Baffling Final Fantasy Commander Combines Two Wildly Different Strategies

Last updated on May 23, 2025

If you’ve been scouring the Final Fantasy card file for a new, innovative commander to build around, but haven’t quite found anything yet, all Hope is not lost! In fact, he’s doing quite well, showing up as Hope Estheim in the mainline set. Hope is an Azorius legend that’s incredibly easy to understand, at least as far as processing what the words on the card mean. But digging into the ability and how you’re supposed to build around it is a head-scratcher. Lifegain and mill? Together, in this economy?

Magic Card Design 101

First off, let’s deconstruct the card.

This is a very basic strategy that Magic uses to design multicolored cards. What are the card’s colors, and what is something that each of those colors can do? Put them together, and bam! Gold card. In this case, Hope’s got a very straightforward design:

• White is a color that cares about lifegain.
• Blue is a color that cares about mill.

Ergo, a white and blue card that mills based on the amount of life you’ve gained. It’s a perfect example of two puzzle pieces just kind of fitting together. Except it’s not exactly a peanut butter + jelly combination, is it? More like caramel flavored wasabi. This is the first card in Magic history that intentionally combines these two strategies on one card, and they don’t seem like they go together very intuitively.

Mining New Design Space

Now there is some precedent for Azorius cards that care about lifegain specifically. Drogskol Reaver has a very similar blue + white design where the lifegain aspect comes from white, and the blue reward is drawing cards. And Will, Scion of Peace was a Wilds of Eldraine commander that converts lifegain into cost reduction for your spells. Using white for a lifegain bonus on an Azorius card is pretty common, though they usually end up feeling like blue cards with just a touch of white, rather than equal parts white and blue.

Hope’s a bit different, because you’d need to care about lifegain (white) and mill (blue) before you’d ever run the card. But because it’s such a different take on an Azorius commander, it opens up an entirely new strategy, and it might even be pretty good.

Here’s the thing: It’s very easy to gain life in Magic. MTG’s history is littered with cards that just gain life and do basically nothing else, and they tend to be quite weak, since they don’t actually affect what’s happening on the board. Your Meditation Puzzles and Chaplain's Blessings and Renewed Faiths of the world don’t do very much. But as every Ajani's Pridemate or Sanguine Bond lover knows, lifegain’s all about the payoffs, not the enablers.

And Hope Estheim is the ultimate payoff: an actual win condition for lifegain decks! There are white cards that gain a lot of life, and that converts into a lot of mill for your opponents. The end result is a fairly linear strategy that looks to keep your own life total high while turbo-milling your opponents into oblivion. And you’ll need the life total buffer, because people hate mill, and they will be gunning for you.

The Big Players

Lifegain decks usually rely on repeatable, incremental lifegain triggers to keep their synergies flowing. That often comes in the form of Soul Sister cards like Soul Warden and Guide of Souls. Those still have a home with Hope, but they’re not quite as effective here since Hope only triggers on your own end step.

Instead, you’ll want huge swathes of lifegain that you can fire off during your own turn. Think Providence, Sanguine Sacrament, and for the first time ever, you might even unironically consider playing trash-tier mythic Archangel's Light in a Commander deck (or, you know, don’t).

Life-doubling effects like Beacon of Immortality and Celestial Mantle are akin to Traumatize and Maddening Cacophony here, and don’t forget that Hope has lifelink, so a well-timed Celestial Mantle can pull even more weight with the combat damage Hope deals. And yes, doubling your life total counts as gaining life.

The final nails in the coffin are the effects that amplify milling. Think your Bruvac the Grandiloquents, Fraying Sanity, and The Water Crystal. If you had “putting Bruvac and Soul Warden in the same deck” on your Bingo card, mark that off now!

The Harsh Reality

Glimpse the Unthinkable | Illustration by Brandon Kitkouski

Of course, running a deck with Hope Estheim as the commander won’t be smooth sailing. For one, the card itself is a Grizzly Bears with no protection. You’ll be in blue for countermagic and white for protection, but Hope’s a bit hopeless without some support.

There’s also the fact that mill is an archetype that some players despise with a fiery passion, like “upset at you because you kicked their dog” angry, so you should expect some retaliation if you present Hope as your commander. And no trying to sneak in the old “oh, this is my group hug lifegain-mill deck.” People will know what’s up as soon as Hope shows his face, and some people will gun for you immediately because of that.

So, playing Millbro Baggins here might be an uphill battle, but you’ll be doing something pretty novel, combining cards that have never shared a room together before, and hopefully keeping your life total high while emptying out everyone else’s libraries.

So are these two great tastes that taste great together? No, not really. At least, they haven’t been until now. But maybe Hope changes that, maybe there’s hope for the lifegain-mill crossover no one was asking for, and just maybe it ends up being something cool and interesting. For one player at the table, at least.