My First One Piece TCG Event

The Event Recap

Just got back from my first One Piece event. I watched the Eagles lose (hopefully they can make the coaching staff corrections everyone’s been asking for all season), but more importantly—One Piece is awesome. One Piece is going to be a staple in my hobby life going forward.

I had more fun playing One Piece than I have had in a very long time. It definitely scratched that competitive card game itch.

Learning the Rules the Hard Way

I got a couple of cool cards—nothing huge on pulls—and I got my one round win. The first round, I messed up on the rules pretty badly. I thought you only got one Don card (the resource cards you need to play other cards) per turn, when you actually get two. My opponent didn’t say anything and just watched me be a dummy, which is totally my fault.

I lost that one, but halfway through the second round, my opponent let me know I was doing it wrong. Then I won my third round. So I’m one and two, with that first loss being because I was a big old dummy.

The Loot

Check out this playmat though—it’s Ian Miller art from Dragon Shield. Didn’t know this existed. The picture is holographic with this cool holographic texture. Way cooler than any of the cards I got.

I got three extra packs and they gave me a ton of promo packs too. I pulled a $5 card apparently (I don’t really know the values that well), another shiny boy, and Sherms if you actually care about One Piece. I got the Rainbow Luffy Promo Dawn, the girl promo (not the one for winning obviously), and the main hitter. Between this and some of the promos and a couple other cards, I definitely made my money back.

Why One Piece Works

Looking forward to playing constructed. Apparently it’s pretty hard to get actual cards here if you don’t pre-order stuff, and I missed the pre-order window.

The cards themselves are about twice the thickness of a Magic card. Modern Magic cards are a lot thinner than they used to be, but One Piece cards are really high quality. I always get nervous with card games of other IPs because they’re usually cash grabs, but this game has been impressive.

The Format is Perfect

The shop is only 20 minutes away, which is way more doable than the 45 minutes to sometimes an hour and a half drive to the Warmachine shop. And One Piece isn’t best of three like Magic—it’s straight best of one, which is kind of crazy. You really have to know what you’re doing and have tight deck building for consistency because poor draws can really screw you.

Because of that, a full event is only three rounds at 30 minutes each. It’s weird that you only get three matches, but it’s very cool that I’ll be able to play competitively without my wife getting too mad at me.

A Magic Rant

One of the biggest game stores in my area says they have a hard time running standard Magic events or competitive events—the only thing they really do is run Commander. That’s insane to me.

Commander (what used to be called EDH) was what all the people who went 0-2 and didn’t actually know how to play Magic went and did while the people who knew what they were doing played in the real tournament. It’s just crazy that you couldn’t play competitive Magic locally even if you wanted to now.

I’m a hater, I’ll fully admit it. You guys ruined the thing I loved most and you made Hasbro ruin it. But I’m just a salty boomer when it comes to Magic the Gathering.

Back to Painting

I’m still working through Crucible Guard. I didn’t get a Dolmenwood guy finished this week, but I got him primed. I’m having some problems with my air compressor—it’s not keeping up the PSI and wasn’t atomizing the paint properly, just kind of spitting it out.

I’ve had this Altoids tin since February 2014. After I ate the Altoids, it’s always just been a palette. I use it for contrast paints since they fall apart on the wet palette. Crazy to think I’ve had this since 2014—there’s been a lot of apartments and moves, a lot of opportunities to lose this thing.

The Plan Going Forward

I’ll finish this Dolmenwood guy tomorrow and do two models next week. I’m on track for finishing Crucible Guard when I want to finish it, but next week I really need to switch over to the Infinity commissions. I need to get those done and off my mind—I’m constantly thinking about them and it’s making it so I can’t enjoy these other projects.

So if you want to see me paint really tiny Infinity models, that’s going to be the bulk of next week, then we’ll switch back to Crucible Guard.

I’m not going to suddenly turn this into a One Piece channel and probably won’t really talk about One Piece again. But if you’re like me and you’re looking for that competitive card game itch, One Piece might be it.

See you tomorrow where we’ll get back to actual painting.