News Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy sets will tell the stories of the games

[News]

Magic: The Gathering has revealed a look at its forthcoming Final Fantasy-themed set. In an interview with IGN, senior game designer Daniel Holt talked about the collaboration and this initial look, which focuses on four major character cards and their associated pre-constructed Commander decks.

The revealed cards include Terra from Final Fantasy VI, Tidus from Final Fantasy X, Y’shtola from (critically acclaimed MMORPG) Final Fantasy XIV, and of course, Cloud from Final Fantasy VII. What’s interesting about these Commander decks is that instead of being constructed to simply support a single powerful card (known as the Commander), each deck’s mechanics and cards are designed to tell the story of a specific Final Fantasy game.

Since the back half of Final Fantasy VI is all about rebuilding the world Kefka destroyed, its associated deck is all about returning creatures from the graveyard to the battlefield, for example. Cloud’s deck is all about equipment — you gotta have the right materia for the job, right? Magic has always been really good with how it marries the story of a set to gameplay mechanics, and seeing that applied to Final Fantasy is really cool.

In the IGN interview, Holt assured fans that even though these Commander decks are focused on only four games, the rest of the Standard-legal set will feature cards that represent all 16 mainline Final Fantasy games.

You can see previews for some of those cards’ artwork on the set’s official website here. There will be even more cards revealed during an official MTG x Final Fantasy livestream taking place on February 18th at 1PM ET.

The full set launches on June 13th and will feature artwork from famed Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano.