Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ Set Design: Melodies of Life
FINAL FANTASY IX
It was time for the road trip. Again.
It's 2002. I'm a 12-year-old kid and a year-old Magic player. My brother's and my entire card collection is tucked in one big white box in the back of the car. Snacks are all around us. Everything we need for several months away is stuffed somewhere.
Splitting half the year in Seattle and half the year in Phoenix had its perks: the best of all weathers, watching baseball spring training but still being back in time for regular season, different zoos and science centers to check out. But it also meant driving around 20 hours from one city to the other twice a year.
My mom, ever vigilant, drove straight with maybe a little rest-stop nap in the wee hours. She had razor-sharp focus. Her preteen children trapped in the car with her … perhaps not so much.
So, a deal was forged: For each trip, we would get something new to keep us busy. And through a convoluted series of wires and a portable tiny screen, we had managed to get the PlayStation working in the car. To ensure I had myself occupied, something was waiting there for me: FINAL FANTASY IX.
It was around six in the morning when we pulled out of the driveway. But I didn't care. Shortly after, I unwrapped the game and popped it in. And for the remainder of the road trip, that game was my sole focus. I wandered the streets of Lindblum, learned about Vivi, summoned Alexander, fought Kuja, and so much more.
Not a peep was heard out of me that trip.
The game captured me. There's this cinematic that plays as you boot up the game showcasing the main characters, each with their own insightful quote.
Many days later, finishing the drive and continuing to sink hours into the game, I wanted to share a piece of the game with my family. So, I went to the computer, printed out those nine quotes, and gave them to my mother.
She looked at them. Then looked at me, beaming, sharing my world with her. She swiveled around, grabbed a magnet, and up on the fridge it went.
Years have passed. Many more Magic cards and FINAL FANTASY games have been released. My collection no longer fits in a single white box. But that paper and those quotes still sit in my mom's kitchen over two decades later, their words echoing throughout time. I went over and took this picture recently:
I saw them every time I got water. I still see them when I go home to visit. They're more than just words: they're a love of storytelling. Of a special time we had together. Of how I wanted to share something I loved and how my mom, despite knowing nothing about the games, connected with me over them.
Working with SQUARE ENIX, I realized we shared the same love of games and the power of gaming.
There was an occasion where members of the Magic team working on the set—myself included—flew out to Japan to run a playtest with SQUARE ENIX and show them the cards.
During our playtest, I began talking with one person, a localization staff member. I asked him what he had worked on, and he told me one of his favorites he had worked on was FINAL FANTASY IX.
I told him it was a very meaningful game for me, memories from my inner teenager bubbling up, that white piece of paper on my mom's fridge firmly in mind. I asked about his favorite characters.
He told me he really loved Queen Brahne. Alas, nobody ever talks about her much.
I told him to wait. I walked over and grabbed one of the playtest decks. Flip. Flip. Flip. I grabbed a single card and handed it to him. "Do you mean this character?"
A smile crept across his face as he got to see his favorite character in our game.
Stunned to see us use that character, he bowed at me. I bowed back, my inner 12-year-old beaming.
FINAL FANTASY III
"What the heck is an Onion Knight?"
These words, uttered at a playtest, may have caused every card in Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ to change.
This card, formerly called "The Onion Knights," depicts the heroes of FINAL FANTASY III.
One thing we realized while playtesting is that a lot of people have affinity for some of the FINAL FANTASY games; very few people know the details of all the FINAL FANTASY games. But that led to something cool: a player would ask a question like the above, and then somebody else at the table would begin telling the story. It really encourages communal discussion in a fun way.
To help nudge those conversations along and make it clear what the cards were referencing, Zakeel Gordon and SQUARE ENIX had the idea to put the game number on the bottom of each card. That way, every card acts as an invitation to learn more about the game it references. You can also search the set's card image gallery by series entry. It is a really nice little touch for this set.
FINAL FANTASY VIII
Flashback premiered in Odyssey 23 years ago. (Sorry for that reminder!) Much like cycling, its name was chosen for a mechanical reason more than a flavorful one.
But does it always have to be that way?
We were in a design meeting and talking about adding flashback to the set. We were missing a mana sink and graveyard mechanic, and, well … flashback certainly fit the bill!
I believe it was Yoni with the pitch that really got me interested: what if these were actual flashbacks in the games?
