A Realm Reborn in Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™
Lali-ho! I'm Cameron Williams, a card designer on Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ and Studio X's very own FINAL FANTASY XIV fanatic. I started playing the game almost a decade ago after seeing a friend stream the ridiculously cool transition between Exdeath and Neo Exdeath in Deltascape V4.0 (Savage). I knew I had to try it myself. Since then, I've spent thousands of hours exploring Eorzea, gleefully shepherding my friends through the main scenario and clearing the game's six ultimate-difficulty raids. My favorite content in the game is Bozja and Zadnor; duels are just too fun.
For those of you who haven't played, FINAL FANTASY XIV is a story-driven MMO set in the world of Eorzea, where a cycle of devastating calamities beleaguers its people. Some desperate folk have turned to summoning "primals," false gods who wield dangerous and destructive power. The Warrior of Light (which is the player character) fights these primals and various other foes, including the ruthless and expansionist Garlean Empire to the north and the mysterious robed Ascians. With a twelve-year history, FINAL FANTASY XIV's story is full of beloved characters and moments, and we easily could have made a whole Magic set out of just this entry. Packing all of the stuff we wanted to show into the set, which also contained fifteen other awesome FINAL FANTASY games, was hard!
In this article, I'll describe some of the challenges and victories we encountered when designing the set, focusing specifically on FINAL FANTASY XIV cards.
Summon: Primal Garuda
At the end of the day, Magic is a game about combat. That makes some properties trickier to faithfully adapt. However, the essence of FINAL FANTASY is not limited to combat.
As both the card designers for this set and longtime fans, we approached the design process by first understanding how each character fights, and then using that insight as the foundation for how they are represented on cards. We see Cloud and the Buster Sword he wields as truly iconic, so we designed him to work especially well with Equipment.
In a similar vein, Aerith reflects her strength in healing magic, and we chose to give her abilities tied to gaining life.
As for Cecil, we felt that, as an expression of the Dark Knight's power in FINAL FANTASY IV, he should be a character who deals damage to you.
On the other hand, because of the focus on combat, many of the spells and abilities we wanted to represent only dealt damage in their original FINAL FANTASY game. That works well for an RPG with gear, stats, and elemental resistances, but Magic sets rely on a variety of effects to be fun. We found ourselves with the tricky task of designing Magic effects that didn't deal damage but still represented a damage-dealing spell or ability from FINAL FANTASY.
This came up often when designing the summons, which are Saga enchantment creatures in the set. Many summons cards work like you'd expect a Saga and creature mash-up to work. When they enter and after you draw each turn, you add a lore counter and trigger the ability of the corresponding chapter. While the card is on the battlefield, it can attack and block like a normal creature. Once the last counter is added, you resolve the last ability and sacrifice the creature. It's a great fit for how summons work in FINAL FANTASY series—creatures that are called forth, unleash a devastating signature attack, and then depart—are a perfect fit for expressing that distinctive behavior through game mechanics. We adapted summons from many different games in the set, but here's an example of a FINAL FANTASY XIV summon:
Garuda is a great example of the damage problem. We've got countless named abilities to choose from—Eye of the Storm, Wicked Wheel, Downburst, Mistral Song—but they all deal damage in one form or another. We wanted to only use one damaging effect on the card to keep it from being monotonous, so we chose to show off Garuda's most iconic ability, Aerial Blast. Even though that's Garuda's ultimate, it's on the first chapter here so that the removal effect happens immediately and doesn't hang over the game.
For Slipstream, we had to get a bit creative. Garuda has wind-aligned entity, which match up best with a few Magic effects: flying, tapping, and returning creatures to hand or library. Tapping was already being used to represent Shiva's ice powers. Returning creatures to hand was also a bad candidate for the later chapters of a Saga as it'd hang out for a couple of turns on the battlefield, discouraging your opponent from playing their big creatures (and making them feel silly if they did). That's how we ended up granting flying, which matches up well with the word "slipstream," and we felt it was easy to envision Garuda bestowing flight upon her allies through that power.
White Auracite
White auracite was the very first concept I attempted to design a card for. I had just arrived as a full-time designer at Wizards a couple months prior and had been loud enough about my love of FINAL FANTASY XIV to earn a spot on the Commander Vision Design team, brainstorming cards for the FINAL FANTASY XIV Commander deck.
