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The Verge
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Final Fantasy fans, now is the time to get into Magic: The Gathering
The Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering set is here, and there's never been a more perfect assemblage of Magic cards. The set features cards taken from every mainline Final Fantasy title, including the two MMOs, so there's something for every generation of Final Fantasy lovers. And while Magic has featured other video game crossovers in the past (hello, Assassin's Creed and Fallout!), with the way this set is constructed, from card mechanics to art, you can tell this one is a developer favorite, sure to appeal to the massive chunk of people who love both games. But what if you don't inhabit the center circle in the Venn diagram of Magic and Final Fantasy lovers but are still interested in experiencing this set for yourself? Magic: The Gathering is an intimidating game, even if you're a seasoned player like myself. There are so many ways you can play, both in person and online, that it can be overwhelming to figure out the best way to jump in. So here's a few tips and tricks to playing the Final Fantasy Magic set. Be warned, though: this is the best-selling set in Magic's 30-plus-year history, and you will pay for the pleasure of this experience — if you can find the product to pay for it at all. How to play: physical edition Over the years, the designers at Magic developer Wizards of the Coast have realized it can be intimidating as hell for a new player looking to start their planeswalking journey. To help these new players along, Magic developers have created a line of products called Starter Kits. Each is a set of two 60-card decks featuring cards specifically designed for new players and an instruction booklet that goes over the game's basic rules and cadence of play. Keep one deck for yourself, give one to a friend, and learn as you play together. For MTG x FF, the starter kit features two decks themed around Final Fantasy's greatest rivalry: Sephiroth vs. Cloud. These decks are a decent introductory course to Magic. Cloud's is themed around equipment cards (think the Buster Sword or the Ultima Weapon), which are essentially weapons you can attach to your creatures to pump up their damage and hit hard. Sephiroth's deck is all about him. Kill creatures (yours and your opponent's) to make him as big as possible. I played both decks against the set's designers and managed to beat them both, a monumental feat for any Magic player. However, if you want to play them for yourself, the Starter Kit is currently sold out on Amazon, so your best bet to find one is to hit up your local card shop (known in the community as your LCS) to see if it has any in stock. Wizards' website does feature a handy store locator if you don't know where your nearest LCS is. There are also four Commander decks you can buy and play, with each one themed around a specific title in the series. Commander is the most popular format of Magic, but the rules are slightly different from standard play, and matches can often include more than one opponent. The Final Fantasy Commander decks are beginner-friendly but expensive, running anywhere from $80 to $130 when Commander decks in other sets are much cheaper. How to play: online edition If you don't have any friends you can beg, bribe, or beat into playing Magic with you, there is another, far easier option: the game's online version, Magic: The Gathering Arena. Arena is the best way to experience the Final Fantasy set as there's no worry about stock, it's relatively cheaper, and there are so many different ways to play that in-person playing simply does not accommodate. Once you've made your account and downloaded the game, you can play through the game's tutorial, which I recommend to get your bearings. Not only does it explain how to play, but the color challenges also give you a feel for the playstyles of Magic's five different colors. Think of colors and color combos as characters in your favorite hero shooter. Each has different abilities and favors a specific style of play. Blue and white center on going over your opponents' heads with flying creatures, while mono green (my favorite and the best way to play) favors big, stompy creatures that run over your opponents' defenses. The Final Fantasy set makes it easy to find a color or combo that works for you. If you want to get straight into the Final Fantasy set, you can simply skip the tutorial to unlock all of Arena's many game modes and features, and it'll still be there to try if you ever need to go back. Once you're ready, you have a number of options available. You can get right into the thick of things and start playing the game's constructed modes. If you've never played Magic before, do not do this. It is expensive, costing a lot of resources your account will not have unless you buy them in the game's cash shop, and it is hard. Making decks is difficult; even I