Final Fantasy TCG Deck Examination - Dragoons

 This weekend is my area's local anime convention, so I can't make it out to Commander tonight (nor Gundam on Sunday, yet again). While I may have forgotten to have any sort of post ready for when I went to Too Many Games about four weeks back, that's not the case for this week.

The last time I did one of these deck tech/"deck examination" type posts, I decided to go ahead and do a write-up on one of my favorite Commander decks. Fitting since it was posted on a Friday in lieu of going out to Commander night, at the time.

However, tonight, I'm taking a good look at one of my Final Fantasy TCG decks. Specifically my "first love" in the FFTCG, the deck I brought with me the very first time I tried to take on a Local Qualifier (where I got utterly thrashed since it was my first time, uh, actually playing FFTCG):

Dragoons. A solid, fairly budget-friendly list - though a few of the cards in it are a little pricey as of the writing of this post, the whole list will nonetheless be less expensive than a number of other decks in the current metagame, and comparable to a few others.

Let's get into it, shall we?

The Single Most Important Card in the Deck

We're going to start off with the one and only character in the deck that is not actually a Dragoon.

Alus, run at a playset of three copies, is the single most important card in the Dragoons list. Drawing cards is incredibly powerful, and while FFTCG already allows you to draw two cards per turn just as a default rule, Alus gives you high odds at drawing a third card, which is incredibly powerful in terms of the resource advantage that it will provide over the course of a game. Alus can also come in clutch at the end of the game to potentially remove a blocker on a game-winning turn.

With the way my list is constructed, the deck is 47 Dragoons - either Card Name Dragoon or Job Dragoon - and the only 3 cards that aren't are my copies of the Prince from Final Fantasy III.

Even if you disagree with any other aspect of my Dragoons list, you want three copies of the Prince.

There's Something Special About Her

If Alus is the single most important card in the deck for the sake of providing extra card draw and resources, Freya is the single most important name in the deck because of the power of the Burmecian Dragoon's Special Abilities.

Assuming you've never played the Final Fantasy TCG before, take a look at those Freyas above. Specifically the one that costs 3 and the one that costs 4. You see how they each have an ability that's named in bold, orange text and has a little red "S" as part of their cost alongside some number of Lightning CP?

To pay for the "S" on those costs, you need to discard another copy of a card named Freya. Any Freya, including the cost 2 Freya that doesn't have any such ability. The cost 2 Freya is also, coincidentally, the worst of the three Freyas, and is only in the deck for two reasons - one of them being her card name, meaning I can discard her for Cherry Blossom or Dragon's Crest.

The other reason is that she's both Lightning Element - meaning I can grab her to my hand if she's revealed off of either the cost 2 Aranea Forward or the cost 3 Ricard Backup - and Water Element, which means if I need to use Lunafreya from my Limit Break deck to dig a little deeper into my deck, I can use her to cover the requisite Water CP.

Back to the other two "good" Freyas: Cherry Blossom from the cost 3 is a powerfully scaling mass removal tool, with the deck being designed to dump Dragoons onto the field en masse, meaning it's almost laughably easy to have 4 or 5 Dragoons and have Cherry Blossom blast the opponent's entire field for 8k to 10k damage. Meanwhile, the cost 4 has two powerful targeted spot removal abilities - an attack auto ability that, simply put, unleashes a single-target Cherry Blossom to remove problem Forwards with each attack, and her Dragon's Crest Special, which is an even stronger single-target removal due to the fact that being based on Dragoons in the Break Zone means that it scales even higher, even faster than Cherry Blossom or the attack auto-ability.

The Best of the Rest

Limit Break Kain, released in Opus 25, was an outrageous benefit to Dragoons as a deck. Giving a strong 8k First Strike in the Limit Break, whose beefy 9 cost is reduced to an outright steal of 4 CP if you have even a few Dragoons in play. On top of being a powerful 8k body, much more importantly Kain provides much-desired recursion.

Being able to save Freyas from the Break Zone, both to replay one that's been subjected to removal or to simply provide another Freya to fuel another Special Ability without having to try drawing into one gives Dragoons more ready access to their most powerful removal pieces. And while Freya is one great target, most of the Dragoons in the list are well worth targeting for the return.

