Y'shtola, Night's BlessedY'shtola, Night's Blessed | Art by Magali Villeneuve

As I'm sure you, your friends, and your grandmother all know, Y'shtola, Night's Blessed hit that mythical 50,000-deck milestone. The Esper legend from Final Fantasy is the first to ever do so in the history of EDHREC, so it's kind of a big deal here.

We reached out to some people who had a bit of a hand in creating the card that rose to dominate the Commander format: Daniel Holt, Senior Game Designer, and Gavin Verhey, Principal Game Designer. Gavin served as Lead Game Designer on Final Fantasy, while Daniel served in the same role for the set's Commander release.

Here's what they had to say:

When designing Final Fantasy, did you expect the set to have the impact it's had on Commander? Was there any expectation that it would have become as popular as it has?

Daniel Holt: As soon as we started work on the Final Fantasy set, we knew we had something special on our hands. Anyone familiar with the IP was excited to playtest, look at cards, and be involved in whatever way possible. That said, seeing the fan reaction and response when it released was even more incredible than we could have ever imagined! It was many years in the making and truly heartwarming to see the player reception.

For Commander specifically, we assumed that it would have an impact, same as any other set. But with Final Fantasy in particular, we covered sixteen different games, each filled with popular characters expressed as new legendary creatures. So naturally this would inspire players to build different decks around their favorites. One motto we had when designing and picking characters was "Every character is someone’s favorite," so we aimed to make as many as we could to ensure there was a card for everyone!

Gavin Verhey: For me, it was one of those things that the longer you work on it, the more special you realize it is. The more fans come out of the woodwork to tell you how special it's going to be to them. The more moments you see people smile during a playtest. But even then, the set surpassed my wildest expectations. Final Fantasy is one of my favorite video game franchises of all time, and so I was just honored to work on it and pour myself into it - and I'm so happy with the result.

And part of all of that was bringing people's favorite characters to life. Because time and time again, these fans who would come out of the woodwork's first question would be: "is this character in the set? What do they do?" And the task of getting them just right was paramount in my design decisions. I'm so happy to have created as many different kinds of legendary commanders (and cards for 99s!) as I did, and it's been a delight seeing so many different kinds of decks spawn from the set.

Regarding Y'shtola specifically, can you walk me through the design decisions that led to the final product? How much did it change from concept to print, what was tweaked, that sort of thing?

Daniel: Y’shtola probably changed the most of all the Final Fantasy face commanders through development! In fact, she wasn’t the original face commander at all!

Final Fantasy XIV is unique in that it doesn’t have a predefined "main character" but instead has the player create a Warrior of Light that they play as through the story. We tried a few executions that aimed to capture this customization aspect, but ultimately decided to let the hero tokens and equipment in the deck perform that role and chose Y’shtola and G’raha Tia to be the faces based on their overwhelming popularity.

Getting her shape, and in general the deck’s creative and mechanical themes down, took some time and iterations. The gameplay loop in Final Fantasy XIV is about casting spells, equipping your character, managing cooldowns, etc, so that eventually led to a noncreature theme and control deck style of play to allow us to put more of those types of cards in the 99.

Once the deck theme solidified, she remained with the ability to "deal direct damage" to represent her black magic skills and giving you card advantage to help keep your game plan going. G’raha Tia always created heroes to help populate your board and protect yourself, so we avoided token-making on Y’shtola, since that wasn’t really her flavor anyway.

Throughout development, I always kept Sygg, River CutthroatSygg, River Cutthroat in the back of my mind from my pet Ninja typal decks and was a huge inspiration for Y’shtola’s shape.

Numbers and stats changed throughout the rest of set design, though the general shape remained the same by this point. Gaining life was added a bit later to represent her ability to use white magic as well as black magic.

The timing and shape of the card draw hoop was probably the biggest shift through development. For a while, we let this trigger only during your end step, to reduce tracking complexity, but give you a card for each opponent that lost the required amount of life. This felt too easy to net three cards during each of your turns, so we wanted to make you achieve the goal each turn for maximum benefit, and overall allowed you to draw four cards per turn cycle instead of three.

One of the more subtle words is "if a player" lost life. We found in testing that it was fun to allow you to play some black "pay life" effects to also trigger this yourself, so we kept that more open-ended

"Each opponent" and "target opponent" were both considered for her damage output. This decision would ultimately impact how self solving she was in a world where there was only a check at the end of your turn versus each end step.

Back during development, if someone had asked you if you thought Y'shtola will become the #1 commander in the format as per EDHREC data, what would you have said?

Daniel: I don’t think any of us could have predicted that exactly Y’shtola would be that character.

We knew Final Fantasy as a whole would be popular on release, so I may have said "Yeah, I bet a FIN card will break into Top 5. And Final Fantasy XIV has such a large player base that I bet they’ll love a legend from the deck!"…but there’s just no way I could have predicted a specific card or that it would reach number 1!

