Critical Hit! Thoughts on Card Bans

 

Welcome to Lv.1 Onion Knight - the Final Fantasy TCG blog where I jam a big old stick in the rails of the new card hype train for with my unsolicited THOUGHTS and FEELINGS. 

So this is a pretty weird thing to admit given the subject matter of this blog, but I've actually been pretty bored with the FFTCG as of late.

Look what you've done! Now you have me relating to a XIV character! 

There's a lot of reasons behind this which I don't want to get too much into right now, but I've felt that the game has been pretty stagnant for a while now. Maybe this is just a natural consequence of playing a game for the last 8 years, but to sum up some of my whinging quickly: 

• Category decks often feel like they lack a unique identity from each other, and it often feels like certain titles get perpetually blue-balled with half-baked support. 
  
  
• There's a lack of unique mechanics that feel "Final Fantasy", and locking Priming behind only category XVI feels like a waste. You'll notice this is a direct contradiction to my first complaint, but what I'm saying is, either add more specific mechanics to other categories, or expand Priming to be an effect for other "transforming" characters from other games. Yeah, I know it's called "Priming" which is a XVI thing, but it's not like all the characters with Warp are known to "Warp" in their games, so it's just semantics at this point.    
  
  
• Most Job-based decks in the meta now largely feel homogeneous, being aggressive mid-rangey control-ish decks with a similar gameplan of "play a card that plays other cards for free" (Knights, Sky Pirates, Warriors, WoL's, Scions). Jobs with unique playstyles like Black Mages, Ninjas, and Dancers have largely been forgotten or get half-cocked support.
  
  
• Elemental deck cores haven't really shifted in years. There doesn't feel like there's a ton of flexibility in the cards you play in certain elements, and the choice not to play specific elemental staples feels like a liability. This isn't a complaint that good cards are popular, but rather the lack of better alternatives or effective counters printed in subsequent sets means you feel at least partially "locked-in" when starting to build any deck with that element. Any deviation away from those staples mean's you're just shooting yourself in the foot, rather than having a unique alternate playstyle. 
  
  
• The strength of certain elemental combinations feels largely dependent on if they get some sort of Tribal support. Certain element combinations still largely feel weak and underused (Wind/Fire, Water/Ice, Fire/Lightning, Lightning/Wind). Running more than 2 elements outside of Earth cores or Tribal decks that easily play free cards, thus can ignore elemental restrictions, feels like a risk. 

I was recently given the absolutely sage advice from another player that "If you're not happy with it, you could always play something else." And look, I understand the sentiment of not spending time engaging with something that doesn't feel as fulfilling as it used to. I also get that complaining isn't necessarily productive. I've been playing this game long enough to remember a whole host of fairly petty yet vocal complaints that were annoying to listen to (like Tifa not being a Monk being bad game design. Remember that?). And you know what? I absolutely COULD go play something else. I like Gundam! I like Disney! I tolerate Pokemon! I totally could put my Final Fantasy decks into retirement and go play one of those TCG's instead, and maybe it would be a less frustrating experience for me. 

BUT, I also think responding to a player's gripes with "lol play something else then" is a pretty poor response, least of all because it's just telling somebody to shut the hell up while hiding behind the optics of civility. I think that it's okay to be passionate about something, and sometimes passion can lead to people having strong, and sometimes negative opinions on something. Within reason, I don't see what's wrong with that, as long as you don't make it your entire personality. I'm not planning on becoming some "debate me" bro that complains about women in Star Wars or whatever. 

I think it's only natural after engaging with something for so long to wish that certain things could be done better, or to wish things felt fresher. I think that there should be space for players to air complaints they have with the game. We all play FFTCG because we're passionate about it for one reason or another, whether it be because we like the individual video games from the series, or really enjoy card games, there's something about the FFTCG that resonates with us. So to dismiss anyone with criticism about the game just feels off to me. Besides, if after writing this blog for 8 years hasn't gotten me a PR package from Square Enix, I think it's okay not to be positive all the time about their products here.  

This blog is a "Go talk to a wall"-free zone

Let me make one thing clear: I'm not naive enough to think that anybody in charge of the game's direction or card design reads this blog, or will take anything from it. Hobby Japan ain't uploading my silly ramblings into Google Translate any time soon, and I may share a birthday with Kageyama, but I'm quite sure he has no idea who I am. That being said, I also don't want to give the impression that my gripes are necessarily shared with the player base as a whole either. One of the things that really grinds my gears is when people online aren't able to differentiate between them not having a personal preference for something, and something being bad. Like rather than saying "this just isn't my taste", you get "this thing people like actually SUCKS and I have the MATH to prove it" or whatever. 

