If you haven't read part 1, I'd recommend doing so. Also, I apologize if this is posted in the wrong section, there didn't seem to be a place for tournament reports and as this is essentially part of a bigger article on deck building, I just figured I'd put it here.
So me and Fairbanks arrived at the tournament site early in hopes of playtesting. Tragically no one was there. Fairbanks deck (which I'll get to in a bit) was a bit of genius, but absolutely worthless to playtest against, so we just sat around for awhile. Eventually the first other competitor showed up and the deck finally got tested. It seemed really solid so I was feeling pretty good about this. All in all there were 8 people for the tournament (though 1 of em showed up really late so it's hard to count him). I apologize if I don't remember names or very many details from the games.
Round 1 vs Ethan running Valor aggro:
His deck seemed to be a pretty standard aggro affair. Good attack cards good friend cards, little bit of valor. 2 main things were in play here though: 1) aggro is at a disadvantage here, if they challenge every turn and I move every turn, the HP lose is canceling out and I progress towards winning. Valor fixes this, BUT, it became apparent to me that if I never try and fight back when he challenges me and save my oblivion/divine roses/samurais and just challenge him on my turn, I can knock valor form off the turn he plays it fairly consistently. 2) it became apparent to him (and me) that it hurt him to drop dark cards on my worlds. If they were things I could just clear by fighting, I might be able to gain 3 hp just from killing them, add in a move and there was just very little for him to do. I win this match fairly easily
1-0 (2-0)
Round 2 vs Fairbanks running the meta deck:
I guess you could call the deck a world racer, but really it's the perfect example of a meta deck. See he found a big gaping flaw in the tournament floor rules (if a match goes to time, the tiebreak is most hp+world count) and built a deck that just exploited that. It was really a brilliant execution of this and while a deck could be made that would beat this, it was such an unexpected thing there wasn't much for anyone to do. Of course it wasn't unexpected for me, but I wasn't gonna be a jerk and meta that specifically. I won't go into detail here at all cause it was incredibly boring, but basically he won game won and I just conceded game 2 as it wasn't relevant anyways.
1-1 (2-2)
Round 3 vs Hayner running a world racer:
So going into this I was of the impression that him and Fairbanks were running pretty close to the same deck, so game one I made no effort to track HP or anything. I pulled it out because in the end he couldn't handle my dark cards and while he was running stealth sneaks and gargoyles, I just ran away immediately and it wasn't relevant. By game 2 it had become apparent to me I could probably beat him by assuming the aggro role in the match-up. So I did that.
2-1 (4-2)
Round 4 vs Alex running valor aggro:
He had actually played against the deck before the tournament and the beating he received prompted him to switch form a Riku aggro deck to a valor one. Didn't help. This went largely the same as my round 1 match.
3-1 (6-2)
TOP 4
semi-finals vs Ethan:
More of the same from round 1. Except in game 2 he crushed me. So bad. Wasn't even close. He played a couple bambis first turn and got valor into play and that put me in such a hole I couldn't dig out. Especially because he anticipated my 1 big challenge to knock his valor form off so he held cards to stop me the whole game. It occurred to me that either of the valor players may have had a better chance if they had waited to drop valor form until they knew they would be able to protect it. But I don't know their decks well enough to really comment.
4-1 (8-3)
Finals vs Fairbanks:
So he wanted to play in a tournament at 2 and if we played it would time out and he would miss it. Prizes weren't relevant since we came together so through a highly scientific process we awarded me the win, yay!
Overall it was a good time, FFG kept the tourney going well and as always provided sick prize support. I ended up liking the deck quite a bit and have since put some thought into the ideal version (with an unlimited card pool) but that will have to wait for part 3.