don't like it that much compared to playing decks preassembled for me. Your best, most economical option is to play Jumpstart mode. In Jumpstart all the hard work of making a viable deck is done for you. You are presented with a number of archetypes: Bold, Mage, Chocobos, Equipment, and more. You can pick two of them based on nothing more than vibes and personal preference, and the game will automatically create a deck using those two archetypes. Then you play your deck against other Jumpstart decks and rack up the wins or the valuable experience that comes with losing. The great thing about Jumpstart is that it's cheap — a new account grants you enough currency to try the mode three times — and the cards you pick are yours to keep. Do it enough times and you'll eventually have enough cards to tool around with making your own decks to try out in the game's friendly mode, Quick Start. I've enjoyed all the different Jumpstart decks I've made, but if you really wanna have some fun, pick chocobos whenever you get the chance. They're creatures that get stronger whenever you play a land card (think of land like the gas that powers your deck's engine) and have incredible synergy with other card types, leading to a deck that will overwhelm your opponent. Also, they're chocobos! What could be more Final Fantasy than chocobos? If you are a Final Fantasy fan, I cannot stress enough how much fun its Magic set is. And if you're intimidated by Magic's difficulty, don't be. There are so many beginner-friendly ways to play, and there are so many beginners trying this set out for the first time, that you'll be in good company. Plus, I've found the community is always happy to help newcomers. When I played at an in-person event, my first opponent had never picked up the game before. Over the course of our match I taught him everything I knew as best I could, and before the end, he beat me. Badly. I've never had more fun.
CNET
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Getting Beaten by Magic: The Gathering's Final Fantasy Set Designer Was a Wild Ride
In an air-conditioned tent on a sweltering Los Angeles day at Summer Game Fest, I sat down to play a hand of the card game Magic: The Gathering and drew a handful of characters from Final Fantasy. Sitting across from me was the man who oversaw the process of turning some of the world's most beloved video game characters into playable cards for what's shaping up to be Magic's most popular set ever -- already a best seller a month before its release. Magic: The Gathering is a storied collectible card game made by Wizards of the Coast that's arguably more popular than it's ever been since it debuted in 1993. In recent years, the game has ventured into the mainstream by adapting the most popular nerd properties, like Marvel superheroes, Warhammer 40K and Lord of the Rings, into playable cards. These Universes Beyond sets, as they're called, have had special releases that make them legal only in select formats of the game -- meaning you couldn't bring them to play in tournaments with the most recent sets. That all changes with the Final Fantasy set, whose cards feature every mainline game from the original Final Fantasy first released in 1987 to Final Fantasy 16 from 2023. The new set is being released in the Standard format, which means players will be able to bring the most famous characters, like Cloud, Sephiroth, Yuna, Lightning, Noctis and Y'shtola, in their decks to play in regular competitions alongside the other newest sets. I'm no Magic scrub, but it's been years since my teen days when I started collecting during the Urza's Saga and Sixth Edition sets. The game has changed a lot since then, with new keywords and more powerful cards than ever, but the basics remain the same: Take a deck of cards with a mix of mana-generating lands, creatures, artifacts and other spells to battle against your opponent. Untap, upkeep, draw, play, combat, end phase. As I sit across from Gavin Verhey, principal Magic: The Gathering game designer and set design lead for Final Fantasy, I'm daunted by the task of playing someone who literally oversaw the development of every card in my hand. But I'm comforted that, like me, he's a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games, as was everyone on the team. "The good news is we've been doing the homework for the past 30 years of our lives," Verhey said. "I mean, we did play through the games, we all revisited the old ones." Though not everyone on Verhey's team had played every one of the series' games, collectively they'd covered them all. For instance, he's never played the massively multiplayer online Final Fantasy 14, but he pointed to a colleague across the tent at a different table -- "Dylan over here, he's played thousands of hours of 14," Verhey said. The Final Fantasy Starter Kit includes two 60-card decks that each feature a hero from Final Fantasy 7, including Cloud (pictured) and Sephiroth cards. David Lumb/CNET Turning Final Fantasy icons into playable