Aside from a brief stint in covid lockdown where I dumped several hundred dollars into MTG: Arena, got to mythic with a scute swarm deck and went cold turkey, I have been clean from Magic: The Gathering since the mess around the Mirrodin block in high school. But before then I was a regular tournament goer, spent a lot of time playing the game and still have my rare binder. I still keep up with what’s happening to Magic from a safe distance, far away from my wallet. That’s why I’m pleased that Vivi Ornitier from Final Fantasy IX is currently making the Standard format so miserable that they might have to ban the little guy. Buddy, I’m so proud of you.
Vivi, the diminutive black mage, was introduced as part of the wildly popular Final Fantasy set, a part of Universes Beyond. Universes Beyond is a sub-brand that focuses on lassoing IP from outside of the lore of the Magic universe (The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, etc.) into the main game. Often this consists of simple reprints and reskins of existing Magic cards, but Final Fantasy marked a turning point because it was a totally new set that was entirely legal to play in Standard. The Final Fantasy set has been obscenely popular, making 200 million dollars in a single day. It is a love letter to the series and a fantastic lure to new players, and one that did not feature too many overpowered cards. It was a gargantuan hit, and subsequent Universes Beyond sets coming up include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Spider-Man.
On his own, Vivi starts off powerless and gets huge as time goes on. Every spell you cast that isn’t a creature makes him bigger with counters and pings all opponents for one damage. The more powerful he is (either through this ability or other means) the more red and blue mana you can add to your deck once per turn. Even without other synergies, he’s somewhat broken mechanically: bare minimum, Vivi’s ability should have been a tap ability to begin with. The part where it becomes a problem is with another card in Standard: Agatha’s Soul Cauldron.
Agatha’s Soul Cauldron is a legendary artifact. The first effect is that it allows you to spend any color mana to activate creature abilities. This is nice, but not really that interesting in this context. Where it gets nasty is that it allows you to exile (remove from the game) creature cards in any graveyard (where they normally go when they die or are discarded from your hand) to share activated abilities with every creature with a +1/+1 token, as well as place a counter +1/+1 on a creature you own. This means that if you intentionally build a deck that puts Vivi in the graveyard, then remove him with the cauldron, all your characters with +1/+1 counters become Vivis: an increasing fountain of mana that scales with the creature. Also unlike Vivi, the creatures you’d be playing in that deck do not start off as a 0/3, and thus are more powerful with this combo. When it goes off, it potentially creates an increasing feedback loop that just creates more spells, more cards, and more mana. Even if the opponent does manage to get rid of the cauldron, they often have to deal with what it created. This deck is known as Izzet Cauldron, it is dominating the standard format, and currently costs like $700-$800 in physical cards.
There are also other components to Izzet Cauldron that make it nasty. The spells in the deck tend to focus on graveyard abilities, tokens, and drawing and discarding cards to not only dump Vivi in the graveyard, but also find the combo. There’s Marauding Mako, a weenie that adds counters when you discard and can be discarded for a card. Proft’s Eidetic Memory is an enchantment that adds counters to creatures based on how many cards you’ve drawn. Fear of Missing Out and Tersa Lightshatterer can occasionally have utility on their own with the Cauldron, although they are primarily there to dump Vivi or dump something in the hope of finding Vivi. And Winternight Stories lets you draw and discard cards and can be played from the graveyard for a higher cost. There’s enough here that makes the cauldron fun without Vivi, but Vivi is what makes the deck a problem.
Izzet’s Cauldron is currently dominating the Standard game format, which is composed of recent sets that get rotated out on a three-year cycle (although it used to be two years). Standard is not the only format out there; Commander is way popular and frankly more fun, but it is a significant one. If you care about tournament play, which many players simply don’t, the question becomes if Izzet Cauldron will get so unsustainably dominant that it pushes out other decks from play, and if that’s a fun format to play in.
There’s multiple ways that Wizards of the Coast could deal with this. Normally bans are announced in specific and predictable timeframes. They could emergency ban the Cauldron in Standard, which would do something but not solve the fact that Vivi is wildly overpowered and would be kicking around until February 2028 (Izzet Prowess decks would still be around and still be nasty). They could ban Vivi in Standard, in which case everyone who spent a lot of money on Vivi cards (currently going for like 40-55 bucks each as of this writing) would be pissed off, although I’d argue that if you bought Vivi knowing what was happening you factored that in as a possibility. They could just hang out and do nothing and hope the situation resolves itself. Or they could make some other weird attempt to fix it.
I don’t have a material stake in the current Magic meta: not my monkeys, not my circus. Wizards of the Coast also has no reason to listen to me, I didn’t make 200 million dollars in a day. But it’s a tremendously funny situation all around. As our good friend Esper Quinn pointed out, it’s appropriate that an $700-$800 deck containing a card named FOMO represents a big part of the current Standard meta. I also just adore Vivi as a character, and the mental image of players turning him into soup and making an army of Black Mages is thematically resonant with the source material – Vivi is an experiment who escaped containment and took on a life of his own.
Though I was thoroughly impressed by the care that went into the Final Fantasy set (it is clearly a labor of love) I do not think making the Universes Beyond brand tournament legal represented a healthy impulse. The Fortnite-ification of everything is often done cynically, and slamming all the various IPs you love together in an attempt to grow your player base is tiring. Though it is a funny mental image, I don’t want Beavis to kick the T1000 in the nads in Call of Duty, that just kinda bums me out. I would like games to have confidence in the worlds they create instead of feeling the need to borrow from other worlds. But if something has to break the game, I’m so glad it was the tiny, unassuming figure of Vivi, who’s just a little guy and never harmed anyone.
[h/t Ashley Glenn for additional assistance]
UPDATE: Clarified the wording of the piece to reflect that Agatha's Soul Cauldron gives activated abilities to other creatures.
