Beyond Final Fantasy: The Masters of Magic Preview the Next Great Set [Interview]
I had the privilege of attending MagicCon in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, in the midst of the most popular set release of all time: the Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set. With a host of amazing commander decks, recognizable heroes, villains, and set-pieces, the Final Fantasy set has made some serious waves within the Magic: The Gathering community. Given how difficult it is to find product, it seems it was very successful in luring in fans of the franchise…but there’s another set that’s not too far off. Just about a month away is the looming Edge of Eternities set, and after a fascinating preview panel which showcased the return of shock-lands, a revised rule on Commanders (legendary vehicles are in!) and some stunning card treatments, I was eager to pick the brains of a few of the most notable creatives at Wizards supporting this upcoming set.
On the panel was Roy Graham (Narrative Lead), Mike Turian (Product Architect), Jadine Klomparens (Play Design) and Andrew Brown (Game Design Architect).
Due to some audio issues, I’ve transcribed the original audio interview below to the best of my ability.
Jeremy Snow (JS): This first question is for Roy: Edge of Eternities hints at multiversal stakes - an interstellar space-opera like narrative - can you talk about the inspiration for this narrative direction and what makes this story distinct from past multiverse arcs?
Roy Graham (RG): I think when you’re talking about past multiversal arcs (like March of the Machines), those are stories that are part of a larger sequence of events. I wouldn’t put Edge of Eternities in that category, actually. We really tried to make a large story here in terms of word-count investment, professionally recorded narratives etc, but it was also important that it’s as stand-alone as it can get while still being canon within the Magic universe. There are elements of the story that contribute to the larger story-arc that we have been building from back to Outlaws of Thunderdark, but because we’ve thought of Edge of Eternities as an incredible possibility space of storytelling and a setting with deep potential - I think of things with “Multiversal stakes” being the climax of a whole arc. This is not that. This is vast in scale, like March of the Machines, but contained within its own setting and focused on its own world-building. We ultimately had freedom to tell the whole story because we didn’t have to tie in other plot-arcs and close off narrative questions that had been seeded before - so it really is its own story.
JS: Excellent, thank you. This next question’s for Mike: from a product design standpoint, how does Edge of Eternities fit into the larger 2025/2026 release cadence and Magic’s evolving meta?
Mike Turian (MT): From a product standpoint the releases are fairly standard: play boosters, collector boosters, we’ll have the two commander decks as well. It’s interesting because we have these huge universes beyond releases on either side (Final Fantasy/Avatar the Last Airbender). To me, the Universes Beyond products often are different because we’re trying to customize them to what the property is and what it represents. Edge of Eternities is more like: Hey, this is the Magic you know and love! And so we try to build something that’s accessible and understandable. We want people to get excited about the world: every time we get to a new set we don’t want people always asking “Oh what’s this new thing? What’s that?”
JS: Right, you want it to be informed by the releases that have come out around it…
MT: Right, and also too the set coming out in August is the last official Magic set for the year (not partnered). So something we were aware of from early on was the gap between Edge of Eternities in August and Lorwyn Eclipsed in January, so that also played into the strategy as well.
RG: It’s nice also that since it’s framed between the two Universes Beyond sets - I would love it to mean that someone might come in from Final Fantasy and be able to jump pretty cleanly into Edge of Eternities without feeling like they’d have to know a ton.
MT: Yeah - and that’s true too. While Final Fantasy and Edge of Eternities are very distinct, we are expecting Final Fantasy to be the mega-hit that it is, which means we’re going to be bringing in new players or bringing in players that haven’t played in a decade but are saying “Well hey I need to check out Final Fantasy!”
JS: Hi, that’s me.
[Laughter]
MT: Exactly, we love that! Here’s something so if you’re a fan of Final Fantasy you’re saying “This is totally my thing…”
JS: I played a lot of Magic when I was in middle school, so when I was younger I got into it for a while until my mom thought I was worshipping Satan (she found my Dark Ritual and Demonic Tutor cards, etc) and said “What’s this?” so I didn’t play again until college. For the better part of the last 10 years I’ve just had one Commander Deck…
MT: Who’s your commander?
JS: Gargas, Vicious Watcher…big green stompy-stompy has always been my thing.
RG: A man after my own heart.
