Crafting Commander Decks for Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™

Greetings, kupo!

I'm Daniel Holt, senior game designer and lead designer for the Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ Commander decks. Since starting my journey on this project in September 2022, I've been eagerly awaiting its release and finally get to talk about the process, theming, and design decisions that went into making each of these decks.

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Four Universes, Four Commander Decks

With most Universes Beyond properties, we have a single canon that all the products fall within. With the FINAL FANTASY franchise, we took a different approach. Because of each game's depth of story and character pool, we decided to pick four game titles and make entire Commander decks devoted to each one.

We designed each deck to beautifully recreate the legacy of its featured title. That meant that each Commander deck had to follow its own unique creative design. Because of this, it's almost like we did four different Universes Beyond products in one!

As the lead designer, it was important that I know each title as well as possible. Like most of you out there can relate, a lot of this brand familiarity came from growing up playing these games. But some titles required more hands-on experience during development, meaning we'd lean on our in-house subject-matter experts (SMEs) for guidance.

Designing for Universes Beyond

Universes Beyond products are a fun puzzle to tackle because they add a creative restriction to deck building. Proper nouns and legendary cards from Magic's Multiverse don't exist in these partners' worlds, so without giving them different names, certain Commander staples aren't usable in preconstructed Commander decks. That means no Sram, Senior Artificer in an Equipment deck and no Simic Growth Chamber in a blue-green deck. This also applies to creature types on reprints. For example, a given property may or may not have elves, and this type of worldbuilding impacts reprint selection.

But restriction breeds creativity and finding the perfect reprint to fit a concept within a universe and deck theme can be extremely satisfying as a designer and, I hope, to you as the fan! A lot of the fun involves experimenting with cards I don't typically lean on in my Commander builds because they fit a particular story moment, item, or character interaction as opposed to being "best in class" for a deck archetype.

So, without further ado, let's talk about each of the decks!

Revival Trance (FINAL FANTASY VI)

FINAL FANTASY VI is one of the classics in the series lineup with a large nostalgic following. It's also the only one of these four FINAL FANTASY titles that I had never played prior leading to these Commander decks.

But, wow, this game delivered on the promise of excellent drama and storytelling that all of my peers hyped it to be! I discovered why Kefka was such a beloved villain and how large the ensemble of rich characters was. I always intended to have as many party members as possible in each of the decks, but knew it was important we feature all of them in this deck for players to enjoy.

This deck's structure came together fairly quickly. Yoni Skolnik, the early vision design lead for the set and an avid fan of FINAL FANTASY VI, noted that the game is divided into two acts and pitched the idea of focusing more on the World of Ruin in the second half. This led to the concept of a reanimator deck focusing on Celes's initial journey of "getting the gang back together" to take down Kefka, using the graveyard to represent her lost teammates.

Enfranchised Magic players associate reanimation effects with bringing a creature back from death. But in FINAL FANTASY VI, the heroes are merely scattered across the world, not dead. This is where some creative theming came in and helped sell the concept on some of these game pieces. New-to-Magic cards like Rejoin the Fight focus on getting back up and continuing to battle, while other epic moments are captured in reprints, as seen in Rise of the Dark Realms. Here, we see the climactic approach of the entire roster of characters toward the final showdown with Kefka.

Limit Break (FINAL FANTASY VII)

If you're a FINAL FANTASY fan, there's a good chance you've interacted with FINAL FANTASY VII and even more likely that you can recognize the game's lead characters, like Cloud. If the nostalgia for the classic wasn't enough, the FINAL FANTASY VII Remake series has reignited the passion for this beloved story.

Cloud was an easy choice for the face commander of the deck, even before we settled on making the main playable character of each game the general first choice for each deck's commander. We explored a few concepts for deck themes though before settling where we did. One leading contender was a landfall theme to play up the battle for Gaia and its Lifestream, but that ended up feeling too ambiguous.

The thing that stuck out to me most when thinking about this lineup was their iconic weapons. By going with an Equipment theme, I was able to include a new legendary creature card for each party member and give each of their weapons a card in the form of reprints and new-to-Magic cards!

Limit breaks were something else we explored for the FINAL FANTASY VII deck's theme. When that was cut, I shifted to a power-matters subtheme to complement the boosts provided by Equipment while showing the transition of characters leveling up. I got several notes both in favor and against the "cuteness" of tying many of the mechanics to the number seven for the sake of the game's title. But in testing, it turned out to be correct from a gameplay perspective! Four and five were often easy targets and hard to design top-end cards for, so seven felt natural, and the reference worked!

While working on this deck in particular and capturing some of the charming, non-combative story moments with reprints, many people asked, "You're doing Cloud disguised in his dress scene, right?" ranging from FINAL FANTASY fans at Wizards of the Coast to our consumer playtesters. My answer was "Yes, absolutely!" I considered many options, but once I landed on Clever Concealment, I knew that was the perfect card for the scene.