Among the many powerful Standard Unit Forwards in the deck that are Card Name Dragoon, the cost 2 that I affectionately refer to as "fat idiot" due to his absurdly scaling self-buff ability is one of the best available, offering an outrageously sturdy wall to hold off opposing aggression while you build up your backup line and general board state. I've had the "fat idiot" skyrocket to well above a 20k power, and with him being a Multiplayable card, you can have two or even all three copies in play at once and making an impenetrable wall of bodies that can turn around and attack when you're ready to finish the game out.

Also powerful is the cost 5 "Power Loss" Dragoon from Category FFEX, one of the few non-damage sources of removal in the Dragoons deck (which can be useful to get around a variety of Forwards that have abilities that prevent them from taking damage from Abilities). An 8k body for 5 isn't the best cost-to-power ratio, but that powerhouse removal - much like cost 4 Freya, single target but mighty - makes him far more than worth it. His biggest weakness is that at 8k power, he's susceptible to getting taken out by Amaterasu from any Fire deck, which will both stop the auto-ability and break the Dragoon itself.

While Alus is the single best card in the deck, and therefore single best backup in the deck, the rest of the deck's backups certainly don't skimp on the value.

Ricard of Final Fantasy II, the franchise's original Dragoon, gives you a deep dig into your deck, letting you grab any Lightning card you find within the top 5 - and with every card in the deck being Lightning, that means you'll get to take your pick from the revealed cards. In a pinch, he can throw First Strike out on to one of your other Forwards - the cost 2 Standard Unit just above, who would admittedly shrink a little bit from the loss of a Dragoon on Board, being a prime candidate if you need one - making them much safer to block with, or to win a combat trade when attacking.

The rest of my Backup Line, aside from Ricard and Alus, are all a variety of Standard Unit Card Name Dragoons. Each and every one has a different effect that's well worth their cost and any one of them could have easily been put in place next to Ricard for this position as "the best". However, I am biased and like Final Fantasy XIV, so I chose the Dragoon that provides more recursion in much the same way as LB Kain does.

The Game Plan

So how do you actually play the Dragoons once you've put your deck together? While you might think that Dragoons are an aggressive deck - and they can be, if your card draws demand it - they don't necessarily need to be.

Your first order of business: You want a turn 1 Alus. If you don't have one in your opening hand, mulligan. If you don't get one on your second hand, all is not lost, but if you can't find one by the end of turn 1, it will mean being more cautious with your resources as you won't have the (probable) third card draw each turn.

Ricard is useful for helping to dig deeper for Alus, to a much lesser extent so is the cost 2 Theatrhythm Aranea, and if you need to, the cost 2 Freya can be discarded for Water CP, enabling you to play Lunafreya from your Limit Break deck to dig another five cards down.

Try not to overextend your hand too drastically - it doesn't do any good to manage the Alus in hand if you don't have the resources to then play him, especially with how prominently Ice is showing currently, meaning there's a remarkably good chance your opponent will force you to discard an unplayed Alus if you dumped too many resources into digging and you weren't able to actually play him afterwards.

Regardless of whether you get Alus in play or not, you want to start building your backup line. A lot of your best effects rely on you having a large number of Dragoons in play, and a deep backup line both absolutely counts and is a lot harder to remove than a line of Forwards. Obviously Alus lets you "draw" more cards a turn, meaning you'll see more of your deck and it'll be easier to find your Backups, but you can absolutely manage without, it's just a little trickier.

As for setting up a defense until you can manage to establish yourself and start doing some damage with Freya or Aranea, you'll want to see the cost 2 "fat idiot", the cost 3 that gets cheaper for each Dragoon you control, or even the cost 6 Aranea who, on top of breaking a Forward on entry, is a 9k body with First Strike, making her an excellent deterrent.

Being in Lightning, you also have some strong Limit Break options, including Cloud who can also break the same caliber of Forward as the cost 6 Freya while leaving an 8k body behind, Gilgamesh who can remove cards from your opponent's break zone so that they can't use their own recursion effects, and in my case, I use the cost 8 Sephiroth to round the list out. Kain is pretty handily the best LB card for the deck, but there are times when you can't always get him out the way you need or want.