I loved it. After 23 years, we would finally pay off the use of the name flashback. And as a FINAL FANTASY VIII enjoyer (yeah, that's right!), you only play as Laguna in flashback sequences in the game, and I knew I'd want to get one of those into the set.
While not every flashback card in the set ultimately ended up being a flashback—there were only so many good concepts for them—several did, and I'm happy with how they turned out. Nibelheim Aflame was my other "this must have flashback" design.
FINAL FANTASY XII
It is the year 2025. This collaboration was announced in 2023. And that meant I could do something very unusual.
This set was a huge team effort. Not only did the design team work closely together. Not only did we reach out to FINAL FANTASY fans throughout the company for their opinions. Not only did we get feedback from SQUARE ENIX to incorporate into the set. Another secret ingredient was all of you!
Because the set was announced so early and I was still in the thick of working on it as people learned about it, I had the unique opportunity to hear about what people wanted while we could get it into the set! I began asking everyone who I knew who had played FINAL FANTASY what they would most want to see in a collaboration, and I devoured every online thread I could find with speculation.
Two characters that showed up a shocking (to me) amount of the times were Balthier and Fran. While they were in the set as individual cards at vision design handoff, hearing so much support for them ensured their place in the set and inspired me to put them on the same card since they were so often talked about together.
The Magic community is incredible, and I care about it so much. It makes me so happy to have been able to get bits and pieces of conversations into the set. Thank you to everybody who provided any feedback about FINAL FANTASY. From Reddit threads and conversations at dinner to meeting a FINAL FANTASY fan on a cruise ship and staying on deck to talk about what they'd like to see until the early hours of the morning. It all made a difference.
FINAL FANTASY X
Having a brother has many delights. Sharing is not one of them.
We were fresh from the game store running a copy of FINAL FANTASY X on our brand-new PlayStation 2. I say "running" rather than "playing" because it was in the console on the main menu, but my brother and I were in heated debate about who got to play it first. Only one of us could be the first to try it out. Our reasons mostly boiled down to "Because I wanna play first!"
Eventually, my mother came to adjudicate. "If you can't agree, then it's getting taken away and neither of you will get to play it." I stared at my brother. He stared at me. And … I relented.
My sulking was temporary. The opening cinematic played, and I was entirely drawn in. What is happening? Who are these people? What is this monster? Is this the most gorgeous video game I've ever seen?!
But the whole game changed when my brother made it to Luca. Because then blitzball was unlocked. Suddenly, discussing the main game took a back seat to discussing our blitzball strategies.
Enter: Sidequests.
The set was coming together well, but I got an interesting piece of feedback from a playtest. I had all the heroes and villains fighting one another with some moogles and chocobos around, but FINAL FANTASY is so much more than that. There are sidequests and minigames you can spend endless time on!
That's where the Sidequest cycle came from. I wanted to give you something in your games of Magic to try and achieve, a little sidequest of your own. Whether it's fishing, blitzball, or even playing cards (when I learned Magicked Card was a mount, I knew it had to be a card), there's always something else besides combat to do here.
FINAL FANTASY II
"So, you talk … with beavers?"
When the set left vision design and Yoni handed it to me, he gave me the rundown on what every card on the set was doing and what it was trying to accomplish. And one of his favorites was this card:
This just tickles me for so many reasons. First, the idea of talking with beavers is incredibly charming and helps highlight the tone of FINAL FANTASY. it also brings Magic and FINAL FANTASY together: Commune spells, like Commune with Nature or Commune with the Gods, look at cards on the top of your library to find something and put it into your hand. So, it seemed fitting that Commune with Beavers would do the same! This was a great way of naturally blending Magic's language with the lore moments in FINAL FANTASY.
Usually, cards change a lot from vision design through set design. There is at least a year between vision handoff and the "pencils down" moment. Very few, if any, cards will remain the same. But in the case of this one, the core of this remained almost untouched the entire time.
Nice work, beavers!
FINAL FANTASY V
This is the first Universes Beyond set legal in all formats. As such, making sure the cards worked in Standard was going to be a monumental task. Fortunately, I had just the team member up to the task: Michael "Hindy" Hinderaker.
Hindy is a member of the Play Design team. And to give you an idea of how critical he was to the team, when we were getting new desks and I was asked about any requirements for where my new desk would be, one of my requirements was "I need to sit next to Hindy."
