The Creative Craft of Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™

Well met, Warriors of Light! Welcome to this creative deep dive on the development of the Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ collaboration. I'm Dillon Deveney, principal narrative game designer for the Universes Beyond team. I am a huge FINAL FANTASY fan. People in the office will tell you that is the understatement of the century, and I will tell you that I (now justifiably) just played a lot of video games growing up.

I was lucky enough to be chosen as the narrative lead for this set's development, following the well-pathed visionary foundations of Worldbuilding Designer Grace Fong, Creative Lead Ari Zirulnik, and Principal Game Designer Yoni Skolnik. And I had the absolute pleasure of spending many years of my life working alongside Executive Producer Zakeel Gordon, Principal Game Designer Gavin Verhey, and Senior Game Designer Daniel Holt on this project. I'd also like to thank Senior Director of Japan Sales and Marketing Yuki Fujii and Program Manager Joseph Leis for cultivating such a wonderful relationship with our partners at SQUARE ENIX: Shoichi Ichikawa and Kohei Yamashita. Without these four incredible people, this project would not have been possible!

Today, we are taking an extended look at the history of this project, giving insights on the creative process for Universes Beyond, sharing some of my favorite anecdotes from this adventure, and getting you excited about the set's release!

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An Anthology Like No Other

Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY was an absolutely massive undertaking. Unlike many of our previous Universes Beyond properties, instead of trying to capture the creative essence of a single franchise into a draftable set or a suite of Commander decks, we essentially had to adapt sixteen separate franchise entries into one product lineup. While many of the FINAL FANTASY games in the mainline series have significant overlap in tone, theme, and tropes, each of their worlds, parties, and stories are completely unique. We asked ourselves the following: How do we capture all sixteen mainline games in just one collaboration? How do we ensure every fan gets something that feels like it was made just for them? How do we cover each mainline game in the FINAL FANTASY franchise?

For such a complicated question, the answer was quite simple: summon the nerds!

We have countless fans of FINAL FANTASY in the studio, and every game was represented as someone's all-time favorite; whether it was the classic retro game aficionado, the nostalgic PlayStation 2-era fan, or the die-hard FINAL FANTASY XIV raider, we had a Warrior of Light for every occasion. Once it was decided that we were only exploring the mainline games, we made a spreadsheet for every game and filled it to the brim with every character, spell, weapon, monster, summon, and story moment we could fondly remember or that was so iconically FINAL FANTASY that it had to make an appearance.

Afterward, I would tour around the office and pepper FINAL FANTASY fans with random questions like, "What's a boss fight you struggled with in your favorite FINAL FANTASY game that you'll never forget?" and "If I told you we were making a red burn spell from FINAL FANTASY VI or earlier, what's the first thing you think of?" I would also ask our SQUARE ENIX partners similar questions about their own titles. Whenever SQUARE ENIX and Wizards gave me the same answer, I knew we were on the right track!

Universes Beyond has a guiding principle we try to stick by: "For fans, by fans." The creatives behind each Universes Beyond release are huge fans of the source material, just as you are. It's our job to ensure that everything you want to see, expect to see, and are delighted to see makes its way into the set. We work in tandem with game designers, art directors, and product architects to ensure everything plays right, looks right, and feels right. Authenticity is paramount for us, and the same is true for SQUARE ENIX and how they view FINAL FANTASY as a game series.

For four years now, our English and Japanese teams have hopped on a call every week with SQUARE ENIX's Development team and spent countless hours working on this project together. Hours into these night meetings (or mornings in Japan) were spent identifying resonant concepts for card art, sorting through thousands of reference images, pitching delightful and powerful design ideas, and constantly enjoying each other's company. We're huge fans of FINAL FANTASY, and our wonderful partners at SQUARE ENIX are longstanding Magic: The Gathering players.

All this is to say, the people who love and create FINAL FANTASY, and the people who create and love Magic: The Gathering, worked tirelessly on this collaboration to ensure that fans across the world could experience the most joy possible when playing with their friends. After all, nearly every FINAL FANTASY game is about gathering your party of friends and saving the world together. And Magic, at its core, is about the gathering! So, heroes, gather your party and journey with me on this creative deep dive behind the crafting of this legendary set!

