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congrats on the strong finish

Relm looks amazing this set!

Missed the Belgemine + Number 128 combination which is potentially incredibly strong. It's a variable 3 card combo that clear everything under 7k and 2 11k+ forwards.

Great video. Agreed with almost everything said here. Being the one knocked out with the major case of getting rule sharked felt like doggo feces. Otherwise my experience at Nats was nothing short of magical. I came in hoping to dodge the big names, for survival's sake....and that def didnt happen. Looking back though, I couldnt be more proud to fight the gods of FFTCG, including you, and be able to come out and represent NA. It was awesome meeting you and I hope we can play again next year. -D

Had the pleasure of playing on the other side of the table in Chicago this year and was rooting for you this past weekend because of the strong and positive impression you left on me. Keep your head up and I look forward to seeing you tear through next season. I consider you one of the goats to look up to. Thanks for the enlightening insights on your match replays!

Keep your head up man, you're still one of the best players in the world. It's still always a flex beating KP in any tournament. Variance sucks, but at this point it's just a numbers game for you. You'll get there.

People need to realize metas come and go... We had almost exclusively control metas for 17 sets? I am not an aggro player, and I hate aggro, but its important to have these cycles in the game.

If having to rely on RNG EX burst or having an interaction in your opening hand is the only way to counter then we might as well play Yugioh with more then half the deck filled with hand traps.

God bless you KP. Won't be needing to go to Corn Hub tonight

Looks like I'm silly and Hythlo doesn't force all 4 cards into play, also Canada didn't play with new set so should've excluded it

So I figured I'd hop in a bit on this - probably some non-zero bit of this is a reaction to me talking about the cards here. First off - I really hope I never gave the impression that people shouldn't play what they want to or enjoy or anything of that nature. The goal of competitive games is to win, you pick the deck that you think gives the best chance to do that. I think that's great and important. Players play and break cards, card designers have to make cards that are fun and interesting. As far as the two decks in question - I honestly just have huge problems with them as long term health of the game things. I'll start with Chaos - the counterplay is to burst. Hence everyone running Lev 6. But that means that there's a huge centralizing force now to playing a ton of ex bursts in a deck and we start to approach a different problem. Right now, if you aren't doing something "unfair", you need to play between 18-25 bursts in most decks. Basically, 40% of your deck needs to have the EX symbol in the corner. But they only print maybe 10 cards with EX per set. So now, when a set releases with 110 main deck cards, less than 10% of them are getting 40% of the deck slots. And then, I think the problem is exacerbated in two deck format. I guess you can do Water and Lightning but only one deck gets to play Lev 6 and Chu. I dunno, I just think propping the format on a decision 4 years ago to put EX in the corner of a 6 CP summon is scary. And then the question is... what power creeps the deck? Better interaction is probably the healthy way, but as noted, they're trying to turn off interaction with cards like Bucaboo and Clione. What about power creeping for better aggro? Is it literally just going to be a Force check format where the opponent plays the thing and if you don't have Amat or MD or something after a mulligan, you lose? And then, as you mentioned, Wind literally has no answer to this. I'm not going to pretend mono-wind has ever been the healthiest deck to have in the format but I don't think it really even has bad cards it can play to survive something like this. Hand rip 2 and 4 damage is just... not really leading to a game state that any of Wind's mechanics work in. And clearly, the designers want mono-wind to have some sort of metagame share or Adelle wouldn't have been printed this set. Ice is slightly better off just due to the nature of discard being a weird natural counter to this and the ability to kill faster but I don't think 2 CP Shiva helps very much, if at all. You can stop a single damage from Chaos or two damage from Raijin/Fujin over two turns... at the cost of 2 cards in hand after discarding 2. So you go to a 1 card hand, with 3 forwards on field. And the bursts aren't much better since they only delay the problem. As for Hythlo, I cannot disagree more on Clione - it turns off so much of the cards that interact with the deck it's wild. Ryan had to Shantotto LB a Relm to have a chance to interact with Hythlo. Or you have to Amat Relm, at which point, she's basically Teodor and then they still need to find removal for Hythlo + Emet. I think there's an argument it's worse against Chaos or Ice Discard because it still uses every card in hand but I think turning off the main way that people interact is brutal. On top of that, outside of exactly Dragon which... I really don't think is a great answer, lots of on board interaction folds to the ping that Emet does. Refia for instance can't profitably interact outside of spinning Emet on play. I guess the final point is that I think Refia is still probably the same as she ever was - the deck initially spawned as a way to combat the ludicrous aggro meta in Japan at times - they'd do things like dump the entire hand going first to play 3 backups, then expect to burst or draw Refia and win the game. I think Bartz probably leaves the deck as a card that doesn't interact favorably into the new aggro but I think that the lack of results in Portland was a pilot discrepancy for the most part - until Mike or Air play and fail to convert, I think the deck is more than fine and should be considered one of the premiere control decks of the format. Great video and fun listen. Love hearing your thoughts.

I seem to always call the Warrior of Darkness people Kingsglaive 😅

isnt alisaie bu alr all scion gain haste???

Lunafreya hitting a 6CP Leviathan does scare me 😅😅😅 expecially with how Water can stack the top deck 😅

At 18:37, both of you mention that the cuchu stops tidus, how does that work? I don't fully understand the rules of that.

I think Astrologian will help Lunafreya or even Leviathan that puts a card on top of your deck. You can have either Thordan/Lev6 in your hand or on the top 3 of your deck and set up a Lunafreya for max value. Venat seems really cool in a Famfrit deck where you you can sack it and pay the crystal making it a 1 for 2 kind of removal with the ceiling being you get to search a card also if you made an other crystal somehow. A Viking Crystal deck will be born from this I'm almost sure. Regarding the new Y'shtola there's an Alisaie lightning backup that gives all your Scions haste so the dream is there ;)

Chat was harsh, but this match was a blast to cast! Always love seeing the breakdowns you do and getting some insight into your thought processes. Good run last weekend, KP!

