2018 Last Chance Qualifier and North American Championship

NA Nationals 2018 Review

Sorry for the late post. I wanted to write about a lot of things so I wanted to take my time in writing it out. Nationals weekend was an absolute blast. It was great to see and meet many of the big and familiar names of the community.

LCQ Day

It was definitely a sleep deprived weekend. 😕 I carpooled with Jonathan Chen and we had to wake up super early to get there on Friday for the LCQ. I thought I would've taken naps that day, but I was just talking with peeps and playstesting most of the time.

I was super bummed that some friends couldn't qualify at the LCQ. I didn't get to follow much of the tournament since I was play testing most of that day. But congrats to the Top 4 for the LCQ.

Thanks to Arvin Bernardo, Azul Besares, Zach Burrell, Vince Angeles, and that one guy (geez I keep on forgetting his name 😕) for playstesting with me. That was just very unfortunate that I had a pair up with Azul and Zach in Swiss rounds. 😕 The playstesting helped me so much that I changed a lot of my deck to increase its pace. I was originally going to run my deck from the SoCal Crystal Cup and have the standard Earth/wind XI package as my backup deck. I didn't want to fully switch decks, so I tweaked it towards the middle of the two with the help of Arvin and Dan Nguyen and kept my "Shereena Special" according to Greg Cole. Thanks to David Nguyen for lending me two cards for my deck. I wish I had more time to playtest against certain matchups, but it was pretty late. So I just had to go with my past experience from my older deck version with those matchups (which barely helps since I lost most of those matches too. 😑)

Day 1

Opus VII Prerelease Promo Kit Display


Opus VII Poster Board


Entry Swag
The entry swag included a FF Blue lanyard for our badge, a foil Marche promo, a Light and Dark Elemental Dice set, and the NA Nationals 2018 playmat.



Err... So I don't remember much of the specifics for each Swiss round. There were 8 rounds total with 90 participants. I just remembered going over my wins and losses. It was W-W-L-L-W-W-L-W.

Swiss Intermission
There was a big break before that irked quite a lot of people. It didn't help that the breaks got prolonged three times. The issue was double checking the records by inputting all the 7 rounds manually in Hobby Japan's software. It was the X-3 people that found this intermission the most stressful since we were all on the bubble for tie breakers. This included me, Arvin Bernardo, and Patrick Lagdamen.

So to appease the crowd, they gave out prizes (Japanese foil cards and Play Arts Kai) for FF trivia questions and Janken, which was Rock Paper Scissors. The Janken was a big highlight during the break and was super fun.

Photo of standings after Round 7


Final Swiss Standings


I placed 22nd and was very happy to have made Day 2. I achieved what I wanted for the tournament from this and secured a Crystal Cup Sephiroth box. 😏 I was super bummed that Arvin Bernardo bubbled out. Makes me not like the bye given to the undefeated. 😒 But I don't like the byes in this tournament at all for other reasons, which I've already provided my feedback on it to RB.

Announcements for Top. I'm unsure which top announcement this was for. Lol

Day 1 Night Time
After the tourney, a lot of us ate dinner at a nearby pizza and sub joint. When we got back to the hotel room, some others joined in our room to hang and playtest. I made my first matchup's deck for Day 2 (Aaron Wiseman) and got to get in 4 games with it. I didn't feel confident enough to beat it, so I was already mentally preparing for side events. Lol.

Day 2
I'm happy to have gotten as far as I did, which was Top 16. My bracket was pretty unfortunate that I had to go up against Matt Okimoto. Even if I did beat him, I'd still have to go up against Nathan Perez, who got 2nd place btw, but I always lose to him. 😕 It was a bitter sweet ending for me in my match with Matt though. No matter the outcome, I was happy with whoever won. I, along with many others in the community, wanted Matt to go to Worlds. I expected to lose and be content with it, but it was how I lost that I'm kicking myself over. I uhh, made some bad calls and mistakes that costed me the 3rd game. Had I not done those, it probably could've been either's game. Whoops. 😕 But I'm still really happy with how unexpectedly well I did for this tournament. It's a big jump from last year's Nationals, where I was placed 120th. 😕 Thanks to everyone that sent their congrats to me. 😊

And congrats to the Top 8 that are going to Worlds! Super hype! I think we have a solid team this year. 😊

Top 8 Prizing. Look at that sweet hoodie! And Leather Moogles! 😍


Side Events

It was announced that Day 2 would be open to public for side events. It was a very late announcement that SE should avoid to do in the future. People that could've possibly traveled for this most likely couldn't from the late notice. But I'm really glad that side events was open to the public. Day 2 was packed with all the side events going off.

There was a draft table and was the only entry fee event ($15), for obvious reasons that we had to purchase our packs. I participated in that. The participants got to choose the packs to draft with. We voted for x2 Opus V and x2 Opus VI. I won the first round for two Opus 6 packs and got wrecked after that. Too bad too. They gave out Crystal Cup boxes for Round 2 and 3. Winner also got a Cloud Plush. There may have been more prizes, but I didn't see them. There was also the Light and Dark Elemental Dice as a participation prize. That was sweet and made my money's worth, on top of the cards I pulled.

