2025’s best Universes Beyond card tells a powerful story with mechanics

Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy crossover set weaponizes fan nostalgia by delivering what is essentially an anthology of memories from games we love that still resonate with us. Across multiple versions of the same characters, we see their identity evolve in a trading card game, just as we did years ago when we played the video games.

Few cards do precisely this while both delivering on the character’s potential and telling a meaningful story. Vivi Ornitier may be the set’s undisputed best card. Mechanically, he’s an overpowered mage that grows over time. That’s technically true of the Final Fantasy 9 character as well, but there’s no real emotional weight or lore connection there. Another top-tier card from the set, however, proves that its designers really understood the lore they were dealing with.

Yuna, Hope of Spira is a 3/5 mythic rare cleric that costs three colorless, one green, and one white mana. Yoni Skolnik, a principal game designer at Wizards of the Coast, wrote in a June blog post that green-white best aligned with the identity of a summoner, which explains why both Yuna and Garnet from Final Fantasy 9 share that color spread. Whereas a wizard casting elemental magic falls squarely in line with blue-red, summoners are more often defined as clerics who wield faith connected to nature that allows them to call upon powerful magical creatures. Green is the color of the natural world. White is the color of holy magic. What better combo is there for a Final Fantasy summoner?

During her turn, Yuna, Hope of Spira and all your enchantment creatures have trample, lifelink, and ward 2. Her other ability returns one enchantment card from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it, meaning if it dies again, it gets exiled instead.

Yuna is a powerhouse that buffs all of your enchantment creatures with useful perks, dealing overkill damage to the enemy player with trample while regaining life for each damage dealt with lifelink. Ward 2 also offers a modest bit of protection, forcing other players to spend two mana just to cast a spell on any creatures affected by Yuna’s ability. While trample is an offensive buff, lifelink and ward fit perfectly with Yuna’s White Mage toolkit from Final Fantasy 10 (summoners are often depicted as the party’s white mage), almost like she’s casting Cure and Shell by default.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

An interesting distinction between Yuna’s abilities: The first buffs enchantment creatures on the battlefield, but the second one that draws out of your graveyard interacts with all enchantments. That includes aura spells that often buff your cards (or debuff an enemy player’s cards), and other enchantment subtypes like sagas.

Summons in the Final Fantasy Magic set were designed as a novel collision of card types: enchantment, saga, and creature. “These versatile permanents combine the storytelling of Sagas with the combat readiness of creatures,” reads a May 2025 breakdown of the mechanics. All sagas gain a lore counter each round and activate a different ability, and the card expires once it reaches its max number of counters. “Summons needed to feel important, powerful, and like they could turn the tides of battle before vanishing—just like in the games!” wrote Dillon Deveney, a principal narrative game designer on Universes Beyond in a separate post.

Both of Yuna’s abilities were designed specifically to interact with summons, especially expensive ones like Bahamut and Knights of the Round. But there are plenty of other enchantment creatures out there. Consider Nyxborn Behemoth, a 10/10 that costs a base of 12 mana. If that winds up in your graveyard, Yuna can summon it to the battlefield. As a Commander or part of any deck, Yuna, Hope of Spira works really well with all kinds of enchantments and some kind of mill/discard strategy that lets you get those expensive enchantment creatures into your graveyard so you can then cast them for free.

From the top down, however, this card is a perfect example of what the design team has described as the “snapshot method,” where a creature card captures a moment in a single character’s story. For this version of Yuna, who is the “Hope of Spira”?

Yuna’s legacy begins long before she ever summons her first Aeon (FF10’s terms for summons). Her father, Braska, brought about the last Calm a decade before the start of the game by defeating Sin, a seemingly immortal and monstrous entity that routinely destroys cities and reshapes Spira through fear. Yuna walks the same pilgrimage as a public hero to the people, and she is expected to pay the same price. At the start of Final Fantasy 10, hope is understood as temporary relief: Sin will be defeated, the summoner will die, and the cycle will reset. That’s why, long before the player and protagonist Tidus learn the truth, there’s a feeling of malaise about the whole thing.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Final Fantasy 10 stands apart from most games in the series in terms of the deep lore surrounding summons. In most cases, you summon a magical beast to do a special move in battle, and the game never explains much, or anything, beyond that. But in FF10, even Sin itself is a summon — specifically the previous Final Aeon created to defeat the previous Sin that eventually distorts into the next Sin. All this to say that to be called the “Hope of Spira” packs a lot of weight.

But what exactly is an Aeon? A fayth is a person who sacrifices themselves and has their soul sealed inside a statue, a mystical process that puts their consciousness into an endless state of dreaming. When a summoner prays to the statue and forges a mental connection, they’re then able to create a physical manifestation of that fayth’s dream: an aeon. Essentially, FF10 summons are dead people who come back to life as magical monsters, albeit temporarily.

For Yuna, Hope of Spira to literally resurrect summons and other enchantments in the way that it does is borderline uncanny. Because every time any summoner in Spira calls upon an Aeon, they’re temporarily pulling their soul back from the dead.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Image: Wizards of the Coast

It’s fitting, then, that Yuna, Hope of Spira exists alongside Yuna, Grand Summoner — the alternate commander from the Counter Blitz preconstructed Commander deck from the set. “Grand Summon” is also the name of Yuna’s Overdrive (aka Limit Break) in FF10, which allows the Aeon she summons to use its most powerful move right away. This version taps to generate a mana of any color and gives the next creature you cast two +1/+1 counters. And her second ability allows you to transfer counters from any of your permanents that die onto another creature (including herself). So, Grand Summoner turns loss into momentum, feeding on sacrifice.

Yuna, Grand Summoner reflects a world where sacrifice is productive. Loss must be converted into momentum so the pilgrimage can continue. Yuna, Hope of Spira, by contrast, draws a hard line. She can bring something back, but only once (since resurrected enchantments get a finality counter). You could say that here, power is honored, not exploited.

This contrast is the point. Taken together, these two cards don’t show Yuna becoming stronger. They show her becoming free. And in a world built on the expectation that someone must die so everyone else can live, that freedom at least hints at her ultimate goal in FF10 of breaking the cycle. That’s what makes Yuna the true Hope of Spira.