A new Challenger in the World Stage: Kilmeny enters the fray!

Article in english/Article en anglais

Hello there !

Today I’m bringing some English to the French website, since we’re interviewing Jordi, aka Kilmeny, a Spanish player that qualified to the world championship with a strong 3rd place finish at the European Championship!

Ned : First, thank you for being okay for this interview. Please introduce yourself to our readers that may not know you yet !

Jordi : The pleasure is mine! My name is Jordi Costal (I’m using Kilmeny as nickname). I’m from Barcelona, Spain, and I’m 29 years old. I started playing FFTCG back in January 2022 (when Sterne got banned), so I’d say I’m quite new to the game. Before playing FFTCG, I played MTG and Hearthstone. My brother MarcX, who is one of the top players in Spain (in my opinion the best one currently), introduced me to the game and I fell in love with it. He has been playing since opus 1, so I instantly had access to all his pool of cards to build and play any deck, and that helped me get into it faster.

Ned : What’s your favorite element, and your favorite card (past or current)?

Jordi : When I started the game, I loved Fire because it was very easy to play. “Choose a forward, deal XXXX damages”; really easy to understand. But when you start playing more and more, you then realize that there are more interesting elements to play, at least in my opinion. Even though I consider Wind as the strongest element, my favorite one at the moment is Ice. I really like the discard and dull/freeze abilities, it’s a really good element for controlling your opponent. My favorite cards in the past were Palom and Porom (Opus XV L), but currently my favorite one is Byblos. It’s a 2cp monster that is really good for ice.

Q: What decks did you bring to this event, and why those two ?

Jordi : My decks for the event were Ice/Earth and 3 color FFVI.

Ice/Earth: Ice Earth has been my favorite deck since I saw it in a stream from NA. Since then, I have been playing it a lot and always have tried to improve it. In addition, my brother and I tested it a lot, and we thought it was really good against a lot of the current decks in the meta (multicolor, VI, Chaos, Ice Lightning and any other control deck). My brother also won a Store Championship in Madrid with an older version of the deck, so we were quite confident that the deck worked well. The problem is that against Mono Water and specially Storm decks, it’s a very tough matchup.

FFVI: What can I say about FFVI, it was probably the most played deck during the event… It’s really strong right now, it’s specially good against aggro decks like Scions or FF XIII, and it’s also very good against Ice/Lightning (which we knew there would be a lot of these decks). You can either play aggressive or play it more slowly, so you can adapt to almost every match. In the Euros format (2 decks BO3), FFVI is really good because it’s only using FFVI cards, so you can really play whatever you want as the second deck. It’s true that I was only playing the Opus XX Locke (neither Opus IV nor opus XV) which made the version worse against mirror matches that had Opus XV Locke. But, in my opinion, it was also stronger against other matchups as you can run some Amaterasu and Unicorn. Having said that, I’d probably change this deck a bit moving forward. I think this line up was really strong. Both Markomelon and myself played this combination and we both made it to the top cut.

Q: You got 20th at the LCQ, then got 3rd, earning a world spot. Did you expect those results when you were packing your stuff to go to London?

Jordi : Absolutely not! My goal was to reach Euros, as this was my first competitive session in FFTCG. It is true that I had confidence in myself, but I started the LCQ with a 0-2. The first game I played against vPurple (who finished 4th at Euros) and my second game was against Alex Hancox (no introduction needed). From here I ended 4-2 and made it to Euros. And then I played without pressure, thinking that my job was already done, that I could enjoy the decks I was playing and the experience.

Q: What was your favorite moment of the week-end ?

Jordi : It is difficult to choose one. On the competitive side, probably when Alec mentioned I’d compete in Euros was the happiest one (because that was my objective). But then I made top cut, and then I made it to worlds, so all the weekend was unbelievable. On the personal side (the most important one), I met a lot of people from all around Europe that was really amazing. The community of this game is incredible! Also a lot of strong players from Germany and France have offered their help to test before the Worlds, so I really appreciate it!

Q: Any last shoutout you want to give, to end this interview ?

Jordi : I want to thank all the Spanish community for the support before and during the event. A lot of hours testing, discussing and preparing for the euros. I feel that my 3rd place is a community effort, so I just wanted to thank them all! And last but not least, this wouldn’t be possible without my brother. He taught me from scratch how to play, we tested almost every night for the last 2–3 months, we discussed decks, strategies between 1 game and another one, etc. In fact, he is the mind behind the 2 deck lists, as he knows more cards and is far better than me at building decks. He was 1 win away from making it to Euros top cut, so I’m sure that next year we will both make it to top 16 and, why not, worlds.

Once again, thanks Jordi for this interview! You made quite an entrance in the competitive scene this year, and we’re looking forward to your performance in Tokyo in two months!