Got two more Gold Medals on Fairy Wars Hard Route A1.
I don't recall the name of the first card but it's the first card the three fairies use. Very fun attack. Flying all around the screen to disable Sunny's back up made her a simple target but I don't think I'd use the word easy about the process of disabling said backup. Well, I got it in one try but it was still fun to do. It wasn't exactly soul-crushingly hard but hard enough to get my blood flowing. Which is good. I haven't experienced much of a rush out of Touhou for a long while. In fact, i think the last time was my perfect run of Koishi and that wasn't really intensity rather than a 'please let me have this perfect so I never have to play this stage again' kinda feeling.
Second card. Ice Dissolver. I don't really know if this is as impressive as I'd like to think it is. Its probably not but somehow I didn't feel entirely in control. Or rather, I felt unnaturally MUCH in control. Cirno didn't make one move that I didn't want her to. Which is odd considering how poor my eye to hand coordination has been recently.
I failed at any other of their cards but they all seem possible. Elfin Canopy seems like it would be smart to take out one fairy and then concentrate on dodging since I'm pretty sure the other support fairy gets more health when you take one of them down. I died here three times btw.

Star Sapphire was a dick as expected, though not as much of a dick as I had anticipated. Only one card struck me as downright BS - as in, use Ice or Die! - But given that the game is focused around the Ice gimmick I suppose its acceptable that not all cards are meant to be No-Ice'd. Acceptable but not ideal. The cards should've had been designed so that No Ice would be legitimately possible on all cards because of the Gold Medals.
Oh and I remember ranting about the stages back in the day but really, these stages are a bit lazy yeah but a lot better than the bulk of Touhou stages.
EDIT: Got the S3 midboss one. Got very close to Gold Medalling the Final Card but fucked up right at the end. Meh.
Also, tl;dr: Gold Medalling is fucking awesome and a lot better than TD so drop that game and go hunt for the gold!