Terra, Magical Adept – Final Fantasy
Date Reviewed: June 11, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.75
Casual: 4.75
Limited: 4.13
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Plenty of people have drawn Terra (and other characters from the 90s) in this way before – the way they always looked in our imagination all along, before game art evolved into the highly-detailed style many things have now. But there’s something about seeing it on a trading card, whether that’s Magic or the official Final Fantasy TCG, which makes it feel a lot more real. It’ll never be lost somewhere in the depths of the internet; it’s a clear statement by the company that yes, this is indeed her. And it helps make Terra’s card even more memorable than it already was. I know that’s a lot of text and I know she’s basically pre-banned from simplicity cubes, but when you do use her in a deck, she’s often going to be the biggest threat in your entire 40/60/75/100/whatever cards. Her front side is deceptively unassuming as a standard value card, but if she ever flips with setup, you will often run riot over the entire table. When facing powerful Sagas, opponents usually get a degree of breathing room in that they know what sequence of abilities you’ll be facing and on what time frame, and so can try to play around them or time your countermeasures appropriately. With Esper Terra around, you have control over that separate from the Sagas themselves, and that completely changes the game on both sides of the table. The setup this requires is definitely not trivial and will sometimes require deckbuilding sacrifices, but when it all comes together, it hits opponents for numbers worthy of a Final Fantasy game’s high-level post-story content.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
omg woman
While the large cast size and unusual structure of Final Fantasy VI means it’s harder than most games to pick out a singular lead protagonist, Terra is the “canonical” choice that way, and she’s actually the first Final Fantasy lead protagonist to be a woman…and one of two in the main series to date, only joined since by Lightning in XIII. Yuna and Serah would star as leads in their own games, but those were spin-offs. All the same, Terra is the emotional undercurrent of VI, a woman whose magical powers awaken and allow her to help to save the world from a crazy clown.
Terra, Magical Adept leans a bit into this, supporting the various summons (and other enchantments and sagas) you may have reason to run by drawing you one (in effect). With enough magic stored up, though, she can temporarily shift into her esper form (which she gains access to part of the way through VI), which turbocharges a lot of different things by temporarily copying enchantments (and letting you get whatever lore ability you want to benefit from). You get this once she re-enters, and at the start of each of the next two turns after, and if you’ve got the deck structured to abuse this, you can definitely go wild. Her final lore ability lets you have quite the explosive turn after she reverts…keep in mind that you can reuse it if you have a way to give Terra haste, but she doesn’t have it innately.
Terra’s a pretty solid creature, though she is a bit fragile before she flips and tends to need time and investment to really go off. Once she gets going, she’s vicious as an enabler, and she’s also a pretty potent attacker once she flips (thanks to 6 power and evasion). She’s not the star of the show, but she’ll make things function exceptionally well if you have her…which feels quite in-character for her, but that’s maybe a story for another day.
Constructed: 3.5 (my feeling is that she might be a touch too slow for Standard, but you could make something work if you believe hard enough)
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.25 (I think she’s strong enough to build around)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4 (keep in mind she counts as five-color, because of the specific wording of her final lore ability as a saga, but she’d actually be a strong five-color Saga commander)
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