After last weekend’s Prerelease, Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy set is officially out in the wild. Players are cracking their packs and sharing their pulls, grappling with the hugely inflated prices at this early stage. It’s an exciting time for Magic, but it’s not without its pitfalls. With the set under a microscope, players have discovered a number of clear quality control issues with MTG Final Fantasy.
From mistakes on card text to incorrect artist attribution, there’s a lot going on here, only some of which has been formally acknowledged by Wizards. Some of these issues, like a switched rarity stamp on an in-demand card, could even have financial implications down the road. Despite this, it’s discouraging to see so many minor errors amid the excitement of the Final Fantasy launch. It doesn’t bode well for future Universes Beyond Standard sets if the first one is already buckling under the added pressure.
The Quality Control Issues Of MTG Final Fantasy
If you’ve been following the set on socials this week, you’ve probably seen a few of the MTG Final Fantasy quality control issues for yourself. Just yesterday, for example, trirayoute noticed that their French copy of Summon: Fat Chocobo had two Chapter III’s, rather than a III and a IV. This misprint, if played as it reads, would result in a strictly worse Chocobo, dying one turn earlier.
This isn’t the only card text issue we’ve seen, either. Last week the official Japanese MTG website posted corrections for the Japanese-language printings of Triple Triad and Gogo, Mysterious Mime. Both cards had minor errors, with Triple Triad’s actually making the card a good bit better.
Some cards have even had their artwork wrongly attributed. Both Jumbo Cactuar and Promise of Loyalty had errors in this area. These were addressed by Wizards in a brief statement on Monday. These will be corrected on digital platforms, but it’s still a hit for the artists who created each piece.
Perhaps the most interesting Final Fantasy misprint we’ve seen so far is that of Yuna, Hope of Spira. This card is a mythic rare, but the Japanese borderless version, as you can see above, is marked as a rare. Before you get too excited, Wizards has acknowledged this issue, and noted that it doesn’t mean the card will drop at a higher rate in Japanese boosters.
They did note that future printings will be corrected, however, which makes this misprint a rare limited edition. A copy has already sold on Canadian Ebay for the equivalent of $220. This is about seven times the current value of the base version. As if Final Fantasy didn’t have enough collector’s items, this misprint has created one more.
A Sign Of Things To Come?
While the Yuna example is a fun curio for the set, the other misprints are undeniably net negatives. Cards with incorrect text are awkward to play with, and can lead to wasted time as players look them up. Artists not getting their due credit is unfortunate too.
These quality control issues with Final Fantasy aren’t the first of their kind for MTG by a long shot. Most sets now have some kind of similar problem. Just a couple of months back, we saw strange pack distribution in Tarkir: Dragonstorm, for example. As Magic: The Gathering ramps up its global reach, demands on supply are clearly creating more problems like this.
Given how popular Final Fantasy is, this sets a worrying precedent. If quality control is slipping already, we can likely expect similar issues for Spider-Man and Avatar later in the year. More misprints is bad for the game no matter how you slice it, so hopefully Wizards can get a handle on this sooner rather than later.
Fortunately for players based in the US, these problems seem to mainly be affecting non-English cards for now. The reason behind this is currently unknown, but it’s likely due to disparities between printing locations, which vary from country to country. If you want to avoid these issues, sticking to English printings is your best bet at present.
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