Setting the Tone

Early in the creative process, we create tonal targets for our work to set our future selves up for success. These tones act as guiding beacons when we need to make decisions on how to depict something visually, what kind of flavor text makes the most resonant sense, or what card name will fortify a consistent theme across the set. For FINAL FANTASY, we decided on the following pillars:

• Epic and Dramatic
• Optimistic and Hopeful
• Cute and Whimsical

We felt like this was a wide enough net to encompass what makes the series iconic, and these goals were specific enough that we could execute on these across the entire set. Straight from my earliest documentation, here's how I defined these pillars:

• Epic and Dramatic: No matter who the hero of the game is, every FINAL FANTASY story has world-shattering stakes. The party travels across entire continents, realms, and worlds facing off against deadly monsters, acquiring legendary artifacts, and mastering powerful magic. They defend their moralities and beliefs while making heart-wrenching sacrifices to save their homes from esoteric villains and godlike entities!

• Optimistic and Hopeful: But even when the plot is at its darkest, there is always hope! The forces of light, the crystal's chosen, and the heroes of prophecy are always empowered by their friendship and bonds, allowing the heroes to break their limits! Even villains realize the error of their ways and walk hopeful paths of redemption when it matters most. We'll see heroes pull each other up from their most sorrowful states, team up to unleash powerful attacks in defense of their friends, and conquer the darkness of despair—together.

• Cute and Whimsical: The FINAL FANTASY franchise spans a wide range of artistic styles, known for pushing the graphical capabilities of every generation of gaming consoles to the next bar of cinematic quality. But no matter how realistic the games get, there is always room for moogles, chocobos, and the other beloved franchise mascots! Cute critters, funny sidekicks, and silly monster designs are all a welcome breath of levity among the epic plots of gods and summons. Our heroes take time to joke with each other, embark on fishing side quests, and master minigames at Gold Saucer. These creatures and moments of whimsy remind us that we are playing a game to have fun, kupo!

With our creative expectations set, it was time to meet up with game design!

Playable Nostalgia

Everyone has a favorite FINAL FANTASY game. Everyone has a fond memory of playing their first game, meeting their first favorite party member, conquering their first super-boss, and finally beating that game. Furthermore, many people have multiple favorite FINAL FANTASY games—full of amazing characters, epic fights, and memorable battle systems. The games gave us a lot of fuel to work with both creatively and mechanically, so we had plenty of top-down designs early in development. I'll let game designers Yoni, Gavin, Daniel, and Cameron Williams speak more to the design process in their articles, but it was important we all came together across our disciplines to make the best FINAL FANTASY cards possible. Here are a few anecdotes that I thought were important to capture, so you can see the crossroads between creative's and design's roles.

RPG Motifs: I feel like we got a lot of mileage out of RPG tropes and iconic FINAL FANTASY motifs. In a lot of the early FINAL FANTASY game concepts, we wanted to encourage retro RPG vibes. Cards like World Map, Random Encounter, and Battle Menu feel classic and invoke the iconic mainstay mechanics of NES- and SNES-era RPGs. Early feedback showed that many people said FINAL FANTASY was their first introduction to the RPG genre, so while we tried to make every card as specific to FINAL FANTASY as possible, there was a lot of merit in calling out hallmarks of RPGs in general with card designs that were resonant and understandable without needing to know any game-specific lore. We concepted most of these cards to be from the first six games to feel appropriately "classic."

Summons: Capturing the summons was key for both Wizards and SQUARE ENIX. Summons needed to feel important, powerful, and like they could turn the tides of battle before vanishing—just like in the games! I think the Saga creature execution is so brilliant; hats off to the Vision Design team for that. Creatively, each summon was selected to represent a specific version of that character, but its card's mechanics are ideally wide enough to capture the essence of the summon across many games. To capture both the Saga and creature aspects of these cards, the naming convention we settled on was "Summon: (as a verb) [Proper Character Name]." Our partners at SQUARE ENIX encouraged us to dig deep into the lore, especially with the summons' card names, to ensure each one felt at home in their respective game world. For example: You'll notice summons from FINAL FANTASY XIV usually have the word "Primal" in their name, as in the game world of Eorzea, many denizens refer to summons as such. Similarly, summons depicted in FINAL FANTASY VI have the name "Esper" because that is their world's term for summons. Summons in FINAL FANTASY VIII have "G.F." which stands for "Guardian Force."