I don't want to do that here. I'm not saying this to try to shield myself from criticism if anyone disagrees with me either, just that I understand my personal opinions may not necessarily reflect an actual flaw with the game that needs to be fixed for it to be good. It's just things I think would make the game better. If you think I'm wildly off base and the game is just as good if not better than it's ever been, then that's great! I WANT to actually discuss these things with people and share our differing perspectives, and I sure as hell don't want to respond to people like I'm a toxic boss on Kitchen Nightmares telling disgruntled employees "if you don't like it, there's the door". Let's talk about this! Let's disagree about this! 

So if I've been so bored playing the FFTCG, what am I doing here then? What was it that got me to crawl out of my little Onion Knight burrow to make a long, ranty blog post? 

Card bans, that's what. 

Me at locals after being slapped around by WoLs and Relm Monsters one too many times 

I think this has been a pretty historic ban list for the FFTCG. In the past, we've only seen cards become restricted if they've created such a toxic, one-sided gameplay environment that an urgent ban or limitation was needed to maintain healthy gameplay balance. So to many, the decision to limit cards like Tyro and Atomos must seem odd, since it's not like they enabled any game-breaking combos in the same way that Light Yuna or Opus I Rikku did. Sure Refia was a little cracked, but so is most of the Warrior of Light deck at this point. Otherwise, they were just strong, consistent cards that saw a lot of use. I've seen a lot of people say that they thought the bans were unnecessary since stuff like Tyro and Atomos "weren't even a problem". So with that in mind, what are my thoughts on these restrictions? 

 

Good. I'm quite happy that these cards were removed from the pool. Given my feelings of the game's stagnation, I'm weirdly excited by the prospect of limiting cards for the purpose of promoting deck diversity - at least if their claims in the post about the bans are to be believed anyway. If I had to take a wild stab in the dark, I'd say the primary motivation for this had something to do with the top decks from Worlds once again being Warriors of Light and Relm Monsters. From a game design perspective, this is pretty embarrassing, since it's proof that even a year's worth of card releases wasn't enough to make other decks competitive. 

It's also pretty bad from a merchandise perspective too. Say you're SE/HJ, and you've released a new product line - the World Championship decks. Ideally your plan would be to release a new version of this every year and get more product in the hands of players. Well, now you can't do that since the top 2 decks between 2024 and 2025 share a majority of the same cards between them. Existing players aren't going to buy such a similar product twice, so you'll likely get less sales unless you do something drastically different like fully foil the cards or something, which would just drive up production costs. So you may as well bite the bullet and ban some of the most prevalent cards featured in those decks so that this doesn't happen again next year. But that's just a theory. A GAME THE-

Ahem. 

Wild speculation aside, I'd like to take a look at these cards and give my thoughts as to what factors potentially led to these particular cards getting banned/restricted. You know, use it as a learning experience of sorts. Sure it's like, a month since these bans were announced, so this is pretty late, but: 

1) This weekend marks when the bans have actually gone into effect, so we've only just made it into the environment where the cards are no longer in play.

2) When have I ever done anything in a timely fashion here? 

Given the stated intention of these bans to promote deck building diversity, let's take a look at some of the potential reasons these cards were limited. 

Kicking things off with one of the more unusual of the bans, we have Tyro. From what I've seen online, most people were pretty confused by this one. After all, Tyro was the glue for making Earth one of the most accessible multi-element cores in the game. Sure, the EX burst letting you search any Forward is pretty strong, but it's not like Thordan doesn't also have a Bust that is handily better than Tyro's since it lets you search any card you like. So why should he get to live while poor, sweet Tyro gets taken out the way of Old Yeller? 

Well, I think Tyro just does too much. 

He's a searcher. He's a color fixer. He buffs your Forwards by 2K late in the game. AND he's an EX burst on top of that, so Warriors of Light, a deck that can pretty handily end their opponent's turns with more than six cards in hand with all the draw-centric EX bursts stuffed into it, just has even more consistency than the average deck. Even if you're using a mono-earth deck, his straightforward search effect makes him a near-mandatory inclusion in every Earth build, with the only question being if you include two or three copies. At least, that's my most reasonable theory behind his banning. I do, however, have a crazier, tinfoil hat theory I'd like to offer up if you're interested...  

I think Tyro was killed so Warrior of Light could live. 

Given that Warrior of Light is both the only 4-color multi-element in the game and the signed chase card for the Legacy Reprint collection, I can see the game producers being reluctant to restrict him. But I also think that they underestimated just how big of an impact he was going to have on the meta. The intention behind him seemed to be the payoff for what was probably seen as a a difficult ask - running a deck with four colors. What they didn't seem to realize is that for a deck with an Earth core, that's significantly easier to do than say, a Fire/Wind/Lightning/Ice deck, and that's in no small part to cards like Tyro allowing for easy color fixing, combined with the Category III and V packages finally coalescing into one cohesive Warrior of Light package. 