cards The first official Universes Beyond set was Warhammer 40K in 2021, but Verhey told me Wizards of the Coast has been working on the Final Fantasy set for about five years, requiring a lot of back-and-forth from the card game maker and Square Enix to get all the details and translations right, along with the extensive design process to adapt the venerable property. "What really helped us out was that Square Enix has huge Magic players," Verhey said. One of the challenges was to incorporate Final Fantasy 16, which was released in mid-2023, years into the Final Fantasy Magic set's development. Verhey's team had precious little time to incorporate the game. "When it came out, we had a marathon weekend where we're all gonna play through," Verhey said. "We're putting in the chat, we should make this a character, and this a card, and this a card. It was super fun." In preparation, Verhey had saved 10 card slots out of the 310-card set for Final Fantasy 16 cards. Their goal was to make sure every game had at least 10 cards and at least one of rare quality, to make sure fans could find some representation from their favorite games. Of course, some more-popular entries in the series got more cards, leading to more from Final Fantasy 6, 7, 10 and 14 -- games that make their way on the lists of the best RPGs of all time. David Lumb/CNET But there were design directives Verhey held to make sure that players would recognize staples of the series even if they hadn't played every game. "When I was designing the set of common and uncommon cards, especially common, I wanted to put in things that were generic across many Final Fantasy games, so no matter which ones you played, you'd find a thing you recognize," Verhey said. "If you've played any Final Fantasy game, or even any RPG, you're like, Yep, there's the weapons vendor, the item person, there's the person greeting you when you come into town." Many of the most recognizable heroes, like Cloud and Sephiroth, are reserved for the rare and mythic rarity character cards, which are intentionally powerful, yet the latter of which show up only in one of every eight packs of cards. It's a tough balance, Verhey said -- but to make sure players still get these popular heroes in their decks, they splashed them into the art of common and uncommon cards for different spells, artifacts and enchantments. These often depict memorable moments in the games, including, perhaps most infamously, in Final Fantasy 6 where a martial arts character suplexes a train. (I'm not kidding. It's really a card in the set.) As I draw more cards, Verhey points out the many details his team made sure to pack into them, including a small indicator near the artist credit that says which game they came from. Even the simplest card in the game, a mana-producing land, evokes the moments and settings from Final Fantasy games -- when I drew a basic plains (white) land, it showed the iconic car from Final Fantasy 15, the Regalia, driving up a road. I was instantly brought back to playing the game and its boys road trip adventure (which kicks off with one of the greatest intros of the series). Every card in the Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering set references a moment, character or location from the games. On the bottom-left corner is an indicator of which game the card's art is from -- this one says "FFXV" for Final Fantasy 15. David Lumb/CNET Designing Final Fantasy for Magic: The Gathering newcomers If you have a friend who's been into Magic: The Gathering, you've probably heard a lot about the Final Fantasy set already, and many newcomers are being drawn in by all the hype. I asked Verhey what design decisions they made to make the set as welcoming as they could for folks who've never played a game of Magic before (indeed, in addition to the interview, I and other Summer Game Fest attendees were offered introductory demos to learn Magic if we were totally new to the game). "One of the things with Final Fantasy, and any Universes Beyond IP, that I think is amazing is we just start that conversation a little further down the road, because if you play Final Fantasy, I don't need to explain health and mana and strategy and goals as much," Verhey said. Verhey also notes that the Starter Kit for the Final Fantasy set is a great entry point for new players, including two premade 60-card decks that are themed around Cloud and Sephiroth, as well as codes to redeem the decks in the Magic: The Gathering Arena online digital version of the game. But the team also made design decisions to make the Final Fantasy set easier to grasp for newcomers, too. "The mechanics in the set, many of them are things that are very approachable, like flashback [being able to cast some spells twice] and landfall mechanics [effects that trigger whenever you play land cards] that players know and have played with for ages," Verhey said. "The new mechanics are stuff like job select, which is a riff on living weapon from [Magic expansion] Mirrodin, which