For Yshtola, it came down to a mix of popularity of the character as well as being a spellcaster, her story and character development offered a wide range of abilities and moments to pull from to lead the deck, Holt explains, going on to say this deck represents her specifically during her Shadowbringers arc
To represent the conflict in FF14 is Zodiark, Umbral God, which is indestructible and makes each player sacrifice half their creatures upon entering, also gaining a +1/+1 counter for each of them
With a big enough board state, this can go from a middling amount of lore to game-winning amounts very quickly
You won't have to pay the commander tax to activate that ability, and activating that ability won't increase the commander tax to pay later
You'll also be able to regularly retrigger enchantress abilities by returning things to the battlefield with finality counters on them
When spoilers started to be revealed, including the golden Chocobos, pre-orders ramped up massively, as expected