After half a decade in development, two years spent building up anticipation, and months of teases and reveals, Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy collaboration has finally hit shelves. Even before its official release, the set made history as Magic: The Gathering’s best-selling set of all time, and the weeks that have followed have only further cemented the launch as one of the most significant in MTG’s history.
At this year’s Summer Game Fest, GameSpot had the chance to speak with one of the collaboration’s lead designers, senior game designer Daniel Holt, about the collaboration and how it feels to see folks finally playing with the new cards. We also chatted about preventing Final Fantasy spoilers, how the team manages its regrets, and if he thinks “power creep” is a prevailing issue in the new collection.
GameSpot: You have been working on this set for basically half a decade at this point. What is it like seeing all of this out in the wild–seeing folks playing with these cards?
Holt: It’s wild. It was so secretive for so long. I hear people across the street and they’ll say, “Sephiroth.” And I’m like, “Wait, have we shown that card? Oh, that’s right, it’s all out.”
It’s just crazy that it’s all out there right now and it’s exciting to see the passion that the fans are bringing to it. Something we’ve been taken aback by is the fact that every character or story moment is someone’s favorite. With every single one of these side story characters that aren’t the main party members, we see someone say like, “I can’t believe they included this. This is my favorite character.” It’s that kind of excitement that we’re so excited to see.
Sephiroth as seen on one of his Magic: The Gathering cards.
It really is impressive how the team managed to fit so many characters and moments into the set. What was the biggest struggle with taking over 30 years of content across 16 games and condensing it into one Magic set?
We had to take the approach of [knowing] we’re not going to get everything in. Then, we used a tier system coined by [principal designers] Dillon [Deveney] and Gavin [Verhey]. Tier 1 are those main characters and moments that, if you think of that game, you’re going to be like, “Okay, that character, that moment, has to be here.” Tier 1 is where the main set stayed because they [covered] Final Fantasy I through XVI, so needed to stay in the top level stuff. But for me, on the Commander decks, where each deck is a full game of a hundred cards [dedicated to a single game], I got to go deep into Tier 2 and even Tier 3 moments. I got to include side characters and story moments that maybe you only saw after you put 200 hours into the game.
How did you balance fully capturing some of Final Fantasy’s most iconic moments without spoiling anything?
We had to be a little cheeky about that. We didn’t want to spoil things, and Square [Enix] didn’t want us to spoil things. So you have cards like Sephiroth’s Intervention in here where, you see Sephiroth coming down with a sword. It’s just a cool moment if you’ve never played Final Fantasy VII, but for us that know… we know exactly what story moment is about to happen. In the same vein, Aerith has a death trigger on her ability, so we tied that together. One of my favorite cards in the Commander decks is Farewell in the Final Fantasy X deck. It’s Yuna and Tidus embracing and you don’t know literally what’s going to happen 10 seconds after that moment unless you play the game.
How did you end up deciding which four games to use for the commander decks? It’s got to be hotly debated for sure.
Oh, yeah. Right at kickoff, Final Fantasy VII was, I think, the first one we put in there. Remake and Rebirth are new, it’s on everyone’s mind, and it’s a classic. You know Cloud, you know Sephiroth. Then XIV was the next one we thought of. It has such an active player base and such a large community behind it, we’re like, “This just makes sense.” Fun fact on that one, I’d never played XIV until this product. I put in 200 hours in the first month. I had to go hard on it, just to get that authenticity in there.
As for the other two, Final Fantasy X is my personal favorite and it’s our lead product architect Zakeel [Gordon]’s favorite, too. I might’ve pushed a little hard for that one to be one of the decks. Then wrapping it up was Final Fantasy VI, which is [principle game designer] Yoni Skolnik’s favorite. He pitched the World of Ruin and us focusing on the second half of the game for the deck. I was so charmed by that. Also, VI marks the end of the pixel era, so we actually got one of the pixel games into the four. I think that was important to do.
Now that we’ve seen all of the cards, we know there are certain characters, like Eiko from IX for example, who don’t have a card. How did you deal with knowing that certain characters are not going to have a card and that’s just going to be what it is?
I think you touched on it right there. And I think Eiko is one that… we’re like, “Okay, if we were to do it again, we’d probably try to get her in.” We got her in on the Sleep [Magic] of the set, and we tried to show characters on cards like that.
