Here thar be Dragons!

He's here!
I'm sure some of you were waiting for summons, and Bahamut doesn't disappoint. This is a great Bahamut piece from a very talented artist. Genzoman talks about how his Bahamut design was inspired by different incarnations of Bahamut in the games. I'm lucky to get such a great, and original design to use in the game. Check out Genzoman's page at genzoman.deviantart.com.
He's done work for professional card games too! Pretty sick. I highly recommend the mythos section of his page, I spent like 45 minutes looking through it!
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Instead of looking at this entry solely from a Final Fantasy fan's perspective, I'm going to take a look at it from a competitive gamer's perspective.

I feel every game needs at least a card that makes the other player freak out when it hits the table. The trick, is getting that card to mesh with the rest of the cards without creating a balance issue.

I don't think a meticulous game balance is the end-all-be-all of competitive gaming. If it was, we'd all be playing Virtua Fighter instead of Street Fighter or Tekken. Guess which game is in the $10 bargain bin...

Not that Virtua Fighter is bad... it's a masterpiece, balanced to perfection... but it's TOO balanced, like no matter which character or style I'm using, it feels like Potato vs. Potato. Instead I'm playing Tekken where I can juggle 80% of a character's health away, or Street Fighter where I can Spinning Pile Driver someone out of a jab.

I wanted the game's Summoner mechanic to mirror this. Even though Summoned creatures power varies Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy, you're fighting dragons, and gods, and other majestic things.

I want people to freak out when Bahamut hits the table, and scramble to take out the Summoner before it finishes. (sometimes in vain!)

I feel Bahamut accomplishes this, that's certainly a powerful ability, considering it can't be dispelled, if the opponent doesn't have a Summoner, it's pretty much an auto-win for you.

So where the heck does the balance come in? Well, lucky for me, true summoners in Final Fantasy are usually the damsel type, small children, or anemically weak. I try to give all summoners a base ATT/DEF of 600/600. (which is 200 points above the Mysidia twins by the way, ouch) This means, it's really not all that hard to kill a Summoner, any class can do it. Even if they have other magicks, if they're already kneeling, they're prone to any magic spells you may have anyway. Not to mention you can only have 1 copy of each Summon in your deck, you don't want to recklessly waste that power card.

In a summoner's defense though, you don't have to start your battle with a summoning. Pop in your summoner after most of the field is knelt out, and you'll have a better chance of survival.
Also, don't forget, the only requirement to trigger a summon is for the summoner to re-stand, and while most of the time, this will occur through 2 consecutive passes, and the round ending, anything else to prematurely stand the character also works. Haste works well for this, there is definitely some other synergy for this also, just gotta be an optimist. ...