Magic: The Gathering’s Beyond Universes crossover with Final Fantasy offers a beautiful trip down memory lane with some really cool Commander cards and deck synergies to boot. It has also made everyone lose their minds as the best-selling expansion in the card game’s history sees prices skyrocket, including one collector asking $50,000 for the set’s rare Golden Traveling Chocobo.
I Didn’t Play Final Fantasy XVI ‘Right,’ And That’s OK
The Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set includes only 77 of these foil cards in total. They are similar to the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings MTG crossover that ended up selling for millions to Post Malone. While there are more of them, making them slightly less rare in theory, that also means there are more of them to be traded between collectors, and one of the Golden Traveling Chocobo cards that’s already been discovered was recently put up on eBay for $50,000.
It was Traveling Chocobo 41/77 to be precise, and it was technically listed for $200,000 initially, before its seller apparently thought better it Wargamer reports. It has since been sold for a “best offer,” so the final price is unclear, but according to the third-party tool 130point it may have been closer to $40,000. If accurate, that would actually made the entire set of 77 Gold Chocobos worth $3,080,000 if they all fetched a similar amount, dwarfing what the One Ring previously sold for.
Screenshot: eBay / Kotaku
The Final Fantasy set contains a bunch of regular Traveling Chocobo cards as well, each of mythic rarity but featuring a different color from Final Fantasy VII, including yellow, red, blue, green, and black. These less rare variants are still fetching wild valuations, with many priced at over $1,500. Other expensive cards include, not surprisingly, iconic main characters like Sephiroth, Cloud, Lightning, Terra, and Clive, as well as summons like Knights of the Round and Bahamut. There are borderless, Through the Ages, and Surge Foil variants of each, upping the prices even further.
And what about people who just want to have fun opening packs, looking at cards, and playing the actual game? Well, the launch frenzy has made Final Fantasy one of the hardest sets to actually participate in as a fan, just as its popularity hits new heights. Play booster boxes are sold out most places, and the collector’s boosters are pretty much only available from resellers at this point for extreme markups.
Even big box stores are turning to scalping. A Target I visited this week was selling about a dozen regular Final Fantasy MTG play boosters with an MSRP of $7 for $15 each. I wanted to cry. “RIP to the casual players trying to find product,” reads a common refrain on Reddit. While reprints are expected as soon as July, and should continue for a while given the Final Fantasy expansion is part of MTG’s standard set of cards (and thus legal in all tournament play), the difficulty of not only finding cards at the moment, but actually being able to afford them, has been a bit of a buzzkill.
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