But me and Gavin, we worked really close together to make sure a lot of characters were represented. For the Final Fantasy X deck, for example, he didn’t have a Lulu or a Wakka in the main set so I made sure to get those in the Commander deck, and vice versa on certain characters. If he had them there, I was less pressured to get them in my decks, but I knew there was a responsibility of that if they weren’t there. Matoya I think is one of my favorite characters from Final Fantasy XIV. I would’ve 100% put her in the Commander deck if Gavin didn’t already have her in the main set.
Crystal Fragments and Sleep Magic cards, both featuring Final Fantasy 9’s Eiko.
When it comes to designing Commander decks alongside the main set itself, how does that process work?
Mostly it comes down to examining what characters might overlap, and using the mechanics. For example, Job Select and Saga Creatures both come from the main set and [the] Final Fantasy X [Commander deck] is a “counters” deck and all about Yuna’s journey collecting the summons leading up to her fight against Sin, so the Saga Creatures work in that deck because you can remove the counters with Tidus and now they stay longer. So it’s about finding synergy there.
Then Job Select cards [work] with Final Fantasy XIV because they’re non-creature spells and will trigger all of your Scion members, but they also build you a board by creating heroes so you’re not wide open to attacks. So it really is synergistic between those.
My real work when selecting the characters and the themes is really working with the creative team. Dillon Deveney was the lead creative for this, and every morning I’d message him, “Hey, I want to put this reprint in the deck. Can it work for this concept?” And he’d be like, “Yes,” or, “No, [but] maybe try this.”
Were there any cards that were particularly difficult either to implement or to come up with an idea for, or that maybe just were imbalanced initially and you really had to work to figure out?
Yeah, Y’shtola in the Final Fantasy XIV deck was actually probably the hardest Commander to do because, originally, that deck’s Commander was going to XIV’s Warrior of Light. That’s what you would think would be the face of Commander. But when we tried that, we’re like, “There are like, 20-something jobs, and everybody customizes their character.” [We decided] the player character wasn’t going to work as a face Commander. We couldn’t make a satisfying, single card for that. So we’ve moved to Y’shtola, G’raha Tia, and the other Scions.
But a lot of the cards in the deck make hero tokens, so you can still feel [the Warrior of Light’s presence]. That’s why we have so many hero tokens. My character was a dancer in the game, so I made sure to get a dancer weapon in there… and I might’ve pushed for the character to be a blue-haired Miqo’te in the art.
Oh, that’s great.
Yeah. But, I think Y’shtola was a little tricky to do. When we got to her and the theme of the deck, I went with non-creature because in Final Fantasy XIV, you’re casting spells, managing cooldowns, et cetera… So I wanted to capture that gameplay with it. I think Transpose really captures the Black Mage abilities. That card having Rebound was the meta of, “That’s your cooldown. You have to wait till your next turn and then it’s ready again.” I designed that because I played a little Black Mage in the game, too.
Two versions of Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy hero tokens.
There’ve been some people who have said that the power creep is very real with this set, but what do you think?
I don’t think that’s true, certainly not for Commander. You have all of Magic’s history to work with here. And I really think it just came down to being true to the characters, doing what the abilities there do, and I think it really plays into the larger environment of Magic.
Have your feelings on Final Fantasy as a game series changed during this process? Are there games you used to maybe not appreciate or like as much and then come round on?
It’s been a lot of rediscovering my love for them. I dug up this old picture of me dressed as Tidus when I was 17, one of my first cosplays. VII was one of my first ones, and then I played older ones like IV and II, et cetera, while going to college.
We all grew up with the series. We’ve all played these for so long. It is really just rediscovering them and the passion. And, like XVI? XVI came out during development, so we all jammed that over the weekend. [I remember being] like, “Oh my God, it’d be so cool if we got Dion in here,” It was so important to me as a person to get that in here. And Gavin was like, “Yep, happy to put him in.”
Has there been any interest in coming back to this series and going into stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics or Final Fantasy X-2–titles outside of the mainline 16?
We certainly have a lot of fans in the office that love those games. I love X-2, I love the dresspheres system. And I need to play Tactics, I know that’s bad that I haven’t. But [as for revisiting Final Fantasy in Magic: The Gathering,] that would be too far in the future right now.
This interview has been edited for both brevity and readability.
