Final Fantasy x MTG key art of Cloud Strife and Sephiroth | copyright Wizards of the Coast and Square Enix

As the release of Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy set release draws closer, players are being shown more cards, mechanics, and treatments that they’ll be able to get their hands on.

Just before the recent preview panel for the set at PAX East, EDHREC got the chance to talk with four of the Wizards of the Coast game designers that worked on this upcoming release.

In an interview with Gavin Verhey (Principal Game Designer on Magic: The Gathering and Lead Designer of the Final Fantasy set), Zakeel Gordon (Executive Producer for Tabletop Magic and Product Architect of Magic: the Gathering Final Fantasy), Daniel Holt (Senior Game Designer for Magic: The Gathering and Lead Game Designer of the Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy Commander Decks), and Dillon Deveney, Principal Narrative Game Designer for Universes Beyond and Creative Team / Narrative Lead for Magic’s Final Fantasy set, we chatted about the set design process, some particularly interesting cards in the set, and their thoughts on how all sorts of players may interact with these cards.

This interview has been edited for length, style, and clarity.

First off, why Final Fantasy?

Gavin Verhey: When it comes to games, think of some of the biggest names in all of gaming, some of the most revered names in gaming. You'd be hard pressed to not have Final Fantasy near or at the top of that list.

It's such a perfect partnership for Magic. We've both been around about the same amount of time; a lot of players that grew up with Magic grew up with Final Fantasy. We've both released new expansions on regular occurrences.

We both visit different worlds. We both have rosters of characters. When I heard we were doing Final Fantasy, I was like, “that is such a natural fit. It's a perfect fit.” In fact, the only problem with Final Fantasy is, and I'm sure we'll get into this, is how much there is.

If you were to ask me, “can you do Final Fantasy?” The answer would be yes. If you were to ask me “how can you fit it into one Magic set,” that would be much more of a challenge. We did a lot of work and [put in] a lot of effort to get there.

Dillon Deveney: When you talk about “why Final Fantasy,” it's also the people behind these decisions, right? Wizard of the Coast and Square Enix are both huge fans of each other. There's always an appreciation of your fellows in the industry, but we're talking huge fans of each other.

It was so amazing to know that it was reciprocated. Our partners over at Square Enix, some of them are more competitive than me when it comes to Magic! They're [Magic: The Gathering] Arena grinders, they go to pre releases every week, and their collection is like double mine. When we started these conversations… we just were off [to] the races.

Final Fantasy is a huge franchise. How did you determine what characters, moments, and objects would appear on Magic cards?

Dillon Deveney: We needed some sort of tool to be able to make decisions, because when you’re a fan of something your first instinct is, “I'm right and you’re wrong.” I love my thing, you love your thing and that's great for you, but my thing is so much cooler than your thing. So when you're a fan of Final Fantasy, you're often a fan of a couple of games … So we opened up an Excel sheet and we went into an office and we had a whiteboard and we just said, “okay, Final Fantasy 1.

What do you remember off the top of your head? Go way back in the [time] machine, go deep in the tank. […] When we were done, we then went to all of our fellow wizards and asked them the same question. When we were done with that, we talked to Square Enix and [asked], “what did you love making,” “what were you proud of,” and “what's a character that's really special to you?” We took all of that data and then we could finally start having conversations.

So we created this tier system for internal use only. […] The tier one content is DNA: it's the hallmark of Final Fantasy. […] If we didn't have it in there, someone [would] call us out […] Tier two is if you’re a fan of a specific game or two, you would immediately recognize this thing.

Maybe it's a very memorable side quest that made you cry, maybe it's a dungeon that has the coolest theme you've ever heard, maybe it's a super hard boss you grind up to 99s to fight. You would totally recognize it if you were a fan of that one game. Tier three is the ultra-crunchy super-nerdy Easter egg where you go, “no way […] they spent time and money getting this in? That's amazing!”

Zakeel Gordon: The thing that I'll add […] is the scale of the content we cover from Final Fantasy, it’s… more than 37 years of gaming history. Each individual Final Fantasy game, theoretically, could be its own Magic set. So one of the early design limitations that we put on ourselves was limiting it to the mainline games, just so we could make sure that we were […] delivering an authentic representation of the characters that fans wanted to see.

Daniel Holt: We haven't shown a lot of cards yet from the tier three section, but we just showed off Hildibrand Manderville from Final Fantasy XIV. […] You can play all of the Final Fantasy XIV main story and not touch that storyline. But, when that was announced, people were losing their minds over it. […] I fought for that design so hard […] deep cuts like that are going to excite fans, and there's so many of those Easter eggs throughout the whole entire product suite.

And how did you design cards for Magic players who aren’t as familiar with Final Fantasy, but are still hungry for new cards?

Dillon Deveney: We were obviously very aware that this is the first Universes Beyond set that’s going to be Standard legal. So it’s going to kind of make a statement [about] what Universes Beyond is trying to do. […] [We also wanted to en]sure that there was enough content that felt authentically Final Fantasy and authentically Magic: The Gathering, because the point of the collaboration is to bring both of our respective IPs upwards. […] [If you] didn't know [about a given character], it'll be a cool thing you could ask your friend about.

If you didn't know anything about Final Fantasy VIII, for example, you can look at the bottom left corner [of a card from this set, where some text shows you which Final Fantasy game the card is from]. It tells you that card's from Final Fantasy VIII, and your buddy's a huge fan. All of a sudden, you've had a great conversation with your friend and learned a little bit more about what was going on.

