Opus IX Competitive Meta Report Release - September 2nd

9/2/2019

Hello Mysidians, welcome back to another Meta Report. We haven’t seen too many changes since our last report, but it is nice to keep up with the numbers and observe if any decks are on the rise. Just a reminder for these articles, we only look at tournaments with 17+ players, or five rounds of swiss. I also don’t have information on tournaments that aren’t posted, so always assume this is not the full picture. Alright, lets get into it.

If you prefer to watch rather than read, then check out The Mysidia Post YouTube channel and the video version of this article! Otherwise continue on for some stats.

The Data

Mono Wind has seen a whopping 34 Top Cut appearances this Opus. Water/Wind is second with 30, and Mono Ice is third with 25. Ice/Fire has seen a big rise since the last report with +10 appearances. Otherwise, other elements have increased steadily, or not at all. We are seeing less decks appear that aren’t in the top 4 appearances.

Since the last report, Wind/Water has won two more tournaments. Mono Ice is the same at 5. Ice/Fire has increased by 1, and we have seen first time wins from Mono Water, Ice/Earth Flan, and Ice/Water.

Interesting Decks

We have seen some pretty interesting decks be successful these last few weeks, so I decided to highlight a few in this week’s report.

1. Japanese Rainbow Deck (ガチャ)
We first saw this deck come third at the Fukuoka Ice Crystal Cup. Unfortunately, I do not read Japanese, so I do not know the player’s name nor the deck name. We then saw it ran by two players at Game Cafe LQ in Independence, Missouri. The players used the same list, except for two changes, they took out an Aria from the original list and swapped it for a second Echo, and then changed out the 5 CP Sephiroth for a Nidhogg.

Original List
Modified List

The deck itself is very interesting, and I won’t go into a full deck tech on it but I will put some key takeaways below:

All the Backups are pseudo-high cost, as they are search, draw, or recur. This enables multiple things.
- One, you are able to go through your deck quickly to set up Backups and colour fix
- Two, Fusoya will hold a ton of value and almost always hit for 7k or higher. There is only one 2 CP card in the deck (Chaos) and you will often search for it to ensure it isn’t in your deck. The average cost in this deck is 4.92 (Credit FFDecks).
The deck runs, 32 Forwards, enabling Golbez to hit his ability more often. When you set up using this deck, you will cycle through a lot of your Backups quickly, making it more likely to hit a Forward.
The deck also has plenty of ETB’s to abuse with Rinoa, and to act as the decks “Summons” as needed.

2. Mono Lightning All-Forwards (by Brady Whaler)
We saw this deck at the Center Stage LQ in Pittsburg, California. This All-Forwards Gilgamesh deck made a concession to include 3 Bahamut ZERO’s not that I fault him. Otherwise, it is Mono Lightning, and runs 3 of every Gilgamesh card (15 Gilgamesh’s total). This enabled Gilgamesh 1-129C’s Special, Strongest Sword. With 15 copies, you also help Gilgamesh 7-088L become very large, and you can always grab more Gilgamesh’s when he breaks. Otherwise, the deck featured a lot of haste, and a lot of ways to dull Forwards. Clearly this very aggressive strategy must have caught some players off guard!

3. Christopher Mattiske’s Spice King (Australia Fire CC Winner)
If you haven’t heard of Christopher Mattiske, he is a World’s competitor, a rulings genius, and very competent deck builder. You can check out his YouTube channel here.

Christopher was able to work his way through an 87-player tournament with an Ice/Water Vikings deck, modified to counter the meta. He did a great job, and it was interesting to see that the top cut had 2 Wind/Water decks in it and 3 Mono Wind lists. The deck was streamlined with efficient Backups, even running Strago (8-119C) just to enable Locke. Snow and Emperor Gestahl rounded out the Backup line enabling bypass and removal to get through any deck. The deck also ran Chocobo (4-063C) to provide haste. The biggest surprise from the list was White Mage 3-136C, specifically how the card works. If you read the card you might think it only gets damage reduction in a party, but the White Mage always takes 3000 less damage. This means it cannot die to Fina/Valefor or most Wind ping damage, and that if it attacks in a party, whatever it attacked with cannot take damage from a Valefor. Pair this with efficient removal and dulling from the Backup Snow, and you have a 1 CP attacker that is quite difficult to remove.

Closing Thoughts

That’s it for this report. Even though there seems to be a big three of dominant decks, I think a lot of different decks are viable right now. Ice/Fire, Earth/Wind, Mono Water are all still strong decks. Mono Lightning has a lot of potential, and as Mattiske showed, if you put effort into something and you know your matchups you can win with your own creation. So good luck at your locals and LQ’s, and we will see you next time!

-Alex Scott

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