is kind of simple to understand: You get a token and put this [weapon] on it, right?" Verhey continued. "But the flavor really helps you with this because, Oh, it makes sense that a samurai katana would have a hero that comes with it and is holding the katana." One of the set's new mechanics is job select, which creates a basic creature to attach the weapon to when it enters play. David Lumb/CNET That doesn't mean the design process was seamless. Adapting some famous Final Fantasy heroes into a card game was occasionally tricky as Verhey's team decided how best to translate their abilities onto a card, often going to the teammate who knew that particular game best. Verhey gave an example he had "a heck of a time with": Kain Highwind, the best friend of the protagonist of Final Fantasy 4, who keeps switching sides with and against the party. After six different attempts at design concepts, he went to a co-worker who knew that game backward and forward, who sent Verhey a design that same day that ended up in the set: If the Kain, Traitorous Dragoon card deals damage to a player, they get control of him. Elegant. Of the 310 cards in the set, there are some that Verhey is particularly proud of. Esper Terra is a version of the heroine of Final Fantasy 6 and one of the first Saga creatures, a new card type combination introduced in the set, which switches back and forth between normal hero and pumped-up esper (think summons or guardian forces in other FF games) for some turns. Another card, a version of Sephiroth (Fabled Soldier, which flips over to transform into One-Winged Angel), leaves a permanent emblem on the board to represent his lingering presence in Final Fantasy 7, always needling the heroes in that game. James Bricknell/CNET How they balanced Final Fantasy cards for all Magic: The Gathering formats Clearly, Magic can get complicated, and this intrinsic complexity of cards and interactions is a hallmark of high-tier play and fascinating deck strategies. By making the Final Fantasy set legal in Standard format, Wizards of the Coast is enabling it to affect mainstream play, including competitive tournaments that feature the latest sets before and after Final Fantasy. This includes debuting the aforementioned Saga creatures, which Verhey's team developed as a way to embody some of the most powerful of Final Fantasy party abilities, like summons, that make a flashy impact for a turn or two. In development, the team tried out a "vanishing" mechanic where a summon-like creature would slowly die over several turns, which was read as a downside. Instead, Saga creature cards balance that big impact with temporary presence, dependably swinging the pendulum of pressure back to your opponent -- after all, you paid mana for something that goes away eventually -- but presents an interesting dilemma: Does your opponent block it? Kill it? Spend a spell on it? "We balanced [Saga creatures] using the power, toughness and abilities to make sure it would be appropriate, but I think more interesting is, once they're in play, what happens? They really make gameplay interesting," Verhey said. As it was the first Universes Beyond set to be legal in Standard play, Verhey acknowledged that there was pressure to make sure they balanced it well. That meant putting it through the same play design process of other sets, like the recent Tarkir Dragonstorm, with ex-pro Magic players play-testing and iterating the cards. "We put our whole team on it for the balance portion," Verhey said. This process will be used for all future Universes Beyond sets, like the upcoming Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender sets, which will be similarly balanced and legal for Standard and other formats. Wizards of the Coast could always change their mind and pare this back for future sets, but making these new IP adaptations ready to play in tournaments and beyond is the plan for now. These Cloud, Midgar Mercenary and Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier cards are different than the Cloud and Sephiroth cards included in the Final Fantasy Starter Kit. James Bricknell/CNET How Final Fantasy pushes Magic: The Gathering into the future Unsurprisingly, it's challenging to pick the IPs to adapt. A separate team from Verhey and his designers chooses which recognizable properties to pick, and one of their filters is deciding whether it's possible to bring to Magic in the first place. While harmonious, ambitious, aggressive and smart characters match white, black, red and blue mana identities, respectively, some IPs don't have much to offer green, the color of earth and nature. Other requirements include enough characters and monsters that can make small, medium and large creatures or can fit Magic staples like flying creatures, which are important for supporting play environments like drafts. Verhey and his team learned a ton from developing the Final Fantasy set, including tackling the arduous task of filtering all the characters into all five colors of mana