Basic Lands: I pitched this idea during my second week of taking on this project: "We should have one basic land per game. We could do three versions of each basic and get fifteen lands!" This idea was before FINAL FANTASY XVI was publicly revealed. We set out to find awesome concepts for each land. Some were easy to determine—the Sector 7 slums, Besaid Island, Mount Ordeals—and others we had to dive deeper to find a game concept that made sense for a basic land's needs.

When FINAL FANTASY XVI was revealed to us, I knew we needed a land to represent it, but we already did the gag and balanced it across each basic land type … so what should we do? Given some of the early worldbuilding elements in FINAL FANTASY XVI, I pitched adding Wastes to Zakeel and Gavin, and they were all for getting it in, if not just to hit the flavor! We were left with sixteen basic lands, one for each game entry, and that made me really happy.

Job Select: The job system was such a vital element for us to capture. Gavin and I went back and forth on these cards for most of the set's development, trying to find the best way to capture each job and its flavor. I really wanted to ensure the Equipment granted a creature type that made sense for the job, but that extra text limited space on the card. My goal was to have players to find their favorite classic job, put that Equipment into their deck, and grant that job to their favorite creatures (what if Cloud were a dragoon?) or double down on the same flavor (I equip Kain with Dragoon's Lance!). We concepted the original six FINAL FANTASY jobs to be from the first game as an act of reverence to the system's origin and the franchise's humble beginnings. The rest of the job select cards are from FINAL FANTASY XIV, as I believe it's the clearest and most widespread understanding of the job system in the modern gaming space.

You'll also notice on FINAL FANTASY XIV's job select cards specifically, flavor words are attached to the equip ability. The FINAL FANTASY XIV team felt that the fans would want to see these iconic weapons represented with authentic, in-world terms. Since we wanted to keep the card names broadly applicable to the entire series, we settled on using them as flavor words. The weapons from the original FINAL FANTASY are amalgamations of many different weapons and aesthetics, so we did not have any proper names to showcase on these cards. I think it tells a cool story of progression though the games!

Finally, the 1/1 colorless Hero tokens these cards make, as simple as it sounds, went on quite a journey to determine their final characteristics, ultimately becoming the reason we gave these Equipment their subtype-granting ability. A small team of Wizards flew to Japan to meet with the SQUARE ENIX team for a playtest. It was the first time we'd done an in-development, partner-facing Universes Beyond playtest, and there was a lot to figure out and get right. We spent the day at SQUARE ENIX and had the absolute best time playing with over 30 members of their team! I will never forget watching Yamashita-san steal Zakeel's Cloud, Midgar Mercenary with Zidane, Tantalus Thief and yell out, "Thank you!" promptly dealing lethal damage to secure the win.

After this playtest, we went out to dinner with SQUARE ENIX's team and talked about feedback, ideas, and the set's creative direction. SQUARE ENIX felt that the job select cards were close, but not quite there yet. At that time, the tokens were 1/1 Warrior of Light creature tokens and didn't grant additional creature types. We had this great conversation about opening the broader flavor of these cards to be potentially representative of any game across the series and things started to click. Zakeel, Gavin, and I went back to our hotel and stayed up until 3 a.m. (after being up since 6 a.m. the day prior) and jammed on what ended up becoming the final iteration of job select. Good times!

It's our hope that the set feels like the perfect blend of FINAL FANTASY and Magic mechanics and that the creative of both games' strengths shines through. Now, with mechanics laid out, it's time we talked about art!