The Scions & Spellcasters deck ended up in white, blue, and black, focusing on noncreature spells. In the early days, it was a five-color "group hug" deck. We thought that giving out resources was a good fit for all the peacemaking and diplomacy in FINAL FANTASY XIV's story. At that time, the face commander was the Warrior of Light and the secondary commander was Minfilia. This inspired me to think about what characters, story moments, and objects were associated with Minfilia. One of the concepts that jumped out at me was Moenbryda's white auracite crystal.
I thought white auracite was a great candidate for Magic because of its three main characteristics. First, it's a kind of object we've often represented on Magic cards: an object that can store energy. Second, it has a defined role in the story that can inform the design: the heroes use it to trap an enemy and destroy that enemy by destroying the crystal. Third, it's named after a color of mana, so its mana cost could help it feel flavorful. Here was my first pass:
White Auracite A {1}{W}
Artifact
CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped with five [soul] counters on it.
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile up to one target creature.
T: Add {W}.
At the beginning of your end step, remove a [soul] counter from CARDNAME. When the last [soul] counter is removed, sacrifice CARDNAME and return the exiled card to the battlefield.
A common conflict in Magic design is between flavor and complexity. Sometimes, it's possible to make a story leap off the cardboard with a small number of words. For example: "Cowards can't block Warriors." That first four-word line of rules text packs such a flavorful punch that we've reused it many times. But it's more common that telling the exact right story takes a lot of words that are sometimes hard to understand upon first reading.
In my initial prototype for the White Auracite, I explored effects that would recreate the story as faithfully as possible. It's an artifact that can store aether (mana), temporarily locks away a foe, and must be destroyed before time runs out. But the fiddly nature of messing with the counters on a mana rock with a creature beneath it is annoyingly complex. Noticing this, I typed up a simpler alternative:
White Auracite B {2}{W}
Artifact
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile up to one target creature.
T: Add {W}.
Evaluating the relationship between complexity and flavor is a constant balancing act. The more accurate a card is to the concept it's representing, the more complex it usually is. Is it worth the extra words and actions? (Usually, no!) White Auracite A is a more accurate depiction Moenbryda's white auracite crystal, but White Auracite B is a more straightforwardly appealing card and still gets the gist across, so that one made it into the Commander file.
Months later, after I had joined the main set's team, we were looking for a common white removal spell. Gavin, the lead set designer, noticed that my White Auracite design from the Commander set fulfilled our mechanical needs and had a fairly high-profile concept, so we swiped it (and got an extra mana added to its cost somewhere along the way). In a roundabout way, the very first FINAL FANTASY card I designed at Wizards ended up making it to print.
Paladin's Arms and Astrologian's Planisphere
The job system is one of the iconic elements that appears repeatedly throughout the FINAL FANTASY series, so we chose to represent it with a mechanic in the set. "Job select" is a keyword that shows up on Equipment cards; when an Equipment with job select enters, it creates a 1/1 Hero token and attaches the Equipment to that token. Printing a bunch of Hero creature tokens gave us a unique opportunity to show off one of the most awesome parts of FINAL FANTASY XIV: the diverse and personalized player characters.
My favorite detail about these tokens is the various types of weapons shown. This is true to life. Many players take on more than one job, and often multiple jobs within the same role, For example, one of the eight Hero tokens in this set, just like that Roegadyn bard with his dancer's chakrams laying on the steps in front of him. But it's also true to the nature of the mechanic, where these tokens might be used for a wide variety of different jobs depending on which job select Equipment you have in your deck.
When designing the job select Equipment, our top priority was delivering on flavor. For example,
We would be remiss in our duty of making FINAL FANTASY trading cards if we didn't depict the astrologian job. After all, it's literally about drawing and playing cards. Astrologian is a FINAL FANTASY XIV job whose practitioners draw cards that depict the constellations of the night sky, then play those cards to buff their allies.
(Note: The following refers to the specifications of FINAL FANTASY XIV at the time the card was developed. These details have since been updated.)
Each card comes with one of three seals, much like suits in a deck of playing cards. Playing a card stores its seal in your "arcana gauge." In the example below, the astrologian draws The Ewer, which has the moon seal, then plays it, storing a moon seal in their arcana gauge.
Once the astrologian's arcana gauge is filled up with three seals, they can use the ability astrodyne to give themselves buffs based on the number of unique seals they've accrued. This creates a fun minigame where players try to draw and redraw cards with three different seals to maximize the effects of astrodyne.
Here was the original design:
Astrologian's Planisphere {2}{U}
Job Select (When this Equipment enters the battlefield, create an unnamed 1/1 creature token, then attach this to it.)
Equipped creature has "Whenever you draw a card, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature."
