Welcome to the start of Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ previews. This week, various designers will be telling stories of how this set got made. I thought I would pull back and use my article to talk about a common problem we face when making Universes Beyond sets: having more to choose from than will fit in the set. There's no better example of this than the FINAL FANTASY franchise, so I will be using it for all my examples today. I also have a card preview to show off before I'm done.

Worlds to Explore

When we make an in-Multiverse Magic setting, we design it specifically to inspire one or more Magic sets. Having done this for over 30 years, we have a very good sense of what we need. Usually, we'll design slightly more than what's necessary so that we can fill out the set, but we don't spend a lot of time on things you won't see. We'll leave some threads for us to return to, but mostly we focus on what the set has to have.

Universes Beyond is a completely different thing. We don't design the worlds. For these sets, we make cards based on someone else's settings and stories. In the past, I've talked about the challenges of adapating certain worlds for Universes Beyond. For example, flying is a common pinch point for Universes Beyond. Magic sets need a lot of flying creatures, and not every property has a density of flying creatures in its setting. This means we often have to dig deep into some very obscure aspects of the source material.

There's also a flipside to this problem. Sometimes, the issue isn't a lack of material but rather an abundance of it. FINAL FANTASY is a perfect example of this issue. FINAL FANTASY is a video game franchise with expansive worlds filled with characters, locations, spells, items, and events. And it's not just one world, as we were capturing sixteen different games. The challenge of depicting FINAL FANTASY wasn't solving for things that were absent but rather figuring out what elements to include.

In the past, when talking about designing Universes Beyond sets, I've discussed a thing we call a knowledge pyramid where we figure out which elements of the property are best known and which elements are something only the most die-hard fans of the property would recognize. This set had to create a second tool—one that measured not familiarity but popularity.

But don't familiarity and popularity overlap? Yes, kind of. It's hard for an aspect of a franchise to be popular if the fans don't know about it, but there are plenty of things that the fans know yet are lukewarm about. Inversely, there are less commonly known things that are adored by those aware of them. Popularity is about what excites fans of a property the most. We're making a limited number of cards, so what will the fans want to see most?

Yoni, the set's lead vision designer, made a spreadsheet (Yoni truly loves spreadsheets) where they and the Exploratory Design team went to many FINAL FANTASY fans at Wizards and asked what they liked about each FINAL FANTASY game. Which characters were their favorites? Which monsters? Which objects? Which locations? Which spells? Which events? Which elements just had to be on a card? He asked players to rank each item on a five-point scale with, with five being the most beloved. He then talked to many people at SQUARE ENIX to see what data they had about all their games. In the end, the spreadsheet rated all of the key elements from every mainline game from one to five.

I should note that this spreadsheet wasn't the final say on anything. It just gave the design team a sense of what things fans would expect to see. A goal of the set was to incorporate all sixteen mainline games so that whichever game a player favored would be well represented in the set. To do this, the team made sure to include the most popular elements from each game.

Once we understood what items we wanted to get into the game, the next step involved investigating our available tools to maximize their inclusion. I'll be using FINAL FANTASY as my example for each of these, but these tools are universal and can be applied to any Universes Beyond set.

Tool #1: The Cards

First and foremost, we got to turn many elements into cards. The spreadsheet did a good job of helping us understand our priorities, but it's not as simple as just putting the top of each list in the set. Magic sets have a design skeleton. Each card slot has a purpose, and the card filling the slot has to match the mechanical needs of the slot. For example, we need to make creatures throughout the mana curve. That means we need small, medium, and large creatures.

The first big task of a Universes Beyond set concerns finding the elements of the property for the mechanical needs of each slot. That requires another spreadsheet that looks at each element of the property and assigns it a Magic color identity. Some items clearly fit into a certain color, while others have a bit more flexibility. We tend to write down every color that the franchise's elements could be because space can start to get tight in certain areas.

In addition to color, it's important to get a sense of card types, mana values, creature sizes, and rarities for each element. None of this is set in stone, so it's more of a guess, but you want to get a good sense of the parameters for each item. Rarity tends to be determined by three things. One is frequency. For example, our team identified the elements that show up in many games and worked to include those on common cards. Those were things like moogles, chocobos, malboros, townsfolk, and potions. These were elements almost any FINAL FANTASY fan would recognize.

The second is complexity. The higher the rarity, the more complex a card gets. Simple background components can be captured with singular concepts, while characters, especially ones the players spend a lot of time with, often require more complexity to capture their intricacies.

The third is excitement. We want our rare and mythic rare cards to excite players, so we want to save many (but not all) of the most sought-after elements for our rare and mythic rare cards.

Once we understand the parameters of each card slot, we start filling in our set skeleton with specific references. We start at the top of our list of elements to make sure the most important ones get a good slot. There are three ways to fill those slots.

First, we choose a component from the property, find a slot that matches the color, card type, cost, and rarity, then design a card from scratch. This is what we call a top-down design, where everything about the design is specifically chosen to reinforce the flavor of a card concept. This type of design is easiest at higher rarities as there are less requirements to fill.

Next, we take a slot with a mechanical need and find a component to reinforce that need. For example, Set Design needed a character for a white creature that cared about Equipment. They looked through our options, and their choice was Adelbert Steiner from FINAL FANTASY IX. In the game, this is a prominent character whose abilities with his sword are closely tied to his character. The essence of Adelbert Steiner's character is related to his sword, so having him support the Equipment theme in the set matched the needs of his character and the broader set.