In a similar vein, I wanted to show the fan-favorite date scene on the skywheel at the Golden Saucer through reprinting Secret Rendezvous. The trick here is that there is only one copy of the card in the Commander deck but several date options in FINAL FANTASY VII. Zakeel, the set's product architect, came to me with the idea of including the non-Tifa options as variants in Collector Boosters, and I just couldn't say no!

Counter Blitz (FINAL FANTASY X)

As my coworkers quickly learned from my excitement, but FINAL FANTASY X was the series entry I played the most growing up. Teenage Daniel (shown above from 2007) wouldn't believe he'd get to lead a Magic and FINAL FANTASY collaboration! One might even call it a "dream."

With FINAL FANTASY X, I knew I wanted a counters theme and for Tidus to be the face commander. The game's Sphere Grid leveling system uses visual markers to gain abilities and stats, and I knew I could do that physically with +1/+1 counters and keyword counters. I even designed a top-down card to represent the Sphere Grid!

Summons, while present in most FINAL FANTASY games, get a lot more attention in the story of FINAL FANTASY X as you follow Yuna's path as a summoner. The fact that these cards, which are Saga enchantment creatures in the set, use counters themselves made it even more of a perfect fit! For the first time ever, we felt the need to include punch-out lore counters in a preconstructed deck since you can use Tidus and other cards to move them around and keep your Summons on the battlefield for even longer.

I couldn't make a FINAL FANTASY X deck without a couple of blitzball references, as that was the first thing that many of my co-workers associated with the game.

As the game I knew best, it ended up being one of the easiest to pick reprints for. For all the Commander decks I work on, I keep a document of possible reprint cards and potential creative concepts for each card's artwork. We usually flesh these documents out in meetings with our creative team, but for Counter Blitz, I went into the meeting with that document almost finished. Dillon Deveney, the set's creative lead, happily approved most of the suggestions!

While I can't cover all of the story moments in this article, above are some of my favorite reprints in regard to where they ended up in creative theming to capture memorable and infamous points of the game.

Scions & Spellcraft (FINAL FANTASY XIV)

When I was asked to lead this set's Commander decks, I didn't know much about FINAL FANTASY XIV. A month and a half later, I had put nearly 200 hours into exploring Eorzea with a friend before pausing at the beginning of the Shadowbringers arc. For those curious, I mained dancer, ninja, black mage, and white mage.

Only after I did so did I learn that we'd be focusing on Shadowbringers for most of the character theming … so I went back to researching that storyline!

FINAL FANTASY XIV, for those who don't play the game, has such a dedicated and vibrant culture of active players and an extremely welcoming community as part of my new-player experience. Because of that, I wanted to put time into playing the game before designing the deck to make sure that my approach was authentic.

That said, this deck's theme was one we settled on last, with even the face commander taking more time to select than usual. In the game, you play as your own customizable Hero of Light character that can be any given job, wield any weapon, wear any armor, and more. That flexibility is hard to capture on a single Magic card, though we did try. Early versions of the deck involved a "choose a job" system and other decision trees before each game of Commander. Between that mechanic's complexity and the amount of unique art we'd need for its execution, we decided to go another route.

At that point, we thought about which characters in the roster were beloved by fans and played a prominent role in the main storyline. Y'shtola and G'raha Tia quickly rose to the top, though I knew I would include all of the Scions that I could fit into the deck.

For the deck's strategy, I wanted to capture the core gameplay loop of FINAL FANTASY XIV. To me, that included casting spells, activating abilities, monitoring cooldowns, and completing adventures. Thus, the noncreature and control theme was born!

Spells like Transpose capture the abilities of specific jobs (in this case, the black mage's transpose ability) and uses the mechanic rebound to cast it again (the ability's cooldown). Job select Equipment cards can depict any Hero of Light character by making a token and assigning Equipment's job to it. I expect players will have fun with these tokens and showcase their actual FINAL FANTASY XIV character images.

But we haven't even talked about sidequests … and this game is full of them! While the main story alone has years of content (including multiple expansions), I wanted to make sure to highlight some of the moments outside of that. Hildibrand Manderville's story is a fan-favorite one, and I included him very early on. When designers who didn't know the reference asked about him, I just said, "Trust me, he's great."

Later when working on reprints, I also wanted to reference the Wondrous Tails weekly missions, and Tome of Legends felt like the perfect flavor fit by adding counters to your book and granting you rewards for doing so.

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New Game+

With that, our journey comes to a close. For those avid FINAL FANTASY fans out there, I hope you are charmed and delighted as see your favorite characters in Magic: The Gathering. And for those new to the FINAL FANTASY franchise, welcome to this incredible game series! See you next time, kupo!

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