Your offense will come predominantly from your Freyas, ideally the cost 4 as it can apply pressure and act as removal even if you don't necessarily have another Freya handy to fuel its Special, compared to the cost 3 who can only wipe the board if you have another Freya to spare for Cherry Blossom. Backing Freya up with your Standard Units, while holding some of your largest bodies back for defensive purposes, can help you speed your victory along.

Conclusion

Dragoons are one of my favorite decks in the Final Fantasy TCG. Being mono-element, they're arguably less difficult to play than some other lists since you don't need to worry about getting locked out of elements you need to play the game with. This makes them, in my opinion, quite nice for a newer player to start with, and being a fairly popular Job gives them extra appeal while they're at it.

They're also nice and focused since the game plan, while I was fairly specific above, largely boils down to "having more Dragoons in play is better for your Dragoon effects". This makes them relatively straightforward, which is again a good option for a newer player.

But despite the relative ease and straightforward nature of the deck, it's got its tricks and it has a startling amount of bite that can let it hang out competitively with some other top decks.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - July 13th, 2026

 So fortunately, (some of) my card orders arrived today, meaning I got the cards I needed for the deck I had wanted to play during yesterday's LCQ:

Fire/Water Warriors, now featuring a playset of Akstar that (when the tracking was originally added to my order) had been meant to arrive last Friday.

Ah well, better late than never. Especially at the cost those stupid things command right now.

Regardless! Tonight's Locals saw eight players come out to sling some cardboard over the course of three rounds of play, and since my Akstars finally arrived, that meant I was able to play Warriors for tonight's event.

Round 1 vs Sky Pirates - Win 7-1

I won't lie, this is a deck that Warriors should not have a good matchup against. A lot of removal for Warriors comes from damage-based effects, and between Balthier and Ashe it's generally hard to actually punch enough damage through on enough of their Forwards to actually remove them.

Fortunately for me, my opponent's draws were garbage. They had five Backups fairly early on in the game, but the lack of actual plays off of those Backups meant there was nothing they could do to capitalize on their resources.

This meant that I was able to take their Forwards out with shocking ease, between Akstar and Wuk Lamat's entry and attack auto-abilities, letting me run away with the game.

Round 2 vs Category VIII - Win 7-6

Sweet Hydaelyn, this game was bloody tense.

With an early 4-drop Squall whose abilities made him effectively immune to my removal (had I kept the two Cuchulainn that I had in my opening hand, I could've blanked him and taken him out, but I didn't expect to really need them, which was frankly a mistake in a lot of ways) while also letting him freeplay Forwards onto the field, I was facing a lot of challenge with my Warriors.

While I was doing my best to remove everything else they had except for Squall - who, again, was basically immune to my removal - we were slugging each other back and forth for tons of damage. Eventually, on what wound up my opponent's last turn of the game, they made a major misplay.

Freeplaying Adel off of Squall and giving her haste with Selphie, they swung in and used Adel to break my Akstar, along with Squall afterwards, knocking me to damage 6. This left me with enough juice that I was able to use a top-deck Ifrit (XVI) to remove Adel, then between Wuk Lamat and Ifrit being able to take out the rest of their blockers, I was able to finish off the game as they fortunately didn't hit any EX Bursts to save them.

Had they, instead of playing Adel, freeplayed Quistis, they could have dull-frozen my board and left me without any offensive power except for the top-deck Ifrit, meaning they would've taken the game on their next turn.

Round 3 vs "Army of Kain" - Lose 3-7

I'm going to be completely real, I lost this game on turn 2 or 3, when my opponent Warped their Kain - the new(ish) Legend from Dreamlike Oceans.

The turn after, when Kain actually came into play, I forgot that the Warp ability creates an auto-ability to actually play the Forward. Had I used my Amaterasu on the Warp trigger, this would have been a dramatically different game. Unfortunately, I forgot I could use the Amat there, tried to Amat the on-entry auto-ability, and had Kain avoid it with a Jump Special.

From there, I could never quite remove the Dragoon, with any attempt being met with a Jump as my opponent always had more Kains in-hand than I had removal available.