Whenever equipped creature attacks, you may exile three cards from your graveyard. If you do, draw a card.
Equip {3}
This design doesn't just power up a creature whenever you draw a card; it also recreates Astrodyne by letting you gain an advantage using three different cards you've played in the past.
This design stayed in the card file for about a year, until Play Design started testing for Standard. Right before testing began, we lowered the card's mana cost from
Astrologian's Planisphere {1}{U}
Warrior of Light (When this Equipment enters the battlefield, create an unnamed 1/1 creature token, then attach this to it.)
Equipped creature has "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature. If it's the third noncreature spell you cast this turn, draw a card."
Equip {2}
However, playtesting quickly found that the extra bonus for casting your third spell added too much power to an already potent creature that grew over time, and it was eventually removed. At that point, the Equipment just granted: "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature."
As a one-time astrologian main myself, I didn't feel that the fidelity of the design at this stage was satisfying enough, and I worried it would disappoint my fellow FINAL FANTASY XIV players. With that in mind, I left the following comment in our internal system.
"11/27/2023 | Cam | This design has nothing to do with the astrologian job."
In retrospect, my feedback was a bit harsh—buffing your creatures when you play cards is arguably more flavorful than buffing your creatures when you draw cards—but my insistence convinced the team to find a small buff to reference the seal-collecting gameplay of astrologian. This resulted in the final design:
The FINAL FANTASY XIV players among you may have guessed that this is not where the story ends, however. One tricky thing about working on Universes Beyond adaptations of active games is that we want to adapt the mechanics of the subject matter as precisely as possible to create an experience that mirrors the original. At the same time, we work on Magic sets before you ever see them, and it's impossible to know what changes might be made to an actively shifting game. Here's what the astrologian's arcana gauge looks like nowadays:
You might notice that there's no space on the gauge to store the three seals of the three most recently played cards! Because changes to the game system came after we had already begun exploring the card's design, my push to incorporate the Astrologian job's "play three cards" element into
Emet-Selch, Unsundered
Adapting a beloved fan-favorite character is always a daunting task. To deliver on a card that would meet fans' colossal expectations, we needed to capture three important parts of Emet's character:
- He is enigmatically helpful and aids you in getting information to progress through the First.
- After assisting for a time, he transforms into Hades, becoming a clear and direct threat to the player.
- He cares about the past above all and wants to restore it.
When I joined the team at the beginning of set design, Emet-Selch was already in the set, and he looked like this:
Emet-Selch {1}{W}{U}{B}
Legendary Creature — Elder Advisor
3/6
Vigilance, ward {4}
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may exile target permanent card from your graveyard with mana value less than or equal to the number of lands you control. If you do, create a token copy of the exiled card.
Shuffle fourteen cards you own from exile into your library: Transform Emet-Selch. Activate only as a sorcery.
//
Hades
Legendary Creature — Avatar
7/9
Menace, ward {4}
When this creature transforms into Hades, mill fourteen cards.
You may play permanent cards from your graveyard.
Whenever a card would be put into your graveyard from the battlefield, exile it instead.
This design is focused on bringing back the past by returning permanents from the graveyard. The transform mechanic does most of the heavy lifting in capturing Hades, but both sides are too similar in functionality to feel distinct. His role as a guide isn't really represented here. The team came up with this next, aiming to create a front side that was distinct from the back side and captured Emet's helpfulness in uncovering information:
Emet-Selch {W}{U}{B}
Legendary Creature — Human Wizard
3/4
Ward {1}
Whenever CARDNAME enters the battlefield or attacks, you and target opponent each draw two cards, then discard two cards.
At the beginning of your upkeep, if there are fourteen or more cards in all graveyards, transform CARDNAME.
//
Hades, the Dying Gasp
Legendary Creature — Avatar
6/6
Menace, ward {2}
Instant and sorcery cards in your graveyard have flashback. Their flashback cost is equal to their mana cost.
Ancient Double—Whenever you cast a spell from anywhere other than your hand, copy it. You may choose new targets for the copy.
This design was aimed mostly at Modern and Commander. We thought Commander was the right goal for a character this popular, so we gave him a three-color color identity and an ability that helped an opponent, which plays better in multiplayer than in two-player games.
