My Journey - Vietnam Vault Tour 2026
Updated: Sep 1
Honestly, I wasn't planning to compete this year.
I really wasn't.
The last two years of running Vault Tour Vietnam had been pretty brutal. Aside from Enishi, the second brain behind KeyForge Vietnam, we basically only had Long (drkid) as a judge. We had to recruit volunteers just to keep the event running. Of course, plenty of other people helped out too, but there was still an absolutely ridiculous amount of work to do.
This year was supposed to be the last one.
I thought I should go all out and make the event as big and as good as I possibly could, because next year was supposed to be the final year I invested seriously in competitive play.
But then a bunch of friends found out and told me, "Just play."
Ah well. It really is the last year, after all.
And honestly, I wanted to play. I've always told people that if I had to choose between being an organizer and being a competitor, I would never organize anything ever again.
But if I didn't organize it, there was a pretty good chance I wouldn't get to play at all.
So that's what happened.
This year, I competed at my own Vault Tour, on my own home turf.
Huge thanks to Enishi for carrying the entire event on his shoulders by himself. And I'm also really sorry to everyone that the overall quality of the tournament took a pretty noticeable hit because of it. The stream, for example, was significantly worse than last year.
THE OTHER DAYS
Another interesting thing about this year is that I ended up playing all three formats.
That story is a bit of a long one.
Last year, I said that after two years of barely getting to play, I absolutely had to make an effort to play Sealed the following year. But then everyone kept telling me to compete, and if there was one Vault Tour format I genuinely wanted to play, it was Archon.
So I planned to play Archon and Sealed.
Then, somehow, I ended up talking to Varghast.
Varghast has had an insanely busy year and hasn't been able to play much KeyForge. He asked me whether I was playing Alliance.
I said no.
And somehow, that didn't stop him from sending me four or five builds and telling me to play.. all of them.
So I guess that meant I was playing all three formats.
The stories behind Alliance and Sealed aren't particularly exciting.
Alliance sent me a PV Untamed loop build, and I finished 9th, just outside the Top Cut.
I think Varghast's build still had quite a few weaknesses, and it was a little too slow to set up in the current meta. I beat most of the non-set 9 matchups, but struggled against PV Value decks.
A 4-2 finish isn't bad, I think, especially for a format I don't specialize in and had barely practiced at all.
On Sealed day, I opened a pretty average pool.
One of my pods had a really interesting Brainstem + Memrox combo, and that was definitely going to be one of my win conditions. But the other pods were pretty ordinary.
I figured that if I played the pools perfectly, I could probably make Top 8. Going any further than that, though, would be very difficult.
And sure enough, I made Top 8 at 5-1...
...only to lose in the first round of the Top 8.
Looking back now, knowing part of Long's deck — the person who knocked me out — I probably should have switched pods. Maybe I could have found a way to win.
But I simply didn't have enough Sealed experience for that thought to even cross my mind at the time.
Oh well.
I only play Sealed Alliance once a year, after all.
And now we get to the real story.
ARCHON!!!
I consider myself an Archon Specialist.
It's not necessarily my favorite format, but ever since Ghost Galaxy came back, Archon has been the only competitive format I've genuinely invested in.
And I think I'm pretty damn good at it.
Compared to the previous two days, Archon felt like a fish finally getting back into water. Even though PV — along with a lot of the questionable design decisions KeyForge has been making lately — has drained a lot of my enthusiasm for the game, just like it has for many other players.
Part of me felt like this year's Archon Vault Tour was an opportunity for redemption after my 2-2 finish at Worlds last year.
The field obviously wasn't as strong as Worlds, but there were still plenty of good players and powerful decks.
And my deck choice was going to be just as important as ever.
Last year, my deck search was an absolute nightmare. I spent almost an entire month just trying to find a few decks that were actually suitable for Worlds.
I had never had this much trouble finding a competitive deck.
The collection I'd spent so much time and money building had been invalidated twice within just a few months of Ghost Galaxy releasing a new set. Some players simply decided to quit the game over things like this.
And that's genuinely sad.
One of the reasons we came to KeyForge in the first place was the promise of an evergreen game, and the feeling that the things we owned could retain value for years.
Around Worlds last year, within the first week of seriously looking through my collection, I realized that I didn't have a single deck that I could actually use.
So I started expanding my search to collections belonging to people I barely even knew.
Eventually, I narrowed it down to a handful of choices.
And in the end, everything came down to two:
Blud, from Varghast.
