Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy ⏤ A love letter to the Final Fantasy series in card form

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August 28, 2025

On August 28, 2025

I sure feel like that white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I just wasn’t able to jump into Final Fantasy when it came out, but I have managed to play some literal catch-up. The Final Fantasy set for Magic: The Gathering is the biggest release, possibly ever, for the game. (We’ll see if Avatar: The Last Airbender can go higher.) If you’ve engaged with the Final Fantasy set, you likely don’t need me to chime in, as it’s pretty dang good; that’s no secret. This set has the difficult task of representing an entire video game franchise while still being a fun game environment for Magic. The set isn’t perfect, and I do have criticisms and concerns about what this set means for the overall direction of Magic. Let’s hop aboard our airship and go collect some crystals.

There’s a lot of mechanics smushed into the Final Fantasy set, some new and some old. I’m not going to cover every single mechanic, but let’s take a look at the main new and returning ones.

The big hallmark of the Final Fantasy set are the transforming double-faced cards. These come in a couple of different varieties, but the big new ones are the Summons. These are creature sagas, and that means they’re only going to last as many turns as they have chapters. These define the gameplay of the set. There are more traditional transforming cards, such as Garland, Knight of Cornelia, hybrid cards like Jill, Shiva’s Dominant, and sidequest enchantments. You will come across the double-faced card everywhere across the set.

The Job Select mechanic, while technically new, is another version of the “snap-on” equipment that we’ve seen in past sets. These are equipment that create a 1/1 colorless hero token upon entering the battlefield. This is useful because you know there will be a creature to use the equipment right away, and you can almost think of these equipment cards as creature spells when deck building.

The next new mechanic is Tiered Spells. These are modal instants that have a flexible mana cost. When you cast the spell, you pay an amount of mana according to which tier you would like to cast the spell at. Tiered spells are another alternate version of the many modal spells we’ve seen in the past few years, but this one is Final Fantasy-flavored.

Landfall makes an appearance as a staple green mechanic. Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, you’ll get an effect. This is a nice, simple inclusion.

More smaller mechanics also help fill out the set. Towns are a new land type that certain cards will care about. Adventures can now be found on five new legendary town lands. Hideaway, devotion, and even meld make an appearance as one-off mechanics. Lastly, while not strictly a set mechanic, there’s just a ton of legendary creatures. This set has, by far, the most legendary creatures of any set.

If you feel like I’ve sprinted through the mechanical explanation, you’re not wrong. There aren’t many new mechanics like with Tarkir: Dragonstorm. What makes the Final Fantasy set work is how these mechanics go together while representing both Magic and the video games. Let’s start with summons. These creatures come down and impact the board with their saga abilities, but the tradeoff is that they will leave after a few turns. When you play a summon, you want to capitalize on the time you have with it, and conversely, when they exit, you lament their leaving. This shapes the gameplay as you have to plan ahead, knowing that your summons (and your opponents) won’t be around forever. Further complicating Summons is that you have to remember they won’t be able to attack as much as you’re used to. A summon like Titan will only be able to attack once. This isn’t intuitive to new players, as usually creatures don’t have these restrictions. While creatures having timers isn’t a brand new concept to Magic, here the summons add another layer of thought to the gameplay. Can you weather the creatures your opponent currently has and try to wait them out, or do you need to answer their powerful summons now? Summons are the fun kind of wrinkle that differentiates the Final Fantasy set.

Other new mechanics specific to this set, Tiered spells and Job Select, are also fun and well represent Final Fantasy, but from a Magic perspective, they are similar to previous existing mechanics. Tiered spells offer a level of flexibility that keeps those spells useful at any point in the game. The Job Select equipment cards aren’t game-changing either. When deck building, it is a nice boon that the equipment within this set can basically be thought of as creatures. Both of these mechanics are fine; they do a good job of representing Final Fantasy while being functional Magic mechanics. Landfall also falls into this category of carrying the flavor of characters that protect the environment across their respective games. Finally, the town-typed lands are a fun new way to represent the journey across the world while also providing mana fixing by being this set’s dual lands. The five adventure lands are a particular new design that I love, as I just love adventures being stapled to anything.

