Counter Blitz (FINAL FANTASY X) Limit Break (FINAL FANTASY VII) Revival Trance (FINAL FANTASY VI) Scions & Spellcraft (FINAL FANTASY XIV)

Precon comparison · Final Fantasy Commander

Which Final Fantasy Commander precon should you buy?

Counter Blitz is the Final Fantasy deck to play unchanged, and Revival Trance is the one to upgrade if you're keeping the bill small. Tidus's guide makes the fewest swaps in the set and barely moves his curve. Terra's box carries the set's highest average mana value, and her guide cut it further than any other for about $22 of cards in August 2026.

Art, left to right: Nijihayashi, Justyna Dura, Marta Nael and Magali Villeneuve

Final Fantasy Commander is four decks, one for each of four games, released on 13 June 2025 at $69.99 each. Every deck also came as a $149.99 Collector's Edition with the same hundred cards, so what follows applies to those as well. Basic lands aside, the four boxes share little but lands, so most of the choice comes down to which commander you want:

• Counter Blitz (green, white and blue), to play as it ships. Its guide stops at ten swaps, the fewest of the four, and the average mana value goes from 3.03 to 3.02, because the curve was never what held it back. It's also the only box with a bracket floor: Farewell is a Game Changer, so it ships as a Bracket 3 deck.
• Revival Trance (white, black and red), to upgrade on a small budget. Terra's box averages 3.74 mana, the heaviest in the set, and its guide's eleven swaps bring that to 3.27. The adds came to roughly $22 by Scryfall's market prices of August 2026, the smallest of the four totals.
• Limit Break (red, green and white), if Equipment is the draw. Its guide ends on a 2.82 average, the lowest of any list on this page, upgraded or not. About half of its roughly $43 goes on one card, Sigarda's Aid.
• Scions & Spellcraft (white, blue and black), if you'd rather win with spells than with creatures. It's the only one whose guide raises the curve, from 3.37 to 3.5, and it does so on purpose. Its fifteen adds were the dearest at $58.55 in August 2026, though thirteen of them came to $10.58 between them.

Tidus, Cloud, Terra and Y'shtola side by side

Singles value is the TCGplayer market price of the printings each box shipped, summed, as of 23 October 2026. It moves every day, and each deck’s own page carries the current figure and what it means for the price you paid. All four decks cost $69.99 at release. The bracket floor is the lowest bracket the box can honestly claim before anyone changes a card. Each deck also came as a Collector’s Edition, the same hundred cards in foil.

White in every box, and only lands in common

The four colour identities form a ring. Counter Blitz is green, white and blue. Limit Break trades its blue for red, Revival Trance trades the green for black, and Scions & Spellcraft trades the red for blue, which brings it round beside Counter Blitz again. So each deck has two neighbours it shares two colours with, and one deck across the ring it shares only white with: Tidus faces Terra, and Cloud faces Y'shtola.

What the boxes hold in common follows the same ring. Seven cards other than basics appear in all four: Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Command Tower, Exotic Orchard, Path of Ancestry, Evolving Wilds and Ash Barrens. Not one card is in exactly three. Each pair of neighbours has six more, nearly all of them lands that tap for the two colours the pair shares, and the pairs across the ring add a single card between them, Scavenger Grounds, which Limit Break and Scions & Spellcraft both carry. All 25 cards that turn up in exactly two boxes are lands. Leave out Sol Ring and Arcane Signet and no nonland card appears in more than one Final Fantasy deck.

One mana base, built four times

Every box puts its lands together the same way. Each ships one tapped dual for every colour pair it has, lands with no rules beyond their mana and entering tapped, and beside them a three-colour land that also always enters tapped:

• Counter Blitz: Idyllic Beachfront, Radiant Grove and Tangled Islet, with Seaside Citadel.
• Limit Break: Radiant Grove, Sacred Peaks and Wooded Ridgeline, with Jungle Shrine.
• Revival Trance: Geothermal Bog, Sacred Peaks and Sunlit Marsh, with Nomad Outpost.
• Scions & Spellcraft: Contaminated Aquifer, Idyllic Beachfront and Sunlit Marsh, with Arcane Sanctum.

All four guides cut all three duals, so twelve of the 48 swaps across the set are the same repair, and all four keep the three-colour land. Where they part is what goes in. Tidus gets two painlands and Razorverge Thicket, Cloud three Pathways, Terra Caves of Koilos, Concealed Courtyard and Shattered Sanctum, all three for her short colours of white and black, and Y'shtola two painlands and three fastlands. Two guides also cut Temple of the False God. Tidus's trades it for Karn's Bastion, a land that proliferates, and Y'shtola's drops Path of Ancestry as well, which is why she takes five new lands. Counter Blitz started with the most lands that always enter tapped, eight, since it also runs three Temples that scry, all kept by its guide. It ends on five, Limit Break and Revival Trance on two, and Scions & Spellcraft on one.