And Plutotend, from Stormstrong.
Conceptually, the two decks were actually quite similar.
Both had a huge amount of disruption, with their win condition being to establish a stable board and then leverage that board advantage into a win.
Plutotend had fewer tools, but absolutely insane tempo.
Blud required more skill to control the early game and was a little slower, but it had an answer for almost everything.
Varghast convinced me to play Blud.
And as you already know, I ended Worlds at 2-2.
I completely demolished two combo matchups, but lost to two PV Value decks.
I honestly don't think Blud was particularly suited to my playstyle.
It suits Varghast much better because Varghast is incredibly calm in every situation. If you've watched him play, you'll notice that win or lose, he maintains an insane level of focus.
That makes the trap-and-wait style of Blud extremely natural for him.
Me?
I'm an arrogant, reckless bastard.
I'm impatient. I'm aggressive. I'm a little crazy.
I like putting pressure on my opponent, pushing the tempo as hard as possible and forcing them to respond.
Varghast once again offered me Blud for Vietnam.
But this time, I decided to give Plutotend a shot.
The story behind that decision is actually pretty long too.
At first, I wasn't even taking the tournament that seriously. I was planning to borrow Ass from Donkeyforge and see what happened if I tried to fight the meta from the opposite direction.
It would've also been a fun experience because throughout 2024-2025, Ass had basically become my personal rival deck.
But Captain Gale refused and took over the rights to play Ass.
Maybe fate had already decided.
I had a few other options, but every one of them eventually came back to set 9 — and if I go for PV, I had to be full on serious.
Plutotend was also hit pretty hard by Ghost Galaxy's errata.
I had bought a deck from China that relied on an undying Atrocity strategy, but the GG errata completely killed it.
Thankfully, Plutotend came out of it in much better shape. Code Monkey in Dis allowed me to play Atrocity multiple times.
Cosmic did get nerfed too.
But honestly, I didn't think any of that was a real problem.
Its speed hadn't changed.
Its disruption hadn't changed.
And I especially loved TYF because it gave me the ability to decide exactly how much freedom my opponent was allowed to have.
So the decisions were made.
There was nothing left to do.
Time to play!!!
ROUND 1 — RONNIE
My first opponent was Ronnie, a player from Hong Kong.
I'd met him all the way back in Shanghai 2024, and we'd also crossed paths online quite a few times.
I've always found Hong Kong players to be particularly scary. They tend to have a lot of nasty decks, and they know how to play them.
I took a quick look at Ronnie's deck and immediately thought it was going to be annoying. Delta P was particularly troublesome for my board, and there was a decent amount of disruption as well.
But the actual game wasn't nearly as close as I expected.
Plutotend got online incredibly quickly and kept developing the board, while Ronnie didn't get the start he wanted.
Plutotend actually loves matchups where the opponent only has board clear in one house. It's even better when that house happens to be their strongest house.
I just slammed TYF into Dis and played around Prophecy Thunk.
After a few board cycles, I had Ronnie completely locked out.
Game over.
A few months ago, I heard Ronnie said he would come to Vietnam if I played.
Hopefully beating Ronnie twice at Vault Tour — once in Sealed — can now be interpreted as my way of saying thank you.
Haha.
Current record: 1-0.
ROUND 2 — JCKCHU
This time I faced a player from Taiwan.
I'd actually played him the day before.
Apparently I was destined to keep running into people I'd already played.
Another interesting thing: throughout the entire Archon day, I only played Asian players.
jckchu brought a really interesting set 7 deck built around the clock package and Poltergeistoids, which could eventually generate an effectively infinite turn combo.
I wasn't completely sure how the deck performed against PV, but Plutotend absolutely loved this matchup.
Just like Blud, Plutotend was specifically chosen to destroy combo decks — basically a way for me to vent all my frustration with GR. (And, uh... Nghị.)
jckchu chose a passive strategy, discarding almost everything until the combo was ready.
So I did what Plutotend does best.
I kept feeding disruption into TYF and aggressively targeting Geistoid.
Whether a creature or an action fell off, it was awkward for jckchu. The deck needed to play its clock creatures, and if it couldn't play actions, WoD wouldn't eventually clear my board.
After the match, jckchu actually asked if we could play the matchup again in a fun game.
I still won.
If terrifying combo decks like Ass and Noor Du'lac can get completely locked down by Plutotend, things aren't looking great for jckchu.
Current record: 2-0.
ROUND 3 — HARPUIA
Haha.
