Final Fantasy is one of the most successful game series of all time, with more than 200 million copies sold across the 16 mainline games and various spinoffs. So you can imagine the hype when Wizards of the Coast announced last fall that Magic: The Gathering — a trading card game that pulled in $1 billion in revenue last year — was releasing a Final Fantasy set.
At PAX East on Saturday, we got the latest glimpse at some of the cards in the Final Fantasy Magic set, which will be released next month. The Final Fantasy panel took us through cards from every mainline Final Fantasy game, giving us our first looks at protagonists like Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and 13’s Lightning, plus glimpses of recurring characters like chocobos and Cid. We also got to see multiple versions of Final Fantasy 7 icon Cloud Strife — one card in the main set, another card leading a Commander set.
We saw Final Fantasy staples like crystals, summons, villainous transformations (in the form of double-faced cards) and towns. We also got our first look at a new Magic mechanic: Tiered, which allows players to pay more mana for bigger effects, like a more versatile version of the Kicker mechanic.
By paying more mana when you cast Fire Magic, you get better effects, similar to the magic systems in most Final Fantasy games.
Magic: The Gathering has been experimenting with other properties via its Universes Beyond series, which effectively started with limited-edition drops of cards featuring characters from The Walking Dead, before being officially introduced with a similar drop for Stranger Things. Prior to Final Fantasy, the biggest Universes Beyond set was The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, the first full-fledged Universes Beyond set, released in 2023.
When Universes Beyond was first announced, Wizards of the Coast said the mechanically unique cards would be restricted from the game’s Standard format, which generally allows cards from the most recent sets. (Tales of Middle-earth was legal in the Modern format, but not Standard.) The Final Fantasy set is a big deal for Magic because it brings Universes Beyond into Standard, helping to usher in Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender sets later this year that will also be Standard-legal. Collectively, these sets are a huge change to how Magic looks, and Final Fantasy is the start of that change.
I started playing Magic back in 2014 when a group of former players from the game’s early days got back into it and dragged me along with them. I’ve played inconsistently since then, ranging from tournament entries and being a regular at Friday Night Magic to “I last played a single game of Commander several months ago.” But the Final Fantasy announcement — which came shortly after I finished Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth — has me hopping on my chocobo to get back into the game.
Tifa, like Cloud, appears in both the main set and the Commander set.
I fired up old Final Fantasy favorites again. I jumped back into Arena, Magic’s slickest digital version (sorry, Magic Online). I put TCGPlayer gift cards on my Christmas list because I knew there would be some wildly expensive versions of characters that I needed to have.
Case in point.
The PAX panel has deepened my desperation for this set, but it also made me pretty optimistic for it. In media interviews before the panel, the game designers spoke about the imperative they felt to get things right — to design cards that felt authentic to the games and series, cards that felt meaningful to the fans, instead of just constructing them based on business goals.
“We had the rule of cool,” Principal Magic Designer Gavin Verhey said. “Like, if something was an awesome idea, we did it.” He pointed to having a card that showed off 15 different versions of the character Cid, or having just one pair of cards with the Meld mechanic because it mechanically and emotionally fit the characters on those cards as examples. “Every single card in this set is like a carefully hand-crafted gift.”
The Final Fantasy set will be released on June 13, with preorders technically available now, but out of stock most places.
