Magic: The Gathering's 25 best cards of 2025, ranked
A personal ranking of the Magic cards that mattered most in 2025, from Commander staples to joyful weirdos.
Published 4 hours ago
Spoiler: I like Final Fantasy
Image: Wizards of the Coast
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Every year, Magic: The Gathering releases more cards than any one person could reasonably keep up with. Along the way, there are plenty of obvious winners: cards that become pro tournament staples, others that skyrocket in price due to rarity and usefulness, and everything in between. To determine the “best” cards of the year can be a bit of a challenge, considering the wide variety of playstyles and preferences everyone has when it comes to the game.
These are my 25 favorite Magic cards of 2025, a deeply subjective tour through the cards that stuck with me the most, whether because they weaponized the nostalgia I have for Final Fantasy games or because I was struck by their awe-inspiring power and compelling mechanics. Some of these cards have indeed redefined the game’s meta. Others are niche, fragile, or even a little weird. But every one of them left a major impression on me.
I played these 25 cards the most and built so many decks around them — or at least dreamed how they might function in the future as Magic evolved. All of these cards represent something Magic did especially well in 2025: bold design, expressive mechanics, and the confidence to let players find their own “best” cards along the way.
25 Seedship Agrarian
Image: Wizards of the Coast
A great green card for landfall decks that gets even better if you also dabble in planets and/or spacecrafts, Seedship Agrarian is a 3/3 that picks up a +1/+1 counter every time you play a land. But it also generates a Lander token every time it taps (you pay two mana to sacrifice a Lander to then put a land card from your deck on the battlefield).
Obviously, you want to be tapping this card as often as possible, which is where planets and spacecraft come in, with the Station activated ability. You tap a creature to essentially feed a planet or spacecraft, eventually unlocking more advanced abilities. Being able to tape Seedship Agrarian in this way without putting it in danger through combat. In that way, it winds up being a really fun card to play that leans into the themes of Edge of Eternities.
24 Command Bridge
Official art for Command Bridge by Constantin Marin leans heavily on the sci-fi cosmic vibes.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
It’s kind of annoying that hybrid lands always enter tapped and only offer two different kinds of mana. Command Bridge from Edge of Eternities takes it one step further, forcing you to tap another untapped permanent in addition. But the payoff is worth it for it to generate one mana of any color. I often include four of these in any three-color decks.
23 Tifa Lockheart
Image: Wizards of the Coast
I want Tifa, Final Fantasy 7's best girl, to be better in Magic than she is. Don’t get me wrong, with the right setup, she can give an enemy player a beatdown very quickly. But she’s not the kind of card you can just throw in any green deck. A 1/2 that costs two mana, Tifa comes with Trample and a landfall ability that doubles her power until the end of turn whenever you play a mana.
As a pure-green Commander, she really isn’t all that bad, leveraging cards that give her +1/+1 counters and let you play extra lands. Because her toughness doesn’t scale at all, she winds up feeling quite vulnerable in execution. You either need some way to protect her when she attacks or make sure you double her power enough times in a single turn that it won’t matter how many enemies block her.
22 Elspeth, Storm Slayer
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Arguably one of the best Planeswalker cards around, Elspeth, Storm Slayer from Tarkir: Dragonstorm sees huge payoffs in decks that focus on generating tokens of any kind. Her passive doubles the number of tokens generated. She gains a loyalty counter to create a 1/1 creature token (which automatically becomes two), she adds a +1/+1 counter on all of your creatures AND gives them flying until your next turn (all for free), or she can sacrifice three loyalty counters to destroy a target creature of mana value three or greater.
Functionally, that means her token creatures protect her from attacks, but combined with other token generation methods, she can become a force to be reckoned with.
21 Doctor Octopus, Master Planner
Image: Wizards of the Coast
A bit of a silly card, Doc Ock increases your maximum hand size to eight and lets you draw up to eight at the end of your turn. But his real utility is that he gives other Villains +2/+2. Especially because the future of Magic will be dominated by Universes Beyond crossovers, we’re going to get plenty more Villain cards, particularly in the Marvel Super Heroes set. So we can safely expect this card’s value to increase over time. While not exactly a chase card from the set so far, it’ll wind up being a power player by this time next year.
20 Gran-Gran
Image: Wizards of the Coast
The shining star of the 2025 Magic: The Gathering World Championships, Gran-Gran from Avatar: The Last Airbender wound up an unlikely hero in the game’s meta. Though she works exclusively in Lesson-focused decks, since that’s the best type of deck in the game right now, she’ll be a hot commodity for a while. You draw a card and discard a card every time she’s tapped, and with enough lesson cards in your graveyard, all noncreature spells cost one mana less. So she’s a niche pick, but seeing Sokka and Katara’s grandma waving goodbye with her back to the sunset is a bit comical for what winds up being an uber-useful Magic card.
19 Vivi Ornitier
Image: Wizards of the Coast
My one regret when it comes to Vivi is that I didn’t sell the card I pulled over the summer before it got banned. While he thrives as a Commander, pumping out more and more extra mana and peppering each opponent with damage whenever you play a noncreature spell, he can also slot nicely into any blue-red spell-slinging deck. Design-wise, he’s absolutely broken, and that’s kind of delightful to see. This beloved black mage from Final Fantasy 9 starts the game as a timid little boy and ends it as one of the series’ most powerful wizards.
18 The Soul Stone
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Including the Soul Stone in the Spider-Man set feels like a bit of an odd choice, but it’s clearly a lead-in to 2026’s upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set, where we’ll see the remaining Infinity Stones from Marvel canon and likely the Infinity Gauntlet as an equipment as well.
There’s a reason that this card is THE chase card of the set. As a cosmic magical gem, it ought to be powerful, but this is downright overpowered. For two mana, it basically starts out as an indestructible swamp land that can tap to generate one black mana. But you “harness” it by paying seven mana which exiles a creature you control. Then, at the beginning of the player’s upkeep, then return a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield. The way this evokes how to claim the Soul Stone in previous depictions (sacrificing someone they love) is brilliant card design, but this also means the other stones are bound to be just as game-breaking.
17 Fang, Fearless l’Cie + Vanille, Cheerful l'Cie = Ragnarok, Divine Deliverance
While it’s one of the weaker Final Fantasy titles, FF13 still has one of the most charming and aspirational romances in the entire series. And that’s on full display with Fang and Vanille in the Final Fantasy set. They have the very rare “Meld” mechanic, where you can pay five mana to fuse them together if they’re both on the battlefield. As Ragnarok, Divine Deliverance they become a 7/6 with vigilance, menace, trample, reach, and haste. Upon death, it destroys a non-land permanent and returns a permanent from the graveyard to the battlefield. Basically, it can attack right away, doesn’t tap when it does, can only be blocked by two or more creatures, and if it does get blocked, excess damage hits the enemy player. In short, Ragnarok is totally overpowered, but to actually execute on the meld can be challenging. Still, if you build black-green deck around graveyard recursion and try really hard, the payoff is incredibly fun to pull off.
16 Machinist’s Arsenal
The Final Fantasy set introduced the Job select ability as a reworked mechanic we’ve seen before, creating a 1/1 creature token that you attach the equipment to when it’s played, saving you the step of having to pay to attach to another creature. Machinist’s Arsenal gives the equipped creature +2/+2 for each artifact you control. That includes other equipment, traditional artifacts, and artifact creatures. With the right setup of cheap artifacts already on the board, Machinist’s Arsenal can drop a massive creature on round five or earlier. And even if it dies, you can always pay four mana to attach the equipment to one of your other creatures.