Magic: The Gathering

Having already out pre-orders of many packs and bundles already, the Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy cards officially will be released June 13 and Principal Designer Gavin Verhey and Executive Producer Zakeel Gordon were on hand at IGN Live today to discuss the much-anticipated collaboration.

Verhey and Gordon said that there have been other IP crossovers with Magic before, Final Fantasy was particularly exciting because, as Verhey put it, “It’s Final Fantasy! That really helps! We’ve been working on this set for about five years.”

The duo noted everyone at Wizards of the Coast were big fans of Final Fantasy, noting most had been playing the games longer than they’d played Magic and means so much to them.

Verhery said their approach was to incorporate something from all 15 games – which upped to 16 as they were working on the cards – which began with making spreadsheets of all the characters, items and story modes. They then split up the possible inclusions into three tiers – what Verhey described as the “gotta have: primary elements and most popular characters, followed by the second tier, which is where “cool side characters” came into play, while the third tier were the deep cuts, “like Guy speaking beaver. We wanted to get it all in there. Every game is represented from most iconic characters to deep cuts you can’t believe they put on a Magic card.”

There are four Commander decks, based on Final Fantasy X, XIV, VI and VII and Verhery promised “Everything besides the lands is themed to the game” and that playing the FF7 deck “ is like seeing the whole game play out before you eyes.” Added Gordon, “We chose those decks to represent different eras. We tried to really get the breadth of the entire franchise in our product.”

Gordon said inevitably they still couldn’t include every single character or game aspect they would have liked, given they didn’t have unlimited cards, noting, “The big challenge is we were going for the entire mainline series. We limited it to core games which left out a few great characters, but by design.”

Gordon explained that the Through the Ages cards, which include classic Final Fantasy artwork was an idea that came up halfway through the development process, simply because they were looking at the art – from the likes of Yoshitaka Amano and Tetsuya Nomura – so much already and, as Gordon put it “The art was so amazing they wanted to put it on cards.”

A couple of lucky fans at IGN Live were given decks of cards before release and when showing them off, their decks included the likes of Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth and Final Fantasy IV’s Rosa. Verhey said he felt that was an appeal of the Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy cards – taking two characters “you’d never see in [the same] game but here they are together.”