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.'”