Finally.
Hưng is probably the closest thing I've had to a rival in Vietnam.
Although at this point, I'd rate Cường slightly above Hưng as a player, Cường stubbornly refused to play Season 9 at this tournament, which left me rather confused.
Hưng and I always seem to find each other in important rounds.
And of course, I always win. =))
But after two years without getting to play Vault Tour, this was finally the tournament match we'd both been waiting for after all these years of playing together.
I'd played Hưng's deck quite a few times already.
It's very consistent, and Warfaline in Logos works extremely well with Code Monkey.
In general, Hưng's play patterns are highly optimized, which makes him incredibly annoying to play against.
But I think he made one mistake by playing Strop in Shadows too early.
That meant I could just tunnel-vision on TYF and keep calling Dis because there was basically nothing left in that house that could clear my board.
Once I established a board and locked him down, there wasn't much Hưng could do.
Current record: 3-0.
ROUND 4 — SIINAI
Okay, another Vietnamese player.
Nam is an interesting one.
I was honestly surprised by how much he'd improved over the past year.
But then again, I shouldn't have been.
Nam is genuinely serious about KeyForge.
Effort produces results. That's what our grandparents used to say.
And it's not just his gameplay. Some of Nam's observations and analysis have made me seriously consider that he might already be one of the top Vietnamese players.
He may not be far behind Hưng and Huy Cường anymore.
Nam was playing Khiếu, borrowed from Huy Cường.
The deck's game plan was pretty straightforward, but because so much of its power was concentrated in one house, that was actually great news for Plutotend.
So once again, I slammed TYF into Dis.
Everything that fell out was annoying for him.
And then I managed to discard both Veil and Arise.
That slowed down basically every win condition in Khiếu by one or two turns, while I was already developing my board.
At that point, I could still see one tiny path for Nam to come back. Khiếu is like that, it can sometimes win games from an absurdly losing position simply by locking the opponent out.
But that line only existed if I made a mistake.
Nam conceded.
I have very high hopes for the next time I get to play Nam at a major event.
Current record: 4-0.
ROUND 5 — LQDSQUASH
Nick and I have been on Team Reapout together for two years now.
He's also the person I've practiced with the most on the team.
Nick is an excellent player with a very distinctive playstyle.
If there's anyone on Reapout who understands how I play better than anyone else, it's Nick.
And, naturally, I also understand Nick pretty well.
The funny thing is that both of us brought aggressive decks, so knowing each other didn't actually help all that much.
Thuần was already one of the top GR decks.
It had a similar well combo to Nghị, except it burst faster and didn't loop.
Its other two houses were weaker than Nghị's, so it relied heavily on Geistoid.
And to be fair, three Junk makes the combo pretty easy to assemble.
This matchup was interesting because even though Plutotend was facing another combo deck, I'd already encountered something similar against Nghị:
Strategic Feint isn't always effective against this particular kind of Geistoid deck.
It's slightly better against Thuần because disrupting creatures still slows it down, unlike Nghi, but only slightly.
I locked Nick down for almost half the game, then Feint hit a creature...
...and Nick immediately burst almost enough to forge multiple keys.
At one point Nick started archiving Mars cards, presumably trying to play around my TYF Cosmic.
Looking back, I think a different choice in a few of his final turns might have produced a slightly different result. But who knows.
Current record: 5-0.
ROUND 6 — WILLY510
I'd actually never played Willy before.
I'd only watched him play.
This was probably the opponent I knew the least about going into the match.
I'm very good at playing against people I have a lot of information on. For me, understanding someone's habits and tendencies is extremely important.
I knew almost nothing about Willy.
Thankfully, I'd already secured a Top Cut spot by this point, regardless of the result.
Looking at the matchup, I immediately knew it was difficult for Plutotend.
As you know, TYF is incredibly powerful against decks that are heavily concentrated in one house.
Willy's deck had both Cryptic and Trenk, and even though Shadows was being largely ignored, it still had Hoodwink, Cover Fire and Disable Security.
Another problem was that a lot of the C in this deck sat outside TYF's reach, such as Chasm Vespid. My starting hand was poor and lost the tempo within just a few turns.
Plutotend doesn't have a huge amount of defensive capability, so if you can't lock the opponent out, you're basically dead.
So I had to take the loss.
I analyzed the matchup afterward.
It was still difficult, but if I played the early game more carefully and focused on establishing a stronger lock, I think it was definitely winnable.
Hard, but winnable.
