Commander Deck Examination - The Wandering Minstrel

 Tonight is Commander Night at the card shop. However, I have no drive to head out there this evening - my work week was rough, and I had obligations to follow that up with helping at a Chaos Rising prerelease for the Pokémon League last night, so I am, plainly speaking, exhausted.

But I didn't want to go without a post for today, so I thought to myself: Why not try my hand at a different style of post for once? I've said before that I want to branch out and work on posts that aren't strictly "after-action" posts from my myriad nights playing TCGs.

Which then brought me to the question of what deck do I want to take a close look at? Since this would normally be a Commander night for me, one of my Commander Decks is the obvious answer, which then modifies the question to which Commander deck do I want to take a close look at?

And while I could try to explain myself or go heavy into why I did not want to do this or that deck, that's all just waffling around pointlessly.

I want to look at my Wandering Minstrel deck. Why? Because it's possibly my favorite deck right now, even if I know it can still use a lot of tweaking to make it better.

The Commander

Normally, when you build a Commander deck, you want to start with the Commander itself, right? That's the obvious way to build - "This is the creature card I want to focus my deck's strategy around." Or the other way around, as cases may be, that the Commander is the best creature to have consistent access to in order to support your chosen strategy - "I want to build a spellslinger deck, what Commander would support that best without getting me hated off the table?" or similar.

This is a case a little closer to that second one. I didn't, strictly speaking, start off with any particular strategy in mind, nor did I start off with thinking that the Minstrel's abilities would be fun to build around. I started with the fact that I had one copy of every single Town land that was printed in the Final Fantasy set, which would make a reasonably budget-friendly five-color mana base. From there, I chose the Minstrel as my Commander because he supported that.

He lets my Towns enter untapped. He gives me benefits for playing a lot of Towns in the form of a constant source of Tokens. He becomes a wincon in the Command Zone thanks to his (admittedly rather expensive) activated ability. Also, pertinently, he's technically a five-color Commander thanks to that very same activated ability, meaning I could actually run all of my Towns, the entire point of building this particular deck in the first place.

The Main Focus: Towns

 

Obviously, having started with the fact that I have all 23 Towns in the deck, and that I chose a Commander who benefits from those Towns, the next step was choosing additional cards that benefit from my manabase. The Final Fantasy x Magic: the Gathering set made Town support a small theme for Blue and Green cards, with 8 cards - counting my Commander, the Minstrel, and Balamb Garden, one of the Towns itself - that either benefit Towns, or benefit from having Towns. Prishe's Wanderings and Reach the Horizon let me ramp my Towns from straight out of the deck, Travel the Overworld and Qiqirn Merchant both let me draw well at a nicely discounted rate, Town Greeter will let me do some self-mill and nab a land from the bin, and the PuPu UFO enables some minor ramp ability that can turn into a hefty Flying beater later in the game, for a modest mana cost.

Of course, once I have those Towns in play, I need something else to do aside from just ramping more of them and drawing cards.

The Synergies

That's where Omega, Heartless Evolution comes into play. This powerful Raid Boss (why they went with the FFXIV version and not the FFV original I can at best only guess at, but a powerful effect is a powerful effect) benefits from my having a lot of non-basic lands in play.

Non-basic lands such as, for example, all 23 lands with the Town subtype.

If I could more consistently get the Legendary Robot in-hand, I would absolutely consider it to be my deck's "secret Commander". For quite a while, I'd wanted to build a deck that actively just had Omega in the Command Zone, but I don't have nearly enough non-basics in just Blue and Green to make such a deck properly tick. Slipping them into the 99 of the Minstrel works out quite well, all the same.

Once I settled on running Omega as part of the 99, I got it into my head that there would be some Magical Christmasland Moments where I could start literally locking games down using the Robot.

 

Which brought me to Ol' Reliable #1 and Ol' Reliable #2: Panharmonicon and Conjurer's Closet. While the initial thought was 100% laser-focused on what they could do alongside Omega, I eventually came to realize that many of the other cards I wound up adding also came packaged with some incredible ETB effects that this one-two punch of flicker-oriented Artifacts could help out with.