One mechanic that the designers have used in recent draft sets is the addition of creatures with land cycling. There is a cycle of these within this set, and I continue to adore their inclusion. The creatures aren’t anything super powerful, but they can be a lifeline for ensuring you can cast your spells. You haven’t lived until you’ve snagged a late Hill Gigas in draft because you sorely need more mana fixing.

The handful of smaller mechanics like meld, devotion, and hideaway aren’t very impactful to the draft set, but they are nice inclusions of Final Fantasy flavor. You would have to go out of your way to draft the meld cards, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even be opened. I had to look up why the two creatures melded into Ragnarok, and I’m not sure I understood most of the words on the wiki, but it seems fitting for Final Fantasy.

Even with the core design being so solid, I have some grievances with the Final Fantasy set. My main complaint from a design aspect is the bonus sheet, of all things. I love it when sets have a bonus sheet, but I’m finding I don’t like this implementation. The Final Fantasy set has the “Through the Ages” (set code FCA) cards. These are specially flavored reprints of existing Magic cards with Final Fantasy theming and artwork. These cards do not have a dedicated in-pack slot and are instead found in approximately ⅓ of play boosters. You can’t plan around these cards, as they aren’t always there, but they show up frequently enough to mess up your game plan. It’s not great when you find out your opponent has an actual Counterspell. Oh, I didn’t even know Ragavan was in the set; technically, he’s not, he’s on the bonus sheet, but that monkey will still mess you up when he’s played. I much prefer when bonus sheets have a dedicated slot, as then you know they are just in the draft environment.

This complaint isn’t so much about the set itself, but more about the larger Magic ecosystem. There are so many legendary creatures in the Final Fantasy set. This is to be expected as there are an innumerable number of characters across the games, but here it makes me question the larger set design. Some of these legendary creatures are bonkers powerful. As I write this, Vivi is becoming a problem for Standard. This is the year we’ve shifted into six sets for Standard, and it makes me wonder if this set was originally going to be Modern legal, just like the Lord of the Rings set. There’s even going to be a holiday release later this year…just like The Lord of the Rings set. I have no idea if this is the case, but the Final Fantasy set feels powerful, and it may have been reshaped to fit into Standard. Time will tell as Spider-Man and the Avatar set release later this year, and then we can see how they compare.

As I experienced the Final Fantasy set, I kept doing the Captain America, “I understood that reference,” as I’ve played about half of the mainline series. More importantly, the art across the set (at least the ones I understood) are fantastic translations from the video games. I don’t understand all the references, but seeing the Phantom Train on the artwork for Suplex made me giggle. The Final Fantasy Magic set feels like a well-designed bridge between two worlds, and the artwork is a big reason for that.

Everything about the artwork on the mainline set is fantastic. From the choice of artists to the characters represented. You can tell that careful cultivation went into the art. The odds are there’s a character that isn’t represented in the set you want, but the designers did their absolute best to cram this set full of as many amazing characters, places, and moments as possible. If using the transforming double-faced card mechanic was a way to get even more artwork, I commend the designers as a genius way to sneak even more in.

The art variants are also just fantastic. The borderless variants are instantly iconic as Final Fantasy artwork. If you showed me any of these, I would assume they originated from the video games, not a TCG. Magic’s pedigree of artwork is one of its hallmarks, and this is above and beyond even for Wizards of the Coast.

I wish I could say the same for the “Through the Ages” cards, though… Some of these cards look great, others are hard to parse, and more yet look like proxies. The sad part is that these use official concept art or renders from the games, but that inconsistency makes the FCA cards out of place. The odd silver lining is that these cards just make the main set cards look even better.

Review Guidelines

Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy

Great

There’s a lot of worry about what half of Magic: The Gathering sets being Universes Beyond means for the game. The Final Fantasy set is a love letter to the entire Final Fantasy series. The set has some hiccups with uneven power levels in its creatures and some of the bonus sheet artwork, but the vast majority of the set is fun and well-designed. Summons are an interesting innovation for creatures, and the rest of the set mechanics do a good job of oozing what Final Fantasy is. If you’re a Final Fantasy fan or a Magic: The Gathering fan, there’s an amazing game within this set.