We’re expecting a horde of MTG Final Fantasy spoilers for Saturday’s Pax East panel, but a few have come early to avoid the rush. This set is stuffed full of legendary creature cards, representing every character from the Final Fantasy franchise worth knowing, and we’ve two new ones to look at now. They are FFX main character Yuna, and FFXIV comic relief character Hildibrand Manderville.
We’ll start with Yuna, Grand Summoner, since she definitely has top billing here. Yuna’s card is the alternate commander for the FFX MTG precon deck Counter Blitz. The deck’s main MTG commander Tidus is all about moving counters around, apparently based on the Sphere Grid level up system, and so it’s not surprising Yuna plays around with counters too.
Yuna has two abilities, both related to her summoning ability. Firstly, she taps for mana, and when that mana is spent on a creature, it enters with two +1/+1 counters on it – representing her literally summoning a powerful monster to the battlefield.
Secondly, when a permanent with counters on it is destroyed, Yuna puts an equal amount of +1/+1 counters onto a creature. She’s sort of like a living Ozolith.
How does this relate to summons? Well, in MTG Final Fantasy, summons are represented by saga creatures. Like normal sagas, these gain lore counters that trigger the next effect in a sequence, and like normal sagas they are sacrificed after the last counter is placed. They just so happen to also be creatures that can attack.
So when your summon’s time is up and it goes to the graveyard, it’s going to trigger Yuna, and she’ll pop three or four +1/+1 counters onto another creature, powering it up.
You’ll probably want to play a bunch of sagas in a Yuna deck, but if you wanted to get cute with it, you could also take advantage of a sacrifice outlet and cards that come with tons of counters like The Millenium Calendar or Dark Depths.
Then we have Hildibrand Manderville, a character from FFXIV who was apparently assumed dead only to turn up with a bunch of zombies who see him as one of their own and copy his mannerisms.
In card form, Hildibrand has an adventure that creates a zombie, and he buffs creature tokens. But when he dies, you can recast his adventure from the graveyard until the end of your next turn, just like Mosswood Dreadknight. This is a sneaky little gag, a reference to Hildibrand’s ridiculous quest chain, which goes all the way from ‘Hildibrand Adventures’ to ‘ Inconceivably Further Hildibrand Adventures’.
An interesting thing about this card is it doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with the deck’s commander, Y’shtola. True, replaying the adventure again and again does give you lots of Y’shtola triggers, but it has me wondering whether there’s a token subtheme to the deck, or if Hildibrand’s ability is only meant to buff his own zombies.
If you’re excited for MTG Final Fantasy, come join our Discord and gawk with us at all the pretty reveals on Saturday. If it’s not for you… well, there’s plenty more of interest on the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
