We’re nearing the end of our first week of Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy spoilers, and already we’ve seen some truly excellent stuff. Interestingly, the villains of the series seem to be shining the brightest so far. Sephiroth is one of the best Aristocrats cards of all time, and Kefka is a truly absurd draw engine. Not to be outdone, some of the series’ most well-known protagonists are striking back. Noctis, Prince of Lucis, one of Final Fantasy’s more recent heroes, is quickly building a reputation as a powerful MTG combo enabler.
Cards that give you access to your graveyard have always been a bit tricky. Just look at Yawgmoth’s Will and Underworld Breach if you need examples. Noctis isn’t quite on this level, but his recursive capabilities are still more than enough to win games. In fact, he even has the notoriously hard-to-please cEDH community talking. Final Fantasy XV doesn’t have quite the nostalgic weight of other entries in the series, but its protagonist could well help its case out on the battlefields of Magic.
Noctis, Prince Of Lucis MTG
- Mana Value: 1WUB
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Creature – Human Noble
- Stats: 4/3
- Card Text: Lifelink.
You may cast artifact spells from your graveyard by paying 3 life in addition to paying their other costs. If you cast a spell this way, that artifact enters with a finality counter on it.
Noctis, Prince of Lucis was actually one of the first MTG cards revealed for Final Fantasy, as part of Saturday’s Debut Showcase. Hype for the card has only increased since then, however, as players plumb the depths of what he’s capable of.
For starters, “You may cast artifact spells from your graveyard” is an absurd line of text. It’s a great value proposition in Standard, but the further back you go, the more it opens up. Formats like Legacy and Vintage are full of powerful zero-mana artifacts, which you can cast from the graveyard as soon as Noctis comes down. Even Modern has similar lines, like the recently-banned Underworld Breach/Mox Opal combo.
Wizards are well aware of how good this ability is, so they’ve added two safety valves to stop it spinning out of control. First of all, each artifact you cast this way costs you three life on top of any mana spent. This is a pretty steep rate in 60-card formats, and limits your ability to spam cheap artifacts and execute combos. You can mitigate this a bit with Noctis’ Lifelink ability, but not to the extent that infinite loops require.
In a similar vein, artifacts you cast with Noctis also come in with a finality counter. This prevents sacrifice/replay loops like those seen in Grinding Breach decks, and generally pushes this more towards a value piece than a combo tool.
That said, for four mana, Noctis is still a very good deal. Most similar graveyard legends, like Karador, restrict the frequency at which you can cast your spells each turn, which Noctis doesn’t do. It’s also much cheaper than something like Muldrotha, which opens up a lot of aggressive lines for certain Esper brews.
Going Infinite
As is always the case with MTG cards like this, it hasn’t taken long for players to figure out ways of breaking Noctis, Prince of Lucis. On social media, there has even been discussion of the card seeing play in cEDH as a combo wincon.
To combo off with Noctis, you need to find a way around his two restrictions: the life loss and the finality counters. By far the best way to deal with the former is Aetherflux Reservoir. This provides exponential lifegain in turns where you’re spamming spells, which Noctis can easily allow you to do. It’s also a win condition in its own right, which is a major plus.
Getting around the finality counter is harder, but there are certainly ways to do it. Players on Reddit pointed out that the unusual wording on Mox Diamond allows you to circumvent this problem, since you can choose not to discard a land to prevent it from ever entering play and receiving a counter. It still counts as a spell cast, however, which will contribute to your combo turn.
With Noctis and Reservoir in Play and Diamond in the graveyard, you can win on the spot. Throw a Chalice of the Void into the mix, and you can do something similar with any zero-mana artifact. Simply set Chalice to zero and it’ll counter your artifacts, avoiding the counters but still racking up the casts.
CEDH plays plenty of zero-mana artifacts and Chalice of the Void anyway, so it’s not a stretch that this combo could see real play in the format. If you’re feeling a bit more spicy, there are also lines with Power Conduit and Mindslaver that can win the game too, albeit much more slowly.
A Fair Deal
Infinite combos aside, Noctis, Prince of Lucis is also a card with potential in fair MTG decks too. Players have been trying to get an Azorius Artifacts deck going in Standard for a while now, and this could be the piece that really brings it all together.
For starters, it’s a great source of late-game resilience for the deck. While it can have fast starts, Azorius Artifacts is really more about grinding out advantage and building up unstoppable boards of scaling tokens. Noctis fits that playstyle perfectly, letting you take more reckless trades early, safe in the knowledge that you’ll outvalue your opponent in the long run. The fact that he lets you recast noncreature artifacts is huge too, letting you recycle Simulacrum Synthesizer and Repurposing Bay.
Repurposing Bay is a particularly good example, since it synergizes really well with Noctis. Putting artifacts into your ‘yard to immediately replay them is a strong line, made even better since you get to tutor another artifact out as well. On top of this, the deck actually does a pretty good job at dodging the finality counter penalty. A lot of artifacts in the deck, like Clay-Fired Bricks and Braided Net, use the Craft mechanic. These cards exile themselves and return when you Craft them, which removes the finality counter with no issue.
Splashing black in the deck for Noctis is a real cost, of course, but I think it’ll be one well worth paying. Color splashes in Standard should be much easier post-Final Fantasy thanks to Starting Town, and you get access to bangers like Grim Bauble and Demonic Junker, too.
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