Final Fantasy Trading Cards Games
Producer's blog 2020-08-10 09:15:00

From the Producer Special Vol. 12: Let’s talk about Summons


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From the Producer Special Vol. 12: Let’s talk about Summons

 Hello everyone, FF-TCG Producer Tarou Kageyama here. Apologies for the gap in the updates. I’m glad to come back to you this week. For this installment, I would like to talk about Summons, one of the types of cards in FF-TCG.

・Summons and elements

 Summons in FF-TCG are one-time use only, they’re placed in the Break Zone immediately after they’re called forth, and they’re very convenient in that they can typically be used at any time. There are many different types of decks available with FF-TCG, but I’ve rarely seen a deck that contains no Summons whatsoever. It really goes to show just how important Summons are in this game.

 For me, being in a position to decide which characters and Summons will be included in a set, I find it easier to make a decision for a Summon card over a Character card. Reason being, many Summons already have a designated element from its source material. Ifrit is Fire, Shiva is Ice, Ramuh is Lightning, Titan is Earth, and so forth. As such, I’ve never struggled with deciding which element to designate to a particular Summon. However, there are two issues for me when considering Summons for FF-TCG.

・Being torn on which Summon to include

 While it is definitely appreciated that a lot of the Summons already have an element assigned to them, the flip side of the argument is that it is nearly impossible to designate any other element to them. Imagine this: can you think of Ifrit being anything other than Fire element? Is it possible to have an Earth elemental Ramuh? Shiva… I guess can still plausibly be Water, but fundamentally speaking, she should be Ice element. And the other issue is, naturally, there are far fewer Summons compared to the other characters. Especially since the more famous Summons appear in various titles in the franchise, they are used more frequently in FF-TCG, and we see many Summons of the same name as a result.

 If we combine these two problems, this is what we get: “the same Summon tends to be chosen for the same element.” I think everyone has an inkling of this. It is true that there are many Ifrit among Fire elemental Summons. That being said, this does not pose a direct problem with how the game is played. In an extreme scenario, even if all of the Fire Summons are Ifrit, as long as their effects are different, it will not pose a problem when playing the game. But, this is a game that encompasses the FINAL FANTASY series after all, so I think there can be more variations on the Summons we bring, and we ought to do so.

・Newly illustrated Summons

There are many Summons in FINAL FANTASY that may not appear as often but are still very appealing. How do we introduce those Summons to FF-TCG? As a means to resolve that, I thought of commissioning newly illustrated Summons. This idea was a great success. There are Ark [8-135H] and Madeen [8-133H] from Opus VIII illustrated by Toshitaka Matsuda, Mist Dragon [9-068H] by Akira Oguro, the six different Summons from Opus X illustrated by Ryoma Ito, including Balasa [10-003C], and Amaterasu [12-002] by Gen Kobayashi, which is slated to appear in “Opus XII: Crystal Awakening”… Because these are brand new illustrations, they are garnering lots of attention. So, I think we can say this idea was a success.

 Moving forward, there will be more Summons making their appearance in FF-TCG. And you can expect to see more newly illustrated Summons among them. Is there a particular Summon you’d like to see in FF-TCG? Maybe it could appear along with a new illustration. I hope you look forward to the possibility.