Welcome Magic lovers!
I never wanted to write this article.
In fact, I never thought I'd be sitting here, a few, short days before the release of what is already officially the best-selling Magic: the Gathering set of all time, wondering if I'll still be playing this game competitively in the next year or two.
With the launch of Final Fantasy, we've finally entered fully into the Universes Beyond era of this incredible game that so many of us treasure, with the intellectual property of countless other games, movies, toys and cartoons now taking center stage on store shelves, on tournament tabletops and on the Magic: the Gathering cards themselves.
To describe the online excitement and hype surrounding this set as astounding would be an understatement. Final Fantasy was already the best-selling Magic set of all time well over a month before its release, and while many players can't wait to get their hands on their favorite characters, gods, enemies and bosses from this beloved video game franchise, I can't help but feel a deep sense of foreboding regarding the direction that Magic is headed.
I, like many, had reservations late last year when Aaron Forsythe, Vice President of Magic Design, made the initial announcement stating that Universes Beyond sets would be now be legal in all formats. Nevertheless, I chided myself to be patient, and to see how things would look next year. However, now that we're approaching the eve of our first Standard-legal Universes Beyond set, I can't help but wonder, will the regular release of these sets into mainstream Magic: the Gathering slowly be the death of the game as we know it?
There are many potential issues that may arise regarding the handling of intellectual property from outside the game, but I'll try and touch on only the most pressing ones here.
Price
As I write this, a box of Final Fantasy Collector booster packs is an unheard-of $725 USD, with collector's edition Commander deck displays going for an eye-watering $1200 USD…for four decks of cards. Even with regard to the much cheaper Play booster boxes, Final Fantasy is up to $175 each, while the most recent in-universe sets, Tarkir: Dragonstorm and Aetherdrift, never went past $130. An almost 30% spike in price for the cheapest packs available, and ones which contain cards that every competitive player now needs.
While it's true that many of these inflated prices are due to increased demand, as new players come over from Final Fantasy and learn to play Magic: the Gathering for the first time, it goes deeper than that. Much of it is due to the countless Final Fantasy fans who have zero interest in learning and/or playing Magic: the Gathering; the pure collectors, who want to buy boxes and boxes of Final Fantasy cards simply to add yet another manifestation of their favorite intellectual property to their collections. Those are cards that won't make it into circulation, whether on the secondary market or into players' trade binders. Those are boxes that stores won't be opening to provide players with much-needed singles.
Now that we're getting our first taste of this new Universes Beyond world, I think it's readily apparent that this artificial price inflation of regular sets due to outside collectors, or the 'UB effect' as I call it, will almost certainly be an issue with every Universes Beyond set going forward, and will have a serious, negative impact on the number of players that can keep up with competitive, constructed Magic: the Gathering as these sets become ubiquitous.
Cohesion
As I perused the now fully-spoiled Final Fantasy set while trying to come up with some interesting cards to write an article about, it suddenly struck me that I was not actually sifting through a typical, cohesive set, with characters and narratives designed to blend in as part of the larger tapestry of the Magic multiverse. Instead, it felt like I was reading a fan-service checklist of various persons, enemies, weapons and more, pulled from so many disparate worlds that it made no sense for them to even exist side-by-side with one another in the same set. It feels less like worldbuilding and more like world-referencing. The Final Fantasy set has no singular identity, no cohesion, and it's not hard to see why.
For those not familiar with the franchise, Final Fantasy is almost forty years old at this point. I remember being glued to our television's CRT screen as a child, blocky Nintendo controller in hand, battling with black and white mages, fighters and thieves in Final Fantasy long before Magic: the Gathering was even a twinkle in Richard Garfield's eye.
Over the decades, literally a hundred or more different Final Fantasy titles have been released and, unlike other game franchises with persistent universes, they often take place in a totally different setting, with different characters, timelines and even lore. When there is so much source material that a different Magic set could be designed around each individual game in the Final Fantasy franchise, its unsurprising that the result of trying to jam lore from every, single game into one set ends up being a discordant mess.It is akin to PC game developer, Blizzard, releasing a 'Universes Beyond: Magic: the Gathering' set that tried to cram all of Magic's thirty-year history into three-hundred Hearthstone cards. It would be totally disjointed and lack any cohesion whatsoever, and that's exactly what I see when I run down the list of cards in Final Fantasy.
Many names and places I recognize, due to my familiarity with the franchise, but there are far more that baffle me. I'm not sure who all of the protagonists and antagonists are, how these characters and plot points engage with one another, or if they even belong in the same Final Fantasy world together. Often, they have no connection to each other whatsoever, other than the fact that the parent company, Square Enix, happens to own the rights to each. There isn't any overarching story to follow, no struggle, and no grand battle or climax between good and evil encapsulated in card-form to tie it all together. Thus, there is no reason to care at all about any of the lore behind the set, other than to get nostalgia-pilled as I see an enemy or hero I may recognize from one of the Final Fantasy games I previously played at some point in my life.
