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.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - April 3rd, 2026

 As it turns out, I do still play card games other than the FFTCG! It's just that the month of March was incredibly busy and full of Real Life Responsibilities™ for me, so I haven't had time to get out and play anything else since, oh, February.

But tonight? Oh, I was finally back for a bit of Magic: the Gathering, tonight! I joined up with a pod of 3, giving us four players for all three games we got through tonight.

Game 1 - Playing Ashling, the Limitless

I kept a decidedly decent opening hand, one with three lands and a copy of Fertile Ground for some pseudo-ramp. Given that I've kept much worse, and that if nothing else I had the means to play Ashling and then start Evoking my Elementals on subsequent turns, I wasn't going to complain.

Unfortunately, some of my Elementals - Yarok, the Desecrator, Twinflame Travelers, Fury, and Lamentation - were hated off the board fairly quickly.

Fortunately, one of my opponents played Living Death, and I subsequently was able to re-wipe the board in short order thanks to the sudden influx of removal triggers thanks to both Yarok and the Travelers adding extra triggers.

When I hit Mass of Mysteries, it felt like I basically had the game in the bag. Double up on handing out Myriad triggers thanks to Twinflame Travelers adding an extra trigger to the Mysteries, then the Travelers also triggering an extra Myriad trigger, and each of my many entering token copies then getting triple triggers thanks to Yarok and the Travelers once again...

And then Mass of Mysteries ate removal. Then, when I used my own reanimation, it ate a second round of removal. Eventually, myself and two of my opponents wound up in a stalemate, and it became a case of whoever swung first would be playing Kingmaker for the remaining player.

I chose to finish the game, biting that bullet and taking on the role.

Game 2 - Playing Cloud, Planet's Champion

Another game with a remarkable opening hand that only got better after my first draw, I was able to quickly drop a couple of goodies for Cloud before getting the spiky-haired SOLDIER onto the battlefield himself.

From there, the game went in a variety of wild directions, but in the end, after numerous board wipes and attempts at protection, Cloud bludgeoned each of my opponents into the dirt with a stack of phenomenal Equipments. The final swing on the last remaining opponent was stacked with the Buster Sword, Brotherhood Regalia, Shadowspear, and Excalibur, Sword of Eden... plus a couple of other goodies I don't fully remember, all I remember is that Cloud swung as a 25/14, and the most life that the final opponent standing could've had going into my turn was 20, meaning that a single hit from Cloud would've deleted them twice over.

Game 3 - Playing The Wandering Minstrel

For the third game in a row, I had a solid opening hand. I guess Magic sort of missed me after I was gone for a month.

The only real weakness in my early game was that I was a bit light on Towns, so it took me a bit to get the Minstrel online and pumping out Tokens. There was also a Mothman at the table, and several of my "token boosters" - Divine Visitation, Doubling Season, and Roar of Resistance - were all milled away by Radiation Counters over the course of the game. Those same Rad counters meant that my graveyard was full of permanents, enabling Cloud of Darkness - with the help of a Conjurer's Closet - to delete more than a handful of troublesome creatures, at least until the Celes player slammed a Ruinous Ultimatum on the table without any solid follow-up to that.

This game also technically didn't finish. It was nearly 11pm, I was sitting at 50 life with the next closest total being 24 and the next closest after that being 9, nobody had any really good win conditions available, so we decided to just scoop so we could leave and the store's employees could get on with closing shop for the night.

We did apologize on our way out. We're not monsters.

Conclusion

All in all, a really solid night of Magic. My two five-color decks - Ashling and Minstrel - felt like they played better than they have the last several times I'd shuffled them up, and the three folks I joined in with were seemingly pleasant dudes.

Sunday is Easter, so the mall - and card shop - are going to be closed, so my next TCG night this week will be FFTCG on Monday.

...

I promise, I will play Gundam TCG again eventually. Life - and holidays - have just been horribly in the way.

Final Fantasy TCG Dreamlike Oceans Prerelease 2 - March 23rd, 2026

 Today was the second of two Dreamlike Oceans prerelease events that I was planning to participate in. Well, sort of a prerelease event at least.

In lieu of running a Sealed event in which we each purchased a prerelease kit and built a deck out of our packs within, each of the 6 of us who showed up tonight split the cost of four prerelease kits, from which we divvied out 5 booster packs to each player. From there? We drafted, which was a lot of fun to do.

The one problem was that myself and one other player were both fully planning to draft heavily from the MBM Category. And we happened to be sitting right next to one another. This impacted both of our pulls to some degree.

