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.

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.

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). 

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.”

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.

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. 

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.'”