Budget Magic: Tifa One-Shot (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! This week, we're heading to Standard to see if we can pick up some Turn 3 kills with Tifa Lockhart, all on a budget of just over $100 in paper and with 15 main-deck rares on Magic Arena! How can Tifa Lockhart kill on Turn 3? Is the plan any good? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Tifa One-Shot
The Deck
Our deck today is built around one card: Tifa Lockhart. The two-mana 1/2 trampler has a super-scary ability: whenever a land enters under our control, we double Tifa's power! This ability allows us to one-shot kill our opponent, maybe as early as Turn 3!
So, how do we one-shot kill with Tifa Lockhart? There are a few ways, but the basic trick is getting Tifa up to five power. The most straightforward way to do this is Titanic Growth, which gets Tifa Lockhart up to five power all by itself. Once Tifa is up to five power, all we need to do is play a fetch land like Fabled Passage or Escape Tunnel (which will double Tifa up to 10 power) and then crack that fetch land to get a Forest (which will double Tifa's power again up to 20 power), which, thanks to trample, should (hopefully) let us one-shot kill our opponent. With our best draws, we can do this on Turn 3, although killing on Turn 4 is more common.
Of course, we can't just rely on Titanic Growth to pump Tifa Lockhart, so we have a bunch of backup pump spells. While none of these pump spells will get Tifa Lockhart up to 20 power all by themselves with a single fetch land, a bunch of combinations get us there. Both Giant Growth and Overprotect give +3/+3, which means that if we combine them with the +1/+1 from Royal Treatment or Snakeskin Veil, we can get Tifa big enough to deal 20 damage with just one fetch land.
It's also worth pointing out that Royal Treatment and Snakeskin Veil are essential to our deck working since they can protect Tifa Lockhart from targeted removal. And Tifa's a lightning rod for removal because once it hits the battlefield, our opponent will be very scared of dying out of nowhere. Against removal-heavy decks, it's often better to delay deploying Tifa for a turn so we can leave up a protection spell to save it from removal.
Rounding out the creatures in our deck is Llanowar Elves to speed things up. If we have Llanowar Elves on Turn 1, we'll have enough mana to play Tifa Lockhart on Turn 2 and leave up a Snakeskin Veil or Royal Treatment to protect it. Sazh's Chocobo and Mossborn Hydra give up backup landfall creatures to synergize with our fetch lands, although neither is nearly as explosive as Tifa. Mossborn Hydra is close, but its landfall ability only doubles the number of counters on it, not its power like with Tifa. Although it doesn't offer the same one-shot kill potential, it will still grow into a one-shot lethal trampler if we can protect it and play a couple of fetch lands.
Finally, Bushwhack and Archdruid's Charm give us removal that can also find us a land. Archdruid's Charm is especially powerful, giving us one card that can tutor up Tifa, exile an artifact or enchantment (like Cori-Steel Cutter), kill a creature, or tutor a land into play at instant speed. This last mode offers some sneaky kills. If you watch our games, you'll see multiple times where using Archdruid's Charm on our opponent's end step to get a fetch land let us untap and grow Tifa Lockhart or Mossborn Hydra enough times to win the game on the spot!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 4-1 with the deck, which is great. Even better, we beat Izzet Prowess twice along the way! It turns out that Tifa Lockhart might actually be legit. The deck is super fast and is surprisingly resilient as well, thanks to all of our protection spells, assuming you play carefully and focus on leaving up mana to protect Tifa.
As far as changes I'd make to the deck, I'm not sure I'd change anything in the main deck, although I do think the sideboard could use some upgrades. In many ways, Tifa One-Shot is a combo deck, which makes it hard to bring in too many cards during sideboarding without weakening our primary plan. As a result, we probably don't really need three copies of Heritage Reclamation or Pawpatch Formation—even in matchups where they are good, we didn't find the room to bring all the copies in. Meanwhile, if you want to cut the budget on Magic Arena a bit, you can drop Scavenging Ooze and Tranquil Frillback. We didn't bring them in once during our matches. Although we do need some graveyard hate, I think they can be replaced by a random uncommon to save a few rare wildcards.
So, should you play Tifa One-Shot in Standard? If you are looking for a budget deck that felt pretty competitive, at least in our small sample size, I think the answer is yes! The deck felt like it actually might be legit. Tifa Lockhart is an incredibly strong removal check that puts opponents to the test super early in the game. And if they don't pass, they die on Turn 3 or 4, which is fast enough to race even the top tier decks in Standard. We'll have to see where the meta ends up as we move toward bannings and rotation, but for now, I wouldn't be surprised to see Tifa One-Shot end up as one of the better budget decks in Final Fantasy Standard.
Budget Stuff
As you probably noticed, our deck today ended up costing $135, which is a bit over the $100 I normally shoot for (although in my defense, it was around $120 when I played it, but then Tifa Lockhart's price increased a bit). If you are looking to make the deck even cheaper, here's my advice.
Swapping Fabled Passage for Evolving Wilds saved about $20 in paper and four rares on Magic Arena. While Evolving Wilds is worse since it always comes into play tapped, considering how fast the deck is, Fabled Passage isn't really that different since it comes into play tapped before Turn 4. Plus, both work exactly the same for the combo kill.
Mossborn Hydra is the only other super-expensive card in the deck (discounting Tifa Lockhart, of course, which eats up a ton of budget). The problem is that I couldn't really find a great replacement for it. Bristly Bill, Spine Sower would be great in the deck (since the +1/+1 counter it offers can let Giant Growth one-shot with Tifa and a fetch land) but is even more expensive. (It is my favorite non-budget upgrade, though.) I guess you could play something like Sidequest: Raise a Chocobo, but it's way, way worse. For now, Mossborn Hydra sticks, but just because I can't figure out what to replace it with. But if you can find a replacement, it would save about $20 and four more rares.
As I mentioned before, you can swap the Tranquil Frillbacks and Scavenging Oozes from the sideboard for something like Tormod's Crypt, which saves four more rares on Magic Arena but only about $6 in paper.
All in all, these changes drop the cost of the deck on Magic Arena a lot, from 19 rares down to 11, or even seven if you can figure out a Mossborn Hydra replacement. In paper, cutting the Fabled Passage and the sideboard cards would get the deck's total cost down near $100. Is it worth it to pinch pennies? I would say the Fabled Passage and sideboard changes are relatively painless, but it's probably worth splurging on Mossborn Hydra as a backup for Tifa.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@mtggoldfish.com