Hindy, along with Andrew Brown and Jadine Klomparens, did a fantastic job figuring out what this set would mean for Standard and worked with the whole Play Design team to put it through its paces. One thing they came up with was trying to encourage decks that used a lot of cards from the set. That way, FINAL FANTASY fans getting into Magic have something to gravitate toward, but it also won't power up as much as Standard continues to grow. For example, the Towns deck. You likely aren't going to see more Towns in other sets. It's just for this set.
I, of course, had other ideas.
Including the set in Standard made me wonder if there were any existing hooks we could grab onto. One thing I fell in love with was the idea of a Birds deck, combining chocobos and Bloomburrow's Birds. After all, many of our designers love chocobos, so we wanted to give them a home!
So, I built the deck up. It looked silly … but a lot of it was humming! Sazh's Chocobo and Traveling Chocobo put in a lot of work, especially with some old goodies like Mockingbird. But I got feedback from Hindy and others on the Play Design team that it was really missing a way to interact with creatures.
I had a Bartz and Boko design in the set that needed to change because it didn't work in the rules (classic game designer problem), and I thought it would be a great fit for this role. I found affinity for Birds especially endearing!
While the set has a very low number of Bird callouts, I love that Bartz and Boko is one of the flagship ones.
While I don't expect the bird deck to win a Pro Tour or anything, I had a blast playing it and expect to see plenty of it on MTG Arena and local events. Watch out for Traveling Chocobo and Bartz and Boko at your local Prerelease! Your creatures aren't safe from the pecking of chocobos!
FINAL FANTASY XV
Whether or not you played FINAL FANTASY XV, you may have seen one thing grab headlines: an absolutely lengthy boss battle.
While the fight isn't as long as some sources have claimed, the battle against the mountain-size Eos Adamantoise took me hours. While some claim the bosses in FINAL FANTASY XIV can be longer, none of those have the notoriety of this huge beast.
So how to you represent something that you have to kill over time in Magic?
Well, I invented something we had never done in Magic before to showcase it:
At one point I thought about putting this on a cycle of big bosses, but in the end, I felt it could just stand alone on Ancient Adamantoise as something splashy and unique … and that would get some weird attention of its own!
FINAL FANTASY IV
Sometimes, you just get stuck on a card.
Some designs come easy. I came up with Cecil from FINAL FANTASY IV right away. I was inspired by
But others … are much harder.
I've found that one of the hardest classes of cards to get right are the
Kain was one such example.
Kain is a character who goes back and forth between helping the party and defecting to the other side. You're never sure which side he's on. And I was stuck on this card for ages.
The first version I came up with was this:
Kain {1}{B}
Legendary Creature — Human Knight
3/4
Kain has flying and hexproof as long as it's attacking.
Kain can't attack its owner.
{2}, Discard a card: Untap Kain and put a +1/+1 counter on it. You gain control of Kain until end of turn. It gains haste until end of turn. Any player may activate this ability but not while Kain is attacking.
This was an undercosted creature, but your opponent could take it away from you. It wasn't an interesting minigame or a card people were eager to play, even though it could be strong.
I riffed on that design for a little while, trying variations like making it a triggered ability, before eventually throwing it away and trying this instead:
Kain {2}{B}
Legendary Creature — Human Knight
3/1
Kain enters under the control of the player of your choice.
Kain attacks each combat if able.
Whenever Kain attacks, draw a card, then you lose life equal to Kain's power. Kain gains flying until end of turn.
This was a new design where either you could keep Kain and keep attacking to draw cards and lose life or give it to an opponent to force them to take damage. But this card ended up pretty hard to play, and people didn't want to give it away. I tried out different numbers and amounts of life loss, but the Sleeper Agent problem was quite real here: it was hard to get this at a rate where it was fun while encouraging you to keep it or give it away in different games.
That eventually evolved into this:
Kain {2}{B}
Legendary Creature — Human Knight
3/1
Kain attacks each combat if able.
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, it gains flying until end of turn and you lose 2 life. When CARDNAME dies, return it to the battlefield under target opponent's control at the beginning of the next end step.
It's an aggressive creature for you. Then if they kill it, your opponent has to attack you and take damage! As you can imagine … this wasn't that fun either. Your opponent just got stuck with it and took a bunch of extra damage, or you got beat up by your own 3/1. Neither was a great outcome.
So, I had spent hours scribbling out designs and so many playtests trying this out. I was running out of new ideas in this space. What was I going to do?
I mentioned my troubles with Kain in a meeting I was in one day with Creative Lead Dillon Deveney. Now, FINAL FANTASY IV is Dillon's favorite FINAL FANTASY game, and Kain is one of his favorite characters.
