Tonight is Commander Night at the card shop. However, I have no drive to head out there this evening - my work week was rough, and I had obligations to follow that up with helping at a Chaos Rising prerelease for the Pokémon League last night, so I am, plainly speaking, exhausted.
But I didn't want to go without a post for today, so I thought to myself: Why not try my hand at a different style of post for once? I've said before that I want to branch out and work on posts that aren't strictly "after-action" posts from my myriad nights playing TCGs.
Which then brought me to the question of what deck do I want to take a close look at? Since this would normally be a Commander night for me, one of my Commander Decks is the obvious answer, which then modifies the question to which Commander deck do I want to take a close look at?
And while I could try to explain myself or go heavy into why I did not want to do this or that deck, that's all just waffling around pointlessly.
I want to look at my Wandering Minstrel deck. Why? Because it's possibly my favorite deck right now, even if I know it can still use a lot of tweaking to make it better.
The Commander
Normally, when you build a Commander deck, you want to start with the Commander itself, right? That's the obvious way to build - "This is the creature card I want to focus my deck's strategy around." Or the other way around, as cases may be, that the Commander is the best creature to have consistent access to in order to support your chosen strategy - "I want to build a spellslinger deck, what Commander would support that best without getting me hated off the table?" or similar.
This is a case a little closer to that second one. I didn't, strictly speaking, start off with any particular strategy in mind, nor did I start off with thinking that the Minstrel's abilities would be fun to build around. I started with the fact that I had one copy of every single Town land that was printed in the Final Fantasy set, which would make a reasonably budget-friendly five-color mana base. From there, I chose the Minstrel as my Commander because he supported that.
He lets my Towns enter untapped. He gives me benefits for playing a lot of Towns in the form of a constant source of Tokens. He becomes a wincon in the Command Zone thanks to his (admittedly rather expensive) activated ability. Also, pertinently, he's technically a five-color Commander thanks to that very same activated ability, meaning I could actually run all of my Towns, the entire point of building this particular deck in the first place.
The Main Focus: Towns
Obviously, having started with the fact that I have all 23 Towns in the deck, and that I chose a Commander who benefits from those Towns, the next step was choosing additional cards that benefit from my manabase. The Final Fantasy x Magic: the Gathering set made Town support a small theme for Blue and Green cards, with 8 cards - counting my Commander, the Minstrel, and Balamb Garden, one of the Towns itself - that either benefit Towns, or benefit from having Towns. Prishe's Wanderings and Reach the Horizon let me ramp my Towns from straight out of the deck, Travel the Overworld and Qiqirn Merchant both let me draw well at a nicely discounted rate, Town Greeter will let me do some self-mill and nab a land from the bin, and the PuPu UFO enables some minor ramp ability that can turn into a hefty Flying beater later in the game, for a modest mana cost.
Of course, once I have those Towns in play, I need something else to do aside from just ramping more of them and drawing cards.
The Synergies
That's where Omega, Heartless Evolution comes into play. This powerful Raid Boss (why they went with the FFXIV version and not the FFV original I can at best only guess at, but a powerful effect is a powerful effect) benefits from my having a lot of non-basic lands in play.
Non-basic lands such as, for example, all 23 lands with the Town subtype.
If I could more consistently get the Legendary Robot in-hand, I would absolutely consider it to be my deck's "secret Commander". For quite a while, I'd wanted to build a deck that actively just had Omega in the Command Zone, but I don't have nearly enough non-basics in just Blue and Green to make such a deck properly tick. Slipping them into the 99 of the Minstrel works out quite well, all the same.
Once I settled on running Omega as part of the 99, I got it into my head that there would be some Magical Christmasland Moments where I could start literally locking games down using the Robot.
Which brought me to Ol' Reliable #1 and Ol' Reliable #2: Panharmonicon and Conjurer's Closet. While the initial thought was 100% laser-focused on what they could do alongside Omega, I eventually came to realize that many of the other cards I wound up adding also came packaged with some incredible ETB effects that this one-two punch of flicker-oriented Artifacts could help out with.
Gladiolus and Ignis being able to ramp more mana. Cloud of Darkness being shockingly potent removal. Delivery Moogle being able to grab any 1 of 7 different artifacts, including a lot of my Mana Rocks. Flickering Summon: Fat Chocobo can provide even more Tokens alongside the Minstrel's own, bolstering my deck's board presence (though due to being a Chapter Ability, Panharmonicon wouldn't work with it to double the tokens produced by the Bird). Even just Exdeath's 3 life can mean the difference between getting blown out by an aggressive player and surviving to crack back at them.
I've also been considering the addition of Y'shtola Rhul, the monoblue version of FFXIV's preeminent catgirl that has an end-of-turn flicker and provides a second end-of-turn, but I haven't gotten around to figuring out what to remove for her as of the time of writing this post. Part of the reason for that is the deck's other main strategy, which is a focus on the Minstrel's token producing trigger.
