Two years ago, Wizards of the Coast and Square Enix announced a collaboration that would bring the worlds and characters of Final Fantasy to Magic: The Gathering, the tabletop card game juggernaut. Recently, WotC gave us our first look at some of the cards included in the set, which ranged from expected faces like Cloud, Tidus, and Terra to wackier inclusions like Jumbo Cactuar and its 10,000-damage ability.

The set is still three months away, but based on reactions to the first handful of cards revealed, both WotC and Square Enix are leaning on this set to be a massive success. Recently, at MagicCon Chicago, GameSpot sat down with the Final Fantasy set’s lead game designer, Gavin Verhey, and Wizards franchise VP Rebecca Shepard to learn firsthand how this set came to be.

The conversation includes both the creative side of developing a set like Final Fantasy–refining 16 games into one set, design philosophies behind some of the cards, and more–and the fostering of the partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Square Enix. To hear Wizards tell it, this may be the first time the two sides have collaborated, but it won’t necessarily be the last.

Partnering with Square Enix

The story of Final Fantasy joining Magic: The Gathering begins, according to Shepard, back in 2021, when the world was still in the quarantine times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation of the relationship between Wizards and Square Enix, she says, was built over Zoom–with calls sometimes happening weekly, and other times happening multiple times a week.

The relationship may be four years in, but there’s still plenty to discuss even this close to launch. “It takes so much time and conversation, from the first reveal like we did recently, to the set’s launch, and then to any post-launch plans like reprints and everything else,” Shepard says. “Universes Beyond partnerships can be five-, six-, sometimes seven-year relationships depending on the pipeline.”

One key element in getting the deal done, as Verhey tells it, was Square Enix Japan’s love for Magic. “I hopped onto a weekly call for the first time, and one guy from Square Enix hops on and says, ‘I played four prereleases last weekend and I have new questions about my Modern deck,'” Verhey says. “[Final Fantasy producer Shoichi] Ichikawa-san is so into it. One of the team members over there owns a Black Lotus. These are serious Magic players.”

Shepard says this is a common occurrence. “Almost every relationship we’ve had has been that way; Bethesda, for example, has weekly games,” Shepard explained. “We didn’t even know about it until we were in negotiation and one of them said, ‘You know I’m a big player, right?’ Well no, you didn’t tell me, but that’s awesome!”

Working so closely with Square Enix meant speaking with some of the games’ original creators, which led to some memorable moments for the team at Wizards. “I got to speak to one of the original designers of Final Fantasy 9–my favorite Final Fantasy–who still works there,” Verhey recounts. “This designer mentioned that while he loved the cards and that FF9 was represented, there was one specific character he wished would be included. Right then, I flipped through one of the decks and showed him a card with art of this character, and he immediately lit up. Seeing them geek out as much as we were geeking out to be there was incredible.”

Verhey says Square Enix’s excitement for Magic echoes WotC’s excitement for Final Fantasy, with many members of the team wanting to come and help work on some of the cards. “People will come out of the woodwork asking, ‘Hey, are we working on this?’ and we suddenly have someone who can help,” Verhey says. “Even if they’re not in the game design space, they can tag in.”

16 games, one set

The Final Fantasy expansion encompasses the 16 mainline Final Fantasy games–no spin-offs like Final Fantasy X-2, no remakes like FF7 Remake or Rebirth, and no offshoots like Final Fantasy Tactics are included. One key challenge for the team was making sure each of the 16 games were represented fairly throughout the set. Verhey notes they were trying to avoid a situation where “Final Fantasy 7 gets 200 cards, while Final Fantasy 2 only gets two,” but he does note that while the more popular games have more cards, all 16 have “plenty of cards.”

Square Enix, as Shepard says, was very interested in that kind of balanced approach. “In [Square Enix’s] eyes, no one installment is more important than the other,” she says. Working with a video game company on a set like this, as opposed to a broader entertainment firm, brings with it more nuanced comments as well. “It’s a different level of feedback because they’re gamers, right? They build games too,” Shepard says. “They’ll dig into mechanics and understand at a deeper level than someone whose background is just entertainment.”

Even within those specific parameters and pinpoint feedback, however, distilling 16 full-length RPGs into one card game expansion takes a lot of work; as Verhey explains, “a ‘short’ Final Fantasy game is like 12 hours long, and then you have Final Fantasy XIV which can be played for hundreds of hours. There’s a ton of content to consider.”