While there are certainly cards where every aspect of the rules text hits upon a specific flavorful aspect of the character, it's not necessary. Yes, something in the rules text has to feel connected to the character, but everything doesn't need to be. A common trick for Universes Beyond sets: if you have one line that's super flavorful, the rest of the rules text can be more functional. It can't contradict the character, but it's okay if it's more functional than flavorful. We use that text to help connect the card to the larger structural needs of the set.

Finally, there are bottom-up card designs. These are cards where the mechanical need comes first. The challenge is figuring out what creative element from the source material could be. For example, the design team had a small flying creature that made a 1/1 creature token. They looked through the FINAL FANTASY games and decided that it could be a dragoon and their wyvern companion.

After a while, certain sections of the set will be filled. That means some elements won't have a home. We may be able to make them fit by shifting minor elements, but we often have to set them aside and move on to the next element.

Set Design discovered that there were elements they really wanted in the main set that they couldn't find room for, so they talked with the product architect, Zakeel Gordon. Part of his job is handling budgets and figuring out what products should exist in conjunction with the main set. The decision was made to slightly increase the size of the set, adding some uncommons and rares. We can't change a set's size for every release, but this does demonstrate that there is flexibility that can be explored.

Tool #2: Other Products in the Suite

When a product release is initially pitched, part of that pitch is what we call a full product suite. This is a list of every product that's connected to the main set. For example, FINAL FANTASY has a pretty robust product suite: in addition to Play Boosters and Bundles, there are four Commander decks, a Starter Kit, a Gift Bundle, and even more on the way.

To help maximize the number of elements we could include, a couple of important decisions were made for each product. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from players about how much they appreciate the cohesiveness of Universe Beyond Commander decks, as all the cards in the decks are from the source material. To do this for this set, we focused each Commander deck on a single FINAL FANTASY game.

R&D discussed our options and chose our four favorites as the focus of the Commander decks. By having Commander decks focus on specific games, we lessened the pressure on the main set, giving us more space for games without a Commander deck. Even the Starter Kit shows characters that didn't have a home in other products.

The key point here is that one of the tools a Magic set has is its other related products. Commander decks have proven a valuable way to get extra content from a franchise into the product suite.

Tool #3: The Flavor (Especially the Art)

The design teams worked to find homes for as many characters as they could, but eventually they ran out of creature cards. That's when they realized that there's a step between having a creature card and not being in the set. Magic has to have a lot of spells, and somebody has to be pictured on them. What if the art of those spells referenced characters that otherwise wouldn't appear in the set? For example, we didn't have room for Eiko Carol from FINAL FANTASY IX on a creature card, but we did have a spell called Sleep Magic that would depict a sleeping creature. Rather than having that be a generic creature, we used the art to reference a character that hadn't shown up yet. Sleep Magic, along with another card in the set, depicts Eiko under the effects of the spell.

Names and flavor text are also tools we use to reference characters and other elements that didn't find a home elsewhere. If we know that the cards can't contain everything we need, we'll look toward the art, name, and flavor text to fill the gaps.

Artwork has another important role. As I said above, one of the goals of the design was to reference all the mainline FINAL FANTASY games. Certain elements show up in multiple games, so we had to choose which version to show. This let us give certain games more time in the spotlight. For instance, the behemoth shows up in many FINAL FANTASY games. While there are many versions of the behemoth, the one that shows up in this set is from FINAL FANTASY II.

Card names also played a role here. For instance, summons have been a key component of the franchise since FINAL FANTASY III, but different games will use different language when referring to them. For instance, in FINAL FANTASY VIII they're referred to as Guardian Forces, so all the FINAL FANTASY VIII Summons have G.F. in their card names.

Speaking of Summons, I have a card preview to show you. But not just any card preview: a double-faced card.

Click here to see Esper Origins // Summon: Esper Maduin

 
0185a_MTGFIN_Main: Esper Origins 0370a_MTGFIN_SgCrtrs: Esper Origins

Tool #4: Magic Itself as a Tool

Another tool available to sets is a bonus sheet. The first bonus sheet appeared in the original Time Spiral set. The Time Spiral block had a time theme, and Time Spiral was about the past. We wanted to find a way to put old-feeling cards into boosters, so we came up with the idea of a bonus sheet that allowed a retro frame card to appear in each booster pack. It was so popular that we've brought it back multiple times.

For this set, the FINAL FANTASY Through the Ages bonus sheet contains cards from throughout Magic with a fun twist. The artworks for all the bonus sheet cards are concept artworks from the FINAL FANTASY games. Complete with new names to match their artwork, all of them embody their mechanics with the flavor of FINAL FANTASY concept art. This is another place for us to reference things that might not have a home anywhere else.

The cool thing about this category is how it allows us to use Magic itself as a tool to reference the source material. This can also be seen in how the set uses mechanics to communicate flavor. How do we show that on Summons? We make them Saga creatures. How can we demonstrate that chocobos are a means of travel? We use landfall as connective tissue.

A Perfect Mix

I hope today's column gave you more insight into how we capture worlds as expansive as FINAL FANTASY in Magic sets. As always, I would love to hear any feedback, be it through email or my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and maybe TikTok). I'd love to hear your feedback about today's article, this set, or any of the components I talked about today.

Until next time, may you enjoy all the cool things that the FINAL FANTASY franchise has to offer.

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