Remaining Fantasy is among the most profitable sport sequence of all time, with greater than 200 million copies offered throughout the 16 mainline video games and varied spinoffs. So you possibly can think about the hype when Wizards of the Coast introduced final fall that Magic: The Gathering — a buying and selling card sport that pulled in $1 billion in income final 12 months — was releasing a Remaining Fantasy set.
At PAX East on Saturday, we bought the most recent glimpse at a few of the playing cards within the Remaining Fantasy Magic set, which will likely be launched subsequent month. The Remaining Fantasy panel took us by playing cards from each mainline Remaining Fantasy sport, giving us our first seems to be at protagonists like Remaining Fantasy 8’s Squall and 13’s Lightning, plus glimpses of recurring characters like chocobos and Cid. We additionally bought to see a number of variations of Remaining Fantasy 7 icon Cloud Strife — one card in the primary set, one other card main a Commander set.
We noticed Remaining Fantasy staples like crystals, summons, villainous transformations (within the type of double-faced playing cards) and cities. We additionally bought our first take a look at a brand new Magic mechanic: Tiered, which permits gamers to pay extra mana for greater results, like a extra versatile model of the Kicker mechanic.
By paying extra mana if you forged Hearth Magic, you get higher results, much like the magic programs in most Remaining Fantasy video games.
Magic: The Gathering has been experimenting with different properties through its Universes Past sequence, which successfully began with limited-edition drops of playing cards that includes characters from The Strolling Lifeless, earlier than being formally launched with the same drop for Stranger Issues. Previous to Remaining Fantasy, the largest Universes Past set was The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Center-earth, the primary full-fledged Universes Past set, launched in 2023.
When Universes Past was first introduced, Wizards of the Coast mentioned the mechanically distinctive playing cards could be restricted from the sport’s Customary format, which typically permits playing cards from the latest units. (Tales of Center-earth was authorized within the Trendy format, however not Customary.) The Remaining Fantasy set is an enormous deal for Magic as a result of it brings Universes Past into Customary, serving to to usher in Spider-Man and Avatar: The Final Airbender units later this 12 months that will even be Customary-legal. Collectively, these units are an enormous change to how Magic seems to be, and Remaining Fantasy is the beginning of that change.
I began taking part in Magic again in 2014 when a bunch of former gamers from the sport’s early days bought again into it and dragged me together with them. I’ve performed inconsistently since then, starting from event entries and being a daily at Friday Evening Magic to “I final performed a single sport of Commander a number of months in the past.” However the Remaining Fantasy announcement — which got here shortly after I completed Remaining Fantasy 7 Rebirth — has me hopping on my chocobo to get again into the sport.
Tifa, like Cloud, seems in each the primary set and the Commander set.
I fired up outdated Remaining Fantasy favorites once more. I jumped again into Enviornment, Magic’s slickest digital model (sorry, Magic On-line). I put TCGPlayer present playing cards on my Christmas record as a result of I knew there could be some wildly costly variations of characters that I wanted to have.
Living proof.
The PAX panel has deepened my desperation for this set, but it surely additionally made me fairly optimistic for it. In media interviews earlier than the panel, the sport designers spoke in regards to the crucial they felt to get issues proper — to design playing cards that felt genuine to the video games and sequence, playing cards that felt significant to the followers, as a substitute of simply setting up them primarily based on enterprise targets.
“We had the rule of cool,” Principal Magic Designer Gavin Verhey mentioned. “Like, if one thing was an superior thought, we did it.” He pointed to having a card that confirmed off 15 completely different variations of the character Cid, or having only one pair of playing cards with the Meld mechanic as a result of it mechanically and emotionally match the characters on these playing cards as examples. “Each single card on this set is sort of a rigorously hand-crafted present.”
The Remaining Fantasy set will likely be launched on June 13, with preorders technically obtainable now, however out of inventory most locations.