Path of Ancestry is the land the guides split on. It enters tapped, and you scry 1 whenever the mana it makes pays for a creature spell sharing a creature type with your commander. Tidus, Cloud and Terra are all Humans, and their three guides keep it. Y'shtola is a Cat Warlock, her guide finds two cards that turn the scry on, one of them Y'shtola herself, and hers is the only guide to take it out.

The order I'd buy them in

Counter Blitz first for a deck you'll play unchanged, Revival Trance first for one you'll upgrade, and then the two whose upgrades cost more, for the reader who wants Equipment or spells.

Counter Blitz: ten swaps, and the curve stays put

Tidus, Yuna's Guardian costs {G}{W}{U}. As combat starts on your turn he can lift a counter off one of your creatures and set it on another, and the first time each turn that creatures of yours carrying counters hit a player in combat, you may draw a card and proliferate. He never says which kind of counter, so lore, shield and stun counters count as much as +1/+1s. That includes the box's four Summons, Saga creatures that he can keep short of their last chapter one at a time by moving a lore counter off one every combat.

The box already plays to that plan, which is why its guide stops at ten swaps. Four of them are lands. The other six go in pairs: two five-drops that do little for Tidus, two engines that start too late or only when an opponent obliges, and two spells whose double pips the mana can't reliably pay. Summon: Magus Sisters heads the list, because its chapters each pick their effect at random. The ten adds cost $24.71 in August 2026, counting each card at its default printing's market price, and Herald of Secret Streams and Ozolith, the Shattered Spire were more than half of it.

The bracket is the one thing to check before you buy. Farewell counts as a Game Changer, so Counter Blitz has a Bracket 3 floor where the other three set none. Its guide's answer is a plain exile sweeper such as Sunfall, after which the list has no floor at all, and if your group plays at Bracket 2 that's the swap to make before the first game.

Revival Trance: the heaviest box, and the cheapest fix

Each combat on your turn starts with Terra, Herald of Hope milling two cards and gaining flying until end of turn. When her combat damage reaches a player you can pay {2} to bring a creature card of power 3 or less back from your graveyard, tapped, and her guide counts 22 of the box's 35 other creatures inside that limit.

What the box can't do is choose what lands in the graveyard. Every card in it that fills one from your library or hand either mills blind or discards whatever you happened to draw, so Flayer of the Hatebound, the card that turns every return into damage, stays a six-drop until luck puts it in the bin. It's also the heaviest box here, averaging 3.74, with 17 cards costing five or more behind a commander who costs three.

The guide's eleven swaps fix both. Buried Alive and Unmarked Grave put chosen cards in the graveyard, Animate Dead joins the reanimation already in the box, and three seven-drops go, so the average falls to 3.27 and the count at five or more to 10. Its adds came to roughly $22 on Scryfall's August 2026 market prices, a third of that Animate Dead. Two character cards leave, Umaro, Raging Yeti and Gogo, Mysterious Mime, and the guide names the two adds to drop if you'd rather keep them.

Limit Break: sixteen Equipment and a 36-mana bill

Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER costs five, the most of the four commanders, and has haste. He takes one of your Equipment as he enters, and each time he attacks you draw once per equipped attacker, Cloud counted if he's armed, plus two Treasures if his own power is 7 or more.

That makes Equipment the whole deck, and the box ships sixteen pieces. Equipping each of them once adds up to 36 mana at the cheapest equip cost each one prints, eight of it for Colossus Hammer alone. The guide's twelve swaps go after that total. Sigarda's Aid lets Equipment be cast at instant speed and attach as it arrives, while Bruenor Battlehammer and Ardenn, Intrepid Archaeologist make equipping free in two different ways. Colossus Hammer leaves with three six-drops and the box's three tapped duals, and the curve falls from 3.05 to 2.82.

The bill is lopsided. The twelve adds were about $43 by Scryfall's market prices that August, about $21.50 of it Sigarda's Aid, and the guide says the other eleven do their jobs without it, so it's the card to leave until last if you're spreading the cost. White is the colour to watch: six cards in the box want two white mana by turn three, and its lands get there about two games in three.

Scions & Spellcraft: a curve that rises on purpose

Whenever you cast a noncreature spell with mana value 3 or greater, Y'shtola, Night's Blessed hits each opponent for 2 and you gain 2 life. At every end step, opponents' included, you draw a card if somebody lost at least 4 life during that turn, and two of her triggers in one turn are enough for that.

