Much Abrew: Chocobo! Chocobo! Chocobo! (Final Fantasy Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week we're heading to Final Fantasy Standard to play my favorite deck from early-access day (thanks to Wizards for the account!): Chocobo! While having a deck built around flightless, oversized chickens sounds like a meme, the synergies are actually shockingly powerful, to the point where I think that Chocobo might actually be a real deck in Standard, especially once rotation and bannings make red aggro less dominant! What makes Chocobos so good? Could the Birds be a real threat to Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Chocobo
Wrap-Up
Overall, Chocobo was not only one of the most fun decks I played during early access, but it felt like one of the most competitive. In some ways, the deck almost feels like a Standard precon: you just play all of the decent Chocobos and back it up with a handful of older Bloomburrow Birds and a touch of removal, and the end result is an oddly powerful deck.
I'm not going to go too in-depth on the deck here since it's pretty straightforward: play Chocobos, make land drops to trigger their landfalls, make the Birds huge, and win the game. But I did want to shout out one specific card that massively overperformed in Sidequest: Raise a Chocobo. I thought this card was basically curve filler, but it ended up being the best card in the deck. If you watch the games, you'll see that we got a ton of wins by flipping it into Black Chocobo, which then grabbed a land to trigger its landfall to grow all of our Birds and all of our other landfall, generally leading to us dealing around 50 damage and winning the game on the spot! While there are games where we never get enough Birds to flip it, which is a bummer, a 2/2 landfall creature for two isn't that bad. And when we do flip it, spending just two mana for two 2/2s, a land (any land, not even just a basic), and a pile of landfall damage is an amazing deal!
If you like tribal midrange-y aggro decks with a bit of a combo finish, give Chocobo a shot! While I'm not sure how well the deck will line up with Prowess and Mice, hopefully those decks won't be long for this world. And once the meta normalizes, I think that Chocobo might actually have the power to be a real aggro-midrange option!
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.
