Removed From Game: Brian Ng

Last month was the first tournament in Season 5 of our circuit, Trials of the Zodiac Braves. Many of our local players were attending the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest in Las Vegas that week, but 11 still came out to play in our first tournament of the Opus VII meta! If you missed it, you can check out our write-up of that event here.

The Zodiac Braves' very own Brian Ng was victorious that day playing a Mono Earth deck. Brian is easily one of the top players in the area, coming in first at both the Season 1 and Season 2 championships as well as consistently topping and/or winning several of the tournaments along the way. For this first edition of Removed From Game, we sat down with Brian to get his thoughts on the deck, Opus VII, and the new meta! You can check out his winning deck list below while reading his thoughts on it.

Hi Brian. Congratulations on winning the first Trial of Season 5! Let's talk a little bit about the deck you played and how the day went. This was the first local tournament where Opus VII was legal. The new cards your deck featured were Noctis, Yuri, and Asmodai. How did they perform for you throughout the day?

Thanks. Asmodai was super good. He allowed me to stabilize a lot of boards much earlier than I previously could with Opus 5 Cecil and was very rarely a bad draw. He’s a constant threat throughout the game, and in particular is a very solid answer to Yuri, Zemus, or any other forward that dulls to use an ability. You just let the ability activate once, then on your turn, remove it with Asmodai. It’s also worth noting you can remove forwards that are difficult to deal with in combat, like Yda, Dadaluma, etc. And also combos with Wol to remove an Illua in main phase two.

Overall Noctis was pretty underwhelming in this deck.  I think Noctis really shines when you are able to damage yourself to trigger his auto ability when you want to, and this deck only has Cecil's special.  He can situationally be pretty good since this deck allows him to get much bigger with Enna Kros and Ingus, but it’s not the same power level if you have Fusoya, or Cactuars to damage yourself more or less whenever you choose to.  Still worth the slots, but not amazing if you can’t trigger his ability on your terms.

Yuri…Personally, I feel like he’s very strong on paper, but I felt like Opus 2 Fusoya is just better for this deck.  But Yuri was super hyped up by some (maybe just one...) of our local players to be an auto include in any mono deck and even some dual-element decks, so I decided to give him a shot.  After playing it for a few rounds, it felt pretty terrible playing Yuri in the deck.  The main issue is that Yuri slows down the deck a lot, and this deck isn’t very fast to begin with.  So, trying to utilize Yuri’s abilities to gain value basically turned every game into a grind fest where you’re behind, and you’re using a card that is on the slower side to generate value to grind yourself back into the game.  Towards the later stages of the day, I treated him like a 4 for 8k beater, and mostly ignored the text on his card since it made progressing my board state super awkward.  I wasn’t getting enough value from the dull/freeze most of the time, and I didn’t have any games where I could sit back and draw cards from his ability.  The other 2 abilities he had weren’t really relevant for me that day.  One notable exception was against Scions.  Being able to lock down Yda multiple turns in a row is back breaking.  So overall, I think Yuri is really strong if you draw him late when you’re already set up and trying to end the game, but if you see him early, just throw him out on the board and let him eat some removal for you.  If I play the deck again, I’d much rather play a different Light/Dark card in this deck.

Can you talk us through your basic game plan of the deck? What do you want to get down early, how many backups do you want to have to run things smoothly, what do you save your summons for, etc...?

The way I generally play Earth is to set up early, take 1-3 points of damage, and then stabilize the board with Dadaluma, Cecil, or Asmodai. Sometimes you can drop an Ingus and Raubahn on 2 or 3 backups to swing the board, but it is pretty expensive if you try to pull it off early without an Enna Kros out.

This deck really wants to setup backups early; 3 backups is the number you want to shoot for early, but you eventually want to hit 4 or 5 backups. You have a lot of 5 cost forwards you want to be playing to stabilize early boards, so getting up to 3 backups is a must to play them efficiently. You’ll generally find yourself burning through your hand if you can’t get at least 3 backups. Ideally you’ll spend 2-3 turns getting to 3 backups, then either putting a forward down to slow down how much damage you take, or continue building if your opponent isn’t pressuring you.

With Ingus and Enna Kros, your forwards are usually able to push through for damage. New cards like Noctis generally allow you to push more aggressively than I would have been comfortable with last Opus. Also, having more options to remove dull forwards and build your board is very powerful to combo with Noctis. So, for example, if you get into a situation where you are trading damage, Noctis can potentially remove 1 forward with his auto ability, and on your turn you can play a Cecil or Asmodai to remove a second.

Usually I am not very proactive with using summons in Mono Earth, mostly because there aren’t that many, but also because you don’t always need to use the summons to remove forwards. Instead, using them reactively to your opponent’s combat tricks is very potent and in my experience is more likely to swing the board state.

A lot of Earth decks have been trying out using Yojimbo; is it a card you considered for this deck or are thinking about using in a future iteration of it?

I’m not a fan of Yojimbo overall. Taking damage from Yojimbo is almost never beneficial to you which is why I don’t value the card very highly. Opus 4 Hecatoncheir is amazing because of the cost, and I don’t think an EX (and +1k) is worth the extra 2CP. Maybe you want 6x Hecatoncheir fight effects in a deck somewhere? If you build around Opus 7 Galuf, you could give it a try, but I think you’d rather just put in some other cards.

Personally I chose to play Titan over Yojimbo in this deck because it allows for much higher value for 1CP more. One example in particular that pops up regularly is that if you are behind on board, say you have an 8k forward against an ice player that has 7k Setzer, Locke, and 6k Serah. If the Ice player team attacks Setzer and Locke, and you choose not to block. If I hit an EX on damage, I would typically want to choose to kill Locke. So if we compare simple scenarios:

Scenario 1: If I hit a Titan on EX, Locke dies, and my 8k is now a 10k, so the Serah won’t attack.