Regardless. As I said, I drafted heavily into MBM, as that was my plan going in for the day. My priority for picks went in roughly the following order:

1. Category MBM Cards
2. Anything else in Water and Lightning
3. Things I was particularly unwilling to see across the table from me
4. Anything that didn't fit into those three categories.

I managed to nab a fairly decent collection of MBM cards, including notably a copy of Ashe for my LB - the only LB card I played. That said, I didn't manage to pull quite enough to go fully MBM - none of the copies of Penelo that the table saw ever made their way to my hands, for instance - so I had to add in an additional package of Category II cards, as I pulled two copies of Maria, two copies of Firion, and four copies of Leon.

I proceeded to go 2-1 in our event tonight after we finished drafting and building our decks. I lost round 1 against a player who drafted Mono-Fire, giving them six Gunbreakers and four copies of Brute Bomber. They also had a Barret who, turn 1 or 2, wiped out the Maria and Firion that I had played on my own turn. That gave them the momentum to keep ahead of me, though I did manage to at least take them to four.

My next two games I managed to win against Earth/Wind and an Ice-heavy deck with six Remnants, including a Kadaj that I thankfully never saw hit the table.

All in all, it was a ton of fun, though drafting might not be something I want to do regularly with the FFTCG. I did manage to get ahold of most of what I need to finish my playset of MBM cards for the deck I would like to build, with me at this point only missing one copy of Vaan, which is a bonus for me.

If you can get some friends together to draft Dreamlike Oceans, I would highly recommend doing so.

Final Fantasy TCG Dreamlike Oceans Prerelease - March 21st, 2026

Today, I had my first ever experience with a Final Fantasy TCG Prerelease event, and...

Honestly, it was an absolute blast. I've heard that other sets have had mediocre-at-best sealed environments, but in my opinion? Dreamlike Oceans has a great set of cards to make a Limited environment work well.

I went 1-3, but every game was an absolute blast with me trying to figure out how to make my four-color pile of nonsense work out well, or at least how to use it to work around whatever my opponents had going on.

That said, obviously I can't really share a decklist that I, or anybody else, wound up using. That would've required me actually keeping track of what I put in my deck.

A little about the actual process of the prerelease:

50 minutes to build a deck out of my pulls sounded like a lot of time. But by the time I had cracked open my packs and looked through what I had actually gotten, it had eaten up a surprising amount of that time. Then when my hopeful plan of "pull a bunch of Category MBM and use that as the basis of my deck" went up in smoke (I pulled a total of 11 MBM cards, and two of those were the LB Ashe, leaving me 9 cards for the main deck - not enough to invest in trying to build that deck), I had to figure out what I did have enough of to try to make a list work out.

Starting with Fire cards because I had pulled a few that seemed like decent powerhouses - notably two copies of the new common Gunbreaker that can spend a Crystal on entry to deal 8k and the new Hero rarity Barret that serves as a Crystal generator - I tried to build around a Crystal-based strategy. This is what put me into four colors, as I didn't have enough Crystal cards, or really even enough of anything to go into less than that.

I wound up with a pile consisting of Fire, Ice, Earth, and Wind cards. I made a few mistakes - I should've played the 2-drop Firion that has Haste, since even without any other Category II cards, he's still a 5k with Haste for 2, making him a solid enough threat.

Meanwhile, right across the table from me, I watched my fellow Pokémon Professor open up a whole slew of MBM cards, giving them effectively a "real deck" to play through the event. I was definitely jealous.

Regardless.

MBM seems to be incredibly strong if you can pull heavy from it. Which makes sense, it's a full, proper archetype of a deck that's heavily weighted to lower rarities, with some of the strongest cards for the deck being Penelo and Fran at Common, with the outrageously strong LB Ashe at only Rare.

I don't think I'm going to be doing any other Prerelease events for the set - recent life events have me needing to refrain from spending that much money - which is a shame.

That said, trading a few cards with others after we were done for the day, I managed to come up with nearly the full set of MBM Cards for the list I want to build. I'm only missing six cards, and then I'll have the complete set of Forwards and Backups.

Day Off - March 20th, 2026

 I, uh. I completely meant to hit up Commander Night tonight.

But I also went to go see my parents and spent some time with them. I wound up being there a lot later than I was expecting to be.

So for the second Friday off in a row, no Commander. A little unfortunate, but life gets in the way sometimes.

Tomorrow, though, I'll have something fun: My first time actually getting to attend a Final Fantasy TCG Prerelease! Every one since I've started playing the game regularly has fallen during my work week, so I've never gotten to actually play in one before.

But tomorrow, my go-to game store is holding their Dreamlike Oceans prerelease, and I bought in for that weeks ago, when they first put up online tickets for the event.