Gladiolus and Ignis being able to ramp more mana. Cloud of Darkness being shockingly potent removal. Delivery Moogle being able to grab any 1 of 7 different artifacts, including a lot of my Mana Rocks. Flickering Summon: Fat Chocobo can provide even more Tokens alongside the Minstrel's own, bolstering my deck's board presence (though due to being a Chapter Ability, Panharmonicon wouldn't work with it to double the tokens produced by the Bird). Even just Exdeath's 3 life can mean the difference between getting blown out by an aggressive player and surviving to crack back at them.

I've also been considering the addition of Y'shtola Rhul, the monoblue version of FFXIV's preeminent catgirl that has an end-of-turn flicker and provides a second end-of-turn, but I haven't gotten around to figuring out what to remove for her as of the time of writing this post. Part of the reason for that is the deck's other main strategy, which is a focus on the Minstrel's token producing trigger.

 

Of the deck's 10 Enchantments, 8 are dedicated to bolstering the Minstrel's Token generation (and working just as well with the copy of Chocobo Racetrack in the 99). Divine Visitation replacing the 2/2s with, in essence, Serra Angels. Roar of Resistance giving the tokens, whatever form they take, Haste, while Echoing Assault makes them harder to block via Menace. Doubling Season and Parallel Lives bumping the Tokens-per-Trigger count from 1 to 2 to potentially 4. Caretaker's Talent giving me additional card draw and potentially massively buffing the tokens (even the baseline 2/2s are a lot scarier when they become 4/4s instead).

Inspiring Leader and Intangible Virtue both provide Anthem effects to bolster my Tokens - as does Phantom General, who admittedly isn't an Enchantment, but is one of the few non-Enchantment means the deck has for buffing Minstrel's Elementals.

Coming back to why this makes it hard to figure out what to remove for Y'shtola, the Enchantments that bolster the Minstrel's innate abilities make up a fair portion of the deck, so I wouldn't really want to cut any of them if I could avoid it, though this does have the unfortunate side effect of the deck feeling in some ways like it's a little disjointed, almost like it's two different decks that have been stapled together.

The Fluff

 

Then there are the last few cards, which are either decent cards in their own right, or that I added just for a little bit of flavor.

Dark Confidant, who while he's a little less scary these days, still holds a special place to me as historically being one of the best sources of consistent card draw in the game. Garland, Knight of Cornelia and his flipside, Chaos, the Endless, who... well, while Garland can potentially offer some deck manipulation due to the number of noncreature spells in the deck, he's mostly there for the sake of Chaos. Specifically, because Chaos is a Raid Boss that can be faced down during Stormblood's Omega Raid series. Did the Minstrel have anything to do with that Raid series? No - not even the Savage versions of the fights.

Did that stop me? No. Not at all.

In fact, that's actually why a number of the Creatures in the deck made the cut during my earliest draft: They were enemies that can be faced in FFXIV. This version of Dark Confidant, in addition to being a card advantage engine, is directly modeled on the Ascians of the game. Emet-Selch is the leader of the Ascians, a memorable boss fight and beloved antagonist character (and the Extreme version of his fight is unlocked through a version of the Minstrel). Exdeath and Chaos are faced in the Stormblood Raid series. Cloud of Darkness is battled at the end of the Crystal Tower Alliance Raid series, as well as more recently in Dawntrail having a "Chaotic" version that was tuned for then-current Level 100 Players to battle against (that was, again, unlocked via the Minstrel!).

Anyways. Aside from the fluff of "these can be fought in FFXIV", there are other cards that are in for "generally just kind of good" reasons.

Windborn Muse, Propaganda, and Ghostly Prison keep me safe from combat-oriented decks while I try to build up my position. Minwu, Rebellion Strategist (from Final Fantasy: Through the Ages, a reprint of Mangara, the Diplomat) providing further incentive to not attack me lest I get a bit of card draw, while also punishing opponents for playing too many cards in one turn - by again, letting me draw cards. Explorer's Scope and the Regalia to potentially ramp some more land. A few removal spells, a couple of counterspells, and a smattering of other interaction to protect myself or cut down threats are all there to round the list out.

