All 5 Final Fantasy Crystals in Magic Ranked

Final Fantasy Crystals | Illustrations by Pablo Mendoza

Crystals were an important motif of the Final Fantasy franchise during its early years. Newer titles have moved away from the paradigm of the “heroes of light collecting the scattered crystals” in favor of broader, more convoluted plot-lines, but most games in the series still have a crystalline element somewhere.

The Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set chose to represent crystals as a new artifact cycle, which combine useful cost reduction with powerful passive and activated abilities. Their power varies wildly based on strategy and format, so let’s get out the jeweler’s loupe and take a look at these crystals.

What Is the Final Fantasy Crystal Cycle in MTG?

The Crystal's Chosen | Illustration by Kotetsu Kinoshita

The elemental Crystals are a cycle of legendary artifacts that each offer three things: cost reduction for a specific color, a static ability, and an expensive activated ability.

They all have a casting cost of 2CC and a tap ability that costs 4CC. Each one reduces the cost of spells you cast that share a color with it, and they have passive abilities that feed into their own activated abilities.

I’m evaluating these cards from two angles: Commander and Limited. I don’t expect any of these to matter in competitive Constructed formats, so they really come down to how useful they are in Draft, Sealed, and EDH.

The Water Crystal

Limited

The Water Crystal is a complete dud unless Final Fantasy Limited ends up being glacially slow. That’s true of most of the cycle, but this one doesn’t affect the game state at all, and the set has little else to support a mill engine. In fact, this card probably backfires more often than not since some FIN Limited archetypes care about the cards in their graveyard.

That said, these crystals all threaten inevitability in a stalled out game. If FIN is prone to board stalls and games end on turns 9-12, then I’ll eat my words. But until I see that, I’m calling this virtually unplayable. Riverchurn Monument, this is not.

Commander

If you’re on Bruvac the Grandiloquent or testing out Hope Estheim, you could give The Water Crystal a spin. Or maybe your deck’s designed to draw your entire library and use this as a finisher. Otherwise, this is a crystal clear pass.

The Wind Crystal

Limited

The power of The Wind Crystal is entirely wrapped up in the activated ability. Doubling your lifegain just doesn’t matter in Limited, and cost reduction isn’t that important either, especially once you’ve hit 4+ mana already.

The activated ability is pretty strong though. Blanket flying ends games, provided you can find time to build a board while still spending a turn to cast this. It does nothing if you can’t stick creatures in play, which is usually enough to just pass altogether. Same caveat applies that this is probably much better if the format’s slow, which makes it a more appealing Sealed card.

Commander

The Wind Crystal fits an obvious niche of decks, and it’s not very useful outside dedicated lifegain strategies. The cost reduction’s a nice pick-up for white, but there are better mass flying enablers. I like that it turns dorky lifegain enablers into evasive threats, but it doesn’t pump their power, so I’m not sure how much that actually matters.

The Darkness Crystal

Limited

Hard to imagine The Darkness Crystal being too relevant in the average game of Limited. It might have sideboard potential against decks with tons of death triggers or a graveyard theme, but the impact is nothing when it hits the board. We don’t play Leyline of the Void in Limited, and that card’s free sometimes. Late-game inevitability aside, sometimes creatures don’t even die, let alone good ones worth spending 6 mana to reanimate.

Commander

I’m much more optimistic about The Darkness Crystal’s role in Commander. Here, cost reduction and graveyard hate are phenomenal, and you’ll snag much more powerful creatures worth putting back into play. I expect this to be the most impactful of the cycle for Commander, though it’s weighed down heavily by being the worst one for Limited.

The Fire Crystal

Limited

I’m not seeing this for Limited. Using a whole card on a haste enabler is pretty dull, and does nothing if you end up on defense. The activated ability has the same pitfall as The Wind Crystal (no creatures = no output), and you need something with good stats or a strong ETB to make it tick. A little win-more, potentially strong, but rarely worth pursuing.

Commander

I like The Fire Crystal for Commander much more. Haste enablers are staples, and the Heat Shimmer effect has way more impactful targets. It’s still stupidly expensive, but all of the effects are useful. Cost reduction in red opens up a lot of combo lines too, plus being an artifact matters for all sorts of red decks.

The Earth Crystal

Limited

The Earth Crystal has its faults, but less of a fail-case. You need only one creature in play for it to do something relevant, and it doesn’t matter what it is. A single activation on even a small creature produces an immediate threat. And you can activate at instant speed. And the cost reduction actually matters for big tramplers like Balamb T-Rexaur and Coliseum Behemoth. Add in any other incidental +1/+1 counter effects and I think you’re very close to bomb territory.

Commander

The Earth Crystal looks very promising for Commander. It’s more redundant than it is necessary, since there are a lot of counter amplifying effects in the format already, but these decks like the consistency. Cost reduction’s always useful in green, and decks that want this sort of effect could use more mana sinks. I don’t expect this to break any deck that’s not already broken, but it should make a great companion for Branching Evolution or Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider.

How Can You Get Borderless Final Fantasy Crystals?

The alternate art, borderless versions of the Crystal cycle can be found in Play boosters or Collector boosters. Same goes for their ordinary versions.

Crystals vs. Medallions

Medallions are a cycle of 2-mana artifacts that reduce the cost of spells of a certain color by .

Medallions are cheaper and occupy a much more important slot on your curve. The Crystals incorporate the Medallion text, and offer way more passive and late-game utility, so they’ll likely be very strong for the decks that want them, but they’re less important and more replaceable than 2-mana rocks.

Crystals are more likely to see play in 2+ color decks than the Medallions. The 2-mana artifacts are at their absolute best in mono-colored decks, where their cost reduction applies to nearly all cards in the deck. That’s still true of the Crystals, but more decks will want those for their secondary effects, and just consider the cost reduction a welcome bonus. For example, you don’t see Emerald Medallion in Simic decks very often, but you’ll definitely consider The Earth Crystal for Simic decks with a +1/+1 counter theme.

The Medallions also have a colorless color identity. This hardly matters since there’s almost no reason to run them outside decks of their respective colors, but it’s a notable difference in design.

The Crystals are less likely to be reprinted though, given their flavor and attachment to Final Fantasy. Their names are fairly generic, but I’d expect more versions of the Medallions before the Crystals get their first reprints.

How Are the Crystals Important to Final Fantasy?

Crystals were a huge part of Final Fantasy’s core identity, at least early in the franchise. Many of the early games focused on retrieving magical, elemental crystals to defeat the villain of the game or restore order to the world.

The Crystals depicted on the MTG crossover cards are specifically from Final Fantasy III, which featured a timeline where the four elemental crystals all had dark counterparts (represented solely by The Darkness Crystal).

Entries from Final Fantasy VII and beyond largely abandoned the crystal-collecting model, though they usually paid homage to the early titles in different ways. They’re less of a motif in the most recent games, and more of a cameo that pays tribute to the pixel age of Final Fantasy.

Wrap Up

Chromatic Lantern | Illustration by Kiyoshi Arai

Alright hero, that’s enough crystal-hunting for you. This has been a fun look at an inspired new cycle of artifacts, which mostly looks like duds for Limited, but should see plenty of play in Commander. The back-and-forth between formats fudges the rankings a little bit, but the number attached to these isn’t all that important; it’s their applications in the formats where they’re relevant that matters.

Where do you plan on playing these new Crystal cards? Did they do justice to the original Final Fantasy source material? Let me know in the comments below or over in the Draftsim Discord.

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