Lorcana Tournaments

I've been playing a lot of Lorcana recently. Lorcana is the Disney Trading Card Game.

As I referenced at some point, I've been going to weekly Lorcana tournaments for the past few weeks now. I've been to 3 constructed deck tournaments and 1 draft.

Tournament Structure:

They're hosted by our local gamestore. Entry is $10 and the prize support is 2 packs per player. Everybody gets a guaranteed 1 pack and then the rest of the packs are distributed amongst the top 3ish (depending on how many people show up). They are run using Swiss with 3 rounds.

Rundown of Each Tournament I've Been To:

Week 1:

First week we (my two roommates (Joe and Tyler) and I) all lost to Austin, who instantly became our rival. I don't remember exactly what happened outside of that, but I ended up taking 2nd winning 3 packs, I believe. I was piloting Tyler's discard deck (that link takes you to the decklist. In this case, it's not the exact deck I ran, but pretty close. The other decklist links are pretty spot on to what I ran, I'm pretty sure).

Week 2:

Second week we all brought different decks. I was piloting an Evasive Donald Duck Ruby/Steel deck. I ended up winning! Beating Austin in the process, which I was very happy about. I won 4 packs, I think.

Week 3 (Draft):

The 3rd week was a special event for the release of Set 3. We did a draft, and it was seriously such a freaking blast. Each person gets four packs. Open a pack, pick a card, pass the pack, pick a card etc. until that pack is gone. Open up another pack, so on and so forth. 

You get to keep all the cards you drafted. And then they did prize support on top of that, which was insanely awesome. 12 people showed up for the draft, which was so cool (attendance the other two weeks was 5 and 8). I won and I'm super happy about that! My roommate Joe got 2nd, which was awesome. Ended up winning 5 packs on top of the 4 that I drafted. (Entry fee was $25 for this event)

Week 4:

The 4th week was the first week of Set 3 constructed deck. I brought an alright Amber/Steel Bodyguard deck that I had been ironing out throughout the week. Ended up winning! Only 5 people were in attendance, which was sad; we were definitely hoping for more after all the new people came to the draft the week before. Won 4 packs.

Week 5:

2nd week of Set 3 constructed. Great turnout with 7. Had a lot of fun with this Emerald/Amethyst Tempo Deck. Won my first two rounds and my third round was against Tyler. Every game was super close. I barely won game one, 20 to 19 lore. Game 2 was close, but he won. Game 3 I had an awful start, but he made a couple critical misplays, which I was able to capitalize on just enough to win the tournament. I won 4 packs, one of them included a $37 card which was super hype.

Selling Cards:

I've also just started up this week selling cards on a TCGplayer account. I've spent a good chunk of money on Lorcana, and I'm hoping to make some of it back. I'll plan to eventually sell all my cards, but for now I'm just selling my most expensive ones. I've also been "hired" on by Joe to sell many of his most expensive cards ("hired": he gave me $10 worth of cards and I get to keep his profits from shipping (aka, like 20 cents every shipment)). 

It's been a lot of fun so far! We've sold to 15 different people already for a total of (after fees) $273. Definitely planning on keeping this little side hustle going on for a while.

The Kind Of Funny Tragicness of Shiny Hunting

So my roommate (Joe) has a Game Boy Advance and a copy of Pokemon LeafGreen. I'm not sure exactly what his end goal is, but he is hunting for shiny pokemon (I believe his brother who lives elsewhere is too, I think). I have been helping him on this quest. If I'm listening to a book or watching a show or something, you can often find me pressing the A button repeatedly hoping a blue Snorlax appears.

For this pokemon/situation, it's set up in such a way that you can just turn on the game and press A a bunch until a Snorlax appears. When you're never lucky and Snorlax is not blue, you press A+B+Start+Select at the same time and it resets the game; you proceed to press the A button a bunch of times, and so on and so forth.

Trouble is, of course, there's only a 1/8192 chance to encounter shiny. An abysmal .01221% chance.

Bigger trouble is, of course, how statistics works. We are just as close now to catching shiny blue Snorlax as we were when we started this endeavor. Even though we've pressed that A button for hours and hours and hours by now, it doesn't make any difference to our next boot up. And I think that's kind of tragic. But also kind of hilarious in its own way.

On January 23rd, I did have the pleasure of watching Joe encounter a shiny Gastly while Joe, Tyler, and I watched the last episode of one of the greatest animes of all time, Ping Pong The Animation. It was their first time watching it, my fourth, and catching a shiny was just a beautiful moment to add to a beautiful experience of watching that anime again with them.

Merry Christmas!

 Third year in a row of (kind of) celebrating Christmas on the 25th of February 🥳🥳🥳

I'm Competitive

I'm competitive, fun fact of the day.

So, as of not this past week but the week before, I'm attending 3 different tournaments a week. Which is kind of ludicrous. And kind of a lot.

3 different tournaments for 3 different games. Thursdays there are Lorcana tournaments, Fridays is Smash, and Saturdays is Street Fighter 6.

And it kind of amazes me how competitive I am. I don't get overly upset or angry when I lose, however, so I don't think I'm unhealthily competitive. But I just want to win. Start playing Street Fighter 6 with my roommates and lose. Immediately want to grind until I win. Learn there's tournaments for it every week? Immediately want to grind to win. Start playing Lorcana with my roommates and lose. Immediately want to start building decks, looking up videos, learning how to play better until I win.

Granted, I will say my competitive desire for Smash, although definitely re-amped compared to this post, is starting to rescind again. I feel a part of that is definitely these other competitive outlets that I have, but also other stuff, although I don't care to write more about that right now (partially because it wouldn't surprise me if a week from now I feel completely different).

Regardless of whether I stop going to Smash tournaments again or not, it's all been a lot of fun. Lorcana is great (note: I don't actually recommend getting into it, however. TCG's are a money-hole) and I'm excited to see what random decks people bring to the tournaments once Set 3 comes out.
Street Fighter 6 has had a wonderful effort-reward cycle and I feel like I can be very competitive with the best in our small scene (8ish people per tournament (side note: Lorcana has been slightly smaller than that thus far)); I'm not quite there yet, but I feel I can be soon, and it's exciting.

Those three things pretty much encapsulate what I've been spending my free time on recently. Also been getting some reading done. Behind on some books but ahead on Stormlight Archive. And I've also still been following the Warriors. They have been cooking and have won 8 of the last 10, and it's been really fun to watch.

Two Paragraphs of My Short Story, "Auzzy Quite Liked Her Name"

(Title is a work in progress, but I do quite like it, so we'll see if it sticks.)

Wrote this post entitled "I Really Want to Write a Story", which is about, uh, how I really want to write a story.

I actually wrote that blog post before Christmas 2023, and since then the seed of a story idea has grown. As part of a Christmas gift to Hannah, I had her name the main character of this story I was crafting.

 

She chose the name Auzzy (Ah-zshe).

It still has a long way to go; don't expect any form of a finished product any time soon. But I wanted to post what I currently have for the first two paragraphs here because I like them and I wanted to share them. I hope you like them too:)

Auzzy quite liked her name. It was given to her by Hannah, after all, whom she was quite fond of. How does she know Hannah? You see, Auzzy was special and she knew it – in fact, the fact that she knew she was special was what made her special in the first place. Auzzy knew she was in a story.

Auzzy was 10 years old, was a very sweet girl, had red hair, and tried not to think too much about how her free will worked. She knew she had choices, even if those choices were technically written out by someone else. It was complicated. It was weird. She knew it. Her author knew it. But they were both content to simply be part of this fourth-wall-breaking tale together without too much fuss about what the heck is going on.