Small Horse Brigade

Man, it's been a while since I've written a blog post, eh? I reckon it's about time I let you in on some of the happenings that have, well, happened lately.

A couple of weeks back saw the pre releases of both Furious Fists for Pokemon and Duelist Alliance for Yu-Gi-Oh!. Oddly enough, I didn't end up going to any of them but I assume that everyone had a good time anyway. I know Warren did at least, given that he felt the need to message me pictures of the full art Lucario-EX and M Lucario-EX that he got in the pre release (I still haven't forgiven him). Rather, I was off playing My Little Pony CCG in order to practice for the first Queensland regionals that happened today. I'd like to say that I did well, and while that's true for the tournament that was on the 10th I'm afraid that I can't say the same for regionals, only just managing to get 11th our of 12 players. See picture above for an accurate description of my face.

Well, not really. I demonstrated the Cardhousian spirit and shrugged off my losses, recognising some things I could have done better and realising that sometimes Lady Luck just wants to flip you the bird. After all, not only is it pointless to get upset over a card game but I also felt like I gave a good account of myself in the games I lost.

Anywho, I'll give you a bit of a run down as to my four games of the day. I was playing an Orange/Purple troublemaker deck which focuses on blocking the problems from being solved by putting high powered troublemakers in front of them such as Queen Chrysalis, Ahuizotl and Red Dragon. Essentially, the idea is to be an anti-meta deck and slow down faster decks which normally rely on lower powered friends. Basically, MLP's version of a control deck.

My first game was against a Pinkie Pie Pokey Pony/Friend Swarm deck, which unfortunately for me resulted in a loss. I tend to attribute this to poor luck on my part, as the swarms of cheap friends could have been dealt with if I'd managed to draw any of my higher powered troublemakers (in a 45 card deck with 12 troublemakers of power 5 or higher, you'd think this would happen). Pokey Pony compounded this with her effect, which allows her to dismiss one of my friends if she confronts a problem and retires one of her own friends. My friends are generally expensive and losing them is a bit harder on me than most decks, especially losing cards like Spring Forward who is the answer to swarm tactics. So a loss to me, but it was an interesting deck to face.

Second game was against a mostly stock standard White/Yellow theme deck, which was generally hamstrung by not drawing any yellow friends with no play requirements. This one went my way, fairly convincingly.

Third game was against a very aggressive Blue/White deck, which also seemed to negate the point of my deck by simply ignoring the frightening impact of my villains and just playing even more friends. I simply couldn't slow it down enough, which lead to another loss.

The last game was against what is considered to be one of the nastiest decks around, Fluttershy Friend to Animals/Critter Swarm. Now this game was probably my favourite of the day, as even though I lost it was a very close match and could easily have gone my way. Luck played a major factor here, as he managed to defeat my Queen Chrysalis early in the game for a hefty 3 point boost. To decide the game however was something of a misjudgement on my part, as while I managed to stall him from winning a turn earlier with a well timed Plum Tuckered Out I made an error in the following turn. When moving cards around to try and scrape together enough points to bring the game back in my favour, I opted to move a Bright Bulb to the opposite problem instead of a Night Watch to the problem we were both focussed on. My reasoning was that he would try for the unguarded points and Bright Bulb could send a friend home to prevent that from happening, but unfortunately it turned out that having Night Watch would have won me the game. Benefit of hindsight, I guess (and finding out that the second card Night Watch would've allowed me to flip in the face off was a Red Dragon didn't help).

Now that the tournament is done, would I change anything? I can't say that I would, as I feel the deck works quite fine as is. However, with the upcoming releases of Celestial Solstice (MLP's version of the fat pack) and The Crystal Games booster set in October/November that could very easily change. A new villain, King Sombra will be in the new set, which may be something to swap out either Chrysalis or the Red Dragons for, not to mention a whole host of new orange and purple friends that may work better than the ones I already have. Who knows what the future will hold?

At the moment though, I'm almost finished building my fighting deck for Pokemon. Lucario happens to be my favourite pokemon, and with the new Lucario-EX as well as several new powerful cards for fighting types the deck should serve me well. I have practically all the cards I need except one, so I might even be able to play the deck tomorrow with a single substitute.

I mean, look at that card! Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to play it? Of course not!

The Pokemon Professor, Troy