That should be enough proof that there is lots of room to be creative and make great builds. You simply need to put the thought in and get lots of testing and feedback.

Aside from the building aspect, Fun Deck Fridays also teaches you how to play blindly. You are given the deck you’re going to play and you pretty much have to try to figure out what the deck’s win condition is and how you’ll reach it by seeing the first five cards and deciding whether to mulligan or not. This is actually great practice for Sealed and Draft environments because while limited formats are still quite simple in terms of building, most players still don’t think about how to play their deck through.

As each week passed on, we decided to up the ante even more by adding alternate win conditions that have to be fulfilled along with winning the game itself. One week featured Opus 6 Shuyin and the alternate win condition was to steal your opponent’s forward with Shuyin, then not let it return to your opponent by means of a card like Delita, Kefka, or Famfrit. While it may seem a bit disrespectful to your opponent that you are trying to do other shenanigans during the game, we usually try to make the condition something very possible with the featured card. Most people have met us with enthusiasm more than anything else. This exercise teaches us how to play in a different way and how to strategize the game plan to reach our desired goal.

Moving Forward

Since we first began, many other have started to join in on our Fun Fridays. The store we play at pretty much just gives a participation prize to everyone, so there is barely an incentive to try to win. It makes it tough for veteran players to even want to show up. Now many players show up each week to participate in the deck swaps, see what wacky ideas we have, or even just to try and spoil our fun. No matter the reason, it has revitalized our local scene, which I accept as a wonderful side effect. It’s great to hear feedback from other players telling us we should have been playing a certain card we might have missed.

It’s also been great for John and me as players. John has always been known as a mad scientist-type; he brought very out-of-the-box decks that played unusual cards, but might not work too well. I’ve always been the type that likes using the best cards and best decks. We share the philosophy of never ruling cards out though, so he learned to use the meta cards from me and I learned to have fun and not be burnt out on the game or meta from his refreshing ideas.

This all came to fruition in the last local circuit event where we both made the Championship. I played an Ice/Water list that I was very proud of after getting confidence from deckswap deckbuilding practice. I ended up losing to John in the Top 8, but I realized I had come a long way since LCQ and even further than when I first started playing. He played a Water deck pretty similar to the one I built him on that first night of swapping. He almost made a finals appearance, but fell a bit short in the semifinals because of a missed lethal. It showed that he wasn’t accustomed to using some of these meta cards and couldn’t find the deeper lines of play possible with them.

For any people that want to try this in their own local community, I highly recommend it. You can learn a lot of fundamentals from it if you take it seriously. However, the greatest part of it is that it’s fun! Be creative and let your ideas run wild!

If you need some ideas to get you started, here are some of the decks we built: Water/Light, Fire/Earth Shantotto, Shuyin, Sabin/Shock Trooper, Archfiends, Manikins, Mono Wind Sin, Mono Wind Bartz, The Royal Family, Ice/Earth Monster Tax, Ice/Water FF6, and the list goes on!

If you need some alternate win conditions: Sin to win, defeat someone with Rapid Fire Bartz special, play keep-away with your Shuyin, Fusoya yourself 6 times, activate 5 backups 3 times in a turn, etc..!

Have fun!