in Magic, which define play-style and strategy. In the years developing this set, Verhey pioneered what he calls the "snapshot moment," picking a crucial time in that character's story for the card they're making. For example, there are multiple Sephiroth character cards. One is included in a Commander premade deck and is white and red mana, depicting a pivotal moment in Final Fantasy 7's backstory when he discovers his past and angrily burns the town of Nibelheim to the ground. Another, a black mana card, is the Sephiroth that players encounter during the main plot of Final Fantasy 7 as the evil one-winged angel trying to destroy the world. "They're two very different moments of Sephiroth's story that let us show different colors through them, and that separate method is what we're going to definitely take forward and use in future Universes Beyond sets," Verhey said. It's a perfect moment in our real-world game of Magic as I sit across from Verhey: He, running the blue and black deck of the Starter Kit, plays his Sephiroth creature card. Noticing he used all his mana, I use an instant spell to kill the villain on his turn, and a turn later, I play my Cloud card, swaggering with confidence that I turned the tide. Sadly, Verhey notices I overcommitted and plays a Magitek Scythe on one of his other creatures, which forces my Cloud to block and get killed. A turn later, he uses a spell card to resurrect Sephiroth to the battlefield and quickly overwhelms me -- a fitting, Final Fantasy 7-appropriate end to our match. Over the weekend, Verhey played a lot of Magic matches with many other Summer Game Fest attendees -- some veterans, some newcomers to the game. And what he's been noticing, this weekend and in the monthslong lead-up to the set's release, is the joy when fans see cards of their favorite characters and moments from the games. "I think the biggest thing is remembering that everything has fans," Verhey said. "There's 16 games we're trying to cover here, and every game, people are like, Oh my gosh, this card from Final Fantasy 2 is in here. Or, I can't believe this card from Final Fantasy 7 is in here. Or, I wish this character from Final Fantasy 8 was in here. People really do care about it, and the missing stuff is really noticed, is really relevant." Unfortunately, that meant cutting cards even Verhey wanted, like one for Eiko from Final Fantasy 9, as well as others left on the cutting room floor from Final Fantasy 4 and 5. (I was personally hopeful for more Final Fantasy 8 cards myself.) But within the tight constraints of trying to represent 16 games in a 310-card set, they still managed to cram in enough iconic scenes that respect the beloved idiosyncrasies of a video game series nearing its 40th birthday -- things like, yes, being able to kill Final Fantasy 6's Phantom Train with the Phoenix Down card. "In this set, [someone asked,] 'Hey, can you remove -- I don't know why it's even there -- killing an undead thing on your Phoenix Down?'" Verhey said. "I'm like, 'Absolutely not. That is critical. You cannot touch this.'"
CNET
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Google's Latest Doodle Lets You Duel the Moon. Here's How to Play and Win
Google's home page logo is moonlighting as a strategy card game on Friday. If you click on Friday's Google Doodle, celebrating the lunar cycle, you'll go into a click-to-play card battler that turns the moon's eight phases into your own personal combo deck. In the game, called Rise of the Half Moon: May, you play against the moon to link matching moon phases, chasing specific card combinations to get more points. If you outscore the moon, you move on and can snag wildcard power-ups for the following rounds, where the game progressively gets larger and more difficult. This interactive doodle, which marks the Flower Moon's final half-lit quarter, is just the latest entry in Google's recurring Half Moon series. Google Doodles began in 1998 and over the years have ranged from simple sketches to interactive games and puzzles, but this is certainly one of the more intricate ones in recent months. See 53 of our favorite Google Doodles here. Not sure how to start? Here's what you need to know. What exactly is the May's half moon? May's half moon is the month's third-quarter phase, which is the moment when the moon has orbited three-quarters of the way around Earth and sunlight illuminates exactly half its disk. It's the final quarter, or "half moon" phase of this month's lunar cycle. This year, the half moon occurs on May 20 at 4:56 AM PT. From the northern hemisphere, you'll see the left side glowing, and in the southern hemisphere, the right side shines. This month's lunar cycle is dubbed the Flower Moon, because it coincides with the colorful wildflowers that bloom across North America and Europe this time of year. Check out these knockout shots of the Flower Moon as taken by NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers on the International Space Station. How the Flower Moon game