Conclusion

All in all, my Wandering Minstrel deck is a very safely Bracket 2 List. It has two main strategies, which are admittedly a little disjointed from one another. It's not a combo deck, nor is it heavy on Stax Pieces. It's very much a "battlecruiser", building itself up over a few turns while trying to keep itself alive, until it reaches the "critical mass" where it can start taking over a game. Two or three Enchantments are all it really needs to see the Minstrel's ability to generate tokens quickly get out of hand, after all.

Also, I'm glad I trimmed out the additional combat step cards that I previously had in the list so I could make room for more actual removal. They were a cute-sounding trick - "Oh, the Minstrel makes tokens at the start of combat, let's get more combats!" - but in practice they were either worthlessly gumming up my hand, or they were just win-more.

That all said though, the deck could use more tweaking, overall. Shift the focus of the deck towards the ETBs and add more flicker effects - Y'shtola, Ephemerate, Cloudshift, so on and so forth - or towards going all-in on being a token deck - try to get a copy of Anointed Procession, add in even more token production of different sorts, maybe throw in Purphoros to get damage off of the tokens entering. One or the other, tightening up the list that way.

Another possibility is providing additional interaction. The deck is probably still a little light on removal if I'm being honest, so getting a few extra pieces could be useful. That or I could add Tutors to the deck to improve its consistency.

I could even go heavy on trying to build the list up as a Stax-heavy control list, hiding behind effects like Trinisphere, Deafening Silence, and Drannith Magistrate to slow my opponents down while holding up mana to counter or remove whatever they attempt to do, all while letting the Minstrel's tokens be my threats on-board. That would probably start pushing the deck more towards Bracket 3 or even 4, however, which isn't where I really want to go with the deck.

But I digress.

This sort of quasi-deep-dive into my decklist was actually a lot of fun to write-up. I'll have to try to do this more often on days when I can't, or don't have the energy to head out to the shop for otherwise regular TCG nights, or on nights where an event doesn't fire (this most likely being something that would happen to Final Fantasy TCG rather than the others I play, but c'est la vie). I know I have a number of busy weekends coming up through the summer - haunted house things and various conventions I plan to attend - so if I have the time, maybe I can write some of these up to have posts available on the days I can't actually get out to play.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - May 4th, 2026

Tonight was more Final Fantasy TCG, but before I get into that, I have a small thing I wanna vent about regarding the Gundam TCG real fast:

I have not been able to play the Gundam TCG for about two months, give or take, due to issues of various stripes. Issues with my landlord, responsibilities for the Pokémon League I'm a Professor for, holidays (well, Easter specifically), and yesterday by my city's marathon - I live squarely in the center of the "loop" of roads that they close off for the marathon, and while there are instructions for how to "escape" said loop, it was likely to be more trouble than it would've been worth since anybody trying to go anywhere would've been backing traffic up something fierce.

Not gonna lie, I'm actually getting a little frustrated at how it seems like life is bound and determined to keep me from playing Gundam. But I digress, tonight was Final Fantasy TCG night, so let's talk about that instead, shall we?

Tonight, I decided to pull out a brand new list: Fire/Ice Priming

Is it anything I'm liable to use as a serious competitive contender? Not likely. Not while it still has to compete with Scions, MBM, The Twelve, and even Dragoons, at least.

Is it good to have another deck in my repertoire, especially as the Competitive Season is drawing near? One that I can play to learn how it works so I can hopefully better play against it, or at the least play to give my friends from locals a bit of practice against the deck? Sure is!

Anyways, on with tonight's event. We had four players, so just a quick Round-Robin event.

Game 1 vs 4-Color Warriors of Light

Even with Refia restricted to a 1-of, this deck still has some serious hands.

