Final Fantasy Trading Card Game (2016-)

 

Jeebus, they photograph well. There'll be a clear image of Shiva, soon enough, worry not.

 

This certainly has some spoilers.
Avoid the labeled sections for the games you want to play yourself.
The part above the cut is about XIII.

 

I have wanted physical representations of XIII ’s Eidolons for…EVER.

Are there toys? Yes.
Are there problems with them? Double yes.

There was a non-transforming shokugan-esque line of them, but they did NOT look good. My (admittedly sometimes faulty) memories are saying that one of them was a chase figure, to boot. …Bahamut, I think. Yes! Final Fantasy Creatures Kai Vol. 3. Bahamut is indeed the secret rare, for the individual releases. Alexander is the one left out of the boxset.

The Play Arts Kai line was home to only two of them: Odin and Shiva. They are known to start breaking down as soon as you transform them. Once.

Whomp, whomp…

Even if they had made the others, they would have required parts-swapping. These designs were never intended for plastic, which is ultimately good, because it means the fiction came first, and marketing wasn’t able to mess it up. But, I WANTED six dollops of icing, dammit.

Enter the Final Fantasy TCG.

They’ve been releasing waves since 2016! I only found out about it, last week… I came across the XIII starter set, when randomly looking for XIII merch, on Amazon. Success, right?!? Well, it seemed so, but that deck is only HALF helpful, if you want cards for all of the Eidolons. Honestly less so, since I only bought two cards from it. Its contents are pretty damn scattershot. To ebay, it was!

There are two notable issues to be aware of, regarding this game/collection:

1.) As someone who was used to paying 15¢ for common Power Rangers cards, and around a $1 for (3 decades old!!!) X-Men ones, these cards are PRICEY. It has really driven home for me how niche, and small, the PR fandom truly is. Final Fantasy is a BIG deal. I get it; I’m part of its cult. Fanboy nutter, sitting right here! When it actually does come to marketing, Squeenix leans into delivering higher-end merchandise. The Play Arts Kai figures are HUGE. You don’t want to know how much complete Triple Triad decks can go for, and the ones I’ve seen could well be reprints! They sell statue sets. There’s that Terra; you know the one.

Positive Spin: These are QUALITY. The backs have a plastic feel; they’re matte, textured, and only bear the TCG logo. Classy. They do fit in holders meant for standard 35pt cards. The world-sized elephant in the room are the sparkles. A LOT of the cards have them. Their overwhelming, blanket density is incredible, but I can see them slamming headlong into some folks’ sensibilities, at a hundred miles per hour. I, for one, have absolutely no problem with them being ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS~

2.) This is a card collection that is still actively being added to—being created! A new wave just recently dropped. If you’re looking for matching ‘sets,’ you may be waiting a while yet for them to be completed. What I’m referring to when I say ‘sets,’ are things like the parties of each game and other kinds of linked groups like organizations, summons, creatures, bosses, etc. There are two preeminent examples to prove my point: There are no Yoshitaka Amano cards for either incarnation of Cecil, or a Tetsuya Nomura card for Squall. That is fuggen WILD, given that all of the other party members of IV and VIII, both permanent AND temporary, have already been made for those respective sets.

Positive Spin: Bandai of Japan and America were working with a franchise that is largely predicated on uniformity, for Super Sentai Battle: Dice-O and the Power Rangers ACG. The imperative to deliver homogenous cards, in an immediately successive manner, is far less pressing for Final Fantasy. That still doesn’t explain Cecil and Squall, though!


Can you wait? Can the world? I dunno, so you might want to make some concessions.

Let’s return to these Eidolons, specifically:

Once you’ve opened an image in the shadowbox, right-click and open it in a new tab, to see it full-sized.

There is indeed a Hecaton with clean, full-body art, to match Alexander, Bahamut, and Shiva; I just very much prefer the one I chose, instead. There wasn’t any benefit to going with the other, because there are no other Brynhildrs or Odins. Those are the ones you’re getting, at this moment in time. Unless you’re okay with Twilight Odin. I am not, as for me, the sequels do not exist. Stiria and Nix have sparkles. Do they ever. But, the cold holofoil look I got in the picture is so fitting that I went with it, without a second's hesitation. I was under the impression that Odin simply had an understated holofoil finish, until I double-checked for the sake of journalistic integrity (this was before taking the above photo, obviously). He has sparkles, too! I had to be directly under a lamp and shake him around to see them, but by g-whiz, he does have them. They look pretty great, to someone who is incredibly biased to colors being presented over a black background. He’s still the oddball, but I love him a whole lot, now. Hmm. Fitting. That’s how I feel about Lightning.

They all have textboxes bearing their elemental symbols. You can get some of them as full-arts, though. Don’t worry, you won’t, because those are even more ludicrously expensive! I’m choosing to believe that’s an upside-down magatama, because Alexander is not Wind. You try telling me, or any other FF fan, that he isn’t Holy. I feel like Bahamut should be Wind…because Highwind.

Fanboy bullshit aside, I’m telling you that between the sparkles and the textboxes there IS a DEGREE of uniformity. I’m happy. Incredibly happy.

I’ll be going DEEP, below the cut, detailing sets and assembling some for your my viewing pleasure 😜


2024 Update:

The new Hidden Hope set has the remaining two Eidolons, as illustrated by Toshitaka Matsuda (Alexander and Shiva)! I HAVE A FULLY MATCHING MATSUDA SET!!!!!!!!!!

4 Only Because of the Prices (That I’m Paying Regardless) out of 5

Ultra-Pro & BCW Magnetic Card Holders ()

Originally, this was only a review of an Ultra-Pro model. I've since owned many of both brands. They are effectively identical, in terms of functionality, even though the molding and designs vary slightly.

 

The biggest rub with these is that they're less """air-tight""" than screw-down frames. It's a natural consequence of their defining feature: a magnetic closure. If they were a display case for anything else, I'd rage. They're card holders, though, and intensely easy to crack open every once in a while to clean away the minuscule amount of detritus that'll get in, or simply switch the contents out. The card I put into my first was about 20¢. I wanted it to feel special, much moreso than to be completely impervious to dust. If you want to put in two cards back-to-back, you can, but it'll only increase the seam between the halves.

Every holder I own, save one, is 35pt. That's the thickness of standard trading cards. The nice thing is that these come in a range of sizes. My outlier is 75pt. I honestly thought that metric referred to the size of cards, before receiving a noticeably thick Jubilee card. "Was the listing for multiples of this card?" Nope. Looking into the world of girthy cards was...enlightening. 360pt. cards will have compartments hollowed out of them. Why? So pieces of Tiger Woods' pants can be stuffed into them. Or, gravure models' bikinis.

I am not kidding.

You can buy a thickness gauge from BCW, but don't. Every card holder I've bought from them has come with one. I have a stack. Maybe the purchase-able one is fittingly printed on thick cardstock? As long as your printer settings are adjusted properly, you can produce an accurate one, yourself. I recommend that, prior to purchasing your first non-35pt. holder.

These also supposedly help with UV damage, if you're the kind of person to have windows that aren't completely covered in light-blocking curtains. And, to put your things next to them.

Weirdo.

3 Good Enough Solutions out of 5

They're damn classy. I prefer them to screw-downs, now.