works The Rise of the Half Moon starts out on a 3x3 grid. Each turn you choose one of three random moon-phase cards and place it on the board. Here's how you score points: Pairing phases : Drop two identical cards side-by-side (1 point). : Drop two identical cards side-by-side (1 point). Making a full moon : Combine complementary phases (ex. waning crescent + waxing gibbous) (2 points). : Combine complementary phases (ex. waning crescent + waxing gibbous) (2 points). Completing a cycle: Lay cards in the exact lunar order, new moon through waning crescent. (3 cards or more, 1 point per card). If you beat the moon three times in a row, you'll unlock a monthly wildcard with a special power in the game. This month, you have four wildcards up for grabs, as long as you clear all nine boards. As you move on, the layout begins to grow beyond the 3x3 grid, and the game exponentially gets more difficult to win. How to play (and actually win) This is May's Flower Moon doodle on the Google homepage. Google To play the game, go to the Google homepage and click on the doodle. The game will load in a pop-up. Next, scan the board. Lines connect the squares, showing how you can link them for combinations. You should plan your placements on those pathways. Then finally, play a card from your hand. You'll always have three cards, but you should always think ahead. The moon, who is your opponent, will use your cards against you, so you should think not only about offense, but also defense, when you place your card. A few tips from playing:
CBC
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
St. Thomas board game designer hopes players will 'Finesse' their bridge skills with new game
A St. Thomas woman with a passion for the card game bridge is seeing years of work come to life with a newly designed version of her favourite game. Carole Coplea says she's spent years perfecting FINESSE, which she describes as a visual board game that's easier to learn than the classic trick-taking card game. While the concept is similar to bridge, Coplea believes she's got something unique. "After I had spent a few years developing this thing and once people started playing the game itself, I realized it's not a bridge game," Coplea explained. "It's a serious game on its own." According to her rule-booklet, the game revolves around four players each putting down a card, with the highest one winning. The objective of the game is to predict how many times your team will win. The board features five ramps which help to visualize the gameplay, as well as game tokens placed on coloured squares. She's even created a new deck of cards. "The only thing we have to translate are the rules, because there's nothing to translate with the game itself. Anybody can play it," Copela said. With approximately 300 game sets in production, Copela said her plan is to set up a stall at the Horton Farmers' Market in St. Thomas. Feedback mattered Creating the game was not an easy task, Coplea said. After working out the rules of the game, the next step was to sketch out the board and take it to a local print shop. She then tested the game on family members before recruiting a larger group of testers through social media. She said she implemented a lot of the feedback she received, including additional symbols to make it accessible to people with colour-blindness, which she said she now considers a very important aspect of the game. "The tests helped me with some of the refinements," she said. "That is what the game is now." A growing market for board games Kayla Gibbens is the owner of Uber Cool Stuff in downtown London, which specializes in board games. She said many card games have been successfully transformed into board games, like FINESSE. "A lot of games are kind of based off of other ones," she explained, using the game Cribbage as an example. "There's Crib Wars, where there's more of a battling element to it. One game feeds off another one in a gameplay aspect— it's really interesting to see those growths." Creating a new board game and trying to get it distributed has gotten a little easier with social media, Gibbens said, but she pointed out that having a strong community of game enthusiasts is important. She note that it blew up during the pandemic when people were looking for activities during the lockdowns. "It always helps to have those communities around so you can get the feedback about how a game plays. You can get the word out and get a feel for the audience as well." "I think there's still a growing market," Gibbens said. Younger players Coplea enjoys the strategy and tactics of any board game, but says bridge is her favourite due to its challenging gameplay. She hopes FINESSE will offer players that same type of challenge, and potentially lead them to want to learn to play the original card game. "It's a lot easier to learn when you're young," she said. "I'm hoping that my game will help people learn the fundamentals of bridge before they actually need to learn how to play bridge.