We had a little bit of back-and-forth, trading points of damage back and forth over the course of a few relatively slow turns. Eventually, we were each at Damage 3 and, due to that being the "magic number" for Warriors of Light, they proceeded to just absolutely dominate the game from there, for the couple of turns that it lasted after.

Arc brought back Faris who cleared away a good chunk of my board and grabbed a Krile that paid for a Cu Sith to pull WoL4 out of the Break Zone before dropping the WoL4 and swinging in.

I had nothing I could do on my turn, so they finished me off on their next.

Game 2 vs Sky Pirates

So this wound up being two games, because the first was done and over inside of two turns.

They had a somewhat mediocre starting hand, and some poor draws to follow up on it. I dropped Seymour, Dulled and Froze their backups and forced a Discard. They summarily scooped - with Seymour around, they were in an unwinnable position due to the complete lack of resources.

So we played a friendly after while waiting for our other two players to finish up their game for the round. This was a much closer game, at least until they got a good turn that saw them successfully snowball and take over the game. Turns out that damage-based removal is a lot harder to stick when Ashe gives the whole board an extra 2k power and the ability to reduce the damage that they take.

Game 3 vs Earth-Water Cat IX

Long and short of this one: They outvalued me. I knew the deck was a control list so I was trying to mostly avoid overcommitting to the board, and when I made the mistake of trying to use Phoenix's Flames of Rebirth Special to pull back a Jill, I ate a Mist Dragon, causing a massive waste of all of those resources. I also ate a Matoya (I) backup blowing out my board when I had a Phoenix, Ifrit, and Shiva all in play at one point.

I did eventually manage to get Seymour into play, but it was so late into the game that even though I was mostly able to lock down a few of their resources, it was nowhere near enough to stop them.

Conclusion

All in all, this was a lot of fun to play. It's a very different deck than what I typically play in FFTCG, but I think I mostly had a good grasp of how to pilot it despite that. I didn't make many particularly egregious misplays, though on the same token I likely wasn't playing the deck optimally.

Like I said near the start of the post, I'm not likely going to use it as a serious contender for my competitive deck of choice - it would make a great "Deck 2" if I found myself in an event running the 2 Deck format, but it's definitely not going to be my primary list - but I'm glad to have it available, all the same.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - May 1st, 2026

 Another Friday, another Commander Night.

This is going to be a relatively short post, because despite how long each of our games wound up taking, my decks didn't really do much.

There were three games tonight. First with a Pod of 4, then a Pod of 5, and the third game was back down to a Pod of 4.

Game 1 - Playing Cloud, Planet's Champion

I kept a two-land hand. As happens literally every time I keep a two-land hand, this meant I didn't see a third land for several turns, and this put me behind in a big way.

You would think I'd learn. And yet.

I did manage to get my way to 5 mana, strapped a handful of Equipment to Cloud (after being nearly locked out by a Karn, the Great Creator from one of my opponents), but wasn't able to do anything with that. Cloud didn't have enough oomph to take anybody out, and two of my opponents were slowly bleeding the table to death so I was down to 12 or 13 life by the time I would have been able to do much of anything. With one of my main sources of life gain - Shadowspear - sent to my discard pile, I wasn't able to recover from that, and I was removed from the game shortly after.

Game 2 - Playing Yuna, Grand Summoner

This game I had the opposite problem, I kept a six land hand - not that I realized that at first.

I proceeded to not be able to draw much of anything to do with my mana, and decided to look at my decklist - subsequently, I realized that I actually don't have a lot of card draw in the deck. I have a bit, some of it being solid and recurring, but none of which was doing me any good this game.

The addition of a fifth player also went a long way towards making the game much harder to fully keep track of, on top of my having precious little to do and all the mana in the world to do it with.

Game 3 - Playing Baral, Chief of Compliance

The one game I won tonight, in no small part because of an Elf player at the table letting me draw a ton off of my Rhystic Study, with them thinking that they'd ideally be able to win before all of my cards meant much of anything.

