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.

Final Fantasy TCG Local Championship Qualifier - June 7th, 2026

Today was the LCQ I had been looking forward to participating in for the past few weeks. I don't know how much I'll be able to really participate in competitive FFTCG events this season, so there's honestly a non-zero chance that this is the only event that I'm able to make it to.

So when the event was announced as being 6 rounds due to a total of 33 players, I was hoping that I would at least break even and go 3-3, if not in fact manage a winning record. It...

Didn't go that way for me. I still did alright for myself, but I ended the day with a losing record, going 2-4, playing my Dragoons.

There were a few factors at play for that decision. One was, from sheer practicality, I already had a copy of the decklist printed and ready for an event. Second was that Dragoons would have been a solid call into the meta that's been seen at Materia Cups and other LCQs. Third was that despite my putting them on the shelf for several months ever since the Winter Cup, they are still probably my most well-practiced deck at a competitive level.

But despite having a losing record, I still feel incredibly proud of my performance for reasons that I'll get into later.

Round 1 vs Ice/Fire Warriors - Lose 4-7

An incredibly close game between the two of us, with Freyas putting in a lot of work and Kain helping to keep them running - even when Kain ate Amaterasus for his trouble. Unfortunately, this particular player claims to basically thrive in a more control-oriented "long game" situation, and they did run a few cards that aren't necessarily in a lot of other Warriors lists, including Ice/Lightning Zeromus, which gave them a few extra points of control to give themselves control of the game in the end.

Round 2 vs Warriors of Light - Lose 3-7

A second loss in a row, which was probably not a good omen in hindsight. This was a game where I was in a rather commanding position over my opponent until a single turn where they were able to completely turn things on their head, dropping several Forwards in play all at once, including their one copy of Refia and the LB Warrior of Light, which enabled them to remove several of my Forwards from play.

I was able to come up with two pieces of removal, taking out the WoL and Refia, but a Cu Sith bringing Refia back at the end of my turn saw both the Refia get immediately replayed, followed by a second copy of the LB WoL.

I did not have another two pieces of removal. I was stuck losing to their very well-established position.

Round 3 vs Cat IV Monsters - Win 7-0

I came out swinging fairly hard and fast, playing pretty aggressively and getting my opponent pretty well battered pretty quickly. They were a bit tilted, in their words, in part due to being 0-2 with the list while a friend of theirs, playing the same, was at the time 2-0 - the deck just wasn't working out well for them, and it was getting under their skin.

They made a few misplays in the last couple turns of the game as well, which they called out on themselves almost as soon as said turns were over, which left things open for me to finish the game rather swiftly. With us having finished as fast as we did, we reported our results, and then played a friendly with the remaining time-in-round, which I won again, this time going 7-2.

This game was why I'm proud of my performance today. The player I was up against is a Worlds-caliber player, another of my locals regularly happy to brag about a time that they took this same player to a Game 3 at a previous LCQ at some point last season.

So with my taking our "important" game 7-0, and then our friendly follow-up 7-2, I'm incredibly pumped about that, even if I wound up with a losing record at the end of the day.

Round 4 vs Dragoons - Lose 1-7

Dragoon Mirror! And it was against the same player I had my mirror match against at last week's locals.

And much like last week's locals, I got outplayed. They drew better, had access to Cherry Blossom Freya for mass removal, and generally had better value from their cards than what I was getting from mine.

I can't even be mad, all said, because the Dragoon Mirror is always a blast to play.

Round 5 vs WoL 7 - Win 7-3

I should not have won this game.

We had a pretty even pace against each other at first, but they eventually had a solid turn with several bodies in play, including Gilgamesh (FFBE) with enough Elements in their Break Zone to give Gilgamesh the buff, Haste, First Strike, and Dull-Freeze attack auto-ability. I had one blocker in play.

My opponent proceeded to swing only their 2-drop Fire/Water Firion into my blocker, letting the 6-drop Aranea devour the young Rebel. And then they passed their turn.

This gave me the breathing room to successfully get 3-Drop Freya and Cherry Blossom their board away, giving me the win. When I asked what they were thinking with the turn where they swung Firion into my Aranea, and didn't swing Gilgamesh? "I just plain forgot."

Again. I shouldn't have won this game. But my opponent making the mother of all misplays gave me the undeserved victory. I'll take it.

Round 6 vs Mono-Fire - Lose 5-7

This was one of, if not the most tense game of FFTCG I've ever played.

Neither of us could really establish a truly dominant board position over the other. I had a stronger board earlier on, but they had enough damage output to clear that board away and reduce the threat I presented. In turn, I was able to use several Freyas to wipe out their board a few times and keep them in check right back.

