One of my all-time favorite mythic rare Magic: The Gathering cards almost wasn’t a mythic at all. At the end of last year, I wrote about how I’d played an overwhelming amount of Magic Arena thanks to the June 2025 release of the Final Fantasy Universes Beyond crossover.

My favorite deck to play is technically a Naya enchantress deck — a red-green-white strategy built around enchantments — but in practice it’s really just a Final Fantasy summoner deck. I made it because I’m obsessed with the Yuna, Hope of Spira, card. Sure, I love Final Fantasy 10, but this card captures so much of what I love about Magic: big creatures, buffing big creatures, and dragging big creatures back from the graveyard. I couldn’t 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) — so I had to branch out into Naya (red-green-white).

When I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Magic’s 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’s design lead.

“We came to the saga creature idea pretty fast and pretty early,” Verhey said. “Once 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 — and different summoners had to do that in different ways.”

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’s 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.

In Final Fantasy 4, “Mist” is a magical energy associated with summons, which are mystical monsters called from another plane. Hence why Rydia’s called “Summoner of Mist.” In Final Fantasy 6, Terra is half-Esper (the game’s unique term for a race of summons that have their own plane and culture), so her dual nature quite literally makes her a “Magical Adept” capable of transforming into an Esper herself and copying a summon on the board. What does being a summoner mean to Yuna from FF10?

Image: Wizards of the Coast

“For 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,” Verhey said. It’s particularly resonant considering FF10’s 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, the entire summoning system is closely related to death.

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’s abilities focus more broadly on enchantments whereas Rydia is limited to sagas specifically.

Yuna is one of only 24 mythic rare cards in Final Fantasy, but that wasn’t always the case.

“She was rare for a really long time, but we do this process called ‘The Mythic Wall,’” Verhey said. “We 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.”

Verhey explained that it’s 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 being one of the most popular titles in the series, it didn’t have a single mythic rare. In taking a second look at Final Fantasy’s batch of rares, Verhey said that Yuna was the obvious choice.

In hindsight, Yuna almost not being mythic feels absurd. FF10 transformed summons from flashy spell effects into the emotional backbone of an entire RPG, and Magic’s adaptation reflects that. Her card doesn’t just enable summons. It turns the graveyard itself into part of the summoning ritual, and that’s something that emotionally resonates quite strongly with the source material.