The breakdown of the matches is really appreciated and I really enjoyed this video :) Don't let chat bother you you did great!

Wonderful video KP! That game on stream was absolute fire. Between this and the finals (and the other matches too), the second day stream was incredibly fun to watch. Anyway tournament was a blast and I’m super grateful to have had a chance to play with you. See you around! (this is your 8th round opponent, Danny)

Great video as always bruv 🙌

Hey! New player to the game here :), thanks for the deck tech! I was just wondering if you still think this deck is excellent for the meta as OP 22 has evolved, I only saw one version of this in the t16 of the Florida Materia cup. (I know this deck might be quite challenging for a new player :), I don't mind taking the time to learn, I just want to make sure that my time will be worth it in the end if I commit to learning to pilot this haha)

Congrats on your win! Definitely got a new sub once I saw the livestream of the finals :)

Really nice event and great explanation on the meta and your own deck :) Pretty sure this deck is going to get hit in some way by bans and all because it needs to. There's so much decks you can't play because of this kind of speed. Knight is all in and they don't play much backups so they can tire themselves out. This can play backups and have really potent plays off them. I think this is why knights didn't made it to top 8 is because they don't play tempo. WoL7 played like this is a slight cut on the aggro side to make place for top class tempo. I think you could consider this mid-range but in my mind mid-range means you are more reactive and playing threats that can adapt to the board state. This is more proactive thus making it more aggro in my mind. Nevertheless, this is really insightful and I thank you for that! Congratz again on the first place :D

Very insightful! I’d love to listen to your thoughts on the mono water and mono earth lists you had in mind near the top of your video. We only ended up with a little bit of exposure to a single mono water list and a single mono earth list on stream.

Yo,! Bringing out old school Chapin stuff, my man!

good hair cut

I did not mention this in the video, but I would consider playing Larsa now over Aria, as I didn't take much damage this event and Edea/Cid are a bit more important since the mirror exists now

Thanks for the upload! really good listen/watch and to understand the deck and your choices!

Great listen - interesting to hear your thoughts on the format. We definitely came to some similar conclusions about the format but in very different ways. Maybe it's that I don't favor playing aggro decks but my mentality in this event was that Aggro and Refia were going to dominate. I was under no assumptions that Aggro would be dead or that anyone would even think that. In fact, it's why I favored Retainer Storm over Mono-Wind - Retainers (and to a lesser extent Shinryu) are the only thing that give cast focused decks a fighting chance against a fast aggressive deck like this one. I mentioned it at the event but I had a pure Ice/Lightning brew of GigaWoL at one point that I was happy with in almost every way... except for the fact it couldn't search WoL. I think there are solutions but that deck has won games without even resolving WoL. Sometimes, Axis would just be an 8 CP WoL. I definitely agree - one of the best (and most obnoxious things) about this deck is that sometimes it just wants to win. I've literally gone Giga hitting Axis and Greg BE and milled light WoL for game after my opponent hit me with a MD. I also don't know that I agree on playing fewer backups. Much like how you'd develop forwards via Leo, I usually have found that the best GigaWoL hit is a single forward that draws a card and a backup that draws a card. On the next turn, you can play a third backup while still pressuring the opponent and keeping a massive hand for the push once they exhaust themselves trying to deal with a 9k and a beefy forward you barely paid for in the first place. Might just be a playstyle difference but 3 and 4 backups feel amazing in the deck, and I find that it actually top decks extremely well on 3 backups, just due to the density of extremely strong cards. I'll be honest, this deck scares me, in part because I think it kind of counters itself. The Cid Randell and Remedi situate themselves very well as mirror breakers. I'm amazed that the deck almost played through it in the mirror. (As an aside, small ruling but I'd be amazed if you couldn't overload the Ixion - you only need a single lightning card in hand to overload it so unless you didn't have the CP or only had a single backup, it's very hard to not overload it). Even in the situation where you get Amaterasu'd, the opponent is only trading even and a deck capable of playing this aggressive is more than happy to punch you in the face with a 9k while it reloads the hand and finds the resources to push for lethal. Congrats again - hopefully I get a chance to see you in Orlando top cut. :D

Great listen. Always good to hear from two of the best players in the game.

Solid break down boys, love the content! I've been shopping Leo myself for a while but it just didn't feel there yet (have been really focused towards 2 color and having a little too much fun with scions build than > alph > ali > y'sh > x) lines. Easily the most fun deck in the meta, glad to see some other folks giving it the attention it deserves. Appreciate the content and insight =)

Great content! Here for it. Deck has been super strong after testing it. Really enjoy playing it 😅

Congrats on the great finish in SD - super enjoyable games. Really interesting to hear your thoughts on the deck and how it played - especially given that the deck’s performance was pretty unquestionable. Casting Mist Dragon on the first Syldra vs the Summoner recurring it is such a hard call to make and I definitely had to make that choice a few times in top cut. Ultimately, I decided that the 2 CP refund on the break zone removal as well as making Summoner a 4 CP do-nothing backup was *probably* better long term assuming you would ever draw another Syldra which… it’s mono water, the whole deck is draw power. There’s also definitely a world where you go for it and high roll, which means the opponent is on 2 Syldra, the Echidna and only 8 backups so your chance of getting setup is extremely stunted - I just didn’t think that world was as likely as just… trying to outgrind the deck making bad investments into a Summoner that didn’t work. Great listen, can’t wait to hear more!