Final Fantasy TCG Locals - July 27th, 2026

 After a weekend at my local anime convention, I was excited to sling some cardboard tonight at Locals.

I brought along a new deck that I was itching to test out, Ice-Wind Crystals, and shuffled the ever-loving daylights out of it in preparation. We had 6 players show tonight, which gave us a three-round event.

A three-round event that frankly kind of fried my brain a little bit. Brand new control list after a draining (if fun!) weekend will do that, I suppose.

Round 1 vs Category MBM - Win

The first test of my new deck and...

Man, I almost feel bad for how this went. I wound up with all three Remnants in play, each having removed a different Remnant from my Break Zone, giving me a ton of Crystals just off of the three of them, plus having Kadaj's end-of-turn discard effect fully up and active. Between Kadaj, Yazoo's Dull-Freeze ability, and general ability to keep my opponent's Fowards under control, this was pretty decisively a game in my favor.

Round 2 vs Category VIII - Win

Two Ice Decks, clashing against one another.

This game was slow. And grindy. And exhausting. Neither of us really had room to make a lot of headway against the other, chipping away at one another for one or two damage over the course of multiple turns. I successfully cast the 8-cost Bartz for his alternative cost of three Crystals on turn two, and unfortunately I hit two of my three copies of the 4-cost Shantotto, neither of which I could play off of Bartz. Still, effectively drew two cards, so it could've been worse.

Like I said, neither of us could really make a ton of headway against one another, with my Dull-Freeze effects doing a ton of work - Yazoo being able to hit a Backup was clutch, as it kept my opponent's Cid Kramer locked down, keeping access to "every" element out of their reach, plus the resource denial that locking one of their three Backups down provided. Seymour eventually joined Yazoo in keeping things locked down. An "online" Kadaj stripping their hand away helped a lot as well, since it meant they were being forced to play from their top-decks.

This game, it felt like I had a hard time generating Crystals, but as my opponent pointed out to me, I really didn't. I was generating Crystals left, right, and center, but I was also immediately spending those Crystals on things like playing Bartz, or using my Remnants' abilities.

Ultimately, after a long, long game, I took the win by swinging big and "overextending" some damage into their board, then using Shantotto's from-hand ability to Dull their entire board before they could crack back and take me out on their own turn.

Round 3 vs Sky Pirates - Win

And right after frying my brain with the Cat VIII game, I got another round against an opponent with a difficult deck for me to work around.

Fortunately, my opponent played the game less aggressively than they really should have, giving me time to get some amount of setup, and while I again felt like I had a rough time building up Crystals, that honestly really wasn't the case - I was just spending them almost as soon as I was collecting them. My one copy of Spiritus hitting the field did a lot of work to help me with some of my Crystal management since I was able to get some slight refunds on a few of my effects, but unfortunately nowhere near enough of them.

They also, thankfully, never saw Ashe. They went through all three of their copies of Basch, but the only Ashe they saw was used to drop a Kites into play because they weren't expecting me to be able to use my Vaan's Life of Crime special to hit their board for a solid 8k damage. Damage that, thanks to them making a bit of a misplay, took out their 2-drop Yuna along with Balthier, which in turn resulted in Fran going down as well.

From there, I was able to claw my way back to a victory, with Seymour cinching it for me by dull-freezing two of their remaining Forwards and breaking the third. With the damage we'd each dealt to one another, that left me in position to win within a turn or two from there.

Conclusion

My brain hurts.

But man this deck was a lot of fun to play. I'm looking forward to getting some more practice in with it, even if I'm not sure that I'll be able to make it to any other competitive events this season. If nothing else, I'd like to get to the point that I don't need to think as hard about how to handle different situations I find myself in. Being brand new to this control-oriented version of a Crystals list, there were a number of points throughout the night, especially against Cat VIII and Sky Pirates, where I wasn't completely certain what the correct play was, and honestly probably overthought a little bit which contributed to how exhausting it was to play the deck.

But, again, practice. That's what it's for.

