Having already out pre-orders of many packs and bundles already, the Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy playing cards formally shall be launched June 13 and Principal Designer Gavin Verhey and Government Producer Zakeel Gordon had been on hand at IGN Live at the moment to debate the a lot-anticipated collaboration.
Verhey and Gordon mentioned that there have been different IP crossovers with Magic earlier than, Final Fantasy was notably thrilling as a result of, as Verhey put it, “It’s Final Fantasy! That basically helps! We’ve been working on this set for about 5 years.”
The duo famous everybody at Wizards of the Coast had been huge followers of Final Fantasy, noting most had been taking part in the video games longer than they’d performed Magic and means a lot to them.
Verhery mentioned their method was to include one thing from all 15 video games – which upped to 16 as they had been working on the playing cards – which started with making spreadsheets of all the characters, objects and story modes. They then break up up the potential inclusions into three tiers – what Verhey described as the “gotta have: main parts and hottest characters, adopted by the second tier, which is the place “cool aspect characters” got here into play, whereas the third tier had been the deep cuts, “like Man talking beaver. We wished to get all of it in there. Each recreation is represented from most iconic characters to deep cuts you possibly can’t consider they put on a Magic card.”
There are 4 Commander decks, based mostly on Final Fantasy X, XIV, VI and VII and Verhery promised “All the pieces moreover the lands is themed to the recreation” and that taking part in the FF7 deck “ is like seeing the entire recreation play out earlier than you eyes.” Added Gordon, “We selected these decks to symbolize totally different eras. We tried to actually get the breadth of the total franchise in our product.”
Gordon mentioned inevitably they nonetheless couldn’t embrace each single character or recreation side they might have favored, given they didn’t have limitless playing cards, noting, “The huge problem is we had been going for the total mainline collection. We restricted it to core video games which omitted a couple of nice characters, however by design.”
Gordon defined that the Via the Ages playing cards, which embrace basic Final Fantasy art work was an concept that got here up midway by the improvement course of, just because they had been the artwork – from the likes of Yoshitaka Amano and Tetsuya Nomura – a lot already and, as Gordon put it “The artwork was so wonderful they wished to place it on playing cards.”
A few fortunate followers at IGN Live got decks of playing cards earlier than launch and when exhibiting them off, their decks included the likes of Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth and Final Fantasy IV’s Rosa. Verhey mentioned he felt that was an enchantment of the Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy playing cards – taking two characters “you’d by no means see in [the same] recreation however right here they’re collectively.”