I eventually misplayed, popping a Backup to get a copy of Freya back from my Break Zone to fuel a Cherry Blossom. A Cherry Blossom that, due to the loss of the Backup, meant I wasn't able to break the Phoinix I was trying to catch with the removal. They followed that up with a misplay of their own several turns later, where the Zack from last year's Starter Decks took out my Freya, leaving me with only two Forwards and disabling Zack's Haste.

A few more removal trades eventually saw them with just the Phoinix and LB Machina in play. I popped Machina with LB Cloud, and waited, as I couldn't get through the bird.

This was met with The Demon, who removed my Break Zone - including all six of my "good" Freyas, the 3-drops and 4-drops both - to delete Cloud. This was the nail that sealed my coffin as The Demon made it impossible for me to build any other board state from there, and while I fought and flailed for a few turns, there was nothing I could do in the end. The writing was on the wall, I ended up scooping, giving my opponent the much deserved win.

Unfortunately, this only put them in 10th place, not quite making the Top 8 Cut, but alas.

Conclusion

I am drained. Six solid rounds of FFTCG, including some incredibly tense games that forced me to think incredibly hard about how to handle the threats I was facing down, and Round 3 having a second friendly that was even rougher than the "actual" round meaning I had seven games of FFTCG today, was a fair bit.

Even with a deck like Dragoons that I know incredibly well, that was still quite a lot for me, and there's a part of me that's almost glad I didn't get anywhere near the top cut as a consequence.

I still look forward to swinging out to my Locals tomorrow night, and I hope that I can make it to more events this competitive season.

Friday Night Magic: Magic Presents Pride Commander Event - June 5th, 2026

 Normally this would be my work week, but I decided to spend some PTO to get an extra-long vacation for myself as a small gift. Which is why I'll be able to attend the FFTCG LCQ on Sunday, and is giving me the chance to hit a few more TCG Nights than normal!

But, before I get into tonight's night of Magic, I do want to talk about something.

For just a little more than a month now, members of the development team for Magic: the Gathering Arena, the digital game client, have been working to unionize. Wizards of the Coast, or perhaps higher-ups from Hasbro, have been fighting against those efforts tooth and nail. Disgustingly, part of these efforts have included openly deadnaming trans members of said development team.

And in fact, they doubled down, doing so again earlier this week after what was evidently a mealymouthed apology, deadnaming all of these trans employees again by refusing to update forms in advance of the union vote on Tuesday. Tuesday, if you don't have your calendar handy, was June 2nd. The second day of Pride Month.

I'm cisgender. I cannot, will not claim to understand the full breadth of the bullshit and bigotry that transgender individuals experience in their day-to-day, let alone this experience, being forced to identify with your deadname, an identity that does not align with who you are as a person, all in the name of fighting for basic work protections.

Frankly, fuck Wizards of the Coast, and fuck Hasbro.

And for added insult, today, the 5th, is the first day for "Magic: the Gathering Presents Pride" events. A paltry three days after deadnaming all of their trans employees for the second time in as many weeks. But sure, let's celebrate "Gruulfriends" with a pretty Gilded Lotus that has Nissa and Chandra in the art.

Again: Fuck Wizards of the Coast, and fuck Hasbro.

Now, I said I was going to talk about that before I "get into tonight's night of Magic"... But honestly, I don't feel like it. Not in any great detail, not after thinking about all of this.

The most detail I'll get into is this: Tonight was my shop's "Magic Presents Pride" event. I played a lot of games tonight. A few with a pod of 3, a few with a pod of 4.

Most of them, I played my new Winota deck. The last, I played my Ashling. But when the shop employee was shouting out about how tonight was celebrating Pride and handing out promotional packs and pins, in the back of my mind, I just thought again about everything I lined out above.

It soured my mood a fair bit. I had already been considering not even going out tonight after thinking my way through all of this and putting all of my thoughts to proverbial paper. But I made the call to go out and play. I do enjoy the game in spite of the bullshit that WotC continually engages in. The union organizers, as far as I've seen, haven't called for any sort of boycott.

But after the way I felt my mood drop, I'm going to be rethinking my relationship with Magic for the foreseeable future. Until WotC decides to be better, at least. We'll see. I have the choice made for me easily for the next couple of weeks, since I won't be able to do Commander Night due to previous obligations.

But we'll see how things go when I'm not being given such an easy layup.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - June 1st, 2026

 Another Monday, another FFTCG night, and possibly - probably? - the last one before the Local Championship Qualifier on the 7th.

Wanting to dust them off for the first time in quite a number of months - getting some last-minute practice before I likely play them at the LCQ - I pulled my Dragoons off of the shelf.