One game posed a unique challenge: Final Fantasy XVI, which launched in 2023, was going through active development at the same time as the Magic set. While the team at Wizards was able to see some concepts and art in advance to help with planning, they didn’t actually get their hands on the game until launch. “When [FFXVI] finally launched,” Verhey says, “there was a week when the four main designers agreed we wouldn’t spoil anything for each other, but we’d post what was happening in our chat as we’re going saying, ‘This should be a card!'”

Balancing act

The team found a unique way to keep track of each game’s representation through the specific game designations on the bottom of every card. Some are obvious–the Cloud cards seen so far all say “FFVII” on the bottom–but the Tonberry, for example, is specifically the creature’s Final Fantasy V iteration.

Verhey says the idea came from playtesting, when one tester mentioned that they knew a few of the characters shown on cards, but not all of them. “We then realized that this is another fun storytelling moment–where a player can say, ‘I know this, let me tell you where it’s from’–and a little indicator on the card that tells you what game it’s from can inspire someone to go and look up what was happening there,” Verhey explained. “We thought it was a great little touch; here’s the game the card is from, go find out more or ask a friend about it.”

One of the team’s focuses was to find recurring elements of the Final Fantasy world, so that anyone who’s ever played a FF game can recognize them. The first batch of revealed cards included a few of those–Tonberry, the summon Shiva, and a Chocobo among them.

Another focus was laying out each game’s main story, heroes, villains, and key side characters, and from there decisions had to be made. Verhey says that while not every character in Final Fantasy’s history will receive a card–he expects a few omissions will leave some fans disappointed–most people will be pleased. “I’m not going to say who is or isn’t there, but it’s pretty safe to guess that if you’re a major hero or antagonist from a game, there’s a good chance you have a spot in the set,” Verhey confirms. “As for party members, I’m not going to say we covered every single party member ever, but we tried to get them all.”

“I’ve gotten questions all the time since we announced the set two years ago, ‘Is this going to be in there?’ about a bunch of different things,” Verhey continues. “My answer, generally, is that if it’s super obvious, it’s going to be in there. We know Triple Triad is a thing, people love the side card games, but you’ll have to wait and see if it makes the set.”

Designing Final Fantasy

Incorporating something like Final Fantasy into Magic: The Gathering sometimes requires the creation of an entirely new mechanic or subset of cards. One major example shown so far is the unique representation of summons–which, for the first time in Magic’s history, combines the creature card type with the “Saga” enchantment card type to create a unique Saga Creature hybrid. Verhey says this wasn’t the first idea for summons during development, but it was the best one.

“At first we gave them Vanishing, which is an old mechanic where a creature comes in with a certain number of vanishing counters, every turn a counter goes away, and when all the counters go away, it goes into the graveyard,” Verhey says. “Another designer asked, ‘What if we took the concept of the summon going away and turned it from a downside into something awesome?’ That’s all it took; everyone on the design team thought it was perfect, no debate or anything.”

Double-sided cards–which appear once in a while in Magic expansions, but not every set–also feature throughout the Final Fantasy set. Verhey says including them allowed the team to explore key elements of the FF experience. Five “Sidequest” cards represent some of the offshoot activities in a Final Fantasy adventure, while some heroes and villains needed double-sided cards to tell their full story.

“Final Fantasy really pioneered the ‘you haven’t seen my final form’ or ‘hero transformation’ idea in video games for me,” he says. “Incorporating that into double-faced cards was a great fit; we can show both hero transformations and multiple boss forms.”

Through The Ages

While the Final Fantasy expansion includes products many players expect–booster packs, pre-constructed decks, limited Secret Lair drops, and more–the 60-card “set within a set” called Final Fantasy Through The Ages took many by surprise. Through The Ages cards are reprinted card designs from throughout Magic’s history, and all of them portray concept art and scenes from throughout Final Fantasy’s history provided to the team by Square Enix itself.

“Square Enix said, ‘We have this. If you want to use it, you’re able to.’ And once they said that, we had to,” Verhey recalls. “That stuff is so iconic; all of the work done by the prolific Final Fantasy artists is incredible. [Product architect] Zakeel [Gordon] called a meeting one day and said, ‘We have to use it for something,’ and eventually we landed on the bonus sheet.”

