New five color Commanders are a rare treat in Magic: The Gathering. Offering access to the entire color pie, Wizards is typically very careful when it comes to printing these cards. Looking back, we only got five five-color cards in 2024, and there were only seven in 2023. Despite this cautious trend, however, we’re getting not just one but two brand-new five-color cards in Final Fantasy.
Revealed as part of the set’s debut, Terra, Magical Adept was the first five-color Final Fantasy Commander option to be revealed. Many would have expected this to be our entire lot, given how stingy Wizards is with five-color cards. Lo and behold, however, it seems we’re getting another, as Wandering Minstrel has just been revealed.
More than just being a new five-color Commander, this legend may be one players have been waiting for.
Wandering Minstrel
- Mana Value: GU
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Creature – Human Bard
- Stats: 1/3
- Card Text: Lands you control enter the battlefield untapped.
The Minstrel’s Ballad — At the beginning of combat on your turn, if you control five or more Towns, create a WUBRG 2/2 Elemental creature token.
3WUBRG: Other creatures you control get +X/+X until end of turn, where X is the number of Towns you control.
For the most part, the new Town cards that have been revealed during Final Fantasy’s spoiler season have been pretty meh. Putting the obvious incredible exception of Starting Town aside, the best of the entire bunch appears to be Midgar, City of Mako, which says something about this type’s strength. Throughout spoiler season, we’ve really been waiting for something to tie all these Towns together, to little avail.
Now, MTG players are finally getting what we’ve been hoping to see. Not only does Wandering Minstrel expertly support a Town Typal deck in Commander, but he’s a five-color card, too. This means there are no limits on what you can include in this deck, so all the best Landfall and support spells are on the table.
In terms of their own abilities, Wandering Minstrel removes one of the biggest downsides of Towns. This is the fact that almost all of them come in tapped, which threatens to massively slow down your progression. In Commander, where players have access to so much fast mana, this is potentially a death sentence.
On top of speeding things up, Wandering Minstrel can also steadily generate tokens, provided you have enough towns. While these tokens aren’t very big, and you won’t get a lot of them without support, it’s still a nice bonus. This is especially true when using Wandering Minstrel’s final ability, which can provide potentially massive buffs.
As we’ll get to shortly, there are now 23 Commander playable Towns, all of which hail from Final Fantasy. If you jam all of these into a deck, Wandering Minstrel can dish out an insane +23/+23 buff to all your creatures. Even if you only have a few tokens, this expensive yet cost-effective buff could easily end games.
Suspect Support
As mentioned, there are now 23 Town cards that will all be playable once the Final Fantasy MTG set is released. If you’re building a Town Typal Commander deck, there’s little reason not to jam all of these into the 99. Admittedly, most of these lands aren’t too exciting, but there are some decent ones.
The adventure lands, in particular, should each be rather useful in Commander, thanks to the pace of the format. Similarly, Balamb Garden, SeeD Academy should excel, since you’ll always have an abundance of Towns in play. Even Clive’s Hideaway could prove rather useful thanks to Commander’s love for legendary creatures.
Sadly, while it’s fairly easy to build this deck’s mana base, the rest of the deck is more difficult. Outside of Wandering Minstrel and Balamb Garden, only six Final Fantasy cards care about Towns. While it’s possible that more will be spoiled in the future, there’s not long left in spoiler season.
The Town support cards that we have so far neatly fall into two categories. Reach the Horizon, Prishe’s Wanderings, and Town Greeter each help you get Towns into play. Meanwhile, Pupu UFO, Qiqirin Marchant, and Exploring the World all have abilities that improve with more Towns in play.
Much like the Towns themselves, there’s little reason not to jam these six cards into the 99 of a Town Typal deck. This, however, still leaves a lot of room for everything else, since the Typal theme is only 29 cards strong. While this may be somewhat disappointing for Town Typal enthusiasts, MTG thankfully does have plenty of other support cards.
Old Reliable
If you’re building a Town Typal deck, you’ll likely want to lean into having a heavy Landfall theme too. Thankfully, this is a long-established archetype, and there are plenty of cards that make such a deck viable.
For starters, there are tons of cards in MTG that let you put additional lands into play each turn. Mina and Denn, Wildborn, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, and Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait each allow you to do this. Aesi will even let you draw cards when playing lands, which Tatyova, Benthic Druid also does.
Since you’ll be putting a lot of lands into play, actual Landfall cards will also be unsurprisingly very strong. Felidar Retreat, Rampaging Baloths, and Scute Swarm are all staples for a reason, and there’s no reason not to play them here. Even Lotus Cobra is a valuable inclusion, thanks to providing some useful early ramp.
While there are tons of existing support cards for a Town Typal deck, it’s worth remembering that Towns aren’t basic lands. As such, spells like Rampant Growth, Cultivate, and Deathsprout won’t be as good as usual. Growth Spiral, however, is fair game, so it’s worth watching what does and doesn’t synergize. As a result, you may want to consider cards that search for any land, like Hour of Promise.
Ultimately, a Town Typal deck seems interesting, but not necessarily too strong on its own. Most of the time, you’d be better off just playing a Landfall-based deck. Subsequently, this archetype appears to be one for the Final Fantasy fans, first and foremost. Maybe we’ll get more Towns in MTG down the line, but that remains to be seen.
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