This made the game a slow, honestly kind of frustrating affair where I got a few points of damage in, but Kain kept managing to remove my most powerful Forwards, keeping my ability to pressure my opponent at a minimum.

Conclusion

Warriors are fun. And really good. I see pretty easily why they're one of the best decks in the format right now.

Akstar is absolutely nutty, helping the deck run in an insanely powerful way - using Taivas's ability to play Akstar for free, and then having Akstar in turn freeplay another three-drop Forward is almost obscenely powerful, especially with how many Warriors have yet more potent removal abilities attached when they enter the field.

I'm glad I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up the set, though time will tell how often I actually decide to play the deck. Plus side, if I ever decide to pick up the rest of the pieces I need to build WoL7 in the future, I've got the most expensive piece of that deck available to me now.

Final Fantasy TCG Local Championship Qualifier - July 12th, 2026

 Today was a Local Championship Qualifier for FFTCG that I was honestly not wholly expecting that I was going to be able to attend - partly, I admit, because I forgot the LQ schedule.

But when I found out it was happening, during my week off, and that I wouldn't be needed for anything for Pokémon League (it is the Prerelease Window for Pitch Black, but today's event was already well covered by other Professors), I endeavored to head out to participate.

In an unusual change of pace for me, I decided to bring along a deck that's generally considered to be good, one of possibly the top four decks in the current metagame: Category MBM

With thirty-one players, we had five rounds before the event cut to the Top 8. Unfortunately, I didn't quite manage to make the top cut.

Round 1 vs Bartz WoLs - Lose 3-7

A slow game where neither of us could really build any sort of decent position early on, with a bit of back and forth between the two of us. The presence of a Penelo kept my opponent at bay for a while, as they were concerned about feeding Forwards to her removal ability. However, I was unable to capitalize on that open board state due, in part, to my draws not really affording me a ton of Forwards of my own.

Eventually, my opponent dropped a Refia, and while I quickly managed to break her and remove her from the Break Zone with LB Gilgamesh, she still soaked up removal that could've otherwise gone into my opponent's WoL4s, which meant that they got to stay in play, more or less unopposed. When I did find removal for WoL4, my opponent having not one, not two, but all three of their WoL4s meant it did little - if anything - to slow them down. The powerhouse Forward was more than enough to stop a lot of my offense in its tracks, and the 5k ping was more than adequate for easily removing Penelos and Frans.

My first EX Burst at damage 6 nearly spared me for a turn, until my opponent dropped a Time Magic special for more than enough to hunt down Arc and drop him into play, activating their backups and enabling them to give Arc Haste to swing in for the final damage.

Round 2 - Bye

Bye round. I looked around the store a little bit - I'd never made my way down to this shop before, given the length of the drive - and it's quite nice.

Round 3 vs Category MBM - Lose 1-7

A mirror match, and...

Man, the MBM Mirror is really unfun. A complete 180 from the Dragoon Mirror, which I love playing every time.

My opponent won the dice roll, went first, and this put me almost immediately on an insurmountable back foot. With a better opening play than mine, they had Ashe and Penelo online by turn 2, meaning it was functionally impossible for me to make my own Ashe play, lest Penelo put the Princess down before I even got close to a combat step and her "freeplay" auto-ability. This meant I had to try to play around Penelo, and when I did finally get rid of her, it wasn't long before my opponent managed to get her back.

When I finally had an opening to swing in for a point of damage, my opponent flipped over an Odin. I took that opportunity to just scoop, as I was officially too far behind in terms of board state and overall resources to have any hope of victory.

Round 4 vs Ice/Earth/Lightning - Win 7-0

The first game I had today where my deck operated the way it was "supposed" to be running. My opponent played around three Seymours against me, and each one was subsequently broken by Nono or other sources of removal. After three or four separate board wipes, I was still able to rebuild my board and maintain my advantage, as my opponent was on the defensive and unable to set much pressure back up against me.

Round 5 vs Earth/Water Summons - Win 7-1

I had a rather similar start to my Round 3 Opponent's, dropping Montblanc into another Backup - though in my case I had a Gurdy, rather than Hurdy, which ultimately made my turn 1 play significantly cheaper in practice, though it did leave me a little low on access to Water CP for much and more of the game.

