Despite Wizards’ official Final Fantasy debut presentation not happening until tomorrow, it seems spoiler season has started early. Over the past few days, we’ve had a steady drip feed of new cards from both the main set and the accompanying Commander decks. As if hype for the set wasn’t high enough already, these recent reveals have pushed things even higher.
Most recently, two new spoilers from the aforementioned Final Fantasy Commander decks have just appeared. Showcasing two of the secondary Commander options found within these decks, each of these cards is seriously exciting.
Yuna, Grand Summoner
Hailing from Final Fantasy X, Yuna, Grand Summoner can be found as the secondary Commander in the Counter Blitz deck. As the name suggests, this deck is themed heavily around +1/+1 counters, and Yuna should work wonders there. After all, not only does Yuna offer ramp and tokens on the ramped out creature, but she can make sure counters aren’t lost too.
While their Bant color identity isn’t the most popular color for +1/+1 counter decks, Yuna, Grand Summoner will nonetheless do work. If Yuna only had one of her abilities, she’d still be a playable card within the archetype. Having both ramp, counter generation, and counter preservation all on one card is truly nuts.
From a Final Fantasy perspective, however, Yuna is a little bit disappointing at first glance. In Final Fantasy X, Yuna’s main focus is on Summons, which seems to be missed here. Looking closer, however, Yuna doesn’t care about which type of Counters are on a permanent when it hits the graveyard. This means that the Lore Counters on Summons and Sagas will be turned into fairly significant buffs.
As Eck_Coward pointed out on Reddit, this ability gets especially spicy when played alongside counter doublers. Not only will your Sagas get to their final chapter faster, but the number of counters transferred will also be doubled. While breaking Doubling Season is nothing new, it’s always nice for a fan-favorite archetype to get a spicy new toy.
G’raha Tia, Scion Reborn
Appearing as the secondary Commander in the Scions and Spellcraft deck, G’raha Tia, Scion Reborn is rather unusual. As you may expect from the deck’s premise, G’raha synergizes well with casting lots of decent-priced spells. Unlike Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed, who provides life drain and card draw, G’raha creates potentially massive tokens.
As you can see above, these tokens do come with an added cost attached, as you have to pay life equal to the noncreature spell’s mana value. While Commander does have higher life totals to play with, this could get costly rather quickly. Thankfully, so long as she’s in play, Y’shtola should be able to mitigate this cost somewhat.
While he’s bound to work well within the Scions and Spellcraft deck, there are a few avenues to build around G’raha Tia, Scion Reborn. As Exorrt suggests, you can go down the route of creating massive tokens by using a wide board to cast Convoke spells. Alternatively, TriforceofCake suggests using instants to get around the once per turn clause to further flood the board.
To make the most out of G’raha, Delney, Streetwise Lookout seems like a fantastic inclusion when building around them. Notably, doing this could get rather costly, so you’ll also want plenty of lifegain to keep yourself afloat. Sadly, regular token doublers aren’t super effective here, as while Anointed Procession would give you two Hero tokens, only one would get counters.
In any case, while G’raha Tia, Scion Reborn has a somewhat niche ability, he could be a solid addition to many Esper decks. On top of this, there’s bound to be plenty of MTG players building around him thanks to being one of Final Fantasy XIV’s most beloved characters.
More Coming Soon
Thankfully, while Wizards of the Coast has been surprisingly generous with spoilers recently, the wait is almost over. This weekend, on Saturday, the 10th of May, we’ll finally get the long-awaited Debut of Final Fantasy. As usual, it’s believed this blockbuster event will kickstart the Final Fantasy set’s spoiler season, which will reveal all.
Should this trend continue, we’ll soon see plenty of exciting main set and Commander Final Fantasy spoilers. For now, all we have to do is wait. That being said, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Wizards reveals even more last-minute spoilers later today. Whether or not that’ll actually happen, however, remains to be seen.
