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.

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.