And if I had the chance to play it again with that adaptation, I think the result would be better.
Current record: 5-1.
At this point, I had secured Top Cut.
I finished 2nd because my only loss was to Willy, who went 6-0, and I was placed into Bracket B.
QUARTER FINAL — OMEGAMON
Tuấn Anh might actually have the highest win rate against me among Vietnamese players.
I remember losing to him the last time we met in an Archon tournament.
Tuấn Anh is a very good player, and one thing I find particularly interesting about him is how well he squeezes every possible resource out of a position to secure the win.
This matchup was actually quite complicated for Plutotend.
The deck had a fairly even distribution of creatures and actions, but its houses weren't balanced.
For example, Saurian had nine creatures.
That meant TYF potentially became a complete coin flip.
Plutotend was also pretty bad at clearing boards, and if the opponent established a massive warded dinosaur board with Pompitus, the late game could become nearly unwinnable.
The upside was that I knew the deck had a very slow start.
So the key question was whether I could establish enough pressure early.
And somewhere in the middle of that game, I evolved.
This is exactly the feeling that makes me addicted to competitive play.
Of course, the more you play, the better you get. But it's only in high-pressure games that you can actually feel yourself improving in real time.
I realized I didn't need to use TYF anymore.
Trying to specifically target a house in Phan Anh's deck was simply too unreliable.
But regardless of which house I called, that deck was going to play creatures.
So I switched sides and used LHFYHC to target Feint.
It didn't look like the optimal choice.
But it worked beautifully.
TYF was simply too unreliable at targeting the right house.
I also got into tempo very early.
One moment my opponent established Pompitus and Orator, I was able to deal with them immediately, then send Infurnace down to purge them.
That was incredibly important.
Without Orator and Pompitus, rebuilding the dinosaur board became much harder.
The game still won't go into late game, after a few turns of correctly locking him down and completely taking over the tempo, I closed it out.
Phan Anh asked afterward whether Plutotend was actually that strong or whether I'd just highrolled.
And honestly?
I did highroll that game.
Especially because the Feints kept hitting exactly what I wanted.
But Plutotend is also genuinely strong.
If the opponent doesn't have constant C to disrupt it, the deck can enter its tempo very, very quickly.
SEMI FINAL — DHOONG
Another Vietnamese player.
Hoàng is genuinely skilled, but among all the Vietnamese players I've played so far, I think he's the one whose mental game is the least stable.
And I have to say, when you're playing against me, losing your mental game is already half the battle.
I've heard that in many previous matches, Hoàng could have achieved much better results, but pressure caused him to make mistakes.
Another issue is that he can be somewhat mechanical in his play.
He's very good when he's doing something familiar, somewhat like Bamboo.
But when an opponent does something completely out of the box, he can get lost.
And this deck...
...was mine.
I opened this legacy Deusillus deck back in the day and really enjoyed playing it.
Then I liked Huy Cường enough that I gave it to him because at the time he said he hadn't opened a strong Season 9 deck.
I still remember when I gave it to him, I specifically told him not to tell Duy Hoàng, because Duy Hoàng had asked to buy the deck from me and I had refused to sell it.
And somehow, after passing through a few hands, Duy Hoàng ended up playing it at Vault Tour.
Fate has a sense of humor.
The matchup itself was familiar to me.
The deck is another extremely powerful board-development deck, but it also struggles to clear boards.
When things get ugly, it can play Deusillus, push the aember over to the opponent, and then bounce it back.
The only problem with that combo is that you need to switch into Dis.
I took advantage of Hoàng not expecting me to have an answer.
I baited him into getting greedy for one more turn, then played They Tell No Tales to kill the dinosaur and immediately purge it.
That completely ended the annoying combo.
From there, it was simply a question of who could establish board control.
My tempo was significantly better, and my C was also more consistent.
So from that point onward, the game was heavily in my favor.
As far as skill goes, I think Hoàng is already in a very good place.
But if he wants to take the next step, he needs to work on his mental game and learn not to lose his head when the pressure gets high.
FINAL — SEROTONIN
Well.
Talk about fate.
Last year, Jason went on an absolute rampage and won two Vault Tour formats.
The only thing missing was Archon.
This year, he made the Archon final.
And his opponent?
Me.
I told Jason that the only reason he won so much last year was because I wasn't there.
Jason told me he'd been waiting a long time to finally play me at a tournament.
I'd barely ever played Jason directly, but I'd spent all of last year judging and watching him play, so I understood his style to some extent.