The game went a little slow, but during the Elf Player's 7th turn, I drew into High Tide and Mystical Tutor. I used the Tutor to go grab my Enter the Infinite. Turn 8, I dropped my land - I somehow managed to not miss a single land drop this game - played High Tide for free thanks to an Eluge that had been in play for several turns, and proceeded to "combo off" by dropping Enter the Infinite and Thassa's Oracle.

Easy, clean win. A little slower than I would like the deck to run, but nonetheless.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - April 20th, 2026

 Another Monday night, another round of FFTCG at the shop.

Tonight, I elected to pull out The Twelve, because I'm still trying to feel out what deck I really want to commit to using for the competitive season - assuming, of course, that I can participate in any Competitive events this season. Materia Cups for the North American season were finally announced, and there are unfortunately only two dates I could even hope to make - and one of those is already sold out.

Frustratingly, my local shop is hosting a Materia Cup on the same weekend as a convention I'd already made plans to attend that will have me on the opposite side of the state. Deeply frustrated at that. Regardless, sort of hoping that I can at least make it to a few Local Championship Qualifiers, if and when those get dates announced.

Ah well. Back to the topic at hand: Tonight's Locals, and my playing The Twelve. We had 8 players tonight, which made for a 3 Round event.

Round 1 vs Wind-Lightning Crystals - Won 7-6

The same Wind-Lightning Crystals that I played against last week, I admit I mostly won this in part because they had a devil of a time coming up with resources in Wind. Among other things, they saw no Wind Backups except for damage.

Despite that, they had me quickly at 6 damage before I could get even a single point of damage in. This made the game drastically tense for me, as I had to figure out how to fight my way out of that deep corner that I had been backed into.

Eventually, thanks to the fortune of some removal, I was able to fight my way out of that corner, clear away their board, and start establishing a dominant position myself. Even through two separate board clears, I was able to barely keep ahead of them, and eventually I knocked them to 7 damage. They did realize after the fact that there were a couple of turns where they made significant misplays, which alongside their lacking Wind resources helped me out dramatically.

Round 2 vs Warriors of the Crystal - Won 7-0

More Crystals! This one a much different list, of course. I was able to play a much more relaxed game for the first few turns, building myself quickly to 5 backups. Once my front line of Forwards started getting built up, I was able to establish some decent dominance over the game.

A 7-drop Shantotto backup wiping away several of my powerhouse Forwards did slow me down, and not insignificantly, but I was able to rebuild before they were able to capitalize on the board wipe.

Round 3 vs Water-Lightning Monsters - Lost 5-7

My one and only loss for the night, but it was a phenomenal game with a lot of back and forth going on. We traded control over the board back and forth a few times, with Witch of the Fens doing a lot of heavy lifting for them, though I was able to remove her both times she hit the table.

In the end, however, I was unable to manage it. The turn that really sealed my fate saw Witch of the Fens wipe my board by eating so many of their Monsters, with a Cloud from the LB deck removing my Zoraal Ja. This left them with enough pressure that unless I top-decked another WoL4, I wasn't going to be able to establish enough bodies to keep myself safe.

I did not top-deck the WoL4. Trying to draw with Nymeia didn't secure anything useful for me either, so I was "stuck" with my only play being to drop Rhalgr, being the removal for the second Witch. Unfortunately, multi-element Lightning from the Break Zone dulled Rhalgr, leaving me wide open for the final swing.

Conclusion

Oh man, The Twelve still feel weird to me, though this is admittedly only the second time I've played the deck.

Still, other than my first game against Wind-Lightning Crystals, it felt way less weird than I remember it feeling that first night I had tried it out. It's another strong contender for my deck-of-choice for the upcoming competitive season, alongside Category MBM and my Scions.

Still, until and unless the rest of the competitive season gets announced, I have time to figure that out.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - April 17th, 2026

 Another Friday, another Commander Night at the local game store. It was also the Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease event, and I was caught thoroughly off-guard by how many attendees the shop had sold tickets to, which pushed the Commander players into a different play space than usual.

