Mechanics We Might Find in Final Fantasy

Wizards has allowed us our first glimpses of the long-anticipated Universes Beyond tie-in with Final Fantasy! Already, we can see the ambitious scope of the set, featuring iconic characters from across the full breadth of the beloved JRPG franchise and its spinoff games. At least a few of them are getting multiple cards, or dual-faced transforming cards – giving designers a chance to represent them at multiple points in their journey,

But how do you go about capturing the identities of such a diverse group of characters, each from a different story and setting? Other than a handful of elements, like the identities of summons or Dragoons jumping, every Final Fantasy game takes place in a new, unique world.

To faithfully represent that diversity – and to give appropriate attention to so many famous characters, each of whom is somebody’s favourite – is a huge puzzle for the design team. Luckily, they don’t have to start completely from scratch.

SOMEONE ELSE’S FANTASY

The Final Fantasy series already has its own TCG currently active – one of the more successful non-Magic games in terms of longevity and popularity.

Its basic gameplay definitely takes some inspiration from Magic, and obviously it has also had to deal with the challenges of designing cards for all these different characters and balancing them against one another. 

If I was on the Wizards design team for this set, it would seem almost arrogant to not at least consider whether any of the mechanics used by this TCG could be adapted or at least used to inspire the designs of these characters in the upcoming Universes Beyond products. Even if Magic would rather do things its own way, both games have still had to deal with the same questions within similar rulesets – they might well end up producing similar answers!

A YET-GRANDER GRANDEUR

At least once a year it seems, I will write an article where I suggest or predict the inclusion of the grandeur mechanic in a new Magic product. I’m never right, but the Final Fantasy TCG is a big reason why I keep coming back to this idea as something Magic should take another look at.

The rise of Commander has led to Magic being preoccupied with legendary creatures, but FFTCG has been that way from its inception. Its designers had no choice but to confront the mechanical challenges of how you represent all these unique named characters without unbalancing gameplay. 

You don’t want to have more than one Cloud or Tifa on the battlefield at once, that’s weird – but you do want to be able to print a bunch of different versions of Cloud, and you ideally want to let FFVII diehards play a deck using all of them. How do you make that deck function in gameplay terms? Grandeur is a big part of the answer – or as the FFTCG refers to it, “special” costs.

Many legendary creatures in that game have an “S” symbol as part of their activated ability costs. That means that the cost to activate is discarding another copy of the card – the same ability as Magic briefly trialled back in Future Sight as an outlet for surplus copies of legends. Well, nearly the same: FFTCG makes the reasonable adjustment of letting you discard any legendary card representing the same character (i.e. any version of Cloud can be discarded to any other Cloud). 

This might take an extra line of text to work in Magic terms, but it’s well within the bounds of what cards have done before. Best of all, it creates a very interesting deckbuilding tension between including extra copies of a legend to fuel their ability, and having more creatures you can actually play simultaneously. And unlike the original grandeur, this version could actually work in Commander without needing an insanely specific set-up!

IT’S JUST MY JOB, FIVE DAYS A WEEK

Magic creatures have types. Final Fantasy characters have jobs. It’s very possible that we see the new set simply equate these concepts 1:1, especially since a bunch of jobs are already commonly-supported Magic types: knight, ninja, warrior, soldier, rogue. 

But some Final Fantasy jobs lack an obvious creature type equivalent, while also having very famous mechanics that fans will want to see represented in this crossover. Think Blue Mages, Red Mages, Dragoons and Dancers for a start. The Dungeons & Dragons sets introduced class enchantments as a more substantial way of representing these concepts – could that be a way we see these trickier Final Fantasy jobs introduced?

One job I’m particularly curious to see a Magic take on is Summoner. As mentioned before, the cast of elemental summons (a.k.a. eikons, primals, espers, eidolons…) has become one of the most consistent identifying elements linking the Final Fantasy games together, making the Summoner job equally important to the series.

In FFTCG, summons play an equivalent role to instants, and so Summoner characters like FFX’s Yuna are usually designed in the way UR spellslinger commanders are for Magic. The new spoilers seem to hint that summons will be represented in Magic as saga-creatures (very cool), so perhaps the Magic versions of Yuna and her peers will have synergies with enchantments and sagas instead?

KEEPING THE TEAM(S) TOGETHER

One of the biggest design goals for any Final Fantasy card set has to be to support deckbuilding around specific games. Universes Beyond products are essentially fanservice, made with a hope that they will bring at least some new players into Magic, and in this case a lot of those players are going to specifically love Final Fantasy VI, or Final Fantasy X, or Final Fantasy XIV.

How do you make sure that those players are able to build viable, synergistic decks using the cards from each specific game? There’s too many options to try and assign each one a section of the color pie – and I don’t think it would thematically fit to say “all FFVII characters are red” anyway. Well, how does FFTCG do it? You already know they had to have a good solution for this from day one, or their game would never have gotten off the ground!

It turns out their solution is very simple: which Final Fantasy game a card hails from is baked into its rules characteristics, almost like a card supertype. So Sephiroth would effectively have a typeline of “Legendary FF7 Creature – Human Avatar Soldier”, and then you can have effects that simply say “search your deck for a FF7 card” to support fan-friendly deckbuilding.

Except Magic probably doesn’t want to deal with the baggage of retrofitting a bunch of extra card supertypes that way – it would have too much of an impact on a foundational (if underused) area of the rules. So is there another aspect of a Magic card, heretofore neglected, which could reasonably be used to identify cards based on this kind of flavour association? Of course there is – the watermark!

Un-sets have already shown us what the rules templating for watermark-based synergy would look like, and it’s very easy and intuitive. Watermarks haven’t been used with any mechanical significance before, so adopting them going forward won’t impact the balance of previous sets. Unlike creature types, watermarks are an optional part of a card, so you don’t make the design of future sets more complicated to balance for no reason. 

There’s very little downside that I can see to using watermarks of logos or roman numerals to help tell the different Final Fantasy games in this set apart. It even looks visually satisfying. And just imagine how much more it will benefit the game going forward: using the watermarks to help create synergy between cards from the same Universes Beyond properties going forward, or even to have effects which buff a specific Ravnica guild or similar faction.

THE FINAL FRONTIER

These Final Fantasy sets are looming as a massive test of Wizards design team: not only because these games are a massive and beloved pop cultural property whose fans will have high expectations, but because it raises design questions we’re destined to see over and over again as Universes Beyond products become more central to the Magic brand.

I’m not afraid though; the spoilers so far show a deft understanding of the Final Fantasy lore, and a lot of interesting takes on how to represent characters from Emet-Selch to Cactaurs. On the contrary, I’m watching with bated breath to see whether any of the FFTCG ideas I’ve highlighted will quietly end up helping make Magic better.