Magic: Party – Final Fantasy Creator Chooses the Right Character for Cards | IGN LIVE 2025

Magic: Party – Final Fantasy Card has been officially released, with Chief Designer Gavin Verhey and Executive Producer Zakeel Gordon taking place today at IGN Live, today at IGN Live, discussing the highly anticipated collaboration.

Verhey and Gordon said there were other IPs crossing before, and Final Fantasy was particularly exciting because, as Verhey said, “It’s the ultimate fantasy! It really helped! We’ve been working on this set for about five years.”

The two noted that everyone on the Coast Wizards is a big fan of Final Fantasy, noting that most people spend longer playing games than they play magic, which means a lot to them.

Verhery said their approach is to combine all 15 matches of stuff – this will increase to 16 matches when working on the card – starting with making spreadsheets for all characters, projects and story modes. They then split the possible inclusions into three layers – what Verhey calls “Gotta has: the main element and the most popular character, followed by the second layer, where the “cool side character” comes into play, while the third layer is the depth clip, like Guy said. We wanted to put everything there. Each game represents most iconic characters to depth clips, and you can’t believe they wear magic cards.”

There are four Commander decks based on Final Fantasy X, XIV, VI and VII, and Verhery promises that “everything except the land is game-themed” and playing the FF7 deck “is like seeing the whole game play in front of your eyes.” Gordon added: “We chose these decks to represent different eras. We tried to really get the breadth of the entire franchise in the product.”

Inevitably, they still can’t include every character or aspect of the game they want because they don’t have unlimited cards, noting: “The biggest challenge is that we’re going to participate in the entire Mainline series. We limited it to core games that ignore some great characters but are designed.”

Gordon explained that the age-running card, including the classic Final Fantasy artwork, was an idea, and it came out in half of the development process, simply because they were looking at art – from art like Yoshitaka Amano and Tetsuya Nomura, already so much, and Gordon thought it was “the art was amazing and they wanted to put it on the card.”

Before the release, several lucky fans of IGN Live received card cards before the release, with their decks including the likes of Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth and Final Fantasy IV's Rosa. Verhey said he felt it was the appeal of magic: Party – Final Fantasy Card – to take two characters: “You will never see (the same game), but they are together.”