Later that day, he sent me a message. It had a single Kain design in it. And after all my hours working on Kain and trying to get it right, Dillon came up with a version that I thought was just perfect. The card got printed almost exactly as Dillon sent it to me:
It made for a really important design lesson: sometimes you need another person to break you out of your focus on how to make a card work. I was so concerned with Kain's control effect being downside or needing to hurt the opponent that I hadn't even considered the card could instead switch sides but give you an upside when you gave him away! It makes everybody excited to keep trading the card back and forth. Dillon was able to give it a fresh set of eyes.
For his favorite character from his favorite game, Dillon got his first-ever Magic card made. I'm so much happier it worked out this way!
FINAL FANTASY VI
There were a lot of incredibly special moments throughout the whole process of creating the set. But one in particular I will always remember and truly holds the title for the most incredible.
We were over in Japan to meet with SQUARE ENIX. We were all in a meeting room, a totally regular situation. And then somebody walks in with a large black bag.
People started looking over at it and digging through it. There are excited words said in Japanese. Gestures. The chatter elevates. And I can make out a single, repeated word:
"Amano."
When we started working on this set, we knew we needed to involve legendary artist Yoshitaka Amano. At that point, it had just been words. But his art had just come in. And we were about to be among the first to ever see it.
Everybody backed away except for the one person holding the art case. We waited, waited, and then finally, the bag opened. I laid my eyes upon Terra and Kefka:
The room was silent. We all just stared. We moved closer, but not so close that it would disturb the art as we spoke. Those pieces existing in the room was more profound than any conversation. One of the masters of FINAL FANTASY had gone back and just painted some new classics.
I always thought this set was likely to be something special. But seeing those pieces in person, all of us gazing in awe, is when I knew this set was going to be something special.
FINAL FANTASY XIV
For each FINAL FANTASY series entry, I would speak with someone at Wizards who loves that particular entry. For FINAL FANTASY IV, that was Dillon Deveney. For FINAL FANTASY VI, it was Melissa DeTora. For FINAL FANTASY XIV, it was Cameron Williams, who knows the game inside and out. Many of his vacation days actually coincide with FINAL FANTASY XIV content releases.
So, I'll tell you about a story only two others and I could ever tell. It's a very special group. Enter Team Midnight Otani.
Everyone had been speculating on how exactly jobs were going to be represented in this set. The most common speculations involved Class cards, but we had something different in mind: Equipment. While that idea stayed the same, the shape of job select changed a lot throughout the design process.
When the set was handed off from Yoni, job select made legendary creature tokens with no name. The idea was that the tokens would have underscores where the name would normally be, letting you write in your character name. You could also instantly attach the Equipment onto any legendary creature, not just the token.
That had a lot of challenges. We'd have to make the tokens easy to write on, make it clear the tokens didn't "legend rule" each other, and add a lot of legendary-matters effects. As we did more testing, we found most people didn't engage with the write-in element, especially beyond the first couple times. We ultimately decided to drop it for simplicity, instead using 1/1 Hero tokens.
That version of the mechanic made enough sense in the context of FINAL FANTASY and FINAL FANTASY XIV, which inspired these Equipment cards. So, we left it as is. But, in the back of my mind, something felt slightly off. What was the FINAL FANTASY bit of this? What was missing? Like I often do, I kept that in mind as I worked on the set, hoping to find a solution.
Flash forward to our visit to Japan for a playtest with SQUARE ENIX.
We wrapped the playtest and went out to dinner. We asked what they thought of the set. The team was excited and enjoyed almost all of this playtest. But they weren't fully satisfied yet. When it comes to critiques, the main one concerned the job select Equipment and that they didn't feel resonant enough. It was close, but not quite there.
SQUARE ENIX's incredible understanding of games allowed them to provide us with tons of excellent feedback. And in this case, my general design rule is that if I've been thinking something is off and somebody says it is off, that means it's worth looking into.
We finished dinner and went back to our hotel: the Otani Hotel. It's about midnight, but that didn't stop us. Immediately, Zakeel Gordon, Dillon Deveney, and I sit down and try to brainstorm a solution.
We talked through a bunch of solutions. Should we change the mechanic's name? That isn't enough. Should we change the token's name? No, that's not it either. What if the Equipment cards were kindred artifacts? Too weird without it mattering. Then, it hit me. What if it just grants a creature type? That would feel like conferring the class!
