Summer Game Fest Play Days might generally be a haven for hands-on experience with video games, the venerable and endlessly expansive tabletop card game Magic the Gathering was also in attendance. Much like with 2024 and 2023 (where Wizards of the Coast was on hand to demonstrate their sets The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth and Assassin’s Creed respectively) the card game maker was present giving demonstrations with Magic: The Gathering community experts and designers alike. This year, the synergy may have been the strongest yet, as Magic was present showing off its juggernaut success new set, Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy.

We split our time between a station set up for Magic: The Gathering Arena (the game’s digital equivalent which has always been a solid stand-in if you have no friends with real physical decks present) and a session playing against Senior Game Designer Daniel Holt. Holt greeted us with the preconstructed Starter Kit starter decks for the new set. Naturally, we chose to use the red and white deck featuring mythic rare Cloud, Planet’s Champion. For those unfamiliar, Magic: The Gathering’s endlessly customizable architecture allows for integration of cards from any set into your deck, and any given card includes a bevy of clues  that point to their set of origin. Each card has a small set-specific icon underneath the art plate of the card and in the modern era, every card features a three-character abbreviation for the set. Universes Beyond: Fallout for example, the icon was the famous vault-boy caricature and the character code was PIP (short for Pip-Boy). For this set, Magic goes one step further and adds an extra code just above the set code. This one shows FF and a roman numeral, indicating which specific Final Fantasy set the card in question has its origins in (all sixteen major games have characters, places or items represented).

Starter decks for any given Magic set are by design, meant to be easy ways to dive into the game in a readymade way. They’re not too complicated and don’t feature some of the lethal, stackable combos that many players painstakingly craft for their decks. We started early playing the adorable Dwarven Castle Guard (from our favorite FF game, Final Fantasy IV – known as Final Fantasy II when it was first released in the U.S.A.). This 2/1 creature triggered on its death the creation of a 1/1 Hero creature token. One of the new mechanics introduced in Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy is called “job select.” Job select works like a way to automatically seed a token creature into play when an artifact equipment is cast, immediately attaching itself to that token creature without having to pay its equipment cost. We were elated to draw Rosa, Resolute White Mage as we ramped up our mana supply. One of her abilities allowed to put a +1/+1 counter on a target creature we controlled at the declaration of combat.

We couldn’t make much progress as Holt’s blue-black Sephiroth, Planet’s Heir-led deck was filled with creature destruction. Twice in a row he murdered our creatures using Sephiroth’s Intervention—itself a vivid depiction of the legendary moment where Sephiroth kills Aerith in Final Fantasy VII—before ultimately playing Sephiroth, Planet’s Heir himself, which innately triggered an ability when it enters the battlefield giving all creatures we controlled -2/-2 until end of turn. We attempted to rebuild with G’raha Tia from Final Fantasy XIV but ultimately succumbed to Sephiroth and a bevy of Undercity Dire Rats. The wildfire popularity of this expansion is set is no surprise, given the legion of Final Fantasy fans the world over, but one thing was readily apparent even in this brief session tinkering with just a few mid-level cards in the set: just seeing some these iconic characters in cardboard form amazingly is exciting enough along to warrant playing this expansion.

Immediately after we had a wonderful conversation with Magic: The Gathering Senior Game Designer Daniel Holt where we discussed the 800+ card Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy set in detail. Watch that interview below: