Table of Contents

1. Magicite List
2. Explanation
3. Empower and Dampen Magicites
4. Defensive Magicites
5. Offensive Magicites
6. Examples
7. Frequently Asked Questions

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Magicite List

HIGH Priority
MEDIUM Priority
LOW Priority

Empowers

Behemoth King: Empower Lightning x3, Precise Strikes
Geosgaeno: Empower Water x3, Blade Ward
Belias: Empower Fire x3, Deadly Strikes
Manticore: Empower Ice x3, Precise Strikes
Typhon: Empower Wind x3, Attack Boon
Adamantoise: Empower Earth x3, Defense Boon
Ark: Empower Dark x3, Mind Boon

Dampens

Quetzalcoatl: Dampen Water x2, Health Boon, Fast Act
Famfrit: Dampen Fire x2, Health Boon, Spell Ward
Mateus: Dampen Wind x2, Health Boon, Blade Ward
Syldra: Dampen Earth x2, Health Boon, Magic Boon
Hectatoncheir: Dampen Lightning x2, Health Boon, Resistance Boon
Deathgaze: Dampen Holy x2, Health Boon, Hand of Vengeance

Defensive

Phoenix: Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Blade Ward x2
Phoenix: Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Spell Ward x2
Phoenix: Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Blade Ward, Spell Ward
Phoenix: Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Blade Ward, Defense Boon
Phoenix: Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Spell Ward, Resistance Boon

Offensive

Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Attack Boon x2
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Magic Boon x2
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Fast Act, Precise Strikes
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Fast Act, Healing Boon
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Spell Ward, Blade Ward
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Deadly Strikes x2
Madeen: Empower Holy, Surging Power, Mind Boon x2 (Higher priority if Holy mage team is all White Mages)

Astra

Lakshmi: Dampen Dark, Healing Boon, Health Boon, Blade Ward
Lakshmi: Dampen Dark, Healing Boon, Health Boon, Spell