The downside was that it meant a bunch more words on already wordy cards for very little gameplay relevance. But we decided it's worth doing. Plus, it opens up the cards to decks that care about creature type. And if we do this, I could tweak a few existing cards to call out some of these types, so it will occasionally matter as a bit of texture.
That concluded the first meeting of Team Midnight Otani. And the three of us have called ourselves that ever since!
Later, when I flew back to the States and put it in, people noted that they enjoyed the flavor it added. And now, you'll see cards like this in the final set:
While the job select mechanic was inspired primarily by FINAL FANTASY XIV, we would later incorporate elements of the original FINAL FANTASY. Here's one other bit of flavor: you'll notice on the XIV weapons, the Equipment cards have ability words. The FINAL FANTASY team saw the artwork for these cards and indicated that the items they represented had a unique name and proposed we add the names of the in-game items to the cards. While we didn't want to use them as card names as that would require the legendary supertype, flavor words felt like an appropriate place to implement their suggestion.
FINAL FANTASY XIII
I think the one thing I did in the set that consistently raised more eyebrows than any other aspect was doing a single meld pair: Fang and Vanille.
One thing I learned on this project is that, when working on Universes Beyond sets, you have to trust the "rule of cool." A lot of people were mystified by why there was one meld pair … but many people we spoke with who had played FINAL FANTASY XIII thought it was perfect. I got so many notes saying "Do not change this!"
I did, however, decide I wanted to make the meld pair more efficient. Melding in Constructed formats is historically very hard. Even if you play four copies of both cards, it's tough to make that happen. That's not even accounting for Singleton formats like Commander.
While Fang and Vanille were originally rares, we wanted players to be able to meld them together in Limited. I knocked them both down to uncommon so that more players could experience this exciting combination for Limited. That's such a fun dream to try and live!
Then, in the very next Draft playtest, Ian Duke managed to build a slow green-black graveyard deck that melded them not once, not twice, but three times over the course of the playtest! By making them both uncommons that green-black was happy to play, the cost to put them in your deck was low enough that you'd take them both, and then … it's time to Ragnarok and roll!
It's a fun little sidequest to go on if you manage to pick them both up in a draft. Happy melding!
FINAL FANTASY XVI
This set took years and years to make. And during that time, a new game in the series came out: FINAL FANTASY XVI!
We knew we wanted to make cards from the game. But how were we going to do it?
I earmarked a handful of slots for FINAL FANTASY XVI designs. Once the game hit, members of our team started playing through it and sharing what might make for cool cards and story moments. It was a very cool design moment, where people were trying to figure out what we thought was cool to include in real time.
From the reliable Torgal to locations like Capital City, we wanted to get in some fresh concepts. One thing that posed challenges for us were the Eikons, that game's version of summons.
In FINAL FANTASY XVI, instead of calling upon a summon, the characters themselves transform into summons. We were convinced that they need to transform … into Sagas!
There is precedence for this in March of the Machine's Praetors. But those cards had a problem: it's tough to remember what they do. Between the creature side and the Saga's chapter abilities, there's a lot of information. So, we wanted to apply the lessons we learned from those cards to these new designs.
But, after investigating a number of other options, it was clear this was what we should do. However, I wanted to make sure they were streamlined and consistent so that they were easier to remember. I created two design rules for these cards:
- The creature sides should just have an enters ability and an activated ability to transform. That way they all work similarly, so all you need to know is the enters ability. Which also works great for when they transform back over!
- The Sagas should only have two different chapter abilities. That way you need to remember fewer effects.
There's four of these in the set: Clive, Jill, Joshua, and Dion. While they still have a lot going on, I think they're sleeker than the ones from March of the Machine. The only exception we ended up making involved Dion, Bahamut's Dominant giving your Knights flying.
FINAL FANTASY XI
There are so many legends we've squeezed into this set. Between main set, Commander decks, and the FINAL FANTASY Through the Ages bonus sheet, we wanted to get as many beloved characters into the set as we could. But even with a whopping 100 legends in the main set, we couldn't get everybody. Sets also need noncreature spells.
However, one thing we tried to do was use some of these noncreatures to show characters that didn't get cards. So at least you still feel like the character is there somewhere!
A good example of this is Prishe from FINAL FANTASY XI.
While we had to leave our Prishe legend on the cutting-room floor, we managed to work her into this noncreature spell. We did this kind of thing a handful of times in the set, and it really makes the worlds seem even bigger and more expansive.
