Final Fantasy TCG Locals - September 21st, 2026

 After Labor Day meant I missed out on FFTCG two weeks ago, I was able to make my way back out to the card shop today for, well, more FFTCG. By sheer happenstance, it didn't even occur to me that today would be the last day of Locals before a bunch of the local players will be heading out for the US National Championship and the Last Chance Qualifier.

I had already been planning to play my Ice/Wind Crystals, and this turned out to be convenient last-minute practice against the deck for the players going to Nationals this weekend.

There were a total of six of us tonight, giving us a quick three-round event.

Round 1 vs Fire/Ice Warriors - Win

I had a bit of a slow start, but once I finally managed to get a couple of Forwards in play, I was able to start taking over the game pretty handily. Especially so once one of those Forwards was a Kadaj whose end-of-turn discard ability was active.

I also had a fun moment of throwing Alexander at Taivas in response to the Warrior's search ability, which turned into a fun bit of stack as I taught the Warrior player that they were able to use Taivas's freeplay ability in response to the Summon, whereupon they dropped in an Akstar.

Round 2 vs Mono-Earth - Loss

This was a close game and incredibly back and forth, at least until what wound up the last couple of turns. I made a grievous misplay by bouncing their Ingus during their turn, when they were passing priority to head to the end of turn.

I did this because I, plainly speaking, forgot that Ingus was dirt-cheap due to his own cost-reduction. Doing so resulted in Ingus returning immediately, fetching a Leo who could block the Marche I had in hand, which denied me the ability to do damage and draw additional cards.

This was enough to stop me dead in my tracks and handing my opponent the victory on a silver platter.

Round 3 vs Fire/Lightning - Loss

This was, genuinely, an incredibly cool deck. Wild, a lot of nonsense, and something I've never really seen before, but what it did was incredibly cool, as I already said. Unfortunately, because I had never seen a deck quite like it before, I made a lot of misplays and was far more liberal with my resources than I should have been. In addition to that, I wasn't sure what I should have been using those resources against, so not only was I playing more greedily than I should have been, I was prioritizing the wrong targets in a lot of ways.

After we finished our game for the round, we played a second game, and this time with me a little more aware of what I was up against, it was a much closer game and I tried to be less greedy with my resources. Plus I had somewhat better draws, which certainly helped.

Also, I'm being a little vague about what this deck did because I've never seen it before, and I believe my opponent is planning to bring it with them to the LCQ this weekend. Do I think I have any Nats Players among my (incredibly modest) readership? Probably not. But for the sake of being as safe about it as I can be, vagueness.

Conclusion

I am getting incredibly comfortable playing this Crystals deck, which is pretty nice considering the gap since my last Locals. I'm thrilled to have good Crystals deck that I'm getting decent at playing, because that's a thing I'd wanted for a while.

And tonight was also my last Locals of any flavor before my pseudo-hiatus throughout the month of October. I'll still be playing FFTCG on Mondays, but that's about the only TCG I'm planning to engage with between now and November, which isn't super great after having taken off both this past Friday and Sunday since that's a whole lot of TCGs I haven't been playing and writing about, but... Ah well.

Day Off and Upcoming Month Off

Tonight should be Commander Night. Or at least Friday Night Magic in some capacity. However, some upcoming changes at work - we're swapping a lot of our current systems to a new software by a wholly different company than we currently use - meant that I needed to go in to work this morning for training on that new software.

Mind you, I normally work night shifts. So a 4-hour training that started at 8 AM is incredibly beyond my usual scope of "hours awake", especially during my off-week.

In light of that, and in light of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave coming out and my really wanting to play that, I'm sitting Magic out tonight. I'll also be taking Sunday off from my Pokémon League and won't even consider going out to play Gundam to take more time for Fire Emblem (and I have other plans that will keep me busy basically all day tomorrow, so I'm likely to be exhausted on top of that anyway).

Which segues into another topic of time off: The month of October. Much like last year, I'm going to be sitting most of October out for almost every TCG that I play. Thursday Pokémon League takes a backseat because quite frankly I need a day, at least, in between the end of my work week and the start of my weekend at the haunted house I work at. Magic, Gundam, and Sunday Leagues just conflict wholesale with the weekend schedule of the haunt. 

I'll still be trying to get in my FFTCG nights on Mondays, at the very least. So, hopefully, I'll be back this Monday with FFTCG.

Labor Day, Day Off - September 7th, 2026

 Today was Labor Day, so the mall that hosts the card shop closed early. Subsequently, all of their events for the evening were called off, including tonight's usual FFTCG Locals.

A few of us from my local group were considering heading out to the mall earlier in the day to get some games in, but ultimately those plans never came to fruition.

Thus a day off.

Friday Night Magic Commander Night - September 4th, 2026

 Tonight I was back for another night of Commander, which was a good thing as I had finished putting together a new deck and wanted to give it a few test runs.

Two other players joined me, giving us a pod of three for one game, and then another player joined us after our first bringing us up to a pod of 4 players for the rest of the night.

Cloud, Midgar Mercenary

The deck I played for both the first game of the night, with three players, and for our second game once we bumped ourselves up to a pod of 4, and the deck that I came out wanting to put through some paces tonight.

In the first game, I ran afoul of having too many of my more expensive cards in-hand, plus having an overzealous Oveka player decide that most anything I tried to do was going to eat either a counter or, in one case, a Commandeer, meaning that while the deck still managed to function, it was definitely less functional than it could have been. Eventually, I was overrun severely by Bard, King of Dale and the horde of Humans that his player was helming.

In the second, where we added the Arkenstone Emblem from tonight's "Heart of the Mountain" Commander event, it ran much more smoothly, even while myself and two other players were beating each other senseless over the Emblem. No Blue players meant that the deck didn't eat every counterspell available, and a few good pieces of Equipment, including the Buster Sword, meant I was able to get some incredibly solid value from him swinging.

Eventually, I took the win off of the alternate wincon, though by that point two of the other three players were eliminated and I was likely going to win via combat pretty handily regardless.

As this is the deck I was most looking forward to trying out tonight, I am incredibly pumped that it actually did work out incredibly well, maybe not exactly the way I was hoping to, but close enough that I think the deck will be well worth bringing around often for Commander Nights. I could, feasibly, bump it up to a Bracket 3 list if I wanted to try to nab a few of my Game Changers from other decks - I've been surprisingly tempted to take Teferi's Protection and Smothering Tithe out of my Winota deck, for instance, though I lack good replacements for them - but where it currently stands is still pretty solid in my opinion. It's a deck I would probably feel comfortable playing against Bracket 3 lists, though once we start getting into "high power" gameplay in Bracket 4, let alone cEDH/Bracket 5, that's where I think it drops off hard.

Winota, Joiner of Forces

For our third game of the night, I played my Winota list, and it was... a severe power mismatch. One other player was playing The Ur-Dragon and I was expecting a much more dangerous list than what actually got played. Everybody else scooped after I had two rounds of incredibly potent Winota triggers, taking us to our fourth and what wound up final game.

The Wandering Minstrel

And for that fourth game, I played The Wandering Minstrel, a deck I haven't shuffled up in what feels like ages. The deck didn't exactly run the way I would've liked it to, as I saw precious few creatures and almost none of the Enchantments that improve my tokens in any way.

While I was beaten into the dirt by Bello with a little assistance from The Ur-Dragon, Oveka was incredibly mana screwed and was a non-entity during the game. Eventually, Bello and a bevy of buffed up Artifacts overran us all.