Regardless, three other solo players and I banded together to create a pod of 4 for... Honestly a lot of games, tonight. I brought a good half-dozen or so decks with me, but really wanted to only play one of them - though, for a minor change of pace, I did break out a second, different one.

The two decks I played tonight were:

1. Sanar, Innovative First-Year
   
2. Vincent, Vengeful Atoner
   

Sanar, Innovative First-Year

I only pulled out Sanar for the second-to-last game of the night, because I had been playing Vincent fairly non-stop for several hours prior to that. I wanted a change of pace, just for one game... and I wanted to see if I could sneak out a win with the little Goblin.

My opening hand with Sanar was weirdly ideal, in that I actually opened with my two "combo pieces" both in hand. This made the game last a grand total of four of my turns.

Turn 1, I played Temple of Epiphany. Turn 2, Thriving Bluff. Turn 3, a Mountain and the Magmakin - this, I believe, is what gave me the victory. My opponents didn't expect anything was up when I had a turn 3 play after two turns with taplands. On turn 4, I didn't play another land, I just played my Treasure Hunt - paying the one for a Rhystic Study that had been in play from one of my opponents for several turns. I picked my deck up, turned it upside down, and invited my opponents to look to make certain that I wasn't lying about it all being lands otherwise.

When none of them had any interaction - they were all tapped out, and none of them had any free removal spells available - I passed my turn and discarded my 87 excess cards, dealing all three opponents an equal amount of damage.

Sanar won, and I am so bloody thrilled about that. I promptly put the deck back away, and pulled Vincent out one last time for the final game of the night.

Vincent, Vengeful Atoner

This was the deck I had been looking forward to playing tonight. I just put it together within the past week or two and wanted to put it through some paces to feel out how this initial draft of the list works.

And the short of it is that it's a little odd. Or, more accurately, it's a little inconsistent. Each game, I was able to easily drop Vincent into play fairly early - I never had terrible mana issues. Even a game where I had a two-land opening hand, I also had two mana rocks available to me, and I was able to use those to help play Vincent by turn 4.

The problem came from being able to accomplish much after that. Some games, Vincent was able to swing for the fences, pummeling my opponents and growing steadily larger until he was decking every opponent for chunky damage, others he got stymied hard by removal and a lack of Haste or protection. Moreso the lack of Haste, despite my having numerous avenues for providing him with it.

Not helping matters is that, at its core, Vincent is an aggro deck. The entire plan is to play creatures, and then turn those creatures sideways. To that end, with 24 creatures - not counting Vincent himself - the deck is perhaps a little light on adequate threats. Not helping much was that there were a ton of cards that I just never drew during the night. I never saw Slicer, Professional Face-Breaker, Gogo, Mysterious Mime, Kharn the Betrayer...

A lot of the deck's threats, really.

But I digress. At its core, Vincent is an aggro deck. One of my opponents tonight was playing combo decks. Arguably CEDH-caliber combo decks (arguably, they were a touch slow). Combos have this nasty habit of outpacing aggro, especially when the combo decks are inherently designed to be wildly consistent. So there's a possibility that some of my issues tonight stemmed from that; not all, by a long shot, but some.

Regardless. I think I've identified one of the deck's biggest weaknesses for this initial draft. Weird as it is to say, I think I might have too much interaction in the list - I might need to trade some of the removal out for more threats and/or more card draw (Laughing Mad and Cathartic Reunion are good, but I can only get so far with those when my more consistent "turn after turn" options like Furious Rise and Professional Face-Breaker are nowhere to be found) so that I can have more options in play than just Vincent himself trying to do work.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - April 13th, 2026

I took some PTO from work this week because, frankly, I needed a slightly longer break than usual.

I also happen to have a few errands I'll be using these extra days off to run... But that aside, I used the day off to head out to FFTCG tonight. I haven't played my Scions in a long while, and I wanted to get some games in with them tonight.

It went... A bit worse than I had hoped, to be honest.

With only four players tonight, we had a quick, 3-round Round Robin event.

Round 1 vs Ice/Lightning Control - Loss

I hate Seymour.

