Transcript below:
So, I have a card spoiler for you for Magic.
I was there when Final Fantasy VII released. I had bought a Nintendo when I was 10 years old or 11 years old. My father—you may have heard this story before—gave me money when I went to visit my uncle. And I stayed with him for a week, and I was supposed to use this money to buy food. But he always bought the food. I was left with $200 at the end that he wouldn't let me spend on food.
And I said, "Well, I'll just give this back to my dad."
And my uncle, being the great man that he is, said, "No you won't. We're going to the mall and you're going to spend that money."
So we went and I bought a Nintendo. Well, years later I sold my Nintendo and bought a Super Nintendo when the Super Nintendo went out.
Then I went to college and off to Korea for two years. And during that time the PlayStation came out, and my brother sold my Super Nintendo to get money to buy a PlayStation. So when I came back, I owned one piece of that PlayStation, and it had Final Fantasy VII on it. And I tell you, the mind-blowing experience of going from VI with little sprites, and then not playing video games basically for three years because I had no system and coming and then having a PlayStation where we had full CGI rendered cut scenes, was a little bit mind blowing.
In Final Fantasy VII, we didn't have the internet. We didn't know, you know, spoilers and secrets. We had to figure it out all on our own. And I was playing the Chocobo Racing mini game. And I realized, you know, through the hints in the game that you could build a special golden Chocobo that I didn't even know what it would do. But I wanted one. Except this involved a lot of grinding, a ton to get that Chocobo. You had to, like, breed them and win races with them, and use, like, the prizes that you won sometimes in order to get special ones. It's like playing Pokémon but with a racing mini game. It was enjoyable for a little while. And then it got kind of boring.
And then I realized that my sister Jane, 10 years old at the time, you've seen her on the channel before, was watching me with wide eyes. And she loved the cute little Chocobos. And I was able to teach her to grind the Chocobo racing game just to gather all the resources, and I would come back hours later, see what I've gotten, and breed new Chocobos for her, and then she was ecstatic, and then she would play them through the racing. So I did not have to figure out how to get a golden Chocobo. I was able to make my sister grind out the Chocobo for me, and it was my first lesson in perhaps economics in that case, where you can get your little sister to do something for you that you don't want to do, and she'll think it's a privilege.
I'd be like, "Well, I was going to play the PlayStation."
She's like, "I want to play it. Can I play? Can I play?"
I'm like, "All right. You can play for a little while. But you have to do this racing game." And then she would do it.
And so I didn't even really know what a golden Chocobo would do, except I got on it and it can walk across the ocean in Final Fantasy VII, which you would think you didn't need because you had an airship. But the airship could only land in certain places. And there are islands that I had seen that you couldn't get to in the airship. And in the corner of the map, on this little, lonely island, the Chocobo went there, and it found something. And you probably know what my card reveal is right now. I actually have two. But you know what the big one reveals. And there you found the most awesome Summon that has ever been made in a Final Fantasy game. And it will never be topped because no other game has required this level of commitment and time and effort and figuring it out without the internet to get the Knights of the Round.
And here is our first spoiler card, Knights of the Round. So when I saw that we got Knights of the Round I'm like, "They didn't, did they?" And indeed, they didn't. I was wondering if they would have it be a saga that went for 12 turns that summoned a knight every turn. Instead, they wisely chose to make it actually more playable.
By the way, I love these saga designs. The idea of the Summons being sagas that are creatures, that stick around as long as you have the saga, that's just really cool. And then, you know, when you sacrifice the saga, you sacrifice that creature. But it's something--it gets across the feeling of Final Fantasy VII so deliciously well. Whoever at Wizards came up with that, gold star. Gold star to you.
So, Knights of the Round. This is going to create three 2/2 white Knight creature tokens four times in a row and then give you basically an overrun for them. They get +2/+2 and indestructible. And it is itself a 3/3 indestructible. So it is a creature. This is a delightful design. A bit on the pricey side. But I appreciate Wizards being like, "Let's give Brandon the one about the Knights." They didn't know I had this great story of going through toil and trouble and exploiting the labor of my 10-year-old sister in order to get this Summon for the first time. But I did have to work a lot myself. It wasn't all just Jane.
Though we actually have a second one. We also have Primal Garuda, which is an Uncommon, which means we're probably going to be playing with it a lot more. At least I will be because I play a lot of limited. This is your kind of standard value saga Uncommon where you get to conditionally destroy something and get a 3/3 flyer for a couple of turns and buff your team. I do hope that there is a cool enchantment/saga based deck. I always love those in draft where you can kind of play with the sagas like you could in the first Dominaria set, where you can, like, take counters off or remove counters in order to, you know, accelerate, or keep them around long, or bounce them a lot and replay them. I look forward to bouncing Primal Garuda and replaying her a number of times.
Anyway, here's my preview cards. Thanks, Wizards. You once again targeted me really well with picking a Knights of the Round that I have a story about. I hope I will have a story about any other preview cards that they give me in the future. But I hope you guys are looking forward to a Final Fantasy set. Judging by the sales so far, I think that you might indeed be looking forward to it just a little bit.
Anyway, looking forward to drafting this. And I hope that the cosmos says that this has to be opened by Donald and passed to me, just like the last one.
— Brandon
