Hi, I'm Scott and I'm a high school teacher.
I'm also a huge Fire Emblem fan, I've never posted really on the Serenes forums but I decided to share my story today because I thought it might interest people here.
A group of students started a gaming club at the school where I work, and I'm the sponsor of the club. One year ago, on our first meeting I met a young man (for the sake of privacy I'll be using different names for each student) we'll call him Juan.
Juan was playing a card game with a friend and when I passed by the place they were playing I was stunned, the game was Fire Emblem Cipher! He had the Corrin M and Corrin F starter decks and was teaching his friend Daniel how to play. I started chatting with them, and next thing I knew I had a Path of Radiance and Tokyo Mirage Starter Decks coming in the mail. Fast forward a year and there's around 20 students at the school with Cipher decks, many who attend meetings regularly to trade and play. We have monthly tournaments, and even "Festival Events" with prizes.
I enjoy collecting Cipher cards so much that many of my extra cards become prizes for students to earn, I have 10 complete Cipher decks and some of my students even have multiple decks.
It may seem super elaborate but I've even come up with ways for students to earn free cards from participating in different events.
For example: I give out "Exhibition Passes" to each tournament participant, they can spend a pass one of two ways, exchange it for a pack of 10 common cards. Or use it to challenge me to a Best of 3 Round with its own rules, if they beat me they get to choose 1 SR card from my binder.
At tournaments I host raffles, where I give out R cards or even booster packs (The club has about 4 boxes of packs donated by some online friends of mine to be used as prizes) and the top 5 players at each tournament get to pick a R card from my binder (at festival events every player gets an R and the top 5 get SRs)
It's been a pretty amazing experience to not only bond with my students but also to play this amazing card game.
You might be thinking "How do you read the cards?" Well, as posted on this very forum in the past, users such as AsheoftheEmblem, Murdock, and SAIKLEX have made English Half-Card Proxies which I have been using for this club. It's helped enormously for opening the game up to many more students and I haven't been bothered by the extra work of assembling the proxy documents for the kids.
Attached are some pictures of my own decks, and I'm in the process of assembling a picture collection of my student's decks to show off not only how many students are involved, but also their creativity in creating decks. Just a small sample of my decks are here to show how some of them are proxied.