The classic Wolves Den was up and running with a bunch of different achievements for some prizing. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to participate in this. I signed up for the draft right after my Day 2 match ended and the Wolves Den ended before the draft could. Congrats to Arvin with his Most Wins at 32. His favorite number for the weekend. 😜



The free constructed play was a great addition to the side events. For people that just wanted to jam in some regular games with the community and win some prizes on top of that, this was the event for them. It's also very different from Wolves Den because of the lack of the achievements people are usually aiming towards in Wolves Den. There's a less chance of that chaotic deck matchup and just playing a regular deck.

Gunslinger
Uhh, tbh I don't know who was Gunslinging. It was a guy from Hobby Japan, I think. Lol. I signed up for this, but the event ended so I couldn't play him. He stopped right when it was my turn. 😒

Survey
There was another quick survey to fill out this year for a foil Wol promo card. From what I remember, it asked what do I want to see as a promo card, sleeves, and storage box art, FF category-wise. Obviously, I chose FF Tactics for all of them. 😊

Merch Store
Keychains! This was the best seller for the weekend. It was $20 for 5 random keychains. Everybody was trading to get the characters they wanted. I managed the get the ones I really wanted and more.


Day 2 KBBQ Dinner
After the event was over, there was a lot of us the went for an AYCE KBBQ dinner. It was fun. I just didn't like the restaurant we were at since we had to reserve a table in small groups, which scattered us all over the restaurant. So we didn't really get to hang with the out of state people so much. We took a group photo outside and that was fun. What bad timing that Joey Cimino and Richard Alexander stepped aside to get a beer from the bar before we called everyone out for the photo. 😞




Feedback
- Byes. They suck. Get rid of them. We're doing Nationals to get the best of the best, not the best from a previous tournament where the skill levels varied drastically. Everyone at Nationals should compete fairly. That's how we determine to get the best of the best. You basically have to see Nationals as who we're going to get to represent us at Worlds. I don't want a lesser skilled player to be on the Worlds team when there were better candidates for that position. They're not gonna get byes at Worlds. They shouldn't get byes here at Nationals.

- Judges and judging. I personally didn't have any issues with judges and their rulings, but I've heard some issues from other players. First off, it's a big improvement from last year. But we still need a judge program to fine-tune for consistency in some rulings. Many say they the judges were too lenient.

- Deck checks and errors. I had a deck check in my Swiss round with Kody Snodgras and passed. Others weren't so lucky. Some were minor, like not fully writing out the name of a card (e.g. Chaos and Chaos, Walker of the Wheel). Others were big errors with illegal decks (e.g. missing cards). I'm not too sure on the ruling for specific cases, but I've heard that there were some that should've gotten a game loss, but didn't. They just fixed the deck and continued. This isn't consistent with previous Crystal Cup tournaments that gave game losses for deck errors. This feedback is basically for the judges again. Go for consistency in your rulings, maybe even a bit more stricter with the deck checks.

- Arvin gets credit for this one: make multiple Wolves Den events throughout the day with a small timeframe, like an hour or two. The prizes are super lit for the achievements. But a lot of the achievements takes the whole Wolves Den event to secure that achievement, which means you're stuck doing Wolves Den all day until it's over and you don't have time anymore to participate in any other events.

- Gunslinger: Add another Gunslinger to accommodate the big attendance numbers. Also, enforce physically waiting in line to play in Gunslinger. There was just a written list, so people would sign up and do another event. This makes it really unfair for those that physically wait in line for Gunslinger and for those that want to participate in the other events but can't due to limited space. All the side events were filled and there's always a line for Wolves Den. It's unfair to take one's spot in another event when you're supposed to wait for the Gunslinger event you signed up for.

- Suggestions for participants: call the judge when you notice anything odd in your matches. Apparently, we almost had a cheater go to Worlds. I definitely would've not been happy if this had happened. It was only late in the tournament when he was first called out by a judge, so there wasn't any proof or backings from previous matches for a disqualification.

- Suggestion for The Break Zone: Does anyone on the Break Zone streams ever look up? You might have noticed what I'm talking about or any one who has seen the setup. Basically, the screen of the camera is visible, possibly to the player on that side. I'm unsure if one could fully see the cam from that angle. Still, it makes me wonder if anyone has ever used it to peek. But to be safe, The Break Zone should either turn the screen off or just cover the screen. And of course, second stream setup for downtime during streams. 😊 But no rush, build the funds and means to do that. 

- Add more qualifications to Nats. Scale the qualifications based on attendance. It was super hard to qualify in SoCal with our numbers in tourneys, compared to smaller tourneys in other regions. There was still a good amount of highly skilled players in SoCal that didn't qualify, but they would have if the tourneys were scaled based on attendance. I'm sure this happened in other regions with a big community.

Can I just say how awesome this community is!? I'm glad that a lot of the people in this community are friends and not just acquaintances in a card game! Canada people were super nice. Chocobo Joe is just as nice and friendly as Arvin said. And he's selling his Worlds playmat to me. 😏 Jk. It was cool to room with the Chocobros. I like watching their podcasts. Didn't get to talk much with the RVA Returners much, but there's next time and online. 😊 It was nice to see the NorCal and Central Cal people again. I was a bit bummed that I was anti-social this weekend. I'm thinking it was the lack of sleep. I hope to connect with more people at the next big event. FFTCG Fan Fest anyone? 😉