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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little about the actual process of the prerelease:

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

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

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

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

Regardless.

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

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

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

Day Off - March 20th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - March 9th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Round 1 vs Water-Lightning Monsters - Loss

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

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

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

Round 2 vs Warriors of the Crystal - Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Day Off - March 6th, 2026

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

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