Gizmodo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Magic: The Gathering's Final Fantasy Set Looks Like a Match Made in Seventh Heaven
io9 recently got a look at what to expect from Wizards of the Coast's biggest crossover yet—and found plenty to appeal to fans of Magic and Final Fantasy alike. Magic: The Gathering's crossover era has been a divisive one for longtime players. Although there's still plenty of original expansions to the venerable card game, the rise of 'Universes Beyond,' Wizards' umbrella for what has become a swath of licensed crossovers with everything from SpongeBob SquarePants to Lord of the Rings, has become increasingly prominent—and for as many intrigued fans of those other franchises it's brought in, there's pushback that Wizards has traded its original worldbuilding for the card game equivalent of a Fortnite match. That dividing push and pull among Magic fans and curious onlookers is on the precipice of facing its biggest test next month with the release of Magic's 105th expansion: Final Fantasy. It's arguably Wizards' most ambitious crossover yet, a collaboration with a fantasy world as vast, as long-running, and as equally equipped with a voracious, opinionated fanbase as Magic's. The first Universes Beyond set to be made legal in the game's standard constructed format, the barriers between what is a licensed crossover and what is 'normal' Magic aren't just thin, they've been sliced open with a buster sword. And it's already proving to be popular: pre-orders for the set are now difficult to come by, as parent company Hasbro anticipates that Final Fantasy could be one of the game's most lucrative sets ever. But the pressure isn't just coming from Magic fans. Final Fantasy is one of the most famous video game series of all time, 16 mainline games (and yet further myriad spinoffs, sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings beyond them) that have shaped the story of the roleplaying game genre for nearly 40 years. That legacy, of course, includes its own card game, but a Magic crossover is like meeting tabletop royalty: what's included and what isn't, how and why this should all happen, and how much Final Fantasy should be in it has been a hot topic of debate ever since the set was first tentatively teased back in 2023. But the story of the set has been in the works for much longer than that: Wizards of the Coast and Square Enix have been pondering a Magic/Final Fantasy crossover for five years, basically almost as long as knowledge of the Universes Beyond crossover format has been public. 'There were a couple of factors,' Zakeel Gordon, Magic Tabletop Product Architect at Wizards of the Coast, told press at a recent briefing ahead of the Final Fantasy set's first major public preview at PAX East this weekend. 'One is that we built this set simultaneously in English and Japanese for our partners at Square Enix—that included multiple trips over to them for play tests, worldbuilding workshops, Final Fantasy mini-schools to figure out what was important to them. We would come up with design iterations, fly over, and they would say 'we really like these things, we would prefer if you tweak this like this.'' 'But this is also the second ever Universes Beyond tentpole release [after Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth]. We wanted to make sure we were doing everything correctly. We wanted to make sure that the final product met our expectation, and was done in a way that we really think would excite players… in order to do all of that right, it just takes some time.' Just as the pressure on the Final Fantasy set to live up to expectations is coming from Magic and Final Fantasy fans alike, passion for the project is echoed across Wizards and Square Enix. 'It's so fun, any time we get to work with another game studio, many of them are also really passionate about Magic,' Gordon continued. 'Our main producers [at Square] are also lifelong Magic players. We would finish up our meetings, and then we'd go play Commander, or they'd talk to us about Legacy and show us their collections.' The passion on both Square Enix and Wizards' behalf doesn't erase the fact that the new set faces a daunting prospect: encapsulating 16 mainline games (sorry, Tactics, X-2, or Dirge of Cerberus fans, there's no spinoff representation here) across hundreds of cards, each one filled with famous story beats, locations, characters, spells, and creatures to draw inspiration from. 'One of the challenges of balancing the slots in the set—what do we need to fill, what is the mechanical need for a card, what is the flavor reason that we need a card—was that we wanted to get a certain amount of cards per game in the set,' Dillon Deveney, Magic principle narrative designer, explained. 'We started there, and then we decided 'well, how much do we expect to see from this game? How many fans of this game, that are going to want to see X, Y, Z? How big is this game, right?'' Wizards modulated its approach for each game further beyond that into what it considered a kind of tier system. After consulting internally among Final Fantasy fans at Wizards' own offices, and with Square Enix for insight from developers who worked across the series, the Magic team broke down potential inclusions across three tiers of fandom. 