Mana value is read off the printed cost, so a spell paid for by delve, foretell or flashback still counts in full, and her guide builds on exactly that. Its fifteen swaps, the most in the set, bring in cards such as Treasure Cruise and Deadly Rollick, and the average mana value goes up from 3.37 to 3.5, the only guide of the four to move it that way. The box's own mistake was spending slots on combat. It ships five Equipment named for the game's jobs, plus two Auras, in a deck that rarely attacks, and six of those seven leave.

Those fifteen adds came to $58.55 when its guide priced them in August 2026 at Scryfall market, the dearest bill of the four. Deadly Rollick and Aetherflux Reservoir were $47.97 of that, and the other thirteen were $10.58 between them. Leave those two out and the other thirteen swaps still cost about ten dollars.

If you're buying for the game

Each box holds between 25 and 29 cards printed for the first time in this product or in the Final Fantasy set released alongside it, and the guides keep different shares of them. Counter Blitz's guide cuts 3 of its 25 and Revival Trance's 3 of 27. Limit Break's takes out 5 of 27, and Scions & Spellcraft's 7 of 29, four of them job weapons. So if the cast is why you're buying, Tidus's and Terra's guides are the gentlest with it. Counter Blitz's even suggests keeping Summon: Magus Sisters and skipping Tezzeret's Gambit if the Sisters matter to you.

Two boxes on one shelf

Neighbours on the colour ring share the most. Each such pair has two colours and 13 non-basic cards in common, and two of those pairs buy the same lands when upgraded: the Counter Blitz and Scions & Spellcraft guides both add Adarkar Wastes, and the Revival Trance and Scions & Spellcraft guides both add Caves of Koilos and Concealed Courtyard. If you'd rather own two decks that play nothing alike, take a pair from across the ring. Counter Blitz and Revival Trance share only white and the seven cards every box carries.

Just one card any guide adds already ships in a sibling box. Limit Break's guide adds Swords to Plowshares, which comes in Scions & Spellcraft, and Y'shtola's guide keeps it. Moving it leaves her deck a removal spell short, so treat it as a way to try Cloud's upgrade before buying a copy rather than as a saving. Everything else the boxes share is a land or a mana rock both decks already have.

FAQ

If I won't change a single card, which Final Fantasy Commander deck should I get?

Counter Blitz. Its guide makes ten swaps, the fewest in the set, and leaves the average mana value almost where it was, 3.03 against 3.02, so the deck in the box is close to the one the guide wants. Tidus, Yuna's Guardian can move a counter between your creatures as each of your combats begins, and draws once a turn when creatures carrying counters connect. Check the bracket first, though: Farewell makes it a Bracket 3 deck as it ships.

Why does Counter Blitz have a bracket floor when the other Final Fantasy decks don't?

Because it ships Farewell, one of the Game Changers, and any deck holding one starts at Bracket 3. Limit Break, Revival Trance and Scions & Spellcraft carry none, and nothing among the four guides' 48 adds is one either. Counter Blitz's guide suggests a plain exile sweeper such as Sunfall in Farewell's place if your table plays lower.

Which Final Fantasy precon is cheapest to upgrade?

Revival Trance, narrowly. Its guide's eleven adds came to roughly $22 by Scryfall's market prices of August 2026, and Counter Blitz's ten came to $24.71 that month, priced at each card's default printing. Limit Break's twelve were about $43, half of it Sigarda's Aid, and Scions & Spellcraft's fifteen were $58.55, though thirteen of those cost $10.58 together. Every guide's own page prices its list at today's figures.

Which two Final Fantasy decks have the most in common?

Any two that sit side by side on the colour ring: Counter Blitz and Limit Break, Limit Break and Revival Trance, Revival Trance and Scions & Spellcraft, or Scions & Spellcraft and Counter Blitz. Each of those pairs shares two colours and 13 non-basic cards, nearly all of them lands. Counter Blitz and Revival Trance share only white and the seven cards every box carries, and Limit Break and Scions & Spellcraft share only white and eight cards.

Do the upgrade guides cut many of the Final Fantasy cards?

Fewer than you might fear. Counting cards first printed in this product or in the main Final Fantasy set, Counter Blitz's guide cuts 3 of 25 and Revival Trance's 3 of 27. Limit Break's cuts 5 of 27 and Scions & Spellcraft's 7 of 29, four of those seven being the box's job weapons.

What does the extra $80 buy in a Final Fantasy Collector's Edition?

Foil. Each Collector's Edition is the same hundred cards as the regular deck it shares a name with, every one of them foil, so everything its regular twin's guide says still holds. It cost $149.99 at release against $69.99. Each one's own page carries what its singles are worth today: Counter Blitz, Limit Break, Revival Trance and Scions & Spellcraft.