The new Adventure Lands appearing in Final Fantasy’s MTG crossover are something we haven’t seen before. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t create lands that can function as spells too often, and past experiments with such cards have gone awry.
The MDFC lands, for example, gave rise to some of the most uninteractive MTG decks in the game’s history. Oops! All Spells decks have been banned in a majority of formats at this point, but they still plague Legacy, where players complain about it constantly.
While these lands won’t have that issue, they could still be quite strong. Unlike the MDFC lands, these let you have both sides of the card if you’re patient enough. In exchange, both sides of these lands have been mediocre.
The red Final Fantasy land, however, might be good enough to see some play, but players are unlikely to use it in the traditional sense.
Lindblum, Industrial Regency
There’s no way to cut it; creating a 0/1 Token that zaps opponents for noncreature casts is underwhelming on its own. Looking at this similarly to a tapped Channel Land makes it a bit more interesting, but this is even a far cry from lands like Boseiju, Who Endures.
Fortunately, the Adventure half of this card is an instant, which may make it redeemable enough to see play in specialized strategies. The trade-off of using a tapped land likely rules this out of aggressive decks, butthat doesn’t mean it’s unplayable. Lindblum, Industrial Regency partners exceptionally well with Indomitable Creativity, for example.
Keeping MTG Decks Creatureless
Indomitable Creativity decks use their namesake card to cheat in powerful creatures like Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Archon of Cruelty for just four mana. The downside to this strategy is that, because Indomitable Creativity just cheats in whatever you flip off the top of your deck first, you can’t put any creatures or artifacts into your deck besides what you want to cheat into play.
That’s where Lindblum, Industrial Regency comes in. It creates a creature for Indomitable Creativity to Polymorph into something much more powerful. Because the Adventure is an instant, you can even hold up interaction instead of committing to creating a token at sorcery speed.
Indomitable Creativity was a big player in Modern and Pioneer at times, but the deck has grown less popular recently. Between the two formats, Lindblum is likely to make a bigger splash in Pioneer. Not only is the barrier to entry much lower in that format, but Modern already has ways to cheat in Tokens without committing too many resources. Thanks to Fetch Lands, Modern players can reliably use Dwarven Mine from Throne of Eldraine to create a 1/1 Dwarf on curve.
In Pioneer, it’s a lot harder to make tokens without committing your mana. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is currently the best way to make tokens in the format without using creatures or artifacts. While Lindblum won’t replace the Fable, it will likely see play alongside it. Not only are land slots taxed less thanks to the absence of Fetch Lands, but Pioneer Creativity strategies are generally slower. This makes the cost of playing a tapped land a lot easier to offset since you don’t want to act early anyway.
Other Places
Indomitable Creativity aside, Lindblum, Industrial Regency could also see play in Pioneer’s Izzet Lotus Field decks. The deck can run any number of different win conditions as long as they deal damage, and Lindblum does the job. The Wizard token’s damage can be amplified by Artist Talent, easily dealing lethal damage over the course of a few spells. Because of Lier, Disciple of the Drowned‘s wording, you can even cast Lindblum from your graveyard as a spell.
Unless a more combo or midrange spellslinger deck appears in Standard, Lindblum may not be very popular in that format. In Commander, however, this card might become an auto-include in any red deck that can reliably trigger the Wizard token. There’s a ton of other Wizard Typal cards releasing in the Final Fantasy crossover as well, which could increase the Commander interest for this card.
Modern Prowess could experiment with a copy of Lindblum as a half-land of sorts. Since the Wizard cares about noncreature spells, the triggered ability might be able to unexpectedly close out a game. It’s much more likely, however, that both sides of this card are too slow to be relevant in Modern.
There are some other Adventure-related shenanigans that players can try, like building Possibility Storm decks, but this is likely where Lindblum, Industrial Regency will see the most play. It’s certainly not broken, but considering how disappointing the other Final Fantasy Adventure Lands have been so far, it’s nice to see that one is even remotely interesting.