I wasn't going into this blind like I had against Willy.
The thing I was most concerned about in Jason's deck was the Embellish Imp + They Tell No Tales interaction.
Plutotend hated that more than Hoodwink or Cover Fire because it attacked both aember and tempo at the same time.
Thankfully, it was a two-card combo requiring both an action and a creature, meaning Feint could disrupt it.
Jason understood his deck extremely well.
And despite how the matchup looked on paper, he almost never allowed me to maintain a board advantage for long.
His use of C was incredibly disciplined.
Throughout the entire final, neither of us ever really owned the tempo.
Even though I was doing a very good job of disrupting his They Tell No Tales, I managed to completely prevent him from using Cover Fire even once across all three games.
He only got to use Hoodwink once, and it stole a single aember.
At one point, I realized Jason was simply playing better than me.
He had adapted to my tempo in Games 2 and 3.
But Plutotend was the stronger deck, which kept the matchup relatively even.
I also made a mistake in Game 2.
I had a chance to deal with CANDLE Unit before it reaped, which would have prevented Jason from drawing a card.
The extra card wasn't actually the biggest problem.
The real issue was that by then, Jason's deck no longer had enough cards for my next Feint to lock him down.
That left him one open turn to turn the game around.
And that's exactly the kind of mistake I always tell people never to make.
When you're competing, never give your opponent a chance to breathe.
And then I went and did exactly that.
Maybe playing continuously all day was getting to me too.
At one point in Game 3, I genuinely confused Jason's Key 1 with his Key 2.
If that's happening, then I clearly need to train more and get my physical condition under control too.
Game 3 started with another very greedy play from Jason.
I played Atrocity, and Jason responded by using Reassembly Required to put Atrocity into archive.
It was an extremely risky play.
Jason did it because he had Murkens in hand and was betting that I wouldn't immediately choose Dis.
But there were two things he hadn't accounted for.
First, I have a habit of playing a card from the same house as whichever house has the most cards in my hand on Turn 1.
A lot of players do the opposite because it maximizes the number of cards they can play in a single turn.
But to me, having the opportunity to use a creature is just as valuable as playing another card. The tempo is much better.
And the second point — the more important one — is that a normal player should immediately ask:
"Why on earth would someone give me the Atrocity back for no reason?"
I knew he had Murkens.
So whether I chose Dis or not, I was taking that archive back anyway.
That allowed me to play Atrocity three times during the early game and gain a pretty substantial amount of tempo.
But Jason adapted much better than I did.
The game stayed completely even deep into the late game, with us fighting over every single aember.
And this was where I became even more convinced that I had made more mistakes than Jason.
There were several moments where I could have denied him opportunities.
But I didn't.
Eventually, the final game came down to a situation that wasn't entirely under my control.
I checked with eight aember.
Jason could respond with either Shadows or Logos.
But Jason knew that it was Feint under TYF on Shadows.
So he calculated the odds of choosing Logos instead.
His Logos answer was Parallel Thinking.
I'd already minimized the risk by taking the archive back, which meant Jason could only choose between his own top deck and mine.
The odds seemed roughly equal.
Jason chose my top deck.
And I flipped over a creature and an action.
I won.
Later, everyone tried checking Jason's top deck too.
The first card was an action.
The second was an upgrade.
So no matter which decision Jason had chosen, I would've won.
What an incredibly tense final.
I came out of it realizing that I still have a lot of room to improve.
But regardless, it was an incredible match, and Jason was an extremely strong opponent.
And that's it.
I finally won my first Vault Tour.
And officially became a Vault Warrior.
I originally planned for next year to be my first real year of serious competitive play.
But one thing led to another, and somehow I ended up competing this year after all.
Looking at it now, a 3-day record like this really isn't bad:
4-2 in Alliance.5-1 in Sealed.5-1 in Archon.
The Vault Tour trophy was one of the few major titles still missing from my collection.
Mostly because, until now, I'd only been able to attend two Vault Tours.
One was Shanghai 2024, which took an eight-hour flight just to get there.
And the other was Vault Tour Vietnam this year.
So, first of all, thank you to everyone who helped organize this event and made it possible for me to actually compete.
Thank you to Stormstrong for lending me Plutotend.
Thank you to everyone who supported me throughout this year's tournament run.
And thank you to everyone who came to Vietnam.
I hope the next time I step onto a tournament stage, I can put on an even better show for all of you.
See you...
next time.
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