A warm thank you to Wizards of the Coast for the previews, kupo!
It’s Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY preview season! And that means we all get to see if our favorite characters are coming to Magic. Naturally, we’re hoping that whoever you want to see in the game gets in, but we’re also really hoping Red XIII makes it through because he’s simply the best and the goodest of boys.
Anyway, we’ve got two exclusive preview cards to share with you today, and both of them are in blue. Yes, control players will probably be excited about this, but we reckon most people will enjoy mucking about with both of these cards. So, prepare your Phoenix Downs, double-check you have 100 Elixirs in your inventory you’ll never use, and let’s get into it.
Draw More With Matoya
Matoya, Archon Elder
FINAL FANTASY, Rare
Our rare is Matoya, Archon Elder. She’s from Final Fantasy XIV (14), serving as the mentor of Y’shtola Rhul, and a character who grants aid to the player characters a handful of times throughout both the Heavensward and Shadowbringers expansions. She also made her debut in the first Final Fantasy, where the Warriors of Light recovered her crystal eye by defeating the dark elf Astos, and for this, she gives the Warriors a potion needed to wake the Prince of Elfheim. In MTG, Matoya is a three-mana mono-blue 1/4 that we think players will just love.
While not much in a fight, Matoya allows you to draw whenever you scry or surveil. More importantly, this effect triggers after the scry or surveil, which means you’ll pick which card you want to draw a large percentage of the time. Furthermore, this means that individual chances to scry will be excellent with repeatable sources like Elvish Mariner will be incredibly potent, along with the mixture of Surveil Lands from Murders at Karlov Manor.
Matoya, Archon Elder (Extended Art)
FINAL FANTASY
We’re anticipating a fair few Commander decks built around her upon release, no doubt with plenty of other cards from the Final Fantasy set as well, but also plenty of older cards thrown in for good measure. With the release of Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY, Matoya, Archon Elder also appears in the Extended Art frame, a treatment that will appear in many of the rares and mythic rares from this highly-anticipated release.
We’re also expecting Matoya to work pretty well with our other exclusive preview card, which could be the more powerful of the two.
Affinity is Fine… Right?
Valkyrie Aerial Unit
FINAL FANTASY, Uncommon
Here, we’ve got a boss from Final Fantasy VII (7), a flying automaton called the Valkyrie Aerial Unit. As a card, this is a seven-mana 5/4 with flying, which is a lot of mana for a reasonable amount of stats but fades behind many other options in MTG these days. The good news, however, is that you could conceivably pay two mana for this card, and then it’s a pretty decent one to put onto the battlefield.
That’s because Valkyrie Aerial Unit comes with Affinity, which means it’ll cost one less mana to cast for each artifact you control on the battlefield, and can end up becoming a blue two-mana spell as a best-case scenario. On top of that, the Valkyrie Aerial Unit lets you surveil two when it enters the battlefield, meaning you can check the top two cards of your library and put any number of them into the graveyard, then put the rest on top of your library in whichever order you wish. This works with cards like Emry, Lurker of the Loch, where you can throw some artifact cards into the graveyard with Aerial Unit’s surveil ability and bring them back with Emry’s activated ability. Neat, right?
Market Price: $149.01
The Aerial Unit also (obviously) works with Matoya, Archon Elder, but we reckon it’s got a high chance of seeing play in Modern, too. While Affinity isn’t a deck that’s as popular as it once was in Modern, there are an overwhelming number of cheap artifacts you can play now (including the recently unbanned Mox Opal) where this card feels like a natural fit.
We’re pretty excited about both of these cards, and it will be interesting to see how much of a theme scrying and surveiling are in the Final Fantasy set as we get more and more previews trickling out this month.
Market Price: $158.99
Market Price: $708.79
Market Price: $411.10
Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY releases on June 13, where you can find your copies of Matoya, Archon Elder and Valkyrie Aerial Unit in Play and Collector Boosters along with Prerelease Kits, Bundle, and Gift Bundle. Furthermore, Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY sees four fantastic Commander Decks to collect, which feature Cloud, Terra, Tidus, and Y’shtola!