While other long-running series struggle to reinvent themselves when the formula gets stale, Final Fantasy benefits from the way each game is something new. That said, we do love to see how Biggs and Wedge and crystals and all the other recurring elements are reinterpreted each time. Final Fantasy 16 going all grim and Game of Thrones-y wouldn’t have the same impact if characters hadn’t been riding bright yellow chocobos while swearing and hacking each other to gory bits.
Final Fantasy 15 reimagined the JRPG as a road trip across America, only instead of oversized roadside attractions being like the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine, they’re gigantic creatures you can hunt. The adamantoise, a chelonian monster that’s appeared in various forms since Final Fantasy 2, showed up in FF15 as a straight-up kaiju with a mountain on its back. Depending what level you were and how effectively you’d stacked buffs, fighting it could take hours.
The Ancient Adamantoise is just as tough to kill in Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy crossover. It’s got a toughness of 20 and three points of ward you have to get through each time you attack it. However, it also tanks every point of damage you and your creatures would normally take, and it doesn’t heal back to full at the end of the turn. Just like the videogame superboss, it can be killed by repeatedly hitting it in the toe over the course of several hours.
(Several hours is not a joke. It’s got 5,624,000 hit points. Before the game’s release, Final Fantasy director Hajime Tabate suggested that it might take as many as 30 in-game days or 15 real-time hours to defeat.)
Killing the Ancient Adamantoise in the videogame is worth that chunk of your limited time on Earth because it rewards you with an amulet that maxes out your hit points, some useful adamantite material for crafting spells with, and meat you can cook in one of FF15’s typically lavish meals by combining it with Kettier Ginger for a boost to your attack, HP, and regen.
That stack of rewards is also translated into Magic: The Gathering, where killing the Ancient Adamantoise will earn you 10 treasure tokens, each of which can be spent for a point of mana—though they enter tapped so you can’t use them straight away. Still, that’s a pretty good haul that will make your next turn a game changer. When your opponent drops eight mana on the Ancient Adamantoise, they’re not just playing a Big Boy—they’re throwing down a challenge. Topple this tortoise before they kill you with it, and the whole match might be yours.
FF15 is also represented in cards representing a fishing minigame, and one of the 15 different Cids you can have in your deck all at once. Cid’s often an airship pilot or inventor in other games, but in FF15 he just runs the garage where you get your car repaired. Though eventually you can turn it into a flying machine, as seen in the art for Ancient Adamantoise, where it’s about to get chomped and taken back to the shop for maintenance yet again.
Magic: The Gathering—Final Fantasy will be released on June 13. It’s the first of Magic’s Universes Beyond crossover sets to be legal in standard format, as will its follow-ups like Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