Artistically Authentic

We knew from the beginning that this collaboration was going to be an artistic challenge. Not because we wouldn't be up to the task, but because we needed to find the perfect balance between Magic's in-house style and FINAL FANTASY's aesthetic. Our cards needed to look at home in the FINAL FANTASY universe while looking like Magic cards. Art Director Eisuke Takeda, Principal Art Director Matt Cavotta, and I spent many countless hours working with SQUARE ENIX to figure out how to tackle this undertaking. To ensure we met these goals, we decided we wanted to work with a high volume of Japanese artists who loved the source material, our house artists who knew the series as diehard fans, and prolific FINAL FANTASY artists who created some of our favorite characters and concept art for the games themselves. And, of course, we achieved many of our dreams of working alongside the amazing celebrity artists associated with FINAL FANTASY; including Yoshitaka Amano himself!

SQUARE ENIX cares deeply about the presentation of their characters, worlds, and stories. They were extremely diligent and responsive partners, helping us review hundreds and hundreds of art pieces, giving us articulate feedback on the spirit of a character's expression or the amount of muscle definition that was needed to meet creator's expectations of likeness. It was an amazing insight into how these legendary creators make such detailed worlds and beautiful character designs. They also worked with us to find ways to update the visuals of retro characters; being very responsive and optimistic to our pitches for new takes on costume direction and likeness goals. It was an epic collaboration between so many teams, so many artists, so many creators, to find the right blend of Magic and FINAL FANTASY.

For many of the retro titles, we created brand-new concept art for key characters to guide artists through the process of adapting pixel art and concept art into fully rendered designs. If we didn't have a chance to make new concept art, we worked with each artist on individual card assignments, then got feedback and confirmation from our partners at SQUARE ENIX that we were on the right track. For the modern titles, our partners provided generous amounts of high-quality screenshots across gameplay and cutscenes along with internal concept art.

We collected all this hard work into an internal document we refer to as a development guide—a massive visual guide that's a one-stop shop for all the information needed to work on a project, like a world guide for a Magic Multiverse set. Our initial efforts resulted in a document that was over 1,000 pages long. Whoops! We were really excited. Working with our partners on what was necessary to keep, we cut it down to a brief 695 pages (much more reasonable). For context, a typical development guide that we would make for a Universes Beyond set is probably closer to 120 pages. Graphic Designer Orrin Chaplin was responsible for putting the development guide together and was a champion—huge props!

This meteor-size document set the foundation for our art development, but before we began commissioning, we needed to concept each card. If you are unfamiliar with concepting, it's the process of assigning creative flavor and writing art briefs for each card in the design file. I went through the file alongside Gavin, Daniel, our art directors, a group of internal subject-matter experts, and my fellow narrative designers and spent months determining the right moment for each card. It's easy to say, "Just show Cloud doing something cool on his card!" But I wanted every card to be a moment from the franchise. I wanted every card to be a reference to a specific cutscene, boss battle, or sidequest. Whenever possible, I wanted to show an implied moment of what a scene could have looked like from a different angle, a new take on a character-focused piece, a spiced-up version of what a turn-based battle would look like, or visualize an otherwise invisible game mechanic. Each card's concept had to be something. We were always looking for places to push beyond our standards for Universes Beyond.

After every card was concepted, we moved onto writing hundreds and hundreds of art briefs and collected even more game references! Ari, our narrative designers Crystal Frasier, Nicholas Marcantel, and Yang-Yang Wang, visual writers Alia Brandt and Jason Ciaramella, and I booted up our old copies of FINAL FANTASY and took screenshots of major moments, exact lines of dialogue, and specific combat encounters and combed through hundreds of hours of game footage to find our most sought moments. This was the deep dive of all deep dives, and I am thankful for how awesome everyone on my team was throughout this rigorous process. Always pitching the next coolest idea or famed moment, finding beloved deep cuts or pushing for their favorite monsters to make a cameo. It was such a wild ride and such a fun process.

Armed with the game footage, the development guide, our art briefs, and the confidence of our partners, our amazing team of art directors went off to the races and commissioned all the outstanding art you see across the set. With every submission, we received articulate feedback directly from our partners. We worked with both SQUARE ENIX's Development team and each individual game team. Everyone had a different opinion on how to execute upon our shared vision. Sometimes they would provide us draw-overs, additional references, and sketches of their own to communicate their feedback and goals. Eisuke did an incredible job of translating all the feedback into English and ensuring we were meeting SQUARE ENIX's bar of quality. Our art directors turned that feedback into actionable guidance for our artists. Because of this, every artist was able to bring such passion, energy, and excitement to their pieces!