Final Fantasy TCG Deck Examination - Dragoons

 This weekend is my area's local anime convention, so I can't make it out to Commander tonight (nor Gundam on Sunday, yet again). While I may have forgotten to have any sort of post ready for when I went to Too Many Games about four weeks back, that's not the case for this week.

The last time I did one of these deck tech/"deck examination" type posts, I decided to go ahead and do a write-up on one of my favorite Commander decks. Fitting since it was posted on a Friday in lieu of going out to Commander night, at the time.

However, tonight, I'm taking a good look at one of my Final Fantasy TCG decks. Specifically my "first love" in the FFTCG, the deck I brought with me the very first time I tried to take on a Local Qualifier (where I got utterly thrashed since it was my first time, uh, actually playing FFTCG):

Dragoons. A solid, fairly budget-friendly list - though a few of the cards in it are a little pricey as of the writing of this post, the whole list will nonetheless be less expensive than a number of other decks in the current metagame, and comparable to a few others.

Let's get into it, shall we?

The Single Most Important Card in the Deck

We're going to start off with the one and only character in the deck that is not actually a Dragoon.

Alus, run at a playset of three copies, is the single most important card in the Dragoons list. Drawing cards is incredibly powerful, and while FFTCG already allows you to draw two cards per turn just as a default rule, Alus gives you high odds at drawing a third card, which is incredibly powerful in terms of the resource advantage that it will provide over the course of a game. Alus can also come in clutch at the end of the game to potentially remove a blocker on a game-winning turn.

With the way my list is constructed, the deck is 47 Dragoons - either Card Name Dragoon or Job Dragoon - and the only 3 cards that aren't are my copies of the Prince from Final Fantasy III.

Even if you disagree with any other aspect of my Dragoons list, you want three copies of the Prince.

There's Something Special About Her

If Alus is the single most important card in the deck for the sake of providing extra card draw and resources, Freya is the single most important name in the deck because of the power of the Burmecian Dragoon's Special Abilities.

Assuming you've never played the Final Fantasy TCG before, take a look at those Freyas above. Specifically the one that costs 3 and the one that costs 4. You see how they each have an ability that's named in bold, orange text and has a little red "S" as part of their cost alongside some number of Lightning CP?

To pay for the "S" on those costs, you need to discard another copy of a card named Freya. Any Freya, including the cost 2 Freya that doesn't have any such ability. The cost 2 Freya is also, coincidentally, the worst of the three Freyas, and is only in the deck for two reasons - one of them being her card name, meaning I can discard her for Cherry Blossom or Dragon's Crest.

The other reason is that she's both Lightning Element - meaning I can grab her to my hand if she's revealed off of either the cost 2 Aranea Forward or the cost 3 Ricard Backup - and Water Element, which means if I need to use Lunafreya from my Limit Break deck to dig a little deeper into my deck, I can use her to cover the requisite Water CP.

Back to the other two "good" Freyas: Cherry Blossom from the cost 3 is a powerfully scaling mass removal tool, with the deck being designed to dump Dragoons onto the field en masse, meaning it's almost laughably easy to have 4 or 5 Dragoons and have Cherry Blossom blast the opponent's entire field for 8k to 10k damage. Meanwhile, the cost 4 has two powerful targeted spot removal abilities - an attack auto ability that, simply put, unleashes a single-target Cherry Blossom to remove problem Forwards with each attack, and her Dragon's Crest Special, which is an even stronger single-target removal due to the fact that being based on Dragoons in the Break Zone means that it scales even higher, even faster than Cherry Blossom or the attack auto-ability.

The Best of the Rest

Limit Break Kain, released in Opus 25, was an outrageous benefit to Dragoons as a deck. Giving a strong 8k First Strike in the Limit Break, whose beefy 9 cost is reduced to an outright steal of 4 CP if you have even a few Dragoons in play. On top of being a powerful 8k body, much more importantly Kain provides much-desired recursion.

Being able to save Freyas from the Break Zone, both to replay one that's been subjected to removal or to simply provide another Freya to fuel another Special Ability without having to try drawing into one gives Dragoons more ready access to their most powerful removal pieces. And while Freya is one great target, most of the Dragoons in the list are well worth targeting for the return.

