We’ve had our very first look at cards from the upcoming Magic: The Gathering x Final Fantasy set, months before release, and if I was a Final Fantasy fan, I’m sure I’d be very excited right now. (Sorry to be a stick in the mud, it’s just never been my thing). Lots of people are getting hyped up, though – and for good reason: what we’ve been shown so far does indeed look great.
In fact, there’s so much hype around this MTG set, both from established Magic players and onlookers in the Final Fantasy community preparing to throw money at Wizards of the Coast, that I’m genuinely a little bit nervous about the effect it will have on Magic as a game system.
The revenue-making power of Universes Beyond is well-established by now: it’s why Wizards has made it an increasingly large part of its strategy, filling half the spots on the year’s MTG release schedule with third-party tie-ins. Fallout had the best selling Commander precons ever, and Lord of the Rings was the best-selling set. But MTG Final Fantasy, I think, has the potential to be even bigger.
The thing is, everyone loves Lord of the Rings and Fallout, but the people who love Final Fantasy really love it. There are a lot of diehard FF fans. I have no stats or figures to prove this, but I firmly believe that Final Fantasy is a bigger part of its average fan’s identity than any UB property yet announced.
Final Fantasy fans will happily pay $50 for a bubble tea keychain and $14,000 for a two-foot tall statue. And you can already see that that devotion and willingness to spend money on an IP will transition perfectly to Magic, from the way Amazon preorders sold out in seconds, with people spending $210 on one box of play boosters – surely way more than they’ll cost upon release.
When Tales of Middle Earth came out in 2023, there were lots of Lord of the Rings fans who wanted to pick up the cards for their favorite characters or moments from the fantasy epic. However, this year, there will be lots and lots of Final Fantasy fans rabidly determined to own every single card in the set.
Final Fantasy gels really well with Magic’s tone and the sensibilities of its fanbase, so it’s going to do great at the usual UB thing of bringing new fans to the game and drawing lapsed Magic players back into the LGS with its siren song. However, for this set, I’m predicting a greater number of fans will be spending money hand over fist on cards – not to play with, but merely to own.
To me, that’s the danger here. When a trading card game’s cards stop being treated as playing pieces in a game, and start becoming collectibles first and foremost, that’s when prices start to get really silly.
Sure, the most expensive MTG cards do go for crazy prices – but these are all ancient cards, not modern ones, and they still don’t come close to the costs of the most rare Pokémon cards. For the majority of its audience, the Poké TCG has stopped being a game and become just a collectible.
And if hype levels around MTG Final Fantasy reach the level I’m expecting, it could have terrible knock-on effects. For starters, it’s going to draw in scalpers like wasps to a picnic.
With the Pokémon TCG exploding in popularity in the last few months, the number of people trying to make scalping trading cards their profession or side hustle can only have increased; those people are going to be all over this Magic set.
In fact, it seems like they already are. Preorders for Final Fantasy have only been up for a week, and already people are trying to pass off their bagged copies for way above the initial asking price. And that’s before we have any idea what supply will be like.
Now, and fingers crossed this will be the saving grace, Wizards knows Final Fantasy is going to be a hit. Mark Rosewater has said it’s going to be the biggest set of the year, and Wizards has previously compared it to Lord of the Rings in terms of scale. So if the company isn’t printing this set out the wazoo, it’s got something horribly wrong.
But even then, I’m not sure supply will keep up with demand. Wizards has shown in the past that it doesn’t mind too terribly if its products blow up on the secondary market – capitalizing from FOMO with its new approach to Secret Lairs, for instance.
If Final Fantasy is in short supply and prices are driven up, this will be terrible for paper Standard, which has long struggled ever since MTG Arena came out. Much of the appeal of this MTG format is its accessibility when compared to Modern or Pioneer. Final Fantasy, I think, puts that at risk.
Overall, I’m concerned that Final Fantasy could be the first Magic set that’s too big – that pushes the hype so far that it turns the atmosphere around the game into something genuinely unpleasant.
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Source: Wargamer
