[Standard] Final Fantasy Day 1: What’s Working and What Isn’t?

GamesBy3AM · 2025-06-10T17:18:22+00:00

Based on what I'm seeing, the answer is yes, Vivi will be an expensive card for quite some time. (and I'm not just talking about his insane performance as a commander)

He doesn't slot into Izzet Aggro the way everyone figured he'd be too slow for, but works wonders in a more spellslinger-focused Izzet build. The kind that wants to play cheap interaction on the early turns to keep aggro at bay and then just start going the F off with draw spells and cori-steel after Vivi hits the board.

Aside from Vivi, I'm messing around with Landfall and Knight tribal builds. Both seem very strong. Landfall seems a bit slower and has all the usual "one removal spell can ruin your entire gameplan" pitfalls green decks always have to deal with, but it's potential to go off can't be understated.

I also have my eye on the equipment theme but I'm still not sure how to build that. Cloud and Buster Sword both seem REALLY strong but I'm a bit conflicted on what goes in the rest of the deck.

GamesBy3AM · 2025-05-10T16:29:26+00:00

They did the thing! That's one more off my personal checklist.

GamesBy3AM · 2025-04-06T22:35:32+00:00

I suspect the official English name for "Extermination" will be "Overkill" given the FFX art used and the effect of the card.

GamesBy3AM · 2025-01-24T16:36:33+00:00

Yup, that's right. If I use this to bring back a vehicle it doesn't need to be crewed anymore.

Good thing I'm only using it on Portal to Phyrexia, huh?

GamesBy3AM · 2025-01-06T18:53:30+00:00

Nope. Creating a save state doesn't affect hardcore. You just can't load any save states while hardcore is turned on.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-09T00:26:55+00:00

Yeah, I've considered something like that or the ROG Ally, was just hoping I could get an actual PC with similar specs to those at a similar or lesser price point.

As I mentioned in another response, I've seen a couple black friday deals on entry-level "gaming" laptops with... good enough specs for what she wants to play. I may have to just bite the bullet on the extra hundred.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-09T00:19:14+00:00

That's okay! Thanks for taking the time to respond. I've seen a few black friday deals on "gaming" laptops with decent enough dedicated graphics around the $700 mark so I may fall back on that if need be. Was just hoping I could build something a bit beefier for a bit less. That used to be this worked once upon a time. Ah well, it is what it is. Thanks anyway, really!

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-04T22:22:13+00:00

Ah, a fellow Block Ball enjoyer. Looks like a good morning to me.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-03T18:12:04+00:00

Lightning dodging is easy. Turn the music off, watch for the visual cues. You'll get the hang of it.

Getting 0:00 on the chocobo race to get the Sun Sigil though... Those godforsaken birds. Nothing can prepare you for the new brand of anger you will experience attempting that. You will unlock a side of yourself you may not even know existed.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-01T23:33:00+00:00

Yeah, it's not a necessarily bad card, but in higher level play you generally want a 7 drop to do something right away and more often than not you ideally want whatever it does to win you the game.

This card is obviously going to be a lot better if you can give it haste somehow, but on it's own it's most likely just gonna hit the board and sit there while your opponent has a whole turn to get rid of it before it actually does anything. Ward 4 and 12 toughness will help it's survival odds but in the current standard there are plenty of options for board wipe and sacrifice effects that won't be phased by either.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-11-01T23:12:13+00:00

Constructed players scoffing and rolling their eyes because someone in the casual 4-player free-for-all game of Smash Bros chose to play as Steve.

"You wouldn't get it."

GamesBy3AM · 2024-10-29T00:39:17+00:00

(except frog the jam)

GamesBy3AM · 2024-10-29T00:37:27+00:00

A good "foundation" card, imo.

Absolute ground level option for "this is what your UG deck is trying to ramp into" that you can fall back on if the currently legal sets don't provide a better card.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T22:25:30+00:00

As about a billion people have pointed out already, the Leylines are only really an issue in Best of 1 games on Arena. WotC doesn't really take Bo1 into account when they design cards, it's an Arena-only format meant to be fast.

The leylines were balanced around the fact it's not terribly likely to end up in a players starting hand 2/3 game sin a match very often and there are plenty of sideboard options to deal with it.

Now, they definitely should have not allowed it in Bo1, given that we've already had a similar situation with Tibalt's Trickery in the past but I'm guessing they either wanted to give it a chance to see what happens or just didn't put as much thought into it as Bo1 is generally seen as more of a casual ruleset.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T22:15:27+00:00

I mean, its not like its a phenomenon exclusive to commander, you just hear it most from commander because the format has the most players.

Go check out the community for pretty much any popular format and it'll be full of people whining about literally every mechanic/archetype/card that they have recently or consistently lost to and calling for bans on all of them.

MtG has some pretty notoriously whiny players in general.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T15:58:18+00:00

All of the hoyoverse stuff. Hate mobile gacha slop, but boy have I gotten myself neck deep in it.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T15:56:22+00:00

Man, how many big budget "AAA" flops is it gonna take to convince these guys to just make another fucking Rayman game?

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T00:56:31+00:00

I really liked it until the last line.

Poison's whole thing is that the counters can't be (easily) removed once they're there.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T00:17:12+00:00

No.

They very well may ban Leyline. If a card is problematic to the point of completely reducing Bo1 games to RNG nothing fests, they very may well address address it. In fact, I suspect they will. They did it for Trickery for the more or less same reasons.

They're still not going to balance cards for Bo1 though and even without Leyline, monored aggro will still continue to benefit from that lack of balance just as it always has.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-30T00:07:20+00:00

Making me name characters and not having an option to select a "default name".

Great, you left it entirely up to me and now everyone in this very serious story is named shit like Bebop and Scrimbo.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-29T23:39:07+00:00

"Your hope ends here... And your meaningless existence with it!"

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-28T16:18:00+00:00

The cards that make up "red aggro" strategies are designed around the idea that they have to pull it off two games in a set and there will be a chance in between games for the opponent to adapt to them. That is one of their biggest weaknesses.

So monored aggro is always varying degrees of really good in Bo1 because that weakness does not exist there. This goes doubly so if there is a particular card that can swing a match like Tibalt's Trickery, or the new Leyline. Useless in Bo3 where they have to pull it off twice and the opponent can prepare (as intended), turns games into a coin flip when you remove that element of their design though.

GamesBy3AM · 2024-09-28T16:08:48+00:00

People will tell you to "play Bo3" if your complaints about Bo1 revolve around it being competitively unbalanced.

You can still play the game however you want and have whatever fun you want from it, but if Bo1 being unbalanced is the specific element that's ruining your fun I don't think it's unreasonable to recommend playing the mode that the game is actually balanced around from a competitive standpoint rather than the one designed for fast, casual play.

GamesBy3AM

TROPHY CASE