The Through The Ages bonus sheet also confirms a question Verhey had received for a long time: Would Yoshitaka Amano and/or Tetsuya Nomura–two names synonymous with Final Fantasy for decades–be involved with the Final Fantasy set? “I’m happy to say that the answer is yes,” Verhey says. “I’m so glad we were able to do something, and they’ve got some cool surprises in the set.”

Each artist had one piece of artwork featured in the initial reveal, and both were part of the Through The Ages bonus sheet. Amano’s work was shown on Dragon of Mount Gulg, a reprint of Ancient Copper Dragon, while Nomura’s art came through on the Yuffie Kisaragi reprint of Yuriko, Tiger’s Shadow.

This isn’t the first time Magic has worked with Amano; for 2019’s War Of The Spark set, Amano provided artwork of fan-favorite Liliana Vess for a Japan-exclusive version of Liliana, Dreadhorde General. That card, according to Shepard, was used in the pitch to Square Enix for the full Final Fantasy set.

Nomura, meanwhile, is working with Wizards on Magic for the first time, and his feedback has been a major boon for the team. “Getting Nomura’s stamp of approval has meant a lot for us in this partnership,” Shepard said. “When we think about the future of the relationship, we really feel like we earned his respect.”

Beyond vs. within

Final Fantasy marks a new era for Magic: The Gathering, as it’s the first Universes Beyond set that will be legal in the game’s Standard competitive format. It also won’t be the last for 2025, as sets themed around Marvel’s Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender have already been confirmed for September and November, respectively.

With the rise of Universes Beyond has come a subset of fans who “wish Magic were still Magic,” where outside IP don’t have such a foothold in the game. The team has heard these complaints, and those desires are not lost on them.

“I hear it, and I respect those opinions, but I still think it’s right for us to continue growing this community for another 35 years, and to do that, we have to keep bringing people in,” Shepard says. “If someone’s like, ‘I love the Magic IP,’ we do too. It’s very important to me in all the work my team does in addition to Universes Beyond.”The in-universe worlds of Magic are about to be explored heavily outside of the card game, with a Netflix animated series, live-action projects for both TV and theaters coming from Legendary Pictures, and books from Dark Horse Publishing. Ultimately, as Shepard says, “We’re trying to give everyone everything that they want.”

“It’s okay if you don’t love Final Fantasy; making Magic for everyone also means not everyone is going to love every decision we make,” Shepard says. “But if we choose a partner that your kids also love, or your brother or sister or roommate knows about but doesn’t play Magic, and it encourages them to join you for a game, we’ve done our job. We’ve grown the gathering by one more.”

2025 isn’t just for Universes Beyond either; the first set Aetherdrift was set entirely in-universe, and there are two more–Tarkir: Dragonstorm is due in April, and the “Magic meets space opera” set Edge Of Eternities is scheduled for early August. Verhey says this all falls within normal Magic release parameters. “If you looked at our release calendar five or six years ago,” he says, “we were doing three or four worlds a year, so it tracks.”

Ahead On Our Way

If there’s one thing Gavin Verhey, Rebecca Shepard, and the rest of the team at Wizards want people to know about the Final Fantasy set, it’s that for them, this has been a labor of love. “It was four Final Fantasy superfans developing this thing, then an entire company of Final Fantasy superfans creating this thing, and we now get to show it to the world,” Verhey says.

Even though release is fast approaching, Shepard doesn’t think this is the end of Wizards of the Coast’s story with Square Enix. “I don’t think there’s ever an end to any partnership. Even if the product is done and we don’t reprint it anymore because the term of the contract expired, we still stay in contact,” she says. “So much like any other partnership, we can revisit it like we revisit our own worlds. I’m not confirming something is in the works here, but it’s likely a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if.'”

As Verhey looks back on the work he’s done, he keeps coming back to how collaborative this set in particular had become. “I’ve played a lot of Final Fantasy myself, but I can’t say I’ve played them a hundred times and know them all by heart, right?” he says. “By talking to people who have a favorite Final Fantasy and running cards from that game by them, we end up with the coolest stuff imaginable. It’s a special set, and working on it has been an honor.”

Magic: The Gathering | Final Fantasy launches June 13 in local game stores and big box retailers. Prerelease events are scheduled to begin June 6 at local game stores and run right up to launch.