I went in to the card shop tonight with three decks, including my new Y'shtola deck - mostly the precon, but with the precon's copy of Summon: Good King Mog XII swapped out for a Black Mage's Rod - fully intending to play a game with each of them.
What wound up happening instead is that I saw there was a copy of the Limit Break precon, and I bought that. I did play one game with my Y'shtola deck, but then the pod I joined conveniently happened to switch decks such that we each were playing a different one of the four Final Fantasy x Magic: the Gathering precons.
Game 1: Y'shtola vs. Tidus and Y'shtola
The first game before our fourth arrived was between my very-slightly-modified Y'shtola deck, a second, fully unmodified Y'shtola deck, and one other playing the Tidus deck.
Two Y'shtola decks operating at the same time is a little ridiculous. The two of us were drawing frankly stupid numbers of cards. There were also, all said, four or five separate board wipes throughout the course of the game, which ultimately gave me the win, technically, as my opponent decided that they had no desire to start rebuilding their board from scratch again. Our fourth arrived just after, no less, so it was all the same.
Games 2 & 3: Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER vs. Tidus, Yuna's Guardian, Y'shtola, Night's Blessed, & Terra, Herald of Hope
These games were long, and the four precons feel pretty decently balanced against one another. I did not keep any sort of notes for these games, I just remember, for lack of better description, the vibes and a couple of significant plays.
The first of the two, I was playing with very little going on. I drew a little heavy on lands, and got maybe one piece of Equipment out during the entire game. Tidus and Y'shtola fared better than I did, and did get to engage in their deck's respective gameplans.
But Terra. Oh, baby, Terra. The Terra deck absolutely ran away with the game, going crazy with reanimation shenanigans, including a well-placed Rise of the Dark Realms right after a Crux of Fate wiped away most of their board. This gave Terra a practically guaranteed win if none of the three of us could find a board-wipe, which none of us did, whereupon we shuffled up for a second game with our precons.
The second four-precon game was a much more balanced affair. Everybody got to "do their thing", I had around four Equipments in play before dropping my first creature, but that first creature was Helitrooper who could equip all of that gear for free thanks to its ability for reduced equip costs. I got Sword of the Animist out and gave that to Helitrooper, fixing my mana woes as I was a little behind on lands and lacked access to all of my colors.
Tidus was able to generate massive creatures with their varied Counter-production shenanigans, Tidus's combat trigger for Proliferates, and this also gave them card draw. Terra unfortunately floundered for much of the game, having even worse mana troubles than I had, but when they did get some mana, they made up for it in spades with some wildly swingy turns.
The winner of the game, though, was Y'shtola, whose minor bits of passive healing and just-barely-threatening-enough-to-not-attack board state left them at above 30 life when the rest of us had been whittled away to single-digit totals. Hraesvelgr empowering an incredibly beefy Ardbert spelled a swift doom for the lot of us.
Conclusion
As much as I hate the "Fortnite-ification" of Magic as a product, I can't argue with how much fun the Final Fantasy Commander decks were to play against one another. And with the copy of the two-player Starter Kit that I picked up, I look forward to taking apart the Cloud deck, along with some of my other decks, to bash together with the Starter Kit Cloud for a (hopefully) fun R/W Equipment Voltron list.
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