In all other basic Magic: the Gathering sets, a new player can quickly identify who the protagonists and antagonists are relatively easily, and follow the general story arc that the cards are trying to convey. Often, central characters or forces will be persistent across multiple sets, such as the Phyrexians or planeswalkers, creating a foundational backdrop against which the sets can be designed. This greater worldbuilding was obviously very deliberately done, and is a major reason why Magic: the Gathering cards feel like they're part of a living, breathing universe.
Final Fantasy has none of that, and therefore the set is reduced to simply being a checklist of things from across the sprawling intellectual property of Square Enix. Will future Universes Beyond sets that aim to tackle large franchises be any different? There's no reason to think they would be. For example, the Marvel Spider-man set, coming later this year, has seen so many countless story arcs, timeline changes, and characters going from good to evil and back again, that it wouldn't surprise me to see it also be a disjointed mess of things pulled from the myriad story arcs that the comic book hero has gone through over the hundreds and hundreds of books, games and movies produced for it.It's easy to turn outside intellectual property into a Magic: the Gathering card, but it's a much more difficult task turning into a cohesive set that feels like its not just a checklist of names and places.
Licensing
Regardless of how cohesionless and disjointed the Spider-man set coming in September of this year may or may not be, it has already presented yet another significant issue with Universes Beyond sets: corporate license agreements.
Apparently, Hasbro wasn't able to secure the digital rights to Spider-man (presumably because Disney's Marvel Snap exists). This means that, for the first time in the Magic's history, we will get a regular, basic set (legal in all formats), full of cards that will look completely different from their online counterparts on Magic Arena and Magic Online. Different art. Different names. Different settings, and characters, and world. Essentially, a totally different look and vibe, despite the cards being mechanically identical. In other words, two sets of cards that are mirrored mechanically, but with totally different names and flavor.
The obvious issues with this are myriad.
First, this is clearly going to make a great number of new players tremendously disappointed and confused, as the digital platform of Magic Arena is the main gateway for introducing new players to the game. Imagine explaining to a new player that none of the Spider-man cards they were excited about playing with on Magic Arena will exist on that platform. Nothing connected to this set on Arena, including the characters, locations, enemies and plot points, will be recognizable as anything related to Spider-man.
Alternatively, imagine telling new players that all the in-universe cards and decks on Magic Arena that they've crafted and played with for hours don't actually exist in real life when they show up at their local game store to finally dip their toes into paper Magic. Sorry, but you'll never own that beloved Standard deck that you've spent so many hours playing on Magic Arena as those cards as you know them simply don't exist outside the digital platform. You learned to draft this set on Arena, and now want to try drafting at the shop? That's going to be very difficult since none of the cards look the same or have the same names as Arena. These also happen to be some of the many issues with the Alchemy format, but I digress.
Second, consider the implications for competitive play when tournament cards and their online counterparts don't line up. Having to scrutinize multiple lists of the exact same deck because all of the card names are different, judge calls when players name the wrong card to search for, or take from an opponent's deck, etc. I certainly don't envy high-level tournament commentators like Marshall Sutcliffe or Paul Cheon having to track all of this accurately in real time during a broadcast, as they, like many of us, play most of their games on Magic Arena.
Many other content creators and prominent Magic: the Gathering voices have already chimed in on this issue, and the consensus is absolutely clear: this is an unmitigated disaster that will have a far-reaching negative impact on the game we love.
However, Hasbro has clearly decided that this isn't a dealbreaker, and that sets a dangerous precedent. It implies that, during future intellectual property negotiations, if licensing deals aren't optimal, they will push ahead regardless, to the detriment of the entire player base.
Conclusion
I've been playing Magic: the Gathering since the year it launched, and I've watched the game evolve through all of its peaks and valleys, from rules changes and reprints, the reserved list and secondary market ebbs and flows, competitive play changes and much, much more. There have always been doomsayers, and while that hasn't changed, I never counted myself as one of them.
However, now that we approach the release of Final Fantasy, we're starting to see the impact and ripple effects of ramming Universes Beyond into every legal format, and it's becoming clear that this is negatively affecting the game in some very big ways. In addition, the company that produces the game has made it clear that they have no qualms about damaging the player experience in any number of different ways in order to maximize sales. The Spider-man in-universe debacle perfectly exemplifies this.
So, where does this leave us, the players? For those of us who enjoy playing Magic: the Gathering, whether on tabletops on screens, competitively or casually, it's hard not to feel a sense of foreboding. Prices skyrocketing, confusion over multiple mechanically-identical sets with different names and art, and Magic sets that feel more like fan-service checklists than actual, lived-in worlds. All of this should more than overshadow any excitement one may feel when their favorite intellectual property happens to show up on a Magic: the Gathering card.
Unless, of course, you're someone who has no interest in playing this incredible game, and you simply want to buy pieces of cardboard with names and pictures on it from an external property you happen to be fond of. Unfortunately, it's precisely those customers that Hasbro is designing for, to the detriment of everyone else.