Among the many powerful Standard Unit Forwards in the deck that are Card Name Dragoon, the cost 2 that I affectionately refer to as "fat idiot" due to his absurdly scaling self-buff ability is one of the best available, offering an outrageously sturdy wall to hold off opposing aggression while you build up your backup line and general board state. I've had the "fat idiot" skyrocket to well above a 20k power, and with him being a Multiplayable card, you can have two or even all three copies in play at once and making an impenetrable wall of bodies that can turn around and attack when you're ready to finish the game out.

Also powerful is the cost 5 "Power Loss" Dragoon from Category FFEX, one of the few non-damage sources of removal in the Dragoons deck (which can be useful to get around a variety of Forwards that have abilities that prevent them from taking damage from Abilities). An 8k body for 5 isn't the best cost-to-power ratio, but that powerhouse removal - much like cost 4 Freya, single target but mighty - makes him far more than worth it. His biggest weakness is that at 8k power, he's susceptible to getting taken out by Amaterasu from any Fire deck, which will both stop the auto-ability and break the Dragoon itself.

While Alus is the single best card in the deck, and therefore single best backup in the deck, the rest of the deck's backups certainly don't skimp on the value.

Ricard of Final Fantasy II, the franchise's original Dragoon, gives you a deep dig into your deck, letting you grab any Lightning card you find within the top 5 - and with every card in the deck being Lightning, that means you'll get to take your pick from the revealed cards. In a pinch, he can throw First Strike out on to one of your other Forwards - the cost 2 Standard Unit just above, who would admittedly shrink a little bit from the loss of a Dragoon on Board, being a prime candidate if you need one - making them much safer to block with, or to win a combat trade when attacking.

The rest of my Backup Line, aside from Ricard and Alus, are all a variety of Standard Unit Card Name Dragoons. Each and every one has a different effect that's well worth their cost and any one of them could have easily been put in place next to Ricard for this position as "the best". However, I am biased and like Final Fantasy XIV, so I chose the Dragoon that provides more recursion in much the same way as LB Kain does.

The Game Plan

So how do you actually play the Dragoons once you've put your deck together? While you might think that Dragoons are an aggressive deck - and they can be, if your card draws demand it - they don't necessarily need to be.

Your first order of business: You want a turn 1 Alus. If you don't have one in your opening hand, mulligan. If you don't get one on your second hand, all is not lost, but if you can't find one by the end of turn 1, it will mean being more cautious with your resources as you won't have the (probable) third card draw each turn.

Ricard is useful for helping to dig deeper for Alus, to a much lesser extent so is the cost 2 Theatrhythm Aranea, and if you need to, the cost 2 Freya can be discarded for Water CP, enabling you to play Lunafreya from your Limit Break deck to dig another five cards down.

Try not to overextend your hand too drastically - it doesn't do any good to manage the Alus in hand if you don't have the resources to then play him, especially with how prominently Ice is showing currently, meaning there's a remarkably good chance your opponent will force you to discard an unplayed Alus if you dumped too many resources into digging and you weren't able to actually play him afterwards.

Regardless of whether you get Alus in play or not, you want to start building your backup line. A lot of your best effects rely on you having a large number of Dragoons in play, and a deep backup line both absolutely counts and is a lot harder to remove than a line of Forwards. Obviously Alus lets you "draw" more cards a turn, meaning you'll see more of your deck and it'll be easier to find your Backups, but you can absolutely manage without, it's just a little trickier.

As for setting up a defense until you can manage to establish yourself and start doing some damage with Freya or Aranea, you'll want to see the cost 2 "fat idiot", the cost 3 that gets cheaper for each Dragoon you control, or even the cost 6 Aranea who, on top of breaking a Forward on entry, is a 9k body with First Strike, making her an excellent deterrent.

