Preview season has finally begun for Magic: The Gathering - Final Fantasy. The long awaited release is one of the most hyped of all time and is already Magic's best selling set of all time while the set is still in presales. We're now two weeks deep into an unusually extended preview season, this time spanning a full three weeks, and already we've seen a ton of awesome stuff. Since I couldn't get around to writing one of these last week, I figured it would be great to look back on some of the best and coolest cards the set has to offer thus far!

Saddle up your chocobos, grab your Black Mage hat, and let's dive in!

What's New And Expensive?

One of the most iconic weapons of all time in video games comes to Magic: The Gathering and it certainly isn't cheap. It just does everything. Your creature gets huge, and if it hits a player you draw a card, and then it still has more: you get to cast a spell for free from your hand! While the lack of protection is very noticeable, the effects are like Sword of Fire and Ice on steroids, and players are itching to try it out in several formats.

Bahamut is known for being a monstrously powerful summon throughout the Final Fantasy series and is famous for dealing non-elemental damage. Naturally, this makes him a perfect fit for Colorless. More importantly, though, the destruction he rains on enemies translates perfectly here. Summon: Bahamut blows up permanents, refills your hand, and obliterates life totals both with its incredible final ability as well as its 9/9 flying statline.

Bahamut is a truly iconic summon, but is it any surprise that one of the most powerful summons in all of Final Fantasy is one of the most expensive cards of the set? Summon: Knights of Round truly lives up to its pedigree as the strongest summon in Final Fantasy VII, spitting out an absurd number of tokens every turn, only to make them massive in order to go in for the killing blow later. With spells like Zombify and Abuelo's Awakening, players are salivating at the possibilities of what you can get up to with this powerful saga in Standard.

The Cards People Are Talking About

The Final Fantasy series is well known for its extreme superbosses and Ancient Adamantoise is an excellent representation of this. This enemy is so large in the game of Final Fantasy XV it's practically a scalable mountain and will take an absurd number of hours to defeat, making this a perfect translation to card form. We've already seen one other superboss (Sidequest: Hunt the Mark // Yiazmat, Ultimate Mark), perhaps we might see more still?

The five crystals of Final Fantasy III (really there's eight, but five makes sense here) all make their showing with a series of big, flashy artifacts. The Water Crystal gained some of the most attention as players love the allure of milling opponents out. Every one of them became a solid talking point among players of all kinds, though, and if they don't see Constructed play, they're no doubt going to be excellent Commander staples going forward.

I heard you like card games, so we put card games in your card game so you can card game while you card game! Sounds like a lot, but that's what Triple Triad is! Triple Triad is the card game in Final Fantasy VIII, and is extremely popular among series fanatics. Even those like myself who don't enjoy this particular entry in the series can't resist a good game of Triple Triad. This card represents it perfectly in card form, right down to the cascading steals you can pull off in actual games of Triple Triad.

Magic: The Gathering - Final Fantasy isn't shying away from the series' signature silliness either. Magic players who have never played the game are discovering the fun of suplexing a train, instant ramen entering the game, or the weirdness of a UFO-style alien showing up in black border. In all the fantastical seriousness, sometimes a little levity goes a long way.

Cool New Reprints

When it comes to reprints, there hasn't been all that much shown off in the main set thus far. We've only seen the previously revealed Dark Confidant as well as the newly previewed Syncopate, back following the rotation of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt last year.

This is likely due to the addition of the set's Through the Ages bonus sheet. This subset includes 64 cards from throughout Magic's long history, reskinned with classic Final Fantasy art. For as well-received as the main set is, there has been a lot more criticism levied at this bonus sheet. Many find the use of existing art slapped onto a card lazy and others have noted several cards not even making much sense, like Rhystic Study (Stay with Me). The Battle at the Big Bridge card was noted by several - myself included - as being especially odd given the fact that Magic already has a card called Battle at the Bridge in it. Nevertheless, there are no shortage of powerful inclusions here and many with fantastic art - especially those utilizing classic Yoshitaka Amano pieces.

Also, while I already briefly covered the Commander decks in a writeup earlier this week, I did want to specifically call out the number of great reprints the decks have to offer. Every one of them is full to the brim with powerful cards - even ones that are not just Commander playable but Constructed staples as well! There's a little something for everyone with these decks and these reprints are a great example of why.

Additional Resources

You can check out some additional official resources here:

• Official Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy Card Image Gallery
• Where to Find Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy Previews
• Collecting Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy
• Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy Mechanics
• Where to Play Magic: the Gathering - Final Fantasy

That wraps things up for this week's preview round-up! There's only one more week left to go and there's still plenty of awesome cards to be shown off. I'm stoked to see what's left and there's no doubt there will still be so much more to talk about next week. I'll be back next Friday with more coverage of this incredible set!

Paige Smith

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