Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is finally here and it’s pretty great! It’s a deep and vibrant action-RPG which rewarded me with beautiful sights, touching character developments, and moments of tactical genius across the several dozen hours I invested in it. But for all of its strengths and weaknesses, the greatest thing it gave me was a new card game: Queen’s Blood. First introduced as a distraction in the opening hours, I quickly realized how much a) I loved it and b) it informs a lot of Rebirth’s side content. With that in mind, I’ve taken on every challenger thrown my way, ranging from the average hobbyists to robots and Chocobos, and learned a thing or two in the process. Now, I hope to impart some advice to any newcomers looking to get good at the card game that’s sweeping the world of FF7 Rebirth. Here’s what I’ve got for y’all.
Hold off on the middle
The single greatest piece of advice I can give, especially starting off, is to delay taking the middle column. Queen’s Blood is a game about raising power levels in lanes as much as it is a game of territory expansion. Though you’ll find relative success in being aggressive when you first start playing (I won my first game this way), that strategy quickly begins to collapse without some specific tactic in mind. Slapping down cards wherever you can is the equivalent of playing checkers. And what do you want to play? Chess. Knowing that, patience becomes a secondhand virtue. Waiting for your opponent to claim the middle so that you can swoop in and force them onto their back foot is almost always the right play. Be prepared for a bit of a back and forth, knowing that as long as you’ve got a good head on your shoulders and a decent selection of cards on hand, playing the slow game is the best possible move. By the time I learned this, I was winning every game without resets and climbing through the Queen’s Blood ranks.
Buy cards everywhere you go
I know this sounds like the most obvious advice but money is kind of tight early on in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I was particularly stingy and overlooked a few early shops in favor of transmuting materials I found in the open world. However, shops all over the game feature more than just your basic potions, antidotes, gear, and materia. A select few general stores, as well as some specialized vendors, also sell booster packs for Queen’s Blood. Buying them at about 500 gil a pop is the quickest way to start building a substantial enough collection of cards to have some variety in your decks. Otherwise, you’ll be left earning a single card every time you win a match—if there’s even a card up for reward, which some quest-related Queen’s Blood bouts don’t feature. All the booster packs have fun themes, and some of my most helpful cards came from these incredibly easy-to-miss resources.
Replacements cards are your best friend
You won’t get replacement cards for a while, but once you do unlock them they’ll become the defining element of your Queen’s Blood deck. Replacement cards are exactly what they sound like: they must be placed on top of cards you’ve already played, at which point they destroy and replace them on the field. You might think it’s a reckless move to sacrifice the potential gain of more space to double down on a spot you’ve already claimed, but replacement cards are a great way to juice your lane’s power on the cheap. Unlike cards that need a certain amount of tokens to be played, replacement cards use anything already in play as a token, meaning you can use low-level fodder (like a Mandragora, which also grants you a minion once you play it) to expand your territory, and then replace it with something that’s potentially more powerful and has a different pattern, granting you even more territory or tokens to pull out higher-level cards.
Replacement cards become a key fixture in high-level Queen’s Blood, and your AI opponents will use them even when they’ve run out of space on the board to get one over on you. You’ll think you’ve got them on the ropes and then they’ll replace half their field with more powerful monsters that’ll trounce you. In order to be prepared for these back-and-forths, it’s best to start getting used to playing with replacement decks early and building up complimentary synergies. Speaking of which…
Don’t be afraid to use prebuilt decks
The deck you start off with will be fine enough for a rank or two, so you can leave it alone, but soon enough you’ll have to start building your own decks to keep competing. It can be intimidating—especially when you’re just starting out—to make a deck where everything seems to work in tandem. After all, you’re still learning the mechanics of Queen’s Blood through most of the early ranks. I didn’t feel like I had a firm enough grip on the game until the tournament in Chapter 6, so don’t feel bad about it taking a while. An easy way to get thinking, though, lies in the prebuilt decks.
There’s an option to sort through and use a variety of prebuilt decks made with synergies in mind that is buried in Rebirth’s menus. The game never even makes reference to the option as far as I know. At the pause menu, go over to the option called “Card Decks” to get started. There, you’ll see a number of slots for separate, custom decks. Hitting triangle to edit a given deck will take you into the card selection, at which point you will notice a prompt on the bottom of the screen to hit the PS5’s start button (the one with the three lines) to “Craft Prebuilt Deck.” Getting more cards unlocks more potential prebuilts, so go nuts facing every player and buying every booster pack to see all the possibilities.
Experiment with synergies to see what works best for you
Except for the absolute final game of Queen’s Blood, there’s a wide variety of viable strategies and ways to build your deck, especially if you use the pre-built decks as references for those synergies. You can make a deck entirely about buffing your own cards, which would be complemented very well by the Chocobo and Moogle card you get pretty early on, a Cactuar, and Ifrit, whose power is raised by 2 for every enhanced ally card. Smack a Loveless card—which raises the power of everything in a perimeter around it when it’s played—right in the middle of all of them, and you basically have the deck that carried me through most of the ranks.
It’s not the only winning build, though. Shiva can provide the basis for a strong defensive deck, for example, and Shinra troopers are a helpful foundation for a deck centered on expansion and territory. If you want to get really crazy, try synergizing monsters that destroy indiscriminately—like a Bomb card—with Midgardsormr or Tonberry King, which grows in strength proportional to the number of ally cards destroyed. You don’t need to worry about winning every lane so long as the ones you do get amount to higher than your enemy’s total score. There are even cards that’ll increase the amount of points you get in a lane if you win it. Min-max the game to hell and back because it’s built for all these strategies, which makes it that much more fun to experiment with.
If you want a more straightforward progression, I’d emphasize a buff-heavy expansion deck for the first several ranks before introducing some cards with destructive/debuff abilities for the middle ranks. The second you unlock replacement cards, start filtering them in. You won’t regret it.
With that said, I think you all know enough now to get out there and start whooping some Queen’s Blood players. Just remember to take it slow and always be replacing; you’ll be flying through the ranks in no time. Then maybe, just maybe, Square Enix will make a standalone Queen’s Blood game and we can face off to see who’s really the best.
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