Brief preface: I used to do magic as a kid (I was always more of a Decipher Star Wars TCG guy), but haven't collected cards in 20 years. Well, good job WOTC, your choices successfully suckered me in with your FF collab. I bought a few booster play boxes (I am an adult, wtf, with the ability to fund my own hobbies? Weird!), and then decided to buy the rest of the sets via singles.
Well, across 47 orders over the last 4 months, I'm now within sight. I won't be getting the Traveling Chocobo alt ink variants, but theoretically I will get everything else. The very expensive surge foils will maybe be obtained weekly, but as of now I'm in great shape. I'm short about 17 cards of 589 In FIN, have completed FTA and the art sets (both of them), and am down 8 cards in FIC (the surge foil borderless commanders, which run $1800 or so for just those 8 cards).
As you can see, I've shelled out for this! I'm a big boy, and spend money on pretty cardboard~
But the point of this post is to laugh at some lore-accurate misfortune! You see, across those 47 orders, there have been 5 errors where I received a wrong card.
FOUR OF THEM were all about VIVI cards! Seriously, I've received 3 wrong Vivis, and in 2 cases, they gave me a much more expensive variant than the one I ordered (which I already had by that point...) one was a cheaper version, and the last was just a ridiculously bad experience where the guy never shipped my order, said it shipped, found one of the cards lying around, said I should still get the second, then found it 14 days later and just cancelled my order.
But seriously. 80% of the total errors needed to complete 3 whole sets involve Vivi. It's pretty canonical that he's constantly wondering if he exists, and what's real or not... so I guess the cards followed suit!
What are the odds?!