Hecatoncheir from Opus XV, Crystal Dominion, was used to wipe my board on at least two separate occasions thanks to my opponent's recursion. Though I was a little bit behind on resources, the lack of board presence and pressure being put forth by my opponent meant that I had time enough to rebuild and take back control of the game.

Conclusion

In the end, with my 3-2 record, I wound up in 14th place out of 31 total competitors. A winning record, and placing me in the top half of the rankings - earning a Top 16 Promo Seymour - with a deck I haven't actually played in a while, and had never played in its current state before today.

While I would've liked to hit Top 8, I'll happily take a Top 16 placement and a winning record. It's still much improved from the last Qualifier I'd attended.

I also would've liked to have played a different deck today, but unfortunately some of the cards I'd ordered still haven't arrived. So I suppose that I'll just have to be a menace at tomorrow night's regular locals instead, assuming the cards arrive as they're currently slated to.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - July 10th, 2026

 A little over a month ago, I did my usual blog post on my Commander Night - which also happened to be a "Magic Presents: Pride" event, which also happened to fall a scant few days after Wizards of the Coast engaged in some transphobic fuckery as part of their union-busting efforts.

Since then, I've been busy on my Friday Nights. Work, "Summerween" at the haunted house where I work, a trip to Too Many Games, more work...

This was the first time in over a month where I could even consider going out to play Commander.

I decided I was going to go. I just don't plan to spend any more money on Magic product any time soon. A little unfortunate, because there are a couple of upcoming sets I had previously been looking forward to - I am not (wholly) immune to Universes Beyond, because I love The Hobbit and would've been more than glad to pick up a fair bit from the set.

But... Not right now. Not unless I see something that indicates Wizards plans to be less of a shitty company, which is a tall order.

Which brings me to tonight's games.

I, uh, may have flown too close to the sun. Only one of the games I played today was with a pod of four.

Winota may have done her thing a little too well. Two of the four players in the first game I played tonight broke off into another pod (though I think part of that was also that they had more friends show up... but still), leaving me and the last player just playing one-on-one games against each other for the rest of the night.

I got one game in with Sanar, winning it because my opponent looked at it, wondered if it was "the meme deck", decided it wasn't, and then when I got my turn with Sanar in play, they realized it was the meme after about four or five lands.

Next up was the first of my two games with The Wandering Minstrel, which went swimmingly - I had my Token Nonsense™ set up and churning out two 4/4 Angels with Flying and Vigilance every turn, sometimes four Angels if I drew into a land!

The problem was that my opponent had a Platinum Angel with a Lightning Greaves attached, and I had no way to get around the Shroud and remove the Angel, so while I was able to handily beat them deep into a negative life total, it ultimately meant nothing in the face of their inability to lose the game.

This was followed up by a game with Ashling, which I ultimately won, my Elementals engaging in quite some shenanigans. I realized early on that Myriad of Mysteries was mostly ineffective in a one-on-one game due to Myriad doing nothing without more opponents to make copies of my creatures, but it was still a five-color permanent, letting Shimmercreep do a fair bit of life-drain thanks to Conjurer's Closet blinking it for a few turns.

And finally, I pulled Minstrel back out to play against their Yuna deck, and we had...

Frankly, a hilariously bad game where neither of us had anything going on for like, ten turns. I did a lot of work swinging with Emet-Selch and the Regalia, and finally got an 11/11 Hero out of the "Lasting Fayth" Adventure attached to Zanarkand. Combined with the Minstrel's activated ability, this gave me enough power to finish my opponent off, who had still not seen much of anything from their deck.

After that, we both decided to call it for the night.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - June 29th, 2026

 I am so outrageously tired right now.

I was at Too Many Games, a convention near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, all weekend. I had an extra night at my hotel - the convention ended yesterday, the 28th, but I didn't check out of my hotel until this morning, the 29th. Convention was fun as hell, by the by. I spent way too much money picking up some video games I've been looking for for a while. Also got to meet my favorite Vtuber and get an autograph. That was neat.

Anyways. Today, I drove home. Around six hours in the car, almost one straight shot, bar a single stop for gas.

