Today one of the biggest sets in Magic: The Gathering‘s recent history makes its grand arrival at last: Final Fantasy, the first of Magic‘s at-times-controversial “Universes Beyond” crossovers with other franchises to be given the full standard-legal treatment. It’s a marriage of two of gaming’s most beloved fantasy realms, and with absolute legions of fans of both Magic and Final Fantasy to please, it has to hit the highlights and mechanical flavoring of 16 mainline game’s worth of viable cards. From everything we’ve seen of the set in the run up to today’s release, it looks like Wizards of the Coast and Square Enix helped build a match made in (seventh) heaven—but here’s some of our favorite nods to Final Fantasy‘s vast legacy that we love most from the set.
Naturally, some of these references are about key major story points in their respective Final Fantasy titles. If you’re not caught up with the 16 mainline games that have released over the past four decades, well, consider yourself very lightly spoiler warned here.
Tiered Spells Are a Perfect Blend of Final Fantasy and Magic
One of the new mechanical additions the Final Fantasy set brings to Magic is the “Tiered” rule: if a player pays an additional cost to the card’s initial mana cost, they can select from one of three tiers of power. More mana means more effects—just like how in Final Fantasy a lot of magic spells have three evolutionary steps: their base form, a more potent version of that form with the suffix -ara, and then its most powerful form with the suffix -aga.
The tiered spells in the set are spread across two different forms: some are given to represent various limit break attacks from Final Fantasy VII, reflecting the party’s ability to develop stronger special attacks over the course of the game. But the ones that represent some of Final Fantasy‘s elemental and restorative magics are each smartly attuned to the color identities they’re assigned to in Magic. Aggressive fire and thunder magics are assigned to red; ice, which instead of doing damage bounces cards back into an opponents hands or libraries, is assigned to blue, which reflects that color’s archetypal focus on interruption and control mechanics. It’s a very neat way to mechanically marry a Final Fantasy player’s understanding of the series’ base magic system to a Magic player’s understanding of its own colors’ archetypes and escalatory effects.
Suplex the Train, Dammit
Suplex, renamed to Meteor Strike in later versions of Final Fantasy VI, is one of the many martial abilities of Sabin the Monk, letting him… well, pick an enemy up and flip them in the air to slam them straight back down. But while Sabin can use the move on a great number of VI‘s big creatures, the most infamous victim of the attack—spurring years of internet meme history—is the fact that he can use it when the party encounters the Phantom Train after Sabin, Cyan, and Shadow flee the Empire’s invasion of Doma. The Phantom Train is, of course, a spectral haunted steam train, so it’s very absurd that Sabin can just pick it up and suplex it like it’s no big deal.
Suplex gets its own card as a sorcery in Magic, which lets you do three damage to a creature—pretty basic. Except, a player who plays Suplex could instead use its second ability, which allows it to specifically exile an artifact card. You know what’s an artifact in the Final Fantasy set? The Phantom Train.
Lightning’s Stagger
FF XIII‘s protagonist has several cards to her name in the set, but Lightning, Army of One has several cool mechanical nods to XIII‘s battle system. The first is that “Army of One” suffix, a reference to Lightning’s powerful combo attack of that name in the game—an aggression that is symbolically matched in the card by giving her several offensive keywords like Trample (which lets her deal excess damage from combat directly to a player) and First Strike (which lets her deal damage before anyone else resolves damage in combat).
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