Final Fantasy Store Champs/Player’s Championship Qualifier Recap

Final Fantasy Store Champs/Player’s Championship Qualifier Recap

This past weekend we had 25 players battling it out in Standard for some amazing Final Fantasy Store Champs promos, an invitation to our end of year Player’s Championship, as well as Player’s Championship Leaderboard Points! With less than a week to prepare after the latest Banned & Restricted announcement, it really was the wild, wild west of Standard formats. The field was full of people trying new strategies, decks that had been pushed to the wayside due to the strength of the red decks, and some new twists in decks that were always around. Our latest champion Michael Giles saw the latest banning and found a glaring hole in the decision that was made to target a specific deck, UW Omniscience Combo. Who needs Abuelo’s Awakening, when you can just control the board for one more turn and cast a Repair and Recharge? After all, you won’t be dying to any Cori-Steel Cutters or Monstrous Rages anymore. Let’s take a look at Mike’s winning Omniscience Combo list as well as the rest of our Top 8!

Mike Giles – UW Omniscience Combo (1^st)

Connor Cheney – BW Pixie (2^nd)

Cody Leblanc – Zur Overlords (3^rd-4^th)

Michael Cameron – UW Midrange (3^rd-4^th)

Tim Goodine – UR Cauldron Combo (5^th-8^th)

Jon Goud – Mono-White Tokens (5^th-8^th)

Tim Foley – Zur Overlords (5^th-8^th)

Doug Maguire – Naya Yuna (5^th-8^th)

It looks like this Top 8 is all about Overlords! With 34 copies of Overlords of some variety, and Overlord of the Mistmoors appearing in 5/8 of our Top 8 lists, current Standard looks like Midrange central! But at the top of the pack was Mike Giles’ take on UW Omni Combo, utilizing The Brothers’ War card Repair and Recharge as a replacement to reanimate the namesake card of the deck. As always, I caught up with our most recent Champ, Mike Giles for some talk about his win in Standard and his incredible run!

T: Congrats Mike on yet another Qualifier win! This time you showed your strength in Standard, and you decided to play a deck that had one of it’s most important cards banned, Abuelo’s Awakening. How did you find the replacement card Repair and Recharge so quickly? Did it perform more or less the same as Awakening?

M: With the format shaking up, I tested UW Control early but quickly realized the sideboard plan just wasn’t holding up. I pivoted to Omni and found it was strong in pre-board games thanks to the slower pace of the meta. Having played a lot of Control, I could even side out the combo and catch opponents off guard with a more reactive plan. Repair and Recharge isn’t a perfect replacement for Abuelo’s Awakening, but it filled the gap well enough. I definitely benefitted from the number of untested decks in the field—turns out, sometimes raw power and a little misdirection is all you need to steal a tournament.

T: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! You have a lot of experience playing this style of blue control deck, would you say there’s any carry over in techniques or gameplay that you’ve learned from playing Mono-Blue Tron in Modern that you’ve used in Standard?

M: Yeah, the jig is up—I like greedy control decks that end the game rather suddenly. That style really rewards patience and planning, whether it’s in Standard or another format. The core skills carry over: balancing setup with interaction, disguising your true win condition, and knowing just the right moment to flip the switch.

T: Once the Top 8 cut was announced, did you know what you would likely be facing in the elimination rounds? If so, did you think you had many favourable matchups? What does a good matchup look like for Omni, and what would you hate to see across the table?

M: I knew I’d be on the play in the first round, and honestly, my biggest hope was to dodge any opponents I’d already played. Once someone’s seen what Omni does, it gets a lot easier to play around it. I started off against Tim Foley on Domain, which is a favourable matchup—unless they’re packing a lot of sideboard hate, then it gets sketchy fast. The one deck I really didn’t want to face was UB Kaito. That deck didn’t get touched by the bans and can completely shut down my gameplan. Aggro decks are also traditionally tough for the kind of strategies I like to play, but Omni at least gives you a chance to ‘race’ a bit. In the finals, I faced Connor on what looked like BW Aggro with Dark Confidants. It was a super scary matchup, and he played both games really well—definitely kept me on edge the whole time.

T: Wow, that sounds like an exciting Top 8! With what is now your 3^rd Player’s Championship Qualifier win on top of a recent finals appearance as well as other Top 8 finishes, you’ve jumped the pack in what was looking like a very close race between a lot of players! I like to view our Leaderboard Race as Halifax’s own sort of Player of the Year race. What would achieving that kind of long-term win mean to you?

M: Oh geez, the players in Halifax are incredibly strong—there’s so much talent here and always something to learn from each match. There’s still a lot of season left, and someone could definitely go on a great run and pass me. We’ll see how it all shakes out. More than anything, I just hope people enjoy playing against me and that I can contribute something positive to the community, both in the games and around them.

Congratulations once again to Mike Giles both on winning our Store Champs/Player’s Champs Qualifier, as well as his winning streak! And of course, congrats to all who made Top 8 on a great tournament, earning Leaderboard Points and getting one step closer to making the Player’s Championship! Make sure you get your invite and join us for our next Player’s Championship Qualifier on August 16^th! This event will also be a Standard Regional Championship Qualifier for early 2026. So much to play for!!

Written By: Travis Benedict Pro Tour Competitor, Cat Lover