It has been 1000 years since the War of the Magi. The Warring Triad have been sealed away and magic has disappeared from the world. However, the barrier between the world of magic and the world of humans is weakening and the Gehstalian Empire have begun capturing and killing espers to create Magicite, a fuel with which they can create powerful Magitek.

Welcome to the world of Final Fantasy VI, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. With Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy in the pipeline for 2025, I decided it's now or never on revisiting my concept for a cube set in the world of FF6 before I ultimately wind up overhauling it to add acutal cards from the world of FF6 more than a year from now.

This cube is designed to reference the characters, story, locations, and gameplay mechanics of FF6 specifically. It's been a fun experiment in top-down cube design to find emergent themes and archetypes that help make the cube feel more distinctly FF6.

All 14 playable party members with designs and flavor that are hopefully evocative of not only their role in the story but also their unique gameplay aspects.

From these some themes began to emerge. There were a lot of creatures that cared about instants and sorceries which worked out well since there's a lot of magic to be represented in the world of Final Fantasy. There's also emergent typal themes. Unlike many magic planes, there's a limited palate of creature types in the world of Final Fantasy 6. There are essentially humans and monsters and not a whole lot in between. This meant no elves, no merfolk, none of the alt humans that inhabit the multiverse.

Between all the airships, mechanical infantry, and magical sets of equipment, I knew I wanted to make artifice a theme. I liked representing Magicite as Powerstone tokens and figured that since, in addition to Magitek, the party uses magicite to channel espers in battle, I'd also include a variety of creatures with powerful activated abilities since Powestones can also be used for activated abilities.

Ultimately, I want this to be a cube. I want to work within the space of existing card designs as much as possible but, for the purposes of creating mechanical cohesion within the world, I am willing to change creature type lines and remove trinket text that does feel like it fits in the world.