I hate Seymour so much.

But I digress. I had some fairly early plays, punched a few points of damage in, then the Maester hit the field and kept a significant part of my board locked down while beginning the process of stripping away my hand. I dumped all of the cards I had into an Odin to remove him from the field, and was able to start building back up to take another point of damage, but got held back by a second Seymour and a copy of the new Kadaj from Dreamlike Oceans. With my hand still mostly emptied from when I popped the first Seymour, Kadaj made certain that my hand remained fully emptied for by and large the rest of the game.

With no resources available, and my board mostly locked down, it was an inevitable defeat, held at bay mostly by my opponent's concerns about hitting an Odin EX Burst.

Turns out I only have four Odins in my list right now, though. Who knew? I certainly didn't remember that fact.

Round 2 vs Three-Color Scions - Loss

Not quite a mirror match as my list is only a Water/Lightning Scions, lacking the addition of Earth that my opponent has added to theirs (well, give or take my one copy of Wuk Lamat), but...

Well, close enough, right?

Anyways. Long and short of it, I made some significant misplays and my opponent was able to better leverage their removal. My draws weren't great, which didn't help me, but I'm not going to lay the blame for my loss on that alone.

Round 3 vs Wind/Lightning Crystals - Win

This was an absolutely buck wild list, mixing and matching Crystals with Class Zero Cadets and building a weirdly cohesive whole.

My only win for the night, and frankly that was mostly because my opponent saw exactly one backup over the first four or five turns, and that was one that was sent to damage when I hit them. My first few turns were also weird, slow, and frankly kind of bad, but at least I had resources to play the game with, which ultimately is why I was able to come out ahead and take this game, even after they played the 8-drop Wind Bartz and managed to secure two Backups out of the deal.

Conclusion

I am deeply rusty with my Scions. Misplays, poor draws, generally forgetting what a few of my cards do to the point that I had to double- and triple-check more than a handful.

I eventually managed to take a game against the otherwise-undefeated Wind/Lightning player, but even that wasn't strictly because I played well and finally remembered how to make the list work, my opponent just had worse draws that left them struggling to accrue resources.

If I'm still harboring notions of using Scions as my deck of choice once the competitive season does finally get back into swing, I am going to need a lot of practice to get back up to speed with it, and may even need to make some significant changes to it to make it work better.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - April 6th, 2026

 After my last week off from work saw not one but two Limited events for the Final Fantasy TCG, this week was my first one back and playing in a constructed event. We had a total of ten players show up tonight, pushing the event to four rounds, no less!

After having collected everything I needed to build my list, I played the brand new Water/Lightning MBM list for tonight's event, wanting to try the deck out.

It, uh. It went really well for me.

Round 1 vs Mono-Earth - Win 7-0

My first game with the MBM deck, and as soon as I realized what my opponent was playing, I was frankly terrified. This Mono-Earth list has demolished me time and time again, and I was more than a little nervous about how I would do against it with a brand new deck that I had never played before.

Turns out I didn't need to worry over much. My opening hand gave me the means to come out swinging, and I had just enough removal at the right times that I was able to take my opponent to 5 damage pretty easily.

Unfortunately, they managed a turn where they were able to set up a difficult-to-clear board state, and if I didn't manage to punch through them somehow, I would get my board wiped on their next turn. Making matters worse, I had one Lightning backup and no cards in hand at the end of that turn, so I was reliant entirely on my top-decks.

Fortunately, luck was with me, giving me the exact cards I needed to clear the way: Multi-Element Lightning and a Water Card. Vaan in particular, though the specific card was irrelevant. I was able to play the W/L Lightning, dulling one Forward and drawing a card. Then I went into combat, party attacked with Balthier and Ashe, dulling both of their other Forwards and getting the 6th point of damage in, then Lightning finished the job.

A good start for MBM.

Round 2 vs Warriors of the Crystal - Win 7-0

Honestly, I very nearly forgot who I had even played against in this round, because the fact that the night was a four-rounder had thrown me off that much. While getting food after locals, I eventually worked my way through to remembering what it was I had gone up against.