FINAL FANTASY VII
We knew we needed to do Sephiroth right.
He's one of the most popular and well-known villains in all of gaming. We spent a huge amount of time working and iterating on Sephiroth's main set card.
Double-faced cards were in the set from the beginning, as they're the most effective way of showing how heroes and villains have big story-related changes, and Sephiroth becoming the one-winged angel was necessary. But we really needed something splashy when he transformed. Something worthy of the name "Sephiroth."
We tried a ton of different shapes to recreate scenes from the game. One of the most memorable ones set your opponent's life total to 1. But it turns out that becomes less relevant on a huge flier. We removed that ability and kept testing. Eventually, we decided to break out an atypical tool: emblems.
Non-planeswalker emblem generators are essentially unheard of. We have done this once before on The Capitoline Triad. But Sephiroth is more high profile. You should not expect us to do this very often, probably only every couple of years and in very special places. Emblems can't be interacted with, so they need to be behind a pretty big gate. But this is a special thing for Sephiroth. I enjoy that once you have the emblem the game isn't a foregone conclusion. But man, it becomes much harder to fight through. You can feel Safer Sephiroth taking your life force away.
FINAL FANTASY
My family had a small cabin growing up. My mom and dad had renovated and built parts of it together, my mom even doing so while she was pregnant with me. It was our getaway. Goodbye to the city, goodbye to the stresses of work, and hello to a little place nestled out in the woods of the San Juan Islands. You'd drive for about 90 minutes, take a ferry, and then drive another 45 minutes to get there.
It was a simple retreat for my parents. They went there most weekends, especially during the good weather months. But once I entered in the picture, the brown floors and white walls began to see more color. I had tipped the grayscale: now there were colorful cribs, fuzzy blankets, and little bright outfits to walk to the community pool in.
On top of all that, there was a tiny television. with something new that my dad picked up … for himself, mostly. A Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Some of my earliest memories are of me sitting next to my father while he was playing a game on there. He would hand me the unplugged controller so I could "play along" with him. As I grew older, I graduated to the plugged-in controller, then to playing on my own while my parents did repairs, went to the store, did anything else you might do while your child is distracted in front of what seemed like one of the greatest inventions in all of mankind.
But there were rules. The NES stayed at the cabin. The cabin was playtime. When we left, the power went off. It was back to normal home. Back to whatever passed for entertainment there.
We might not have had a console at home, but that didn't stop me from somehow learning about games I wanted from magazines. And I had earmarked one: a game called FINAL FANTASY. I saved up (and probably convinced my parents to chip in) to buy it from the local used video game store. It was one of the first video games I ever purchased.
The next time we went to the cabin, I rushed to the NES. I put in my hard-earned copy of FINAL FANTASY. And the adventure began. I had never seen any game like this! Turn-based combat, monsters, enemies, a whole story unfolding. Much of it was above my head, but I slowly began to figure things out. It was too early to know if RPGs and turn-based games were my genre, but I knew I liked this.
Now, in FINAL FANTASY, the first boss you face is Garland. He comes back later in the game, but you fight him early on. And I had fumbled my way to him, started the fight, and … it was time to go. Sorry, time to turn off the NES and leave the cabin.
The next time I turned it back on, I had to start from the beginning. I did not understand the concept of save points. I started fighting Garland again … and once again was pulled away.
This would repeat. I would leave and return in what felt like a never-ending cycle of fighting Garland. My parents didn't know how to save the game, and I certainly didn't, and the game often got turned off before or during Garland. I must have been in battles with that guy a half-dozen times.
After several instances of this, I eventually grew frustrated and wise and made a pitch to my parents: could we just leave the NES on?
They capitulated. And, eventually, I defeated Garland.
A party of four taking on Garland is where my journey and Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY's journey started. Without it, I don't know if I'd be here today. Those fantasy and turn-based roots may have laid the groundwork for loving a game like Magic.
There's this thing somebody told me once: "Everything in life is training for something else. You just don't always know what that something is yet."
It is an honor, for the Gavins past and the Gavin present, to be able to work on this set. A project truly my lifetime in the making. No matter which games you have played, I hope you find something that makes you nostalgic in this set.
Enjoy. And may you finally slay your own personal Garlands.
Gavin
@GavinVerhey
Good Morning Magic
© SQUARE ENIX
IMAGE ILLUSTRATION: © YOSHITAKA AMANO