With a rather astounding ten (10!) players tonight, we had a solid 4 Rounds of play.

Round 1 vs Cost 1 Bartz - Win 7-4

I won the roll, went first, and when I didn't see an Alus in my opening hand, I took the mulligan. Unfortunately, I didn't see one in my second hand either, nor off the draw.

Thank goodness that 2-drop Aranea flipped the Prince over and put him in my hand, then. Dumping my hand, I played Alus, and ended the turn with one card.

My opponent went all-in on an aggressive opening turn, dropping Bartz, the matching Boko, and a 1-drop Reks. Bartz and Boko partied up and grabbed an Ultros, tucking the Aranea away, leaving me wide open to three points of damage. My turn came around and I put a 6-drop Aranea in play to break the bird, and left her up to serve as an attack deterrent.

LB Noctis got my opponent's Boko back, who was then dropped back into play to party up with Bartz, grabbing a 1-drop Ice-element Lightning. Aranea took Bartz down on the block, but Lightning - who was too large to stop with Aranea - swung in for Damage 4.

The extra draws off of Alus came in rather clutch for me, as in conjunction with the backup line I'd been building up, I was able to play the 5-drop power loss Dragoon to remove the Lightning, along with the 2-drop Dragoon that scales up its power for each other Dragoon in play. This gave me a rather solid defensive line that my opponent wasn't able to get around. When they dropped Kelger and used that to break Aranea, I was able to use LB Kain more or less in her place to give myself another blocker.

LB Gilgamesh removing two Bartz from their Break Zone, and the third eventually getting sent to damage once I cleared away portions of their board, basically spelled the end of the game, and I finished sweeping them away.

Round 2 vs Fire-Wind Crystals - Loss 4-7

I lost the roll, went second, saw the Alus off of a Lunafreya - which also tucked a second Alus, meaning I knew I was even less likely to whiff over the course of the game.

Unfortunately, my opponent had an early Clive, along with a host of backups, and I was worried about feeding a potential blocker to Ifrit, which lead to me playing far more conservatively than I think I otherwise would've been trying - allowing them to rack up a fair bit of early damage and putting me in a position where I felt behind for most of the game.

I did finally get a turn where a few of my single-target removal Dragoons were able to hit the field and take out what was at the time their whole board, alongside LB Cloud. Speaking with my opponent after the game, they said the Cloud was honestly probably a bit of an overextension on my end, and that if the roles were reversed, that's probably the only part that they wouldn't have done.

Part of that was that I was sitting on pretty low backups for most of the game, so spending the resources to drop the Cloud meant I was then behind on resources despite the extra draws off of Alus. Matters were made worse when I had to crack my backups to get Forwards back from my Break Zone to have plays, which just sort of snowballed the resource issue and let them ultimately take over handily thanks to their superior resources, between a full suite of backups and quite a lot of card draw off of Clive and the new Marche from Dreamlike Oceans both letting them draw extra cards on damage.

A Cyan wiping my board after my own board wipe turn was what really drove that resource problem home, and lead to the snowballing losses.

Round 3 vs Earth-Lightning Starter Deck 2025 - Win 7-0

This was... a little mean, I'm not going to lie.

This was effectively a brand new player. They had, by their own admission, gotten all of about two or three games before today, with an unofficial third-party client, against some of their friends who are similarly new to the game. This made our game in Round 3 all of about their fifth game of FFTCG.

And I was playing Dragoons.

I did my best to help teach them throughout the game, tried to coach them a bit on some of their plays, tried my best to explain the reasoning behind some of those decisions, things like why they really wouldn't want to, for instance, play the Starter Deck's "highlight" card, the 3-drop Cloud, onto a board where the only other Forward they had was the 1-drop Luso from the Starter Deck, who had also only just been played and couldn't make use of Cloud's on-entry auto ability providing a buff and Brave.

Despite that, though, unless I had completely sandbagged, Dragoons were just too strong for the new player to handle, especially with the precon.

Still, they seemed appreciative after the fact, so... mission accomplished, I hope.

Round 4 vs Dragoons - Loss 7-4

Dragoon Mirror!

They won the roll, went first, we both had turn 1 Alus, and I had a second backup turn 1 as well.

Unfortunately, those were the only two backups I saw for quite some time, meanwhile my opponent built up 4 or 5 backups over the first couple of turns. So while I got the first points of damage in, they had the resource advantage over the long-term, which is what ultimately gave them the edge over me.

Not helping matters was that my first opening hand had two of the 3-drop Freya and none of my Alus, so I had to mulligan away those two. The third copy of that Freya was deep in the deck, so I never saw the board wipe that I desperately needed to clear away their well-established board position.

Ah well, it happens. I can't even be mad, I love playing the mirror match.

Conclusion

Alright, Dragoons. I think I forgive you after how poorly you ran for me back at Winter Cup.

The Dragoons are probably the list I'm going to take with me for Sunday's LCQ. I already have a copy of the deck list printed, they're genuinely a solid call into the current metagame that we've been seeing at Materia Cups and other LCQs, and I do still have a fair bit of practice with playing them from how much I was using them near the end of the previous season. Today was good for shaking off the rust since I haven't pulled them from the shelf in months, but I think that's about the best prep I can really hope for right now.

Gundam TCG Locals - May 31st, 2026

For the first time in three months, I finally got to make my way out to Locals for the Gundam TCG, and more to the point, finally got to try out my Clan Deck with the changes I made to it after the last time. The deck list, in its current state, is presented below:

There was a shockingly low turnout today with a grand total of five players counting myself. We had three rounds of play, and while in theory I ought to have been one of the bye rounds, though that didn't come to pass in order to avoid having two players have a repeat match with one another. All the same to me, since it meant I got to play the maximum amount of Gundam TCG for the day.

Round 1 vs Red-White Neo Zeong - Loss

Turns out a deck that's 80% Blockers by volume is really good at stopping my relatively aggressive deck from finishing out the game. I got them to their last shield, but the Blockers kept me from clinching it out.

My opponent's Sinanju and Neo Zeong both put in quite a bit of work removing my Units from play as we got into the late game, though fortunately they never saw a Full Frontal to make either of them even more dangerous. Not that they strictly needed it, obviously.

Round 2 vs Blue-Purple - Loss

So many pings, and so little luck drawing pilots to let me get proper pressure in. Though, that said, I think this was the game where I had three Machu in hand and hit the fourth off of Linking one of the first three.

But unfortunately, I had relatively few of my GQuuuuuuX or the general [Clan] Link units compared to the number of Shuji Links.

A Triple Guntank turn fairly early was a heavy swing, removing two of my Forwards and giving them an army of bodies to punch my shields with.

Round 3 vs Green-White "8-Char" Zeon - Win

The only game where I was the one to fully outvalue my opponent. They saw a lot more of their lower-cost units, basically topping out with their level 3 Rick Doms and Starter Char's Zakus, plus few of their pilots. Meanwhile, I was able to practically run rampant over them with my stronger "mid-range" units of levels 4 and 5.

Conclusion

A weirdly small event today, which was... troubling. But it was a very lovely day out, so theoretically other players were out enjoying the sun.

This is also, slightly frustratingly, the only day I'll be able to make it to Gundam for another month.

To wit: 

I have next week off from work because of some PTO, but I have other plans - either a local ComicCon or the Final Fantasy TCG Local Qualifier, likely the latter.

In two weeks there will evidently be a Newtype Challenge at a different store in the area, meaning most Gundam Players are likely to be there instead.

In three weeks, I have my normal work week.

And then in four weeks I'll be out of town for a different convention - Too Many Games; it'll be my first time attending! - and... then another work week the week after that.

So in about 6 more weeks, I should be able to make it to Gundam Locals again.

I swear, it's almost like the universe doesn't want me to play this game.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - May 29th, 2026

 Another Friday, another Commander Night, another good three hours of game.

Singular.

I played one game of Commander tonight, that took a solid three hours, and while everybody playing acknowledged how long it went, it never really - to me, at least - felt like it had dragged.

All four players held the role of "The Threat" at various points. We all got to do our decks' thing, we did knock one player out weirdly early on and all thought the game would be coming to an end sooner after that than it did, but, uh. It didn't end quite that quickly.

Tonight, I decided to play a deck I haven't used in a long while, my Saheeli, Radiant Creator deck.

And what a wild game it wound up being. Like I said, despite its length, it never really seemed to drag, there was constant play and counterplay going on.

There were five or six separate board wipes, four of which were mine (two activations of Aethersquall Ancient, a Blasphemous Act, and a Chain Reaction). In my last two turns I had successfully activated Aetherflux Conduit once each - meaning back to back turns managing to generate 40+ energy to successfully utilize the Conduit, thanks in large part to my Aether Refinery.

I made a misplay and overreached in my last turn, inadvertently wrecking the plan of one opponent, playing Perrie the Pulverizer, who would've otherwise been able to finish off the third player, Quintorius, History Chaser, which in turn would've left me to win the game. Unfortunately, I screwed up, and the Quintorius player finished the two of us off on their turn.

But honestly, after everything, despite being upset at myself and my misplay, I can't even be mad. The game was long, but I can safely say I managed to do everything I could have ever wanted to do in a game playing Saheeli.