Of the deck's 10 Enchantments, 8 are dedicated to bolstering the Minstrel's Token generation (and working just as well with the copy of Chocobo Racetrack in the 99). Divine Visitation replacing the 2/2s with, in essence, Serra Angels. Roar of Resistance giving the tokens, whatever form they take, Haste, while Echoing Assault makes them harder to block via Menace. Doubling Season and Parallel Lives bumping the Tokens-per-Trigger count from 1 to 2 to potentially 4. Caretaker's Talent giving me additional card draw and potentially massively buffing the tokens (even the baseline 2/2s are a lot scarier when they become 4/4s instead).
Inspiring Leader and Intangible Virtue both provide Anthem effects to bolster my Tokens - as does Phantom General, who admittedly isn't an Enchantment, but is one of the few non-Enchantment means the deck has for buffing Minstrel's Elementals.
Coming back to why this makes it hard to figure out what to remove for Y'shtola, the Enchantments that bolster the Minstrel's innate abilities make up a fair portion of the deck, so I wouldn't really want to cut any of them if I could avoid it, though this does have the unfortunate side effect of the deck feeling in some ways like it's a little disjointed, almost like it's two different decks that have been stapled together.
The Fluff
Then there are the last few cards, which are either decent cards in their own right, or that I added just for a little bit of flavor.
Dark Confidant, who while he's a little less scary these days, still holds a special place to me as historically being one of the best sources of consistent card draw in the game. Garland, Knight of Cornelia and his flipside, Chaos, the Endless, who... well, while Garland can potentially offer some deck manipulation due to the number of noncreature spells in the deck, he's mostly there for the sake of Chaos. Specifically, because Chaos is a Raid Boss that can be faced down during Stormblood's Omega Raid series. Did the Minstrel have anything to do with that Raid series? No - not even the Savage versions of the fights.
Did that stop me? No. Not at all.
In fact, that's actually why a number of the Creatures in the deck made the cut during my earliest draft: They were enemies that can be faced in FFXIV. This version of Dark Confidant, in addition to being a card advantage engine, is directly modeled on the Ascians of the game. Emet-Selch is the leader of the Ascians, a memorable boss fight and beloved antagonist character (and the Extreme version of his fight is unlocked through a version of the Minstrel). Exdeath and Chaos are faced in the Stormblood Raid series. Cloud of Darkness is battled at the end of the Crystal Tower Alliance Raid series, as well as more recently in Dawntrail having a "Chaotic" version that was tuned for then-current Level 100 Players to battle against (that was, again, unlocked via the Minstrel!).
Anyways. Aside from the fluff of "these can be fought in FFXIV", there are other cards that are in for "generally just kind of good" reasons.
Windborn Muse, Propaganda, and Ghostly Prison keep me safe from combat-oriented decks while I try to build up my position. Minwu, Rebellion Strategist (from Final Fantasy: Through the Ages, a reprint of Mangara, the Diplomat) providing further incentive to not attack me lest I get a bit of card draw, while also punishing opponents for playing too many cards in one turn - by again, letting me draw cards. Explorer's Scope and the Regalia to potentially ramp some more land. A few removal spells, a couple of counterspells, and a smattering of other interaction to protect myself or cut down threats are all there to round the list out.
Conclusion
All in all, my Wandering Minstrel deck is a very safely Bracket 2 List. It has two main strategies, which are admittedly a little disjointed from one another. It's not a combo deck, nor is it heavy on Stax Pieces. It's very much a "battlecruiser", building itself up over a few turns while trying to keep itself alive, until it reaches the "critical mass" where it can start taking over a game. Two or three Enchantments are all it really needs to see the Minstrel's ability to generate tokens quickly get out of hand, after all.
Also, I'm glad I trimmed out the additional combat step cards that I previously had in the list so I could make room for more actual removal. They were a cute-sounding trick - "Oh, the Minstrel makes tokens at the start of combat, let's get more combats!" - but in practice they were either worthlessly gumming up my hand, or they were just win-more.
That all said though, the deck could use more tweaking, overall. Shift the focus of the deck towards the ETBs and add more flicker effects - Y'shtola, Ephemerate, Cloudshift, so on and so forth - or towards going all-in on being a token deck - try to get a copy of Anointed Procession, add in even more token production of different sorts, maybe throw in Purphoros to get damage off of the tokens entering. One or the other, tightening up the list that way.
Another possibility is providing additional interaction. The deck is probably still a little light on removal if I'm being honest, so getting a few extra pieces could be useful. That or I could add Tutors to the deck to improve its consistency.
I could even go heavy on trying to build the list up as a Stax-heavy control list, hiding behind effects like Trinisphere, Deafening Silence, and Drannith Magistrate to slow my opponents down while holding up mana to counter or remove whatever they attempt to do, all while letting the Minstrel's tokens be my threats on-board. That would probably start pushing the deck more towards Bracket 3 or even 4, however, which isn't where I really want to go with the deck.
But I digress.
This sort of quasi-deep-dive into my decklist was actually a lot of fun to write-up. I'll have to try to do this more often on days when I can't, or don't have the energy to head out to the shop for otherwise regular TCG nights, or on nights where an event doesn't fire (this most likely being something that would happen to Final Fantasy TCG rather than the others I play, but c'est la vie). I know I have a number of busy weekends coming up through the summer - haunted house things and various conventions I plan to attend - so if I have the time, maybe I can write some of these up to have posts available on the days I can't actually get out to play.
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