Magic: The Gathering really understood the assignment with its Final Fantasy set, and it's going to financially ruin me

For more than three decades, I have played Magic: The Gathering. I was there at the Phyrexian invasion of Dominaria when the Nine Titans gave their lives, and I was there when the planeswalkers lost their sparks, and I was there when outside IP began slowly creeping its way into the classic trading card game – so it is with some confidence and experience that I say Wizards of the Coast has finally figured it out with the Final Fantasy set. And it's going to financially ruin me.

This might sound like hyperbole, but please understand: it is not. There is a very real danger to my wallet here. For now, I've managed to contain myself to a single prerelease ($45, where I came in 5th place and got another five boosters for my trouble) and a Starter Kit ($20) to play with my partner. Thankfully, much of my sudden hyperfixation has been focused on Magic Arena, the digital platform, where I've been absolutely dominating with a Tifa Brawl deck that I was able to throw together out of spare parts to the point that I already have to wait another 138 hours just to get more rewards from my weekly wins track.

In other words, I maybe like the set just a little bit.

The perfect subject

The various different franchises that have made their way into one of the best card games over the years – Fallout, Assassin's Creed, Doctor Who, to name a few – outside of the one-off Secret Lair treatments have had their ups and downs. This isn't a particularly unusual circumstance; Magic didn't always knock it out of the park every set even before it became card-based Fortnite by inviting so many different collaborations.

For all its struggles, Magic has had a couple of noteworthy successes when it comes to translating source material into Magic cards. The Dungeons & Dragons set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms is technically an in-house IP, so it should come as no surprise that the Magic set was largely a great implementation aesthetically and mechanically. Another example would be The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, which was a mighty swing at a massive franchise that made fascinating, captivating design decisions from how to portray characters artistically to how it represented Tolkien's story mechanically.

Both of those sets, however, pale in comparison to how above and beyond the Final Fantasy set goes. The fact that all three are steeped in fantasy, and D&D and Final Fantasy are both role-playing games, and that Final Fantasy is the latest set are all solid reasons for why the quality here is by and large improved, but I'd actually argue there's a far simpler explanation.

Final Fantasy, by its very nature, is the perfect subject for a Magic: The Gathering crossover. There are so many different Final Fantasy games from across four decades that are important to a wide swath of people for different reasons that the designers at Wizards had to have been absolutely swamped with possibilities. The fact that it was, as just an example, never narrowed down to a single Final Fantasy game makes the potential number of cards about different moments and characters… well, not endless, but I certainly wouldn't want to count that high.

Dedication to the cause

There are plenty of examples I could use to emphasize my point about fully embracing Final Fantasy successfully from the large number of cards featuring illustrations by Japanese artists (including classic Yoshitaka Amano treatments) to Aerith gaining +1/+1 counters whenever you gain life and distributing those to all other legendary creatures you control when she dies. Or that Triple Triad essentially creates its own card game on top of the normal card game. But if there's one single decision that feels emblematic of Wizards really going the extra mile, it has to be Cid.

Cid, if you're not familiar, is a character that appears across all the mainline Final Fantasy games. Importantly, however, he's never quite the same. His character has morphed and evolved and shifted and changed over the years, and the one constant is typically that he tinkers on stuff. He's often a mechanic of sorts or deals with airships. Sometimes he's part of the playable party, but most often he's not.

It would have been simple for Magic to go the easy route; Cid from Final Fantasy 7 is arguably the definitive version for a lot of people that play the card game, right? Print that man and be done with it. But no, that is not what Wizards has done. The Final Fantasy set includes 16 different printings of each mainline incarnation of Cid. That, to me, is dedication.

Struggling to get your hands on these cards? Here's all the MTG Final Fantasy stock we've managed to find so far.