Scenario 2: If i hit a Yojimbo EX instead of Titan, if I choose to kill Locke, my 8k gets buffed to 11k but has taken 7k damage. So the Serah can attack and can now threaten to trade with my forward. So my choice might be to instead kill the Serah with the EX Yojimbo so I don’t have to risk taking an extra point of damage or trading out my forward. The decision would typically depend on how much damage I’ve taken and how many cards both players have in hand. But most of the time, I think I would generally lean towards killing Serah with Yojimbo. Which, in my mind, is the less optimal forward to remove, but is most likely better to keep my board state in tact and stay lower on damage.

As a regular player in this area, we're used to seeing several other Earth variants from you such as Earth/Wind, Earth/Ice, and the Mono Earth EX Burst deck. How do you think this deck compares to those options?

I think in previous Opus sets, Mono Earth wasn’t very viable because it’s a pretty slow deck, and because it generally struggled to interact with the board without having forwards out. So, if you were behind on board, it was particularly difficult to get back on board to stabilize. I think adding Noctis and Asmodai helps Mono Earth a lot since you can have a few more ways to interact with the board and also allow you to play a bit more aggressively since you have more removal for the swing back. Specifically building the deck with Fusoya should help quite a bit with the Mono Water matchup, which in the past was very difficult because you really had no way to deal with the double Cagnazzo board wipe. And you have Noctis to provide a consistent way to get extra value out of each Fusoya use, so there’s additional value outside having a way to kill Cagnazzo.

I think Earth in general is in a very good place. Most Earth variants look like they have a good build that could be viable to play in a tournament. Though, I’m pretty sure Earth/Wind is still the best out of all the options if you’re looking for the best competitive deck. The deck really only gets Galdes from this Opus, but Galdes is an amazing replacement for The Emperor/Shadow Lord.

Earth/Ice also looks very strong, either using Flans to ramp or focusing on killing dull forwards + the Opus 7 Snow backup. You also can run Jessie to have searchers for Sephiroth specials, or Genesis when you don’t need Sephiroth. Earth/Water is also interesting; some people on the East Coast have been playing with Earth/Water Fusoya, and it looks pretty strong. I think I like the Mono Earth Fusoya deck more, but I might give the Earth/Water deck a try.

Earth/Fire looks better than ever. I’ve been playing a Krile deck at Friday weeklies that has been doing really well. The deck has some quirks, but it’s been a lot of fun to play.  Scions are still strong, so Earth/Lightning will always have that build as an option. I’m not sure how many cards will really make the cut for the Scions list. The list is already super tight.

Did you face any tough matchups throughout the day?

The entire day was a struggle, to be honest. Adding Yuri to the deck made the deck really slow, so a lot of matches felt very uncomfortable even when I was in an advantaged position.

In particular, my match against Blue [local player Bryan Lue] playing Mono Lightning was rough. He drew his removal in the exact correct order to match what I was putting down each turn and slowly killed me with 1 forward, more or less.

My match against [Brian] Gerbi was also difficult. Mono Water is a rough match for Mono Earth, but luckily for me, I didn’t draw any Yuris which allowed me to go for big swing plays with Raubahn + either Ingus or Opus 2 Monk. If I drew into a Yuri early, I wouldn’t have been able to afford paying for a lot of the plays and would have been forced into playing slower (which put me at a disadvantage the longer the game dragged on and the bigger the board states got). Double lucky for me, he drew into more of his Yuris than I did and I was able to pressure him before he could set up for the double Cagnazzo play. I think he was playing 3x Yuri and when I talked to him after the game ended, he told me he drew into multiple Yuris in the 3rd game that he really limited his options. Tldr; Game 1, we both drew Yuri and I lost. Game 2 and 3, he drew Yuri, I didn’t, and I won. So, that means Yuri is bad, right? ^_^;;

Do you have any other insight you'd like to share for anyone who wants to try out your deck list or use it as a starting point?

I would suggest not using the exact same list I played. I would take out Yuri and Vincent for Gabranth (Opus 5) and put in Fusoya. I was playing around with the new Galuf the week before and wanted to try fitting one in this deck. I ended up deciding against it because the deck is still on the slow side, and it’s hard to be aggressive until you stabilize. Galuf is the better offensive option and persistent threat, but I valued stabilizing the board rather than pushing an advantage I might not have. So, that’s why I chose Asmodai and Cecil over Galuf.

I always felt like I was able to fight for the board between Raubahn, Cecil, Asmodai, and summons, so I didn’t bother putting Shantotto in. It helps set up backups more consistently without her clogging up your deck, and I never felt like I would fall so far behind where I really need a Shantotto. It might make a handful of games winnable, but I might lose just as many by not getting backups set up early.

We're still relatively early in the Opus VII meta, but what do you think the impact of the new set is so far?

I think it’s pretty significant overall. Though, it depends if you’re talking truly competitive decks, or decks that are good but you wouldn’t want to take to a Petit or Crystal Cup. If you’re looking for some new stuff to play at locals, I think this set has a lot to offer. For the competitive scene, it’s always going to be less, but I think there are a few decks that became much more competitive this Opus and maybe we’ll see some new stuff pop up.

Thanks for taking the time out to talk to us, and congratulations again on your victory, Brian!

Thanks!

Brian Ng after his hard-earned victory at the Season 2 Championship at Galaxy Games in Dublin!