One of my all-time favorite mythic rare Magic: The Gathering<\/em> cards almost wasn\u2019t a mythic at all. At the end of last year, I wrote about how I\u2019d played an overwhelming amount of Magic Arena<\/em> thanks to the June 2025 release of the Final Fantasy<\/em> Universes Beyond crossover.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My favorite deck to play is technically a Naya enchantress deck \u2014 a red-green-white strategy built around enchantments \u2014 but in practice it\u2019s really just a Final Fantasy summoner deck. I made it because I\u2019m obsessed with the Yuna, Hope of Spira, card. Sure, I love Final Fantasy 10<\/em>, but this card captures so much of what I love about Magic<\/em>: big creatures, buffing big creatures, and dragging big creatures back from the graveyard. I couldn\u2019t settle for just Selesnya (green-white) to match Yuna because Rydia, Summoner of Mist, and Terra, Magical Adept complement her abilities so well in Gruul (red-green) \u2014 so I had to branch out into Naya (red-green-white).<\/p>\n When I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Magic<\/em>\u2019s principal game designer Gavin Verhey at MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026, I had to talk to him about Final Fantasy since he served as the set\u2019s design lead.<\/p>\n \u201cWe came to the saga creature idea pretty fast and pretty early,\u201d Verhey said. \u201cOnce we came to that, it meant all of our saga creatures were also going to be enchantments, so obviously the summoners had to care about enchantments in one way or another \u2014 and different summoners had to do that in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n As both saga enchantments and creatures, summons in the Final Fantasy set can act like a normal creature while they remain on the board. Over the course of three to five turns, they unleash unique abilities each turn before disappearing. It\u2019s a perfect adaptation of how they work in the Final Fantasy games: they take over the battlefield for a short time, perform a powerful move, and then leave.<\/p>\n In Final Fantasy 4<\/em>, \u201cMist\u201d is a magical energy associated with summons, which are mystical monsters called from another plane. Hence why Rydia\u2019s called \u201cSummoner of Mist.\u201d In Final Fantasy 6<\/em>, Terra is half-Esper (the game\u2019s unique term for a race of summons that have their own plane and culture), so her dual nature quite literally makes her a \u201cMagical Adept\u201d capable of transforming into an Esper herself and copying a summon on the board. What does being a summoner mean to Yuna from FF10<\/em>?<\/p>\n \u201cFor Yuna in particular, it kind of made sense for her to bring someone back from the graveyard, and we were working on trying to make some cool cards for Standard that would be really fun for a green-white reanimator deck with summons like Bahamut or Titan,\u201d Verhey said. It\u2019s particularly resonant considering FF10<\/em>\u2019s story: All Aeons are the result of a person sacrificing themselves to have their souls sealed into statues, thus transforming them into fayth whose dreams can physically manifest as summons. In FF10<\/em>, the entire summoning system is closely related to death.<\/p>\n Yuna, Hope of Spira, gives her and all of your enchantment creatures (not just summons) trample, lifelink, and ward 2. At the start of your end step, she also returns an enchantment card from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter (which means it gets exiled once it dies again). Notably, Yuna and Terra\u2019s abilities focus more broadly on enchantments whereas Rydia is limited to sagas specifically.<\/p>\n Yuna is one of only 24 mythic rare cards in Final Fantasy<\/em>, but that wasn\u2019t always the case.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was rare for a really long time, but we do this process called \u2018The Mythic Wall,\u2019\u201d Verhey said. \u201cWe print out all the mythic rares from a set on these big pieces of paper, and we put them all up on the wall in the most commonly walked-through hall in the building. We just leave Post-It notes there, so people can leave comments as they walk by while walking to lunch or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Verhey explained that it\u2019s an organic way to get all sorts of feedback from random people at Wizards of the Coast. One particular note that stuck out on the Mythic Wall was simple: despite FF10 <\/em>being one of the most popular titles in the series, it didn\u2019t have a single mythic rare. In taking a second look at Final Fantasy<\/em>\u2019s batch of rares, Verhey said that Yuna was the obvious choice.<\/p>\n In hindsight, Yuna almost not being mythic feels absurd. FF10<\/em> transformed summons from flashy spell effects into the emotional backbone of an entire RPG, and Magic<\/em>\u2019s adaptation reflects that. Her card doesn\u2019t just enable summons. It turns the graveyard itself into part of the summoning ritual, and that\u2019s something that emotionally resonates quite strongly with the source material.<\/p>\n ![\"yuna](\"https:\/\/static0.polygonimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/yuna-mtg-debut-showcase.png?q=70&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1\")
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