'Tier one was 'we have to include this, it's evergreen, it's the baseline expectation,' like Chocobos and Moogles,' Deveney said. 'Tier two is for a fan of a specific game that would go 'Oh yeah, I totally remember that'… these could be iconic minigames, sidequests and powerful weapons, or a super boss you remember struggling against. Tier three is the superfan, diehard Easter egg moment that's like 'no way, they got this in the game, that's crazy!' We wanted to use that as a system to make decisions and choices to figure out what from all the games would fit into our game.' That sorts out the Final Fantasy element of the set. But at the end of the day, this is still a Magic: The Gathering expansion—an important one too, as the first Universes Beyond set to be officially legal in the standard play format. The set doesn't just have to execute on a referential standpoint, it has to push Magic mechanically, and include a wide swath of card archetypes to make it appeal to regular players. Thankfully, it seems like Final Fantasy will deliver on that aspect too, from what was shown to press of the set so far. The set includes evolutions of certain Magic mechanics, like Job Select, a riff on For Mirrodin or Living Weapon that creates hero tokens that players will then attach equipment cards to inspired by Final Fantasy jobs from the original game (and ones added down the line, like those included in Final Fantasy XIV). There's also Tiered, an entirely new mechanic that reflects Final Fantasy's own magic system, where spells grow in power across three levels of strength, letting players pay more mana to amplify the card's damage. It includes clever uses of Magic game mechanics to retell flavorful plot beats from various games, like Kain, Traitorous Dragoon swapping player control on damage and creating treasure tokens, reflecting the moment in Final Fantasy IV where he's brainwashed by the villainous Golbez and turns on the party. Or, for fans of Final Fantasy VII and generational trauma, Aerith Gainsborough's card gaining counters whenever her player gains life… only to pass those counters around to other legendary creatures you control when she dies. The whole set is littered with details like this. A regular mechanic throughout the set is Transform—used to both show villainous transformations of iconic characters like FFVI's Kefka, IX's Kuja, or XIV's Emet-Selch as they go from their primary forms to their final boss identities, but also to reflect a character's long arc over the course of their respective games, like FFIV's Cecil being able to switch from Dark Knight to Paladin, or FFVI's Terra being able to transform to her Esper form for a limited time. There's also the use of the Saga card archetype—a card that enters the battlefield, progresses through a series of 'chapters' turn after turn, and then expires—to represent the various Summons from across the franchise, like Bahamut or Valigarmanda. Not all of the references are just for Final Fantasy fans, either. Throughout the set, fan-favorite Magic cards will be re-printed with classic artwork from across Final Fantasy to reflect the connection between the set's source material and the games, like FFIX's Zidane being used to re-flavor Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer; FFII's Firion re-flavoring Sram, Senior Edificer; or FFVII's Yuffie taking on the powerful Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow. And some are just plain goofy, like multicolored variants of the Traveling Chocobo card to reflect the rainbow of options seen in Final Fantasy VII's Chocobo racing minigame, or the fact that there are 15 variants of the Cid, Timeless Artificer card: all with the same rules (including one that lets you field as many versions of Cid in a deck as you'd want), but each with different artwork celebrating each version of the character that existed from Final Fantasy II all the way through to XVI. Suffice to say, it's clear looking at the cards Wizards have shown off so far that the Magic team's passion for the source material is shining through clearly, perhaps more than any of the Universes Beyond material we've seen from the game so far. 'If there was something awesome we wanted to do [in the set], we got to do it,' Gavin Verhey, Magic's principle game designer, said. 'You'll see all kinds of fun surprises as you go through the set, it's really special.' 'We recently got the first booster boxes in the offices, and we got to get the team together to do a draft, and after years of working on it, just sitting around a table the way all our players are going to do… every single card in this set is like a carefully handcrafted gift,' Verhey concluded. 'We've put so much time, and energy, and research into it, and I just really hope that as you see the cards you see some of that come through.' 'When it comes to Universes Beyond, there's a lot of different sentiments among the player base about how they feel about certain cards, and certain sets,' Deveney added. 'This one was made for you: if you're a fan, you want to get into the franchise, if you just really like Magic sets… this was made for you, by people who really just want you to have a great Friday night with your friends… that's kind of the ultimate goal, just to reconnect and have a great time.' Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy releases June 13.