A special shoutout to Stephanie Cheung for her work directing most of the FINAL FANTASY XIV cards. If you feel emotional when you see some of those pieces, you have her to thank! And we can't forget the amazing Booster Fun, collectability, and packaging teams! Tom Jenkot, Alicia Mickes, and their stellar teams pushed forth the most amazing alternate card styles and beautiful packaging designs. There are so many amazing styles to check out and collect, and I will be adding my opened Prelease Pack to my FINAL FANTASY collection.

From common to mythic rare, Booster Fun cards to Bundle packaging, this entire set looks fantastic. With the art finalized and card designs locked in, we move toward our final stop in the creative development process!

Creative Text (Card Names, Flavor Text, and More)

For me and my team, this is perhaps the meatiest part of the process. I think I could write an entire article about just this part of development and the production magic we worked in to build this set. Yoni and Joseph had more to say in their articles, but something that I cannot understate about this set's creation is its complexity.

Outside of the massive scope of FINAL FANTASY and scale of content to feature, we built this set simultaneously in both English and Japanese. Something we have never done before but accomplished thanks to Lyz Liddell and our stellar production team! And, as we learned, the localization between the English and Japanese game releases for FINAL FANTASY had enough differences that iconic names and character quotes sometimes were different enough that we needed to explore both English and Japanese audience expectations to find a path forward. Some words in English that we wanted to use as creature types or card names meant something very different when translated to Japanese. So, how did we tackle this?

I, alongside creative writers Matthew Frassetti, Isaiah Clough, Tim Schnei, and Zack Davisson, went through every FINAL FANTASY game we featured and took screenshots of would-be quotes, titles for legendary characters, and names for monsters, lands, and objects. We dug through endless amounts of spreadsheets and text files, pouring over game scripts and cutscene captions. We then worked with fluent Japanese speaker and FINAL FANTASY subject-matter expert Sawako Fukuchi and internal Wizards Mel Louie and Zack Franks to find those exact moments in the Japanese versions of each game to see if parity existed between each line.

If they were relatively the same, we submitted both English and Japanese versions. If they were different, we'd find an English quote that had parity in Japanese or another Japanese quote that was closer to the English one. We wanted to respect that FINAL FANTASY is a Japanese property first and foremost. But both English and Japanese speakers know their games and characters, so we needed both localizations of the cards to speak to each audience authentically. We worked with SQUARE ENIX's localization experts and collaborated with each game's team to find flavor text options, receiving guidance on how to best capture their characters in the most authentic way possible. Of course, Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY is localized in every language we currently support, so my hope is that every FINAL FANTASY fan sees the cards, quotes, and names that they recognize across the set.

After all this, we then worked with Senior Editor Hans Ziegler to see if all our awesome choices even fit on the cards! Hans put in so much effort to make every card work as much as possible, gave a lot of amazing feedback as a FINAL FANTASY subject-matter expert, and went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure every card made technical sense for all your future games. He was such an all-star and always tried his best to make every one of my wild ideas work. Thanks, Hans!

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And, we did it! Cue the FINAL FANTASY fanfare. Thank you all for joining me on this wild ride and for taking time out of your busy day to read this love letter of an article. If I can leave you with anything to think about, I'd like you to remember that so many people are doing their very best, every day, to work on the games you love the most. I am so inspired by the passion and genuine care that every single person, both from Wizards of the Coast and SQUARE ENIX, put into this project. And I really hope you are, too. These games, FINAL FANTASY and Magic: The Gathering, mean so much to all of us, for so many reasons, but don't forget the true power behind them: the power to bring you and your friends together! Now, the rest is up to you. It's up to you and your party to set out and get in some games of Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY. We sincerely hope you enjoy your time playing. May you ever walk in the light of the crystal!

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