People know Final Fantasy as something they’re fond of, whether from their childhood or from a video game with very high quality artistic assets (characters, dialogues written for them, situations they get themselves in, etc, to distinguish from the gameplay that’s my point). Comparatively, people know Marvel nowadays as a milked to death oversaturated capitalist industrial content pumping scheme, which very little of actual artistic value. They don’t remember the old days when they laughed at Thanos memes anymore. Personally, I fully agree with that stance. Wait, you’re telling me this set draws more from the ancient comic that were actually good so the Magic designers worship them and make it the dream to have this set?

But Magic is certainly very behind, it decided that this cinematic universe deserves far more sets than Final Fantasy. Let’s look at the first one of these to see whether that’s justified. Obviously, it will be very terrifying for Magic to eventually become known as another one of those milked to death oversaturated capitalist industrial content pumping scheme, which is what I feel a lot of UB haters is coming at.

1 Mechanics breakdown

This set, due to its limited size, decided to focus on just five allied pairs and archetypes for them. Two will receive new keywords, two will return existing ones, and one will just spell things out. As par for the course of Magic nowadays, keep expecting derivatives of existing things by squinting a little bit.

1.1 [Web-slinging; Mayhem] = [Ninjutsu; Madness] - Risk

Both of these derivative mechanics operate on the same logical flow: Instead of getting players to cast spells at the unique opportunities of a creature getting through or a card being discard, just having those as the condition to enable this cost for the spell to be cast, normally. It certainly reflects in especially how the word “mayhem” sounds when said, compared to the word “madness”. Or how “web-slinging” is surely made of two English words connected with a hyphen than ninjutsu.

Each side has one mythic commander that gives everything the keyword. Then at rare, each have one land that uses the keyword, whether directly so it gets on the above table (Madness didn’t have this), or indirectly so I forgot to put in. Also at rare, web slinging shows up on two green allied pairs, while mayhem went on in on Rakdos, also it have a colorless artifact. What you ultimately see is that blue plays a splash role with both of these keywords, appearing only on a single fully monocolor card for each side.

As an alternative cost, there’s obviously also potential for a kicker variant. Ultimately, each side only uses it for one of their cards. The mayhem side also have more interesting takes on how this alternate cost changes things, whether by increasing or decreasing devotion, turning a gold card into a hybrid, or just by having the land be here.

1.2 Returning stuffs

Should I bring this section back for EOE’s landfalls? Well, this set has twice as much returning mechanics as that, probably because both of these came from Magic’s depictions of more scientifically close place to our reality.

Dimir’s thing is connive, it appears on the mayhem mythic, two blue commons, one black uncommon, one hybrid common, one gold uncommon and one common colorless card. Hope with that mythic, it’s a clearer connotation between looting and discounting discarded cards than two ways to get stuff into the graveyard so that when there’s 5 different mana values among them good value happens.

Azorius’ thing is modified, it appears on two white uncommons, as much as connive has multicolored wise plus one gold rare and one Boros commander. All of these cards minus the common gives counters themselves so do you want to scream “smh two step value engines”?

Gruul’s thing is triggering off mana value >=4, did we learn our lesson from Beanstalk? Or learn the way to solve it in FIN’s Izzet archetype? Gruul got a quadrant or red and green creatures of common and uncommon, actually expand that with Gruul the color pair too, and lastly there’s a bite spell too.

1.3 Commanders overload

You thought Final Fantasy with its mess of commanders all the way down to uncommon were insane enough? Maybe you have seen nothing.

Here, we get commanders at literally every rarity, you already got the mythics, the rares, the uncommons, but now we finally get down to common. Granted, these aren’t the first common commanders to ever exists, there have been MTGO downshifting some absolute classics from Legends, or the basic commanders that have to exist in case those 20 cards boosters can’t provide enough.

1.3.1 Draft set / Mythics

These things take 2/3rd of the slots, which really says something I feel. The big cycle of note is a set of MDFCs that finally can transform, where one face is a theoretical normal person’s name so the card is a single color with either an arrival trigger or an unblockable curious* creature.

Then their back faces are the superheroes they would become, with three colors so all the bells and whistles a commander have. Which three colors? Two cards expand to the shard where their original color is the center. Two cards expand to the shard where their original color is the left one, they’re the villains, the only black cards. And one last card expands to the wedge where its original color is the center.

Therefore, the most common color, is red with four cards. The other three colors have three each, white have this many because that’s how many heroes are here. Well technically one of the villain is a hero too, go figure. Go figure that we finally figure to put Hero and Villain on the typeline, as stressful as it is to the typeline overall, especially on the front face where the set symbol still needs to exist.