Inside Magic: The Gathering and Final Fantasy’s Ultimate Crossover

For the past several years now, the popular and enduring trading card game Magic: The Gathering has teamed up with some of the biggest pop culture properties for crossover cards and accessories, like last year’s impressive Assassin’s Creed crossover. Wizards of the Coast’s latest partnership crossover with Magic: The Gathering is a true labor of love for all parties involved, as both the physical card and its online counterpart, Magic: The Gathering Arena, have launched a crossover with Square Enix’s iconic video game franchise Final Fantasy. At Summer Game Fest 2025, we not only got to sit down and talk with the card game designers about the set, but physically play a deck exclusively made of Magic: The Gathering x Final Fantasy cards.

Now on sale wherever Magic: The Gathering cards are sold and available in Magic: The Gathering Arena, the Final Fantasy crossover is a particularly ambitious one. There are four Commander decks as part of the crossover, each based on a protagonist from a different Final Fantasy game—like Terra from Final Fantasy VI, Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII, or Tidus from Final Fantasy X. There are, in fact, cards representing virtually every game in the franchise. For Daniel Holt, a senior game designer on Magic, this crossover is the culmination of years of work, including hundreds of hours of research. This involved revisiting the Final Fantasy games to ensure the spirit of the franchise was properly represented in their corresponding cards.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Holt tells us while Summer Game Fest attendees play the game around him. “We’ve been working on this for four years, so it’s wild to see it coming out.

The rollout for the Magic: The Gathering x Final Fantasy crossover is particularly impressive, and not only because of the four Commander decks and the main set of cards. It also taps into other licensed merchandise from Magic: The Gathering Arena. This includes card sleeves, playmats, and deck boxes. Meanwhile Arena offers familiar Final Fantasy avatars, pets, and sound cues as part of this celebration of Square Enix’s franchise. While the main set covers the whole history of Final Fantasy, Holt and his team were particular in selecting which specific games to highlight with the Commander decks.

“We chose Final Fantasy VII because it’s on everyone’s mind, and because it’s classic and has the Remake/Rebirth series,” Holt says. “Final Fantasy XIV has such an active user base, so those two games were immediately chosen.” The designer estimates he put  over 200 hours of research into Final Fantasy XIV alone to become fully immersed in the online game’s world.

Say Holt, “My personal favorite game is Final Fantasy X, so I pushed hard for that one. Final Fantasy VI showed the end of the pixel era, so we really wanted to push for that, and it’s also a classic fan-favorite.”

Once the four games for the Commander decks were chosen, the decks themselves were built around both the personalities of the characters being highlighted and the gameplay mechanics for each of their titles. For example, with Final Fantasy VI’s narrative themes of rising back to fight against the darkness after a disastrous defeat, the associated Commander deck is one based around reanimation. Similarly, with Final Fantasy X protagonist Tidus being a star athlete in the frenetic game of Blitzball, his Commander deck is based around counters.

As anyone aware of past Magic: The Gathering crossovers knows, not only are the cards eligible to be used in official competitions, including through Arena, but they are often mapped to existing cards with a franchise-specific twist. This remains true for the Final Fantasy crossover and a good deal of the fun is seeing what familiar cards have been repurposed through the lens of the classic Square Enix franchise. In working directly with Square Enix, Holt and his team discovered that not only do people at Square love and play Magic: The Gathering themselves, but participated in play-testing with the crossover cards when the Wizards of the Coast team traveled to visit Square Enix in Japan, with everyone enjoyably collaborating to bring this project together.

“It was just drawing from all this source material, our childhood and our favorite memories of the games,” Holt smiles as his and the team’s passion project is finally out in the world. “With this project specifically, we had the right people at the right time who just love this IP. Square Enix was just a great partner to work with. They like Magic and we like Square, so it just went hand-in-hand really well.”

The Magic: The Gathering x Final Fantasy crossover cards, Commander decks, and merchandise are available to purchase now wherever Magic: The Gathering cards are sold. The crossover is also available through Magic: The Gathering Arena.