Being in Lightning, you also have some strong Limit Break options, including Cloud who can also break the same caliber of Forward as the cost 6 Freya while leaving an 8k body behind, Gilgamesh who can remove cards from your opponent's break zone so that they can't use their own recursion effects, and in my case, I use the cost 8 Sephiroth to round the list out. Kain is pretty handily the best LB card for the deck, but there are times when you can't always get him out the way you need or want.

Your offense will come predominantly from your Freyas, ideally the cost 4 as it can apply pressure and act as removal even if you don't necessarily have another Freya handy to fuel its Special, compared to the cost 3 who can only wipe the board if you have another Freya to spare for Cherry Blossom. Backing Freya up with your Standard Units, while holding some of your largest bodies back for defensive purposes, can help you speed your victory along.

Conclusion

Dragoons are one of my favorite decks in the Final Fantasy TCG. Being mono-element, they're arguably less difficult to play than some other lists since you don't need to worry about getting locked out of elements you need to play the game with. This makes them, in my opinion, quite nice for a newer player to start with, and being a fairly popular Job gives them extra appeal while they're at it.

They're also nice and focused since the game plan, while I was fairly specific above, largely boils down to "having more Dragoons in play is better for your Dragoon effects". This makes them relatively straightforward, which is again a good option for a newer player.

But despite the relative ease and straightforward nature of the deck, it's got its tricks and it has a startling amount of bite that can let it hang out competitively with some other top decks.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - July 13th, 2026

 So fortunately, (some of) my card orders arrived today, meaning I got the cards I needed for the deck I had wanted to play during yesterday's LCQ:

Fire/Water Warriors, now featuring a playset of Akstar that (when the tracking was originally added to my order) had been meant to arrive last Friday.

Ah well, better late than never. Especially at the cost those stupid things command right now.

Regardless! Tonight's Locals saw eight players come out to sling some cardboard over the course of three rounds of play, and since my Akstars finally arrived, that meant I was able to play Warriors for tonight's event.

Round 1 vs Sky Pirates - Win 7-1

I won't lie, this is a deck that Warriors should not have a good matchup against. A lot of removal for Warriors comes from damage-based effects, and between Balthier and Ashe it's generally hard to actually punch enough damage through on enough of their Forwards to actually remove them.

Fortunately for me, my opponent's draws were garbage. They had five Backups fairly early on in the game, but the lack of actual plays off of those Backups meant there was nothing they could do to capitalize on their resources.

This meant that I was able to take their Forwards out with shocking ease, between Akstar and Wuk Lamat's entry and attack auto-abilities, letting me run away with the game.

Round 2 vs Category VIII - Win 7-6

Sweet Hydaelyn, this game was bloody tense.

With an early 4-drop Squall whose abilities made him effectively immune to my removal (had I kept the two Cuchulainn that I had in my opening hand, I could've blanked him and taken him out, but I didn't expect to really need them, which was frankly a mistake in a lot of ways) while also letting him freeplay Forwards onto the field, I was facing a lot of challenge with my Warriors.

While I was doing my best to remove everything else they had except for Squall - who, again, was basically immune to my removal - we were slugging each other back and forth for tons of damage. Eventually, on what wound up my opponent's last turn of the game, they made a major misplay.

Freeplaying Adel off of Squall and giving her haste with Selphie, they swung in and used Adel to break my Akstar, along with Squall afterwards, knocking me to damage 6. This left me with enough juice that I was able to use a top-deck Ifrit (XVI) to remove Adel, then between Wuk Lamat and Ifrit being able to take out the rest of their blockers, I was able to finish off the game as they fortunately didn't hit any EX Bursts to save them.

Had they, instead of playing Adel, freeplayed Quistis, they could have dull-frozen my board and left me without any offensive power except for the top-deck Ifrit, meaning they would've taken the game on their next turn.

Round 3 vs "Army of Kain" - Lose 3-7

I'm going to be completely real, I lost this game on turn 2 or 3, when my opponent Warped their Kain - the new(ish) Legend from Dreamlike Oceans.

The turn after, when Kain actually came into play, I forgot that the Warp ability creates an auto-ability to actually play the Forward. Had I used my Amaterasu on the Warp trigger, this would have been a dramatically different game. Unfortunately, I forgot I could use the Amat there, tried to Amat the on-entry auto-ability, and had Kain avoid it with a Jump Special.