And then, because I am an absolute fool of a man, I chilled at home for about an hour, then turned right back around and went out for FFTCG tonight.

And I didn't play something nice and simple, oh no. Why would I do that, after a lengthy drive home after a long weekend?

No, I played my Fire-Wind Cat VII Crystals, a deck I haven't played since initially putting the current version of the list together. A deck that, being Crystals, means a whole extra resource to keep track of alongside everything else I'm already doing.

Had fun, though. We had a whopping eight people come out tonight, which is a way larger turnout than I expected immediately following this weekend's Materia Cup at the shop (still a little bummed I missed that, but c'est la vie). This gave us a solid three rounds of play tonight.

Round 1 vs Ice-Wind Crystals - Loss

Turns out that there's a reason that Ice-Wind is the current competitive darling as far as Crystal decks go.

That reason is that Ice does funny control things. Yazoo and Seymour each locking me out of Fire Backups slowed me down drastically, giving the Ice-Wind player a strong lead that I wasn't able to come back from.

Round 2 vs WoL7 - Win

Genuinely, I do not know how I won this one. I think the main thing that gave me an early edge I was able to work around was having an Amaterasu to stop the first WoL7 that they played.

And later in the game, having the resources to drop Barret on the field, with a couple of different options for Crystal-based removal, which Barret would reload for me after seeing an opposing Forward head to the Break Zone, gave me the pressure I needed to keep that early momentum swing going. Zack and Red XIII from the Limit Break gave me the opportunity to put up enough damage that I was able to basically secure the victory, especially with all of the removal I had available that would eat the blockers my opponent was able to get into play during their turn.

Round 3 vs Category MBM - Win

A very Wind-heavy game early on for me, but once I got a few Fire characters in place, the removal was enough to lock things in for me. Especially with Cyan popping their entire board with his 9k Board Wipe to clear the way for me to put game-securing pressure in place.

Friendly Game: Manikins vs Fire-Ice Warriors - Loss

I had brought my Manikins with me and was honestly tempted to play them for tonight's event, because one of the others had joked that they were gearing up for "Dissidia Locals" - several of the local players all play Dissidia Duellum, and were planning to play a game or two together before we got FFTCG Locals firing. And my Manikins being entirely Category DFF, well, Dissidia Locals.

But ultimately I decided to play my semi-real deck, the Crystals, instead. But I still wanted a game with my Manikins, because they're janky (at best), but fun.

So I asked the New Player, who has updated their Warriors List to be Fire-Ice, if they wanted to run a friendly. And, the short version of events, is that the New Player got their first win. I got a couple of points of damage in thanks to Counterfeit Youth, but once an Ifrit (XVI) hit play, I was basically done for. Delusory Knight (1-Drop Earth "Dark Knight" version) saved me for a turn once Ifrit hit the field, but the powerful Eikon was more than enough to really take over the game, especially with the general power of a Warriors list backing him (in spite of the Warriors lacking the powerhouse known as Akstar).

Still, I didn't want to play the Manikins because they're good. I wanted to play them because they're funny. I like them despite them just being a bad version of The Twelve.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - June 15th, 2026

 After a week where other obligations got in the way of even considering TCG nights, I made it to the shop tonight for Final Fantasy. There were only a total of four of us who showed up tonight, a woefully tiny turnout. Unfortunately, I will have to return to work later this week, so I'll be missing out on next week's Locals, which will likely have much higher attendance while people try to get their last-minute practice in before the Materia Cup on the 27th and 28th.

But I digress! That's next week, tonight was, uh, tonight. I wanted to play my Scions, so I pulled them out and shuffled them up for a quick round robin event.

Round 1 vs Mono-Water Monsters - Loss

A rough game to start with. Funnily enough, we had played a friendly before our other players had arrived, and while I won that one due to having a much smoother start (and, notably, my copy of Kalmia to keep Witch of the Fens from being able to obliterate my Forwards), this one, I didn't have quite that same luck.

For our "real" game, we both had fairly smooth starts, building out our backup lines fairly well, but unfortunately, I never found Kalmia.