[Laughter]
JS: So that has sort of been my experience with Magic for me in the last decade and then the Final Fantasy set gets announced and everyone in my circle is saying “Oh man, Wizards is going to get so much of my money.” Myself included of course. Which leads me to my next question: Final Fantasy is so friggin’ huge…is it surpassing your expectations? Is it impacting the trajectory of your future Universes Beyond sets? For example I’m a huge comics guy, and I know you’ve got Spider-Man coming up soon…but I don’t know if Spider-Man is going to bring in the same level of engagement in the shadow of Final Fantasy…
MT: In terms of the Universes Beyond stuff - yes, all of them have exceeded our expectations. We thought the Lord of the Rings set was going to be huge, and it was. Assassins Creed, Fallout, Warhammer…they’ve all done very well. With Final Fantasy we had the highest expectations for - and it’s exceeded our expectations by just as much. Does it affect our future plans? Of course - whenever we see what works or doesn’t work we always adjust and learn from that. I don’t know if you can draw a straight line and say “because this happened then this happened” or dictate exactly what’s going to come next. We’re always trying to do right by our audience and our partners and consider how it impacts the broader storylines as well.
Also consider that it takes several years to make the set. I was the product lead on the Lord of the Rings set and worked on it for four years. Everything evolves: if you want something to be standard legal or modern legal that can change a lot as the set develops, and impacts sets that come after as well.
Andrew Brown (AB): You’re right - we work so far in advance. We’re choosing the places that we’re going to in 2030. We see what’s happening here, but just based on our timelines -
JS: It’s a cruise ship. You don’t turn a cruise ship quickly.
[Laughter]
AB: I can’t wait to see what people are going to be mad about in 2030.
[Laughter]
JS: That’s the interesting thing, players are always saying “Did Wizards not learn their lesson from [this set]?”
RG: We learned our lesson…but it was three years ago! Wait two years!
JS: This next question’s for Jadine: it was exciting to see the return of shock lands, as well as the new spacecraft and station mechanics - is there anything particular about these additions that players should be especially excited about, or that you are excited about specifically?
Jadine Klomparens (JK): I think the station mechanic and representing spacecraft on Magic cards is really cool and I’m excited to see how it goes. It was a fun design problem to work on and the cards ended up really cool. Looking forward to seeing how the players receive them and how it goes.
JS: With the new Pick‑Two Draft format, what design challenges did you encounter? Were early playtests smoother or messier compared to traditional booster drafts?
AB: We’ve been talking about making Booster draft not 8 people for a long time. It’s stalled out over the years but this was the first time when we made a serious push for it. The main difference was in previous attempts we’d use cards designed for 8 player draft and this was the first time we designed the cards for 4 player draft and made a set particularly for it.
MT: If you want to get super mathy about it: if you assume everyone’s going to play 2 colors and there are 8 players, that’s 16 colors and if you divide it against the core 5 colors it’s harder to land on a core color. When you bring it down to 4 players that’s 8 colors which means one person can get more of one color.
AB: In 8 player drafts when you see like 5 cards in and you only see one red card you think “Should I pivot, should I not?” In 4 player draft, if you get your 2nd pack and there are no red cards in there…you’ll say “I will simply not do that.”
[Laughter]
MT: You can see the future very clearly.
JK: Ultimately it’s a question on how efficiently you can distribute the cards. If you open a sealed pool of 6 packs vs booster draft with 3 packs, the booster draft decks are usually stronger because the draft mechanism sorts the cards better. Pick-two allowed us to have a better distribution in a 4 person pod.
JS: Roy, going back to you - how do you approach balancing player expectations of returning characters or planes with the need to tell new, surprising stories?
RG: It’s really difficult.
JS: That’s why they pay you the medium-sized bucks, right?
[Laughter]
RG: I think this is probably a familiar challenge to folks working in a space with 10,000 characters - I have colleagues at Riot who work on League of Legends - it’s really tough when people say “Why didn’t I see my favorite character - Blorgus?” It’s true in Magic as well, everyone has their favorite character. The needs of the game and the set often mean that you’re not going to see the character for 5 years. The way we’ve been doing it lately - narratively - which I think has been pretty successful has been trying to focus the story on characters from the Plane as much as possible. So much of every set is obviously concerned with worldbuilding across however many cards in a particular setting. So when the story is about the misadventures of 4 Planeswalkers bumbling about, fighting each other, it can feel pretty disconnected from the experience of playing the game. At the end of the day, what makes Magic interesting and special is that close handshake between mechanics, the cardset and the game itself. There are a lot of games that have extracurricular story - Magic is one of the only games where as the story progresses, the cards and the mechanics evolve as well.
