Last updated on June 11, 2025
Cloud's Limit Break – art by Billy Christian
Final Fantasy x MTG, the best-selling Magic set ever, finally hit MTG Arena yesterday. In a couple of hours FIN broke the game’s concurrent-player record on Steam… and, well, literally broke the game itself!
Less than two hours after the set went live, MTGA's player tally on Steam tally blew past every previous record, surpassing Bloomburrow‘s high-water mark by nearly 50%.
Source: SteamCharts for MTG Arena
And not long afterward, Arena’s servers had to be thrown into emergency maintenance mode to stem log-in errors and disconnects. Here’s what happened, by the numbers.
Cloud's Crew Breaks Arena Limits
Cloud, Midgar Mercenary – art by Kazto Furuya
According to SteamCharts, MTGA logged an all-time peak of 17,989 concurrent users yesterday, at about 4 p.m. ET. This is nearly 50% higher than Bloomburrow‘s previous record of 12,215 concurrent players back in September last year (which, by the way, means that bunnies beat dragons in this department: Tarkir: Dragonstorm reached 12,119 players according to SteamCharts, failing to beat Bloomburrow by less than 100 players).
Notice that these figures only track Arena players playing through Valve's Steam platform. If you played MTGA yesterday through mobile, or the standalone desktop client, or via Epic if you play on Mac, then you're not tracked in the above figures. There's an argument to be made that brand-new digital players, attracted to Magic thanks to Final Fantasy's hype, may be overrepresented on Steam, but it's very hard to imagine this spike wasn't replicated on all Arena platforms.
Source: SteamCharts for MTG Arena
SteamDB shows even higher numbers, with a peak climbing to 18,047 players by that time.
Source: SteamDB for MTG Arena
And if you zoom into the last couple of days, you can notice when the poor hamsters wheeling to keep the MTGA servers running said, “I'm tired, boss…”
Source: SteamCharts for MTG Arena
Crashes on patch day are not uncommon for MTGA, but this time the Arena servers had to be put on maintenance mode, kicking out logged players:
Source: MTGA Status page
Fun little anecdote: The first thing that went down yesterday were MTGA's authentication servers; that's very likely why during an hour or so, the concurrent users curve hits a plateau (a lot of folks were logged in an playing, but new players couldn't get authenticated). Then the MTGA servers crashed so hard that even our servers heard it, all the way here at Draftsim… and I mean it quite literally!
As you can probably guess, these last couple of weeks our articles that got the most readers are all related to Final Fantasy – articles like Andrew's FIN Limited Set review, or Bryan FIN Sealed guide are, as always during a new set's Prerelease, the ones that interest our readers the most.
But our yesterday's winner happened to be…
… our How to Fix the MTG Arena Authentication Failed Error article, which our readers flocked to while they were wondering why Arena wasn't letting them into the Final party.
The Breakings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Y'shtola Rhul – art by Immanuela Crovius
Final Fantasy x MTG is clearly an off-the-charts success story, and is quickly becoming not just the most popular and best-selling set in Magic's history, it may very well end up snatching the “Most Records Broken” crown.
For starters, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks stated that Final Fantasy surpassed previous records based on pre-order sales alone – which means it's not just the best-selling MTG set ever, but also the fastest-selling.
FIN will also forever be the first Standard-legal Universes Beyond set.
“There's definitely a lesson to be learned about the appeal of UB,” noted u/fnordal on yesterday's reddit thread discussing the MTG Arena outage. There's a very vocal subset of Magic players that strongly dislike foreign IPs, but when comparing Final Fantasy‘s Steam numbers back-to-back with those of Tarkir: Dragonstorm – an in-universe MTG set which Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater called an overwhelming success in pretty much every metric – it's impossible to deny the appeal of MTG-izing a popular IP when executed correctly.
Final Fantasy also holds the record of largest number of Legendaries: Counting the main set, four Commander decks and the Through the Ages bonus sheet, Final Fantasy has 222 Legendary cards and 198 commanders—smashing the previous high of 138 from Commander Masters and 128 from The Lord of the Rings.
Jumbo Cactuar is now the Magic creature with the highest power. And while a silver-bordered card, B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster), still holds the highest toughness record, Ancient Adamantoise is now the biggest-butted of them all when looking at creatures you can play in Commander.
Then we have Overkill, which goes the opposite route by granting the largest toughness debuff ever printed on a single Magic spell.
And I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy also sets several new records in the number of alternate-art versions: Cid is definitely the card with most variants in a single set, at quick glance the 163 extended-art legendary cards across FIN + FIC is another all-time high.
With the MTG Arena servers now running smoothly, we'll see what other firsts and highs Final Fantasy achieves!
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