I'm incredibly excited about that. So I'll be back tomorrow night with my write-up on that.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - March 9th, 2026

 After sitting out Gundam TCG yesterday - between Daylight Savings, my general exhaustion, and a little bit of concern over the life issues that kept me away from Commander on Friday night, I wanted the extra bit of sleep - I was excited to head out for Final Fantasy TCG tonight for a couple of reasons.

One, I haven't really slung any cardboard this week. While I did overhaul my Gym Leader Challenge deck for Pokémon TCG, I didn't actually get to play with it after doing so. And two, I haven't really gotten any opportunity to test my Crystals deck ever since I shifted it into a Mono-Fire list.

So, tonight in order to give the deck some test runs, I played my Mono-Fire Crystals.

I will say, going into this, I knew full well that this list was largely just a bad version of a typical Mono-Fire deck, so my expectations were deeply tempered from the word "go".

There were only four of us tonight, so we played a relatively quick round-robin style tournament. My notes may be somewhat limited since I didn't really jot much of anything down.

Round 1 vs Water-Lightning Monsters - Loss

My opponent's first time playing the Water-Lightning version of the Monsters list, and with them getting a "last hurrah" in with the Relm from Opus XI that was recently announced to be receiving a ban at the end of the month when the next set - Dreamlike Oceans - is released.

Anyway. The long and short of this game was that I had a devil of a time trying to generate Crystals. I also found myself fairly low on cards-in-hand for much of the game, so my resources all around were a bit short. I did manage to get a Zidane in play early, which let me see that my opponent had access to a Relm, a Merlwyb, and two copies of Witch of the Fens.

In retrospect, I should probably have trimmed out the Witches, rather than getting caught up on the Relm and the searcher. Not that much use was really gotten out of the Witches either, but the threat of their removal ability should have scared me more than the Relm's ability to search out Monsters. At the time, they had no other Monsters in hand, so without Relm to grab any, they were stuck trying to draw them instead, but it ultimately did end in their favor. Like I said, Witch didn't get much done, but she was able to do enough. The Monsters took it over me in the end.

Round 2 vs Warriors of the Crystal - Loss

This was weird for me. I had a fair amount of Crystal generation, I had a decent amount of payoff, I even had a reasonable number of cards-in-hand for most of the game.

But when my turn 1 saw me hard-cast my 8-cost Bartz because the rest of my hand was that rough, the game was bound to take a turn for the interesting.

We had what felt like a solid back-and-forth, with the two of us doing a good job at keeping each other in check for a long while. I had a fairly sizeable lead for a while, oddly off the backs of my LB Ardyn and LB Vincent giving me an attacker and two decent blockers, but they were eventually able to stabilize and turn the game around while I was trying to get a few more decent Forwards I could play.

Round 3 vs Mono-Fire "Rainbow" Crystals - Win

Another sort of weird game, but one that my opponent thinks I effectively locked in on turn 2 or 3 when I hit their Guy with Amat, completely destabilizing their resources and game plan, since they didn't have a proper backup in mind.

In the end, I won the war of attrition on resources despite a few significant misplays - including that I forgot the Backup Selphie has the ability to turn herself into a not-insignificant buff for a Forward, which wrecked a few of my removal attempts.

While we waited on our other two opponents to finish up, we played another quick friendly.

I lost that one, because my opponent sort of had my number, and properly played around my Amats that time.

Conclusion

I really want to like this Mono-Fire list. It has a few consistency issues, though, where I either wind up with plenty of Crystal generation but nothing to spend it on, plenty of payoffs but no generation, or I have both of those but my normal resources are lacking.

My opponent from the final round brought up that in their opinion, that's sort of the biggest weakness of trying to do a mono-color Crystal list. There's no one element that really has enough generation and enough payoff to make a Crystal deck tick properly.

I did ask them their opinion of my list, since I knew I was dealing with those above-mentioned consistency issues, and their opinion was, well, basically what I said near the start of this: It's just a less efficient version of the "real" Mono-Fire decks. It does almost everything that Mono-Fire normally wants to do, it just took me more resources to do it.

So despite the vibe that it's a bad Mono-Fire list and an inconsistent Crystal list, I still want to try to make the deck work out, even if not as a serious Competitive contender. I have reasonably high faith in some of the new tools that will be coming out in Dreamlike Oceans, although I seem to be the minority of my local playgroup in that regard.

Day Off - March 6th, 2026

 Short post today. I was already sort of planning on skipping out on Commander night tonight, but my decision was forced by some life events going on right now.

We'll see where that goes. Regardless. I may be back on Sunday for Gundam - I've been tired tired, though, so the chance to sleep in a little would be much appreciated. I'll definitely be back with a write-up for Final Fantasy on Monday, though.