So as for exactly how this game shook out? I could not for the life of me say. I know the result, but I don't remember how I got there.

Still, another solid point for the MBM list as it took another clean game.

Round 3 vs Earth/Wind Retainers - Win 7-2

So in spite of MBM looking rather like some sort of tempo-y midrange list on paper, it was around this game where I started thinking that it might secretly be an aggro list. My opponent was - justifiably, I will concede - deeply annoyed at playing against the deck, because I was able to so thoroughly flood the board, and if I could manage to have Penelo with a board state allowing her ability to activate, I could shut down the Retainers' game plan:

Retainers start off by dropping some flavor of Noctis and snowballing from there into their board state. If I had Penelo active, then in response to any of Noctis's auto-abilities, I could force my opponent to sacrifice Noctis before they could really go any further from there. I didn't have Penelo available to stop their Noctis plays, however - though I did use it to force removal of a Wind/Earth Y'shtola that had been made untargetable previously, as Penelo's ability not directly targeting circumvents such protections - but I still had an incredibly full board that was able to use Balthier's auto-ability to dull away all of their blockers and bring a swift end to the game.

Round 4 vs Earth/Wind Category IX - Win 7-1

This was a weird deck. At its heart, it's more of an Unei/Sophie control deck that happens to run a core of Category IX cards to help facilitate its Summons, in part because Garnet helps to make their summons easier to cast while also making my summons harder to cast.

Fortunately, I don't run very many summons, but the ones I do...

I digress. This was a weird game, because I wasn't able to play nearly as aggressively as I had been for the past three rounds, and I got to actually see the more controlling side of the MBM deck come through as I worked to figure my way around the locks my opponent was trying to set up around me.

Ultimately, I was able to take the win.

We did play a second game afterwards, just as a friendly, and they set a lot of their plan that game to very specifically stopping me from doing my MBM things - they bounced my turn 1 Montblanc and Penelo, used the three drop "Aqua-mat" Leviathan to stop my LB Ashe's auto-ability to flip five cards and grab an MBM from the revealed, and several other things. This is, in effect, what their deck wants to do regardless, but they were willing to dedicate a lot of resources at various points to doing so, resources that I'm not sure they would've otherwise been willing to dedicate.

Still, it was a good exercise in seeing what happens with the deck when I'm held back and have to work harder to fulfill my plan.

I lost the friendly, for the record, the only game I lost all night, but I digress.

Conclusion

There's a part of me that hates how good this deck felt to play. There was admittedly a lot of luck involved, but all four of my games for the actual Locals event tonight went smoothly. For being a completely brand new deck, I don't think I made any particular, major misplays at any point, my draw luck was great - especially in Round 1 when I got the exact two cards I needed to take the game on that turn before my board could get wiped - the play lines seemed to be pretty sensible.

Every game, more or less, I was able to drop at least a Turn 1 Backup, and follow that up with Turn 2 LB Ashe. I never whiffed off of Ashe's on-entry auto-ability (though I know having now committed that to text, it will happen at an inopportune time), her combat auto gave me the means to constantly get a third body on the board, either another Backup to prep me for a longer haul or another Forward if I just wanted to present more pressure.

But, for that part of me that hates how good this felt, there's another part of me that loved every second of it. Yes, I briefly felt a little dirty about it during Round 3 when it tilted my opponent as hard as it did, but otherwise? It felt like a nice, middle-ground between my Scions, my Dragoons, and my The Twelve. It's efficient, synergistic, has solid removal, decent amounts of search and card draw even before getting into my LB deck (aside from Ashe), Penelo's ability lets me play a little bit of a control game if I need to by forcing sacrifices that get around Forwards that could be otherwise untargetable.

I genuinely might make MBM my deck-of-choice for the more competitive Organized Play events when those finally pick back up, taking the spot I had been planning my Scions to occupy. I'll have to see. Tonight might have just been a fluke, a spot of outrageous luck. Time will tell.