And sure, it's not like cards like Cait Sith, Leo, and Shantotto don't still exist, but none of those cards offer the speed and lack of risk that Tyro did. Cait Sith requires a specific damage threshold to use her color fixing effect, Shantotto wipes out your established board of Forwards and prevents you from recovering them, and Leo is a more fragile Forward that benefits from a wide Character count. None of them have the consistency that Tyro offered, even not factoring the EX burst into the equation. 

So yeah, now Tyro is dead, and although there are several other options Earth decks can use to color fix, it'll certainly be a lot less easy. But here's an absolutely off the wall opinion: I don't think that 28 sets into a game's lifespan, it should be hard to accommodate running 3 elements outside of decks that are specifically built to be rainbow decks like Soiree and The Twelve, nor do I think that the ability to comfortably do so should exclusively be Earth's "thing". But I guess we'll see if that Fire/Wind/Lighting/Ice multi-element card gets printed in the future to put that to the test. 

If Tyro was a surprise ban, our resident Pictomancer here was uh... not. I think most people have been nervously awaiting this ban for quite some time, if not actively demanding it. Back when Relm was first printed, this probably seemed like an insignificant effect. After all, how impactful could a 1 cost monster be? 

Ahem... 

But as the pool of Monsters expanded and more powerful cards like Tros and Atomos were printed Relm became the perfect swiss-army knife. Now she can flood the board and give you consistent draw power with untargetable Forwards like Blue Wyrm, play non-targeting removal with Quadav that can clear off two Forwards, and access to a draw-loop with Goblin (XI) that can fetch you a Backup in a pinch and give access to consistent ping damage. As more and more low cost monsters were printed, it also made getting the requisite 5 monsters to trigger Relm's once-a-turn bounce effect much more trivial, so you had access to even more removal on top of what your Monsters provided. Once Witch of the Fens was printed though, Water Monster cores became truly back-breaking, since now, the cheap, one-time use Monsters Relm could play could be used as a steady source of removal, even if they couldn't become a Forward like Apkallu. 

So now, as a card designer, you're in a really weird position. You either have to purposely print a bunch of high-cost monsters or purposely make all of the low-cost monsters you print in the future bad so they don't make an already powerful deck even more broken. They absolutely do *not* like printing high-cost Monsters that aren't laughably bad for some reason (besides Luminous Puma since it recovers two cards, so of course it's good) for some reason, so Relm took one for the Monster Squad. 

Now it looks like the new Golbez will be taking the mantle as resident Monster Mommy, which means we'll probably be seeing a lot more Exoray and Octomammoth in the future. Monster players may even have to debase themselves by playing the Legend Relm who has been sitting dusty in many a binder since her release, since the old Opus XI Relm pretty much outclassed her in every way possible. It would be pretty interesting to see Monster decks skew more towards Category VI, but you know what would be even more interesting? HAVING A MONSTER DECK THAT ISN'T WATER! 

Like my complaints about Tyro, it's becoming pretty tiresome that only certain elements (Mostly Water and Earth) are the only ones that can comfortably accommodate a dedicated Monster deck, considering that Monsters are, y'know, a staple card category spread across all the elements. And I don't mean "use monsters as utility cards" like Wind does with Evrae or Ice does with Scale Toad - another card I suspect we'll be seeing more of in the future. I mean a full on, in-your-face Monster Mash deck. But I guess since the first wave of Monster support in Opus IV was based Water, it has to stay that way forever, even all this time later. 

There's a part of me that can't help but wonder if Atomos got banned because he caught a stray from Relm. Being a 2 cost Monster that was in the top deck at Worlds 2024 certainly didn't help things, but in 2025 there wasn't a single list that ran Atomos at Worlds, even in the Wind-heavy decks. It's honestly pretty surprising that Mono Wind didn't make an appearance at all at Worlds this year, since it's had a pretty steady presence in the competitive scene ever since Storm was introduced as an archetype. But that consistency may have been what played a role in Atomos getting the boot. 

With Atomos essentially being a free-energy machine that can go in any deck that can play a 2 cost Monster, it makes sense that the game producers would want to keep that under control for the future. If I may throw my two gil in though, I think Atomos contributed to a playstyle that isn't super fun to go up against. Storm decks are powerful because constantly reactivating your Backups to play more cards means that you can cast a ton of stuff in one turn. I assume the intention was to have players thoughtfully save their combo pieces until they can pull off one big, explosive turn. Atomos giving you 2CP refund on every turn's second cast is already pretty strong and helps enable that. But once you get to Damage 3, Atomos fully reactivating all your Backups in addition to the previous effect means every turn is your big, explosive turn, and there's very little way to interact with it once it gets set up. Combine that with insane draw power from cards like Alexander, Chocolatte, and Chocobo, and you're almost guaranteed to have your combo pieces every turn. 