Then we re-examined Emet near the end of set design and made a few changes to increase his usefulness in two-player games, namely Standard. We removed a color from his casting cost to broaden the decks that could include him and removed the symmetrical component of the card-draw ability. Despite removing some of the Commander-focused elements of the design, the card was still plenty appealing as a commander, and there was another version of the character in the Commander deck that was inspirational to put in the command zone. We also simplified Hades by trading the copying ability to one that let you play cards from anywhere. This reduced the amount of text on an already busy double-faced card, and the set had too many copying effects at rare and mythic. That's how we ended up with this:
I'm delighted that the "fourteen cards" gag made it all the way through. It's easy to feel cheesy by accidentally going overboard with numerical references, but it's such a perfect way to tell the story of Emet's transformation that we kept it here.
The Wandering Minstrel
This is the first Universes Beyond set to be legal in all formats. Since we were venturing into uncharted waters, the team put a lot of thought into how best to design the set to create a deep and welcoming Standard play environment. We wanted to empower fans to build decks around their favorite characters and give those players the opportunity to fill their decks with FINAL FANTASY cards. This pointed us toward designing a few packages of cards within the set that were highly synergistic with each other and could form the backbone of a Standard deck.
In the past few years, Magic designers have avoided creating "block monsters," which are synergy packages that exist within a set. That's because it's generally good for the strongest deck in Standard to have to change up some cards with every set to keep the metagame fresh. However, we reconsidered our anti-block monster philosophy when Standard was expanded to three years. A deeper card pool leads to a larger diversity of strategies, so making sure that each individual deck changes over time is less important. We also looked to the growing popularity of nonrotating formats like Pioneer and Modern where players were happy that they could keep the same deck over the course of multiple years. In that light, creating block monsters sounded like a pretty good idea to encourage more players to jump into Standard. We still need to agree on a new, less scary-sounding name. My favorite is "block parties."
One of the block parties in Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY is based around the new "Town" land type. FINAL FANTASY XIV's contribution to the cycle of ten common Towns is Sharlayan, Nation of Scholars:
The Town theme is focused in blue and green, so we decided early on to make the blue-green rare legendary creature as a Towns payoff for Constructed. Once we'd decided that it was a Towns-matter legendary creature, the Wandering Minstrel seemed like the perfect character for the job. No matter which town you go to, . We also wanted to make sure that he featured all five colors of mana in his rules text. We wanted to make sure you'd be able to include all of the Towns in Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY in a Commander deck built around The Wandering Minstrel. Here was the team's first attempt:
The Wandering Minstrel {1}{U}{G}
Legendary Creature — Human Bard
2/3
Lands you control enter untapped.
{W}{U}{B}{R}{G}: Draw two cards. You may cast a spell from your hand without paying its mana cost. Spend only mana from Towns to activate this ability.
Helping mitigate a main downside of Towns (most Towns enter tapped) was a good starting point, but this first design was missing an important part of the Minstrel's character. By listening to adventurers recount their exploits and weaving them into verse, he brings forth high-difficulty versions of raids and trials (yes, really), so he should somehow create a permanent that represents a powerful and scary version of an enemy. That led the team to this:
The Wandering Minstrel {U}{G}
Legendary Creature — Human Bard
2/3
Whenever a Town you control enters, scry 1. Then you may pay {W}{U}{B}{R}{G}. If you do, create a token that's a copy of another target creature, enchantment, or land you control, except it's a 6/6 God enchantment creature in addition to its other types.
This version does a good job of telling the specific story of the Minstrel creating higher difficulty fights, but it doesn't reward you for putting Towns in your deck unless you can afford to invest five mana, which often won't be the case in Standard. Early Play Design feedback indicated this wasn't working for that format, so we went back to the drawing board to try and find the best of both worlds.
The Wandering Minstrel {U}{G}
Legendary Creature — Human Bard
1/3
Lands you control enter untapped.
At the beginning of combat on your turn, if you control five or more Towns, create a 2/2 Elemental creature token that's all colors.
This second, simpler ability represented the Minstrel's creation of hard bosses while also passively rewarding players for controlling Towns. He still needed a five-color effect to let players play all their Towns in Commander, so we were missing a short ability that contained
Designing cards to work well in both Standard and Commander is a common challenge, and this is a common solution: designing the core functionality around what works in two-player formats, then adding a splashy expensive ability that sells a big dream and cements the build-around. Making effective multiformat cards was especially important for our set. We were responsible for the content of sixteen huge and beloved RPGs, and we wanted to make sure that as many players as possible could build around their favorite character in their favorite format.