If you could go back and change anything, would you? (Not saying you should of course, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.)

Daniel: I’m personally very proud of Y’shtola’s final shape, especially with how much iteration she did go through during development, but I could see a slight nerf being fine and not harming her appeal. With no textbox changes, maybe she would still be exciting at five mana cost and slightly higher power/toughness? Or if she stayed the same rate, switching to "target" opponent and/or not gaining life on her own and asking players to put more lifelink granting in the 99.

While we could do a whole other interview about playtesting process and iterating on the above thoughts, any edits like these would have to be vetted through play design by our incredible testing team to quickly see how any of the changes play out and whether they make the card more or less fun.

When developing new cards, especially those aimed at Commander specifically, how much thought is given to its likelihood of becoming popular? Like, is there ever a moment where you and the team think "this one's gonna go wild"?

Daniel: We obviously hope our new cards find a home in a deck somewhere! Whether that be a silly fun addition to an existing 99, or a new legend that inspires a whole deck.

Some cards are more obvious than others while designing that they will be popular. For example, a more broadly powerful card or one that fits into multiple archetypes is going to get played more than a niche themed card. We maintain a fine balance of conversations between teams creating these cards, teams who balance them, and teams who decide what product (and when) best to deploy them.

Gavin: The answer to this question is...a lot.

Commander needs to remain sustainable. And a big part of that is making sure that we're making cards that are options, but trying to avoid forever staples. We made a number of cards early in the years of designing Commander products that I would consider mistakes now, because they're too "best in class"; too ubiquitous.

For a long time, every Commander deck started with their commander, Sol RingSol Ring, and 98 other cards. Then came Command TowerCommand Tower in the first Commander precons. So, every Commander deck started with its commander, Sol Ring, Command Tower, and 97 other cards. And then came Arcane SignetArcane Signet (which actually came from the Throne of Eldraine Brawl decks). Now almost every Commander deck begins with its commander, Sol Ring, Command Tower, Arcane Signet, and 96 other cards.

This is a path we have to be careful about walking down. Because if we keep down it, in five years every deck will have ten of the same cards prescribed. And all of this takes away from the creativity that makes Commander so great. I've talked plenty before about how I view Arcane Signet as a mistake.

So, our design philosophy is very much about making cool cards for specific decks, or cool commanders for certain archetypes, but trying to avoid anything that's best in class. For example, a commander I dislike is Chulane, Teller of TalesChulane, Teller of Tales. It's a Bant value commander that is better than most Bant commanders we can give you for any creature type. It eats up a lot of design space.

So, the landing strip we most try and aim cards at today are cards that will be very exciting for certain kinds of decks or helming certain strategies, but not being a one- size-fits-all card. So we put a lot of downward pressure on cards that might look like generic staples, and help boost cards that help out specific archetypes.

In the case of Y'shtola in particular, this sends you on a quest to play noncreature spells with mana value three or greater which is a new hook and something unique that I think helps prevent her from being too generic. If I could change anything about the card in retrospect, it would be the fact it triggers on each player's end step - I think incidentally drawing cards when your opponents attack each other is probably more than this card needed, because it doesn't play into the theme or deckbuilding hook at all. But I think the general shape of this card is something great, and I'm glad it appeals to so many people.

Do you have any comments about the prospect of a Universes Beyond card/character being #1 overall on EDHREC?

Daniel: While getting to number 1 is certainly a feat and I’m proud of my Y’shtola design managing to accomplish it for now, Magic is Magic whether that’s our own IP or any of our amazing partners.

I could see any card already out or created in any future set breaking into the top spots, as it’s achieved by being a combination of fun gameplay, flexibility in deck building, strength of the card, and players just loving the character.

Gavin: One of the things about Universes Beyond is that it is full of characters people who have experienced that universe love. And so it's not a surprise to me that for one of the most popular sets we've ever made, from a beloved and popular game series, a card from it ended up as #1. As Daniel said, a lot of factors can contribute here, but one of them is certainly character popularity. And if you look at the top 10 or even 50 commanders on EDHREC, you'll see other popular characters with exciting cards from Universes Beyond sets doing well.

That said, there are still a ton of awesome Magic world characters on that list, and there are many more yet to come. I'm excited for you to all see what we have in store, especially with Reality Fracture around the corner!

Thanks to Daniel and Gavin for chatting! Having the opportunity to get a peek into the design choices for any card, especially one as record-breaking as Y'shtola has been, is fantastic. So, readers: what do you think about Y'shtola, the card's climb up the ranks, and the popularity of Final Fantasy?

Final Fantasy is considered by many to be the best Universes Beyond set so far, so as Daniel and Gavin said, it's no surprise that one of its legends has become EDHREC's #1. Do you think there's a yet-to-be-utilized IP out there that could produce a legend to beat Y'shtola?