Nearly 400 new commanders have been printed so far in 2025, and more are on the way with next month's Universes Beyond: Avatar. As we gear up for the last release of the year, I thought I would look back on, in my opinion, the best set of 2025: Final Fantasy. The set still has a lot of really cool commanders that haven't had their time in the spotlight, so I figured I'd show off one of my personal favorites: Quina, Qu Gourmet.

For 2 generic and a Green, it's a 2/3 with two abilities: whenever you make one or more tokens you create an additional 1/1 frog token and you can pay two generic mana and sacrifice a frog to put a +1/+1 counter on Quina. As you probably guessed, a deck built around Quina wants to go all in on tokens, adding bodies to the board with each clue, food or plant tokens and using those bodies to grow Quina or swing out at your opponents with an overwhelming army of amphibians. To make things a little more interesting, (and to help you afford more things you can eat), I'm going to show you how to build Quina on a budget, limiting it to just $100.

Let's start with our ramp. Quina costs three mana, so we want to cast most of our ramp on turns one or two. This means cards like Rampant Growth, Glimpse the Core and Llanowar Elves are some of our best options. Ramp cards that make tokens like Staff of Titania, Sami's Curiosity, Awakening Zone and Horizon Explorer are also excellent, as these cards can put us ahead on both mana and board presence once we cast Quina. Finally, because we're playing mono-Green, we can run Emerald Medallion and The Earth Crystal to make our Green spells cost less.

The goal of the deck is to make a big board of frogs and use them to draw cards and close out the game, so our deck is stuffed with ways to generate all sorts of tokens. A few of our most powerful cards are The Hunger Tide Rises, a saga that generates bugs and then lets us sacrifice creatures to put a creature from our deck into play, Nissa, Voice of Zendikar, a planeswalker that can tick up for a plant or tick down to put a +1/+1 counter on each of our creatures and Bootleggers' Stash, a card that was supposed to break commander but instead turns all of our lands into a Squirrel's Nest that also makes mana.

Although this deck isn't a dedicated landfall deck, there are so many cards that make tokens when we play lands that it's almost a subtheme. Tireless Tracker and Tireless Provisioner make clues, food and treasures when lands enter, providing ramp and card draw along with our frogs. Eusocial Engineering and Chocobo Racetrack both make 2/2 creatures when we play lands, Scute Swarm can create armies of insects and frogs with just a few landfall triggers and Springheart Nantuko can either make insects or copy our creatures.

Once we've caught enough frogs, there are many ways to turn our frog engines into card draw engines. Toski and Ohran Frostfang can draw cards if we attack with a bunch of frogs, Fecundity can draw cards when those frogs die and Idol of Oblivion can be our deck's version of Phyrexian Arena. Strongest of all, Skullclamp can let us turn one mana and a frog into two cards, a very strong conversion rate that makes it one of the best cards in the deck. And then there's Audience with Trostani, a sleeper pick from Murders at Karlov Manor that draws us a card for each differently named creature token we control, which could be anywhere from one to twenty-three, for just three mana.

To not die before we've finished catching frogs, we'll want to find ways to keep pesky permanents off our opponents' boards while leaving behind frogs on our side. This means running cards like Break Down, Pawpatch Formation and the recently printed Seedship Impact. Dauntless Scrapbot also gets a special shout out for being graveyard hate, a token-maker and a ramp spell all in one package. Our creature removal options are limited in mono-Green, but we can run a few fight spells like Khalni Ambush, Prizefight and Ezuri's Predation. To top off our removal package, Beast Within is a clean answer to any permanent.

So now that we've caught a bunch of frogs and created a bunch of expendable tokens, how do we turn these into a win? Well, thanks to a recent reprint in Tarkir: Dragonstorm, we can afford to run Craterhoof Behemoth, one of the most iconic win cons in all of EDH. If we have ten or so creatures, it should just win the game on the spot if our opponents can't interact with it. We also have Overwhelming Stampede and Dragon Throne of Tarkir, both of which can also easily end games but require a large creature. Quina can grow large enough to be a finisher by sacrificing frogs or with cards like Ivy Lane Denizen and Staff of Titania. Finally, Nissa, Ascended Animist's ultimate can be activated the turn we cast it if we paid the full mana cost, and in a mono-Green deck we should have enough forests to make that activation lethal.

And that does it for this budget Quina brew. If you want to see a full deck list, you can check mine out here. Finally, if you want to explore other Final Fantasy lists, check out this article on Tellah, Great Sage.