Hydaelyn and Zodiark
I took on the design work for Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY less than six months after the release of the Endwalker expansion. Because of that, I didn't feel confident about adding Endwalker cards to the file until we were well into the middle of set design and had a clearer sense of what would truly resonate with players. I was excited to brainstorm a card for my personal favorite Endwalker character, Venat:
Venat, Convocation Wanderer {W}{U}
Legendary Creature — Human Wizard
1/3
Each player may play an additional land on each of their turns.
{3}{W}{W}, Exile CARDNAME: Each player chooses one fourteenth of the nonland permanents they control, rounded up, then exiles the rest. Return CARDNAME to the battlefield transformed at the beginning of the next end step. Activate only as a sorcery.
//
Hydaelyn, the Mothercrystal
6/8
Legendary Creature — God
Indestructible
CARDNAME can't attack or block unless you control four or more other creatures.
Blessing of Light — At the beginning of combat on your turn, put two +1/+1 counters on another target creature you control. It gains protection from everything until your next turn.
Venat is one of my favorite characters in the game. The main idea behind this design is that second ability on the front, an activated ability that represents the Sundering and transforms Venat into Hydaelyn. This first draft was using some ridiculous one-fourteenth wording to try and tell the story of the Sundering in as specific a way as possible. I was charmed by the fact that Venat exiled herself as part of the cost, allowing you to choose one of your other creatures to leave behind and become your chosen champion. That led naturally to the Blessing of Light ability, which represents Hydaelyn's most iconic power of granting the Warrior of Light ultimate protection from darkness.
The last idea in the design was the restriction on when Hydaelyn could attack or block. This is a mainstay of Gods in Magic and solves the problem of an indestructible creature dominating combat too early in the game. The condition of controlling a light party's worth of creatures was a charming bonus. We ended up putting this design into the card file with a couple of tweaks from the team (but "one-fourteenth" remained intact).
A couple of months after adding Venat to the set, the team was struggling to come up with a successful design for the spaceship Ragnarok from FINAL FANTASY VIII, and we were considering trying out a different concept. Gavin asked me if it made sense to also include Zodiark. In retrospect, I felt like I had failed in my duty as a FINAL FANTASY XIV fan, because it was totally obvious that we needed a Zodiark card if we were going to include a Hydaelyn card. Here's what the team first came up with:
Zodiark, the Dark Inside {3}{B}{B}
Legendary Creature — God
4/4
Indestructible, trample
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, each player sacrifices half the non-God creatures they control, rounded up.
Whenever an opponent sacrifices a creature, put a +1/+1 counter on CARDNAME and draw a card.
Sacrifice a creature: Tap CARDNAME. Only your opponents may activate this ability.
Sometimes you write down a story moment when making Universes Beyond cards and only have to tweak a few words to get a line of Magic rules text. Zodiark's enters ability was one of those times. Zodiark's demands are exactly what his card demands, too.
Because Zodiark and Hydaelyn are two sides of the same coin in the game's lore, it was important that their cards also mirrored each other. These first designs mirrored each other in that they both had indestructible and an ability that meant that they sometimes wouldn't be able to attack. I considered if Zodiark should be a transforming double-faced card (TDFC) to match Hydaelyn, with the front side being the character who eventually becomes the heart of Zodiark. But that seemed wrong because the art would likely depict Zodiark as we see him when fighting him, and the heart of Zodiark had been replaced by that point in the story.
These cards changed substantially as we iterated on the set, but the core ideas behind both remained intact. Venat still has two abilities representing her love of adventure and the Sundering, but the mechanics are simpler and more obviously exciting. We also removed the "god ability" that prevented Hydaelyn and Zodiark from attacking some of the time. That mechanic is a throughline for Magic gods, not FINAL FANTASY ones, and it was a real bummer for Hydaelyn to have a downside when you needed to spend seven mana to flip her.
A theme that keeps coming up in many of these design histories is the gradual simplification of cards that originally tell a very specific story in a mechanically elaborate way. As a designer, it's tempting to capture all the specifics of a Universes Beyond concept with lots of text, but we have to identify the abilities that are most important to selling the flavor and trim the rest so that the set isn't overwhelmingly complex.
Ultima
Ultima in FINAL FANTASY XIV is so destructive that it couldn't really be anything other than a sweeper. But it was convenient that "end the turn" gives this spell an air of finality while providing some interesting utility on a wrath, stifling abilities that trigger when creatures die).
That's not even mentioning that it gave us a place to put "Such devastation …" in the card's flavor text, and it gave me a perfectly named card for the final topic in my article. Sometimes things just work out.
Thank you for joining me on this look back through Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY.
© SQUARE ENIX