Bloomburrow was a successful example of this narratively: the story is focused on the people that live here. A story about Bloomburrow and the problems and conflicts within the setting and characters with the Planeswalker acting as a Player stand-in. I think that’s worked well for telling interesting stories, people like the way it really spotlights the Plane and helps them feel really immersed. You don’t know these characters yet, Maple can’t be your favorite because you don’t know her yet.
It’s a balancing act - we have to make choices but someone is always going to be left behind. That’s the choice we’ve made so far. Maybe the number of planeswalker cards will go up and that will change the equation later.
MT: One thing that the creator team often does is they’ll say “We’re excited about character X, can we include them in this set?” Because it’s a card game, bringing them to life again is a matter of “Oh okay here’s a new X here’s a new Y”, for that character.
JS: That is interesting. Comparing it to the comics-space: there are always new characters and stories and spinning-plates…but with Magic because there’s a good amount of time between sets if you do approach and are charting out the narrative it can be a bit more streamlined. If you want to do something with Ajani you can plan for that.
Next question for the broader panel: the recent vehicle/spacecraft commander rule that allows Vehicles or Spacecraft to be Commanders, can you describe a key mechanic or synergy that emerged during testing?
AB: When we make a new mechanic like Station that we want to go out to the community, Commander is an incredibly large part of the fanbase. Let’s say we release a new thing and it’s kinda for you - we want to be able to say “Look at this new awesome thing it’s definitely for you.” In terms of the exact gameplay behind it, stations and vehicles as commander is an awesome change for gameplay because you have to have this first group or creature on the battlefield in the first place. I don’t think we’re going to end up seeing a new terrible “pick-up-your-cards” commander being a spacecraft. You have to jump through multiple hoops to get there.
MT: It doesn’t subvert any of the existing meta. It’s not like “well now I can build a creature-less deck!” I mean, you can but you could before. There was the element that we like of “Hey, these all have power and toughness”…there were already hundreds of commanders to choose from. I don’t expect things to go awry and in the new system there can be more adjustments if needed.
JS: Last question - you’ve unveiled Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven for 2026. How does Edge of Eternities serve as a bridge or contrast to those upcoming plane-based sets?
RG: From a narrative perspective I think a lot of it is scale, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to diehard fans of Lorwyn. It feels like the kind of fantasy world you could find in the woods behind your house, and is one of the things I love the most about that setting. Edge of Eternities has got planet hopping and space…there’s a lot of contrast there to be sure between Edge of Eternities and Lorwyn. I also think that narratively there are things in the Edge of Eternities story that matter in larger Magic arcs - some eagle-eyed Orthos people have already picked out some lines from the planeswalkers’ guide that has…implications for Magic’s future storylines. By and large it’s meant as a kind of reset point for a lot of people after Tarkir Dragonstorm where a lot of character arcs came to a head, and then move into Edge of Eternities where the only returning character is Tezzeret, it’s mostly a new setting, and it’s a breath in before we continue along with some of the story threads that are still hanging.
MT: To me it’s interesting discussing the contrast because it reminds me of the Bloomburrow into Duskmourn transition and then even into Foundations. I know for Lorwyn Eclipsed there was talk of overlap between Bloomburrow and how do we work to keep them distinct? How do you make sure you express how cool it is that Lorwyn and Shadowmoor and other worlds are colliding, and express that in a way that fits while still acknowledging the cuteness/whimsy in the Bloomburrow set? From a Standard perspective, Edge of Eternities is going to be set in a world that has Lorwyn and Bloomburrow in its orbit…
JS: Mice taking over spacecraft…
RG: They’re hitting all the buttons!
[Laughter]
JS: It’s funny, there’s all those memes like “I tap my Ghostbuster to summon X” and all these things from Universes Beyond and I think that sounds like a great time.
[Laughter]
RG: I mean one of my favorite games of all time is Super Smash Bros. and it’s got Yoshi punching Fox in the face…
JS: Thank you all again for your time!