Gavin Verhey: Something really interesting happened during the design of the set. Over the course of all the play testing and the whole experience, more people kept coming up to me and being like, “I don't know anything about Final Fantasy, but I'm having a fun time playing the set, and now I even want to go learn about Final Fantasy.” […] Mark Rosewater himself is not a Final Fantasy guy, and by the end of the process, he's like, “I don't know what's going on here, but I love it." I think it’s really amazing that the mechanic suite gets you there and encourages you to go and investigate.

Zakeel Gordon: I think one of the interesting things about this set is, because we’re adapting a video game property to Magic, we get to shortcut some of the initial complexity conversations that typically exist within Magic.

If you play video games, specifically if you play RPGs, you're going to be already familiar with health, mana, damage, items, and all that kind of stuff. […] Even if you're not familiar with Final Fantasy as an existing Magic player, you're going to see [familiar] things like meld or other one-off mechanics, like how we had shown Affinity for Birds in Final Fantasy V. [Players will say] “I understand this, this character is on a Chocobo and it interacts with other Chocobos and here are old school mechanics that kind of tie it all together."

Of course, we’re all lifelong Final Fantasy fans, but I think that the love letter to Final Fantasy also just plays out in a very fun and natural way for the existing Magic brand.

Daniel Holt: For the Commander decks, I got to take all three of what they just said and put it all together. Yes, it's flavorful. Every card in the decks is built around flavor. If you think the character's supposed to do this, they're going to do it.

You get Cloud, you put a sword on him. That just makes sense. That's what equipment does, right? […] But then I take the main set mechanics, like saga creatures, that are such a core part of the Final Fantasy story about going to get all the summons. That deck is a counters deck. And because they're saga creatures, they have counters on them, Tidus, Yuna's GuardianTidus, Yuna's Guardian is removing those counters to keep them around longer so they don't go away. [...] It all just flavorfully and creatively fits together.

Cloud, Midgar Mercenary (Normal Art)

Cloud, Midgar Mercenary (Alternate Art)

Recent Universes Beyond sets, like Fallout and Assassin’s Creed, have focused on equipment like Final Fantasy does. Why have recent Universes Beyond sets had this focus, and can players expect it to continue?

Gavin Verhey: The reason is a lot of things have sweet items. Just look at a lot of properties: what's that person holding? A sword! Well, all right, we've got to get the sick sword in [the set]. That just happens. I think you’ll continue to see plenty of equipment themes as we go through Universes Beyond. We're cognizant of this: we can't do every single set with an equipment theme. But especially with Final Fantasy, we wrote stuff down early on that was iconic, and it's like characters, locations, (that's where this town stuff comes in)… and a lot of the weapons.

Daniel Holt: For Final Fantasy VII, the theme of the deck is Cloud and his giant sword. But what I wanted to do with that deck specifically is I wanted to give you every party member, but then I wanted to give you every party member's equipment. We haven't shown a lot of it yet, but every party member, and other characters, have an equipment in the deck, whether it's a reprint or a new card. […] Like you can either do what you think that you should do with them, or just mix-and-match to your delight.

Dillon Deveney: It's an expectation of the exploration of the IP. If we had a conversation and Gavin was like, “equipment strategies are too hot right now, we're not gonna go forward with it,” and I was like, “okay, but we still need to make a Buster Sword, or we still need to make Materia and potions, and we still [have all] these like iconic elements to [make cards for].” Eventually, it turns out that we had to make 60 of them anyway. […] It's so natural when you're fleshing out something that’s so iconic.

Zakeel Gordon: You mentioned three video game IPS in Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, and Final Fantasy. So much of gaming culture revolves around combat in some way. On each of those individual adventures, you're traveling through your story, you get this crazy weapon [and you’re] finally able to overcome the boss or track down the ultimate weapon after spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out the path. So in a lot of ways, it's also just the rule of cool: we have to make sweet cards, we have to make a Buster Sword.

Black Mage's Rod

White Mage's Staff

One card revealed in the panel, Gilgamesh, Master-at-Arms, has a “titan trigger” attached to it. What other cards from Magic’s past inspired Final Fantasy’s design?

Gilgamesh, Master-at-Arms (Normal Art)

Gilgamesh, Master-at-Arms (Alternate Art)

Gavin Verhey: One of the cool things about the set is that it’s a fusion of Final Fantasy and Magic. So I'll give you another great example, one that I love. Everyone here loves it, and I think we're actually gonna show this during the panel tomorrow. [...] This is a common, and it's a card called "Commune with Beavers." Take a moment, take a moment. Now if I tell you there's a card called “Commune with Beavers,” what do you believe a card with "Commune with Beavers" might have?

I’d guess that it’d look at the top five cards and pick one, much like Commune with DinosaursCommune with Dinosaurs.

Gavin Verhey: Nailed it. […] So that's a great idea of like, hey, we took a phrase that people know, and a story from Final Fantasy, and we put it together, and now both sides have this great moment of understanding. There's a number of times we ran that trick in the set.

I think that's almost where the set is at its strongest: when you get to see that amazing fusion of the languages. If you think about it, Final Fantasy has its own bespoke language and Magic has its own bespoke language. When you get them speaking the same language, that is where the pun-intended magic happens.

Final Fantasy releases on June 13th, 2025.