When it comes to rules, Magic: The Gathering is a more intricate beast than most realize. You only need a surface-level knowledge to play and enjoy the game, but dive in properly and you’ll discover nearly 300 pages of rules, sub-rules, and special clauses. It’s effectively an entire programming language, repurposed to power a card game. One often-forgotten element of the game is the cleanup step, nestled right at the end of each turn. It’s not something many MTG cards refer to or interact with, but Ancient Adamantoise from Final Fantasy is an exception.
This card represents one of the most iconic superbosses in the series, so it makes sense for it to push the boundaries in terms of mechanics. It’s joined today by Final Fantasy XII’s Yiazmat, another legendary encounter renowned for its length and difficulty. Between these two and yesterday’s Omega spoiler, die-hard fans are eating well this week. While their cardboard incarnations may not fully convey the scale of these monsters, seeing them represented at all is great stuff for the set.
Ancient Adamantoise MTG
- Mana Value: 5GGG
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Type: Creature – Turtle
- Stats: 8/20
- Card Text: Vigilance, Ward 3.
Damage isn’t removed from this creature during cleanup steps.
All damage that would be dealt to you and other permanents you control is dealt to this creature instead.
When this creature dies, exile it and create ten tapped Treasure tokens.
Ancient Adamantoise is an absolutely stacked MTG card. There’s a ton of text here, and most of it is fantastic. For starters, eight mana is a lot, but 8/20 is pretty much unprecedented in terms of stats for a creature. Other than the Marit Lage token from Dark Depths, nothing has ever had 20 natural toughness before.
This massive health pool is a good reflection of Adamantoise’s ludicrous endurance in Final Fantasy XV. It’s also, regrettably for some, balanced out by its second ability. Unlike every other creature in the game, you don’t remove damage from Adamantoise during the cleanup step. We’ll get more into what exactly the cleanup step is later, but for now, it suffices to say that it takes damage permanently and doesn’t recover.
This gives your opponent a better chance of taking it out, especially since it also absorbs all damage to you or your other permanents while it’s out. It’s still vulnerable to hard removal and edict effects, of course, but targeting it is expensive thanks to Ward 3. Basically, there’s a good chance this will stonewall your opponent for a few turns until it dies.
Once it dies, you exile it and create a whopping 10 Treasure tokens. This is a double-edged sword: it prevents Adamantoise from being a repeatable reanimation target, but it also likely gives you enough mana to win the game on the spot regardless. You can actually cheat this exile clause by using a spell like Not Dead After All on Admantoise, but in most games, that’ll likely be overkill. If you can’t win with 10 mana, another 10 probably won’t make a difference.
Keeping It Clean
Exciting as Ancient Adamantoise is, especially in toughness-matters Commander decks like Felothar, the most interesting thing about it from a broader MTG standpoint is its mention of the cleanup step. Even if you’re an experienced player, there’s a good chance you haven’t come across this step in your Magic journey.
Gameplay-wise, the cleanup step happens naturally every turn. It’s the second half of the end phase, after the end step. It marks the point in the turn where you discard down to hand size, remove damage from permanents you control, and resolve any effects that occur at “end of turn.” These are all things every Magic player is familiar with, but it’s rare to actually refer to the cleanup step by name. It’s even rarer for a card to refer to it, it turns out.
Over Magic’s entire three-decade history, only 15 cards have explicitly mentioned the cleanup step. Of these 15, all but Adamantoise were originally printed differently but received erratas to mention it later. This makes Ancient Adamantoise the first MTG card to mention it right out of the gate. This is a small but significant milestone, rules-wise.
It’s best not to read too much into these things, of course. That said, it does feel like an indicator of a broadening attitude to design from Wizards in this set. Yesterday’s Omega, the Heartless, similarly broke new ground with its ‘nonbasic lands matter’ ability. Cards that get players involved with the more technical aspects of Magic like this are few and far between. Seeing one in Final Fantasy, a set specifically engineered to draw in new players, is a reassuring indicator of Wizards’ respect for their established audience.
Sidequest: Hunt The Mark
- Sidequest: Hunt the Mark
- Mana Value: 3BB
- Rarity: Uncommon
- Type: Enchantment
- Card Text: When this enchantment enters. destroy up to one target creature.
At the beginning of your end step, if a creature died under an opponent’s control this turn, create a Treasure token. Then if you control three or more Treasures, transform this enchantment.- Yiazmat, Ultimate Mark
- Type: Legendary Creature – Dragon
- Stats: 5/6
- Card Text: 1B, Sacrifice another creature or artifact: Yiazmat gains Indestructible until end of turn. Tap it.
Ancient Adamantoise isn’t the only Final Fantasy superboss we saw revealed for Magic: The Gathering today. We also got a look at Yiazmat, the Final Fantasy XII boss renowned for its ridiculous HP stat of over 50 million. It’s not quite as impressive here, but it is an interesting design nonetheless.
On the front side, this is a five-mana removal spell that nets you a Treasure. Even in Commander, that’s not particularly exciting, though the fact that it triggers each turn (just before your cleanup step!) is worth noting. If you can amass two other Treasures before this happens, which is trivially easy to do these days, then you’ll get access to the back half: Yiazmat itself.
Unfortunately, unlike Adamantoise, Yiazmat doesn’t really live up to its inspiration. ‘Boss with 50 million HP’ somehow gets boiled down to a 5/6 Dragon with no evasion here, which is pretty disappointing. You can pay two and sacrifice creatures or artifacts, including those three Treasures you have, to protect Yiazmat for the turn. The fact that this doesn’t give you any other benefits makes it pretty unexciting, mind you.
Unfortunately, this is a classic case of a powerful lore character being compressed down into an uncommon slot. Cool as it is to see Yiazmat in Magic, this really won’t be seeing play outside of maybe Treasure Commander decks. It should be an absolute all-star in Limited, however, which is some small comfort.
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