Artwork of Cloud in the Final Fantasy Magic the Gatherting set

Saturday at PAX East, Wizards of the Coast held its 2 hour info dump panel on the newest set of its flagship card game Magic the Gathering. Finally, 30 some odd years after the beginning of both Magic and iconic RPG series Final Fantasy, we are getting a crossover for the ages, and if this early showcase is anything to go by, it’s doing both games justice. The panel, hosted by Final Fantasy XVI lead Ben Starr, discussed how each mainline Final Fantasy‘s heroes, villains and supporting cast become cards that not only showcase new artwork of the characters and worlds, but how they translate into Magic‘s unique rules while retaining the distinct elements of Final Fantasy.

More than skins

Many of Final Fantasy‘s iconic characters will appear via Magic‘s Legendary creature frames, which pay off their unique designs. For example, Aerith Gainsborough gains +1/+1 counters whenever you gain life and then distributes them to each Legendary creature you control when she dies. parallels her in-game job as party healer, and how everyone becomes emboldened by her death; or whatever the hell happened at the end of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Speaking of jobs, one of Final Fantasy’s most distinctive mechanics, the Job system, gets some love. “Job Select” is given to Equipment cards, behaving like previous mechanic Living Weapon, but this time creates a Hero creature token. One of the added effects of the new job equipment is that in addition to adding abilities or stats, it adds to the creature type of the card equipped. This tacks on Cleric, Wizard, Knight, or more to your creature, allowing for some truly wicked kindred possibilities.

Some spells will be able to replicate Final Fantasy‘s spells using “Tiered.” Tiered allows you to choose from 3 different variants of the spell all on the same card, and players select what level by paying more or less mana. This mechanic makes the same card just as useful in the early, mid and late game. It is a great way of getting iconic leveling spells like Fire/Fira/Firaga onto cards without having to eat up valuable deck space and will likely be showing up in spell slinger decks.

Leveraging Magic‘s existing mechanics

In order to represent the vast history of Final Fantasy, WOTC’s designers aren’t shying away form bringing back some of Magic‘s various mechanical designs. To translate the powerful but temporary power of the franchise’s massive Summons, the set contains Saga Creatures. The new card type works like a hybrid of both Creatures and the Saga Enchantment subtype, sharing each’s strengths and weaknesses. If the Creature dies, the Saga doesn’t finish, and if it does finish, you lose a creature. The flip side of this being that these Enchantment Creatures can take advantage of payoffs for triggered abilities, creature counters, and Enchantress style gameplay.

Adventure, a mechanic that puts Instants and Sorceries on one side of the card, return as well. For the first time, the other half of the card will be Lands. These will showcase iconic cities and worlds throughout the Final Fantasy games. Anytime land cards can also do other things, they tend to be quite powerful, and these Adventure Lands will likely be the same. There will be one for each color.

This set also sees the return of some more niche keywords and abilities, like Bartz and Boko’s Affinity for Birds and the return of my personal favorite ability, Meld. Appearing only on Final Fantasy XIII‘s Fang and Vanille, Meld lets them turn into the powerful Ragnarok. The Final Fantasy set has a plethora of Transforming cards, allowing all of the big bosses (and a handful of heroes) from each of the games to have both their usual human forms as well as their 11th hour Eldritch transformations, that are all crazy powerful enough to make the tricky transformation requirements well worth it. I can see these getting a lot of use in Commander.

Of course there’s Commander

On the topic of Commander, the panel went into a bit more into the 4 Commander pre-constructed decks that are launching with the main set. The decks are deep dives into Final Fantasy VI, VII, X, and XIV respectively, and they showing off the big focus of each deck as well as the primary and backup commanders.

“Revival Trance” stars Terra and Celes of VI, with the deck focus being on graveyard play in Red/White/Black. You’l be chucking creatures into your graveyard, bringing them back for cheap and buffing the creatures on the field with every creature you return from the grave. “Limit Break” is the VII deck, headed by Cloud and Tifa, focusing on equipment, additional combat phases and the number 7, in Red/Green/White.

For X, we have “Counter Blitz,” featuring Tidus and Yuna in Blue/White/Green and focusing on cultivating +1/+1 counters and bouncing them between your other creatures. Then, the deck gives you card draw and counter proliferaion when an attack hits home. Finally, “Scions and Spellcraft” explores the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV via a White/Blue/Black deck. With the commanders Y’Shtola and G’raha Tia, the focus is on spell slinging while paying for those non-permanents with life and doing enough damage to earn some life back.

A grand kick off for this new set

The presentation also took the time to show off some of the truly spectacular full art cards, with a handful of Final Fantasy veterans returning to provide new artwork for the set and paying loving tribute to the series’ nearly 40 year history. With art from returning character designers like Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshitaka Amano, there were some brief interviews with the illustrators to see into their design processes and see what makes each of the characters special to their creators These moments really highlight that this set really shows a lot of love from both sides of the collaboration.

There’s still plenty for fans of both Final Fantasy and Magic to discover together as previews continue in the coming days. With this kick off, it’s clear that the passion for making these Universes Beyond sets more than superficial representation remains top of mind for WOTC.