I feel a little less confident speculating on this than I did with Tyro and Relm, but my guess is with cards like the new Vayne, they want to introduce more counterplay to Storm-style decks' constant cast-a-thon. It would be pretty cool if in the future there was an archetype that specifically revolved around only casting 1 card a turn, but that may be the Marvel Snap Player in me taking inspiration from Doom 2099 decks. Getting back on track though, banning Atomos may be more of a case of future-proofing cards coming out in following set from being too cracked, similarly to how Cecil was banned just before Zeromus came out. Only time will tell I guess, but for now, pour one out for the ultimate suckboy. 

 

Gross. Disgusting. Stupid. And those are the nice things I have to say about Refia. This card was the ultimate coalescence of Warriors of Light from kind of a disjointed but fun deck to an absolute beast that consistently topped tournaments. Unlike the other cards on this list, Refia isn't dead, she's just on house arrest, being limited to one copy per deck. And if I had to make an educated guess again, if the game designers had the choice of Limiting 4-color WoL or her, she was going to be the sacrificial lamb. But she did get a full-art reprint just five sets ago, and we can't fully get rid of her I guess, so limited she is.  

Of course she's still around, but we've pretty quickly seen decks drop off the map once a key card gets banned. With more Category V support coming next set (seriously, didn't we JUST get a full-art Faris two sets ago?), I have the distinct feeling Warrior of Light support won't stop coming anytime soon. Perhaps limiting Refia was a way of preventing the top deck from getting even more cracked with future releases, but even without that, I think she just made the deck too busted in general. 

A close friend of mine who usually builds off-the-wall casual decks built WoL's over the years until he eventually made top cut with the deck at last years Local Qualifier tournament. Even as somebody who loved the deck, he still referred to it as "the Refia Slop deck". Giving a deck that already has NO problems with draw power even more consistency is one thing. Eliminating the risk of going too wide by reactivating all your WoL Backups (of which there are now one in each element) so you can always play your counter Summons, or pop off with 4 color WoL during your Main Phase 2? Okay, reel it in a little. Converting all of your Warriors of Light into bombs that can be used for the most effective and permanent ways to deny your opponent a resource *and* ensure you don't hit an EX burst in the process if you place it on top of their deck, while *still* having them ready to attack? Insert the Angry Video Game Nerd's WHAT WERE THEY THINKING clip riiiiight about there. 

She just did way way waaaaay too much for the deck, and that's not even considering that she pretty much invalidates Ice's whole shtick by making your WoL cards impossible to Dull and Freeze. I think that Warriors of Light will still be the game producer's "golden boy" for some time, but for now, I think it's time for a break. Or, you know, maybe you could print the Warriors of Darkness from FFXIV so that can be an actual deck? I get that they don't have official renders of anyone besides Ardbert from that, but maybe we can take a break from commissioning artwork of characters who just got new cards two sets ago and give somebody else a chance? I feel like there's some reason why certain characters don't get new art, but Square Enix's licensing practices continue to be an enigma.  

                                                  *****  

Even with these current restrictions, I'm really not sure if this will do anything to move the needle very much. Warriors will probably rise up to fill the void left by WoL, and we'll all be living in fear of whichever deck can play out Seymour faster. Even WoL's have no real problem without Tyro, since Time Magic Bartz has zero problems pumping out anything you need from the deck. Even limiting Refia to 1 is only effective if you have a way of removing her from the game, since WoL's also have a ton of recovery. So if these bans don't really feel like enough, what do I think would? 

Well... you see...

This article... was actually a trap. You thought that this was just a one-off rant? Oh no, my friend. It's actually the start of a series. And next time, it's gonna be a group activity. It's going to be about something every TCG player loves and is never a controversial point of contention with anyone ever: 

~gIvInG mY oPiNiOnS oN cArDs I tHiNk ShOuLd Be BaNnEd WoOoOoOo!~ 

Ban Opus III Zidane WoOoOoOooo! 

I'm sure everyone will be super cool and chill about it. In any case, what do you guys think about these new bans? Do you think it's valid to prune cards from the game to make deck building more diverse in the FFTCG? Do you think Banning Tyro and Atomos will change anything, or will WoLs continue to wreak havok on the meta? 

Until next time - Keep on grinding,