From there, I could never quite remove the Dragoon, with any attempt being met with a Jump as my opponent always had more Kains in-hand than I had removal available.

This made the game a slow, honestly kind of frustrating affair where I got a few points of damage in, but Kain kept managing to remove my most powerful Forwards, keeping my ability to pressure my opponent at a minimum.

Conclusion

Warriors are fun. And really good. I see pretty easily why they're one of the best decks in the format right now.

Akstar is absolutely nutty, helping the deck run in an insanely powerful way - using Taivas's ability to play Akstar for free, and then having Akstar in turn freeplay another three-drop Forward is almost obscenely powerful, especially with how many Warriors have yet more potent removal abilities attached when they enter the field.

I'm glad I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up the set, though time will tell how often I actually decide to play the deck. Plus side, if I ever decide to pick up the rest of the pieces I need to build WoL7 in the future, I've got the most expensive piece of that deck available to me now.

Final Fantasy TCG Local Championship Qualifier - July 12th, 2026

 Today was a Local Championship Qualifier for FFTCG that I was honestly not wholly expecting that I was going to be able to attend - partly, I admit, because I forgot the LQ schedule.

But when I found out it was happening, during my week off, and that I wouldn't be needed for anything for Pokémon League (it is the Prerelease Window for Pitch Black, but today's event was already well covered by other Professors), I endeavored to head out to participate.

In an unusual change of pace for me, I decided to bring along a deck that's generally considered to be good, one of possibly the top four decks in the current metagame: Category MBM

With thirty-one players, we had five rounds before the event cut to the Top 8. Unfortunately, I didn't quite manage to make the top cut.

Round 1 vs Bartz WoLs - Lose 3-7

A slow game where neither of us could really build any sort of decent position early on, with a bit of back and forth between the two of us. The presence of a Penelo kept my opponent at bay for a while, as they were concerned about feeding Forwards to her removal ability. However, I was unable to capitalize on that open board state due, in part, to my draws not really affording me a ton of Forwards of my own.

Eventually, my opponent dropped a Refia, and while I quickly managed to break her and remove her from the Break Zone with LB Gilgamesh, she still soaked up removal that could've otherwise gone into my opponent's WoL4s, which meant that they got to stay in play, more or less unopposed. When I did find removal for WoL4, my opponent having not one, not two, but all three of their WoL4s meant it did little - if anything - to slow them down. The powerhouse Forward was more than enough to stop a lot of my offense in its tracks, and the 5k ping was more than adequate for easily removing Penelos and Frans.

My first EX Burst at damage 6 nearly spared me for a turn, until my opponent dropped a Time Magic special for more than enough to hunt down Arc and drop him into play, activating their backups and enabling them to give Arc Haste to swing in for the final damage.

Round 2 - Bye

Bye round. I looked around the store a little bit - I'd never made my way down to this shop before, given the length of the drive - and it's quite nice.

Round 3 vs Category MBM - Lose 1-7

A mirror match, and...

Man, the MBM Mirror is really unfun. A complete 180 from the Dragoon Mirror, which I love playing every time.

My opponent won the dice roll, went first, and this put me almost immediately on an insurmountable back foot. With a better opening play than mine, they had Ashe and Penelo online by turn 2, meaning it was functionally impossible for me to make my own Ashe play, lest Penelo put the Princess down before I even got close to a combat step and her "freeplay" auto-ability. This meant I had to try to play around Penelo, and when I did finally get rid of her, it wasn't long before my opponent managed to get her back.

When I finally had an opening to swing in for a point of damage, my opponent flipped over an Odin. I took that opportunity to just scoop, as I was officially too far behind in terms of board state and overall resources to have any hope of victory.

Round 4 vs Ice/Earth/Lightning - Win 7-0

The first game I had today where my deck operated the way it was "supposed" to be running. My opponent played around three Seymours against me, and each one was subsequently broken by Nono or other sources of removal. After three or four separate board wipes, I was still able to rebuild my board and maintain my advantage, as my opponent was on the defensive and unable to set much pressure back up against me.

Round 5 vs Earth/Water Summons - Win 7-1

I had a rather similar start to my Round 3 Opponent's, dropping Montblanc into another Backup - though in my case I had a Gurdy, rather than Hurdy, which ultimately made my turn 1 play significantly cheaper in practice, though it did leave me a little low on access to Water CP for much and more of the game.

Hecatoncheir from Opus XV, Crystal Dominion, was used to wipe my board on at least two separate occasions thanks to my opponent's recursion. Though I was a little bit behind on resources, the lack of board presence and pressure being put forth by my opponent meant that I had time enough to rebuild and take back control of the game.

Conclusion

In the end, with my 3-2 record, I wound up in 14th place out of 31 total competitors. A winning record, and placing me in the top half of the rankings - earning a Top 16 Promo Seymour - with a deck I haven't actually played in a while, and had never played in its current state before today.

While I would've liked to hit Top 8, I'll happily take a Top 16 placement and a winning record. It's still much improved from the last Qualifier I'd attended.

I also would've liked to have played a different deck today, but unfortunately some of the cards I'd ordered still haven't arrived. So I suppose that I'll just have to be a menace at tomorrow night's regular locals instead, assuming the cards arrive as they're currently slated to.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - July 10th, 2026

 A little over a month ago, I did my usual blog post on my Commander Night - which also happened to be a "Magic Presents: Pride" event, which also happened to fall a scant few days after Wizards of the Coast engaged in some transphobic fuckery as part of their union-busting efforts.

Since then, I've been busy on my Friday Nights. Work, "Summerween" at the haunted house where I work, a trip to Too Many Games, more work...

This was the first time in over a month where I could even consider going out to play Commander.

I decided I was going to go. I just don't plan to spend any more money on Magic product any time soon. A little unfortunate, because there are a couple of upcoming sets I had previously been looking forward to - I am not (wholly) immune to Universes Beyond, because I love The Hobbit and would've been more than glad to pick up a fair bit from the set.

But... Not right now. Not unless I see something that indicates Wizards plans to be less of a shitty company, which is a tall order.

Which brings me to tonight's games.

I, uh, may have flown too close to the sun. Only one of the games I played today was with a pod of four.

Winota may have done her thing a little too well. Two of the four players in the first game I played tonight broke off into another pod (though I think part of that was also that they had more friends show up... but still), leaving me and the last player just playing one-on-one games against each other for the rest of the night.

I got one game in with Sanar, winning it because my opponent looked at it, wondered if it was "the meme deck", decided it wasn't, and then when I got my turn with Sanar in play, they realized it was the meme after about four or five lands.

Next up was the first of my two games with The Wandering Minstrel, which went swimmingly - I had my Token Nonsense™ set up and churning out two 4/4 Angels with Flying and Vigilance every turn, sometimes four Angels if I drew into a land!

The problem was that my opponent had a Platinum Angel with a Lightning Greaves attached, and I had no way to get around the Shroud and remove the Angel, so while I was able to handily beat them deep into a negative life total, it ultimately meant nothing in the face of their inability to lose the game.

This was followed up by a game with Ashling, which I ultimately won, my Elementals engaging in quite some shenanigans. I realized early on that Myriad of Mysteries was mostly ineffective in a one-on-one game due to Myriad doing nothing without more opponents to make copies of my creatures, but it was still a five-color permanent, letting Shimmercreep do a fair bit of life-drain thanks to Conjurer's Closet blinking it for a few turns.

And finally, I pulled Minstrel back out to play against their Yuna deck, and we had...

Frankly, a hilariously bad game where neither of us had anything going on for like, ten turns. I did a lot of work swinging with Emet-Selch and the Regalia, and finally got an 11/11 Hero out of the "Lasting Fayth" Adventure attached to Zanarkand. Combined with the Minstrel's activated ability, this gave me enough power to finish my opponent off, who had still not seen much of anything from their deck.

After that, we both decided to call it for the night.