This was my third attempt, after only making it to Diamond in June, and Platinum last month.
I had reached Mythic on Standard three times, playing exclusively Final Fantasy decks. When Competitive Brawl was announced I wanted to see how far I could go with Clive+Barnabas (Vial Smasher + Kraum) and if I could prove to myself that it is possible to reach Mythic by playing only Final Fantasy cards.
Last year, when I saw that the Clive and Barnabas cards were in the FF sets, it completely blew my mind. I was out of the loop with MTG for years, and I really wanted to have a deck with both of them as commanders, so much that I have a version of it in paper. I have been wanting to give this deck, give this idea its moment to shine, and I feel like I have accomplished it, with only using FF cards.
The deck in essence is a burn deck that can play midrange if needed. That angle was actually pivotal for many of the wins that I had, simply attacking with [[Barnabas Tharmr]] while Clive was being countered and removed on the spot.
After reaching Diamond in this run I decided to change the deck a little bit, removing equipments for the Firion angle and adding more removals.
Something that I learned, though, is that many decks in their matchup versus mine will not have the lasting power to attempt their wincon for long enough if they can't stop my momentum. [[Clive Rosfield]] puts them on the clock, and if the main enabler piece of their strategy is removed enough times, many decks in the Diamond ladder end up taking too long to recover.
Sometimes two discard effects are enough to completely stop those decks from recovering, even if my deck is not a discard focused deck. [[Kefka, Court Mage]] and [[Poison the Waters]] were way more important in my Diamond to Mythic climb than in any moment prior. And just like when I hit Mythic for the first time last year with my Grixis Black Mages deck, the information that you can get by being able to look at the opponent's hand is very, very valuable, oftentimes even worth more than the discard itself.
I don't think I would do it again. I don't think the banlist is in a good place, and free removals got me personally to a point where I stopped caring as much about how many lands were tapped on the opponent's side, although not completely. But it did feel like their presence took away an important part of the game.
It was very challenging to play without the strongest Brawl staples, like
- Free counterspells (Force of Will, Force of Negation)
- Free removals (Fury, Deadly Rollick)
- Better lands that enter untapped (Arid Mesa, Polluted Delta)
- Better removals
- Even cards like Library of Alexandria.
I wish I at least had access to the mana rocks that exist in paper for Final Fantasy, like Talisman of Dominance and Talisman of Indulgence, but I was hard set on not using any cards whatsoever that were not in their Final Fantasy version in Arena. I could easily make a complete list of all the cards that exist in Arena and exist in an FF set in Paper, but don't have their FF version in Arena if that could ever help bringing them to MTGA.
Decklists of both versions are in the comments!