Not that Witch of the Fens was necessary to remove that many Forwards. Various bounces and tucks cleared away my board, and the absolute suite of Monster-Forwards that they had available gave them an incredible amount of pressure that they used to end the game in the course of a few turns once they had the board under control.

Round 2 vs Fire/Water 2025 Starter Deck - Win

The same newbie player that's been showing up for the past few weeks, now rocking some nice Bahamut sleeves and one of Ultra Pro's Final Fantasy playmats (featuring one of my favorite pieces of art from the finale/end credits of Endwalker).

Much like the past couple of weeks, I was explaining my deck to them as the game went on, explaining each piece of my deck as I used it against them.

Round 3 vs Wind/Water Gullwings - Win

This was probably the most fun game I played today strictly because I've never played against Gullwings before. It was a blast to see a brand new-to-me deck.

Part of that fun was trying to figure out what I had to do to get around their board, because I've never seen what Gullwings does. So when one of my first game actions involved discarding my Kalmia to pay for a backup, I didn't realize I was making things difficult for myself later on after they dropped Yuna from Dreamlike Oceans into play, and started using her effect to shrink and remove my Forwards.

Still, thanks in part to Scions having excellent recursion, and per my opponent my ability to keep my hand full so that I wasn't playing catch-up on resources, I was able to take the victory over them.

Conclusion

Despite only having a few players show, this was a fun night of cards. And also the last I'm going to get for a little bit - I have to go back to work on Thursday, and next week after my work week is over, I'll be attending Too Many Games, so I'll be missing out on even considering Commander Night, definitely missing out on Gundam TCG, and then between that same weekend being the Materia Cup and since I'll be returning from TMG on that Monday, I might miss out on FFTCG (a combination of people probably not wanting to play after the MC, and me possibly not getting back home from TMG in time).

Who knows? We'll see.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - June 8th, 2026

 Following yesterday's LCQ, today's Locals were just a quiet, chill affair. A total of four players showed up tonight, including the newer player whose first Locals was last week.

All we wound up doing tonight were grinding out a bunch of friendlies together. In total, I played a good number of games, all but one of which were with one other person who was playing Category MBM, and then a final game with the newbie player.

For three of my games with the first player, I used my Fire/Ice Priming list. And those games were...

Weird. Among other things, my lack of practice with the deck really hit me a lot. I was unsure about what my deck's play lines should've been, my draws weren't presenting anything obvious, and MBM's ability to throw tons of bodies in play before using Penelo for a lot of removal was incredibly strong against a deck like Priming that usually only has one or two Forwards in play.

Their copies of Gurdy also did a surprising amount of work as removal pieces as well.

It was definitely rough going for me. Which is why I put the Priming list aside and pulled out my The Twelve instead. And those games went...

Also weird. I had a rough time getting Llymlaen in play for almost all of them except our last. One game I wound up not getting Llymlaen until about turn 3 or 4, when I had to drop LB Noctis to get a WoL4 back, using that to cover the Wind element to play the Llymlaen that I had finally drawn. This left me with almost no cards in hand and a relatively low number of backups.

Our final game wound up being an incredible, though. Neither of us were able to really build a position to "control" the game, and with the amount of card draw they were burning through using their Vaans, I wound up winning through deck out of all things. They were sitting on 5 damage for the last few turns of the game, and they were able to keep a defensive position in place that kept me from being able to get the last damage I needed in, but neither could they safely hit me back.

That was when two of tonight's players had to bounce, leaving just myself and the newbie. They had earlier in the night said that they were interested in building a Priming list - they had seen the more Ice-heavy variants that only splash Clive thanks to Torgal letting them ignore element restrictions, rather than something more like my Fire/Ice build - and so I offered to let them take my Priming list for a spin while I played The Twelve against them.

It wound up being a 7-0 game, in part because of their unfamiliarity with the deck, the fact that the deck was giving them some weird draws as well, and my The Twelve deciding to play absolutely buttery smooth for one game. That said, it still let them get a small glimpse at a Priming list, and I was able to run them through my The Twelve list after, showing them everything in the list since they had shown a fair bit of interest in that as well when I told them what I was playing at the start of the game.

All in all, it was a really pleasant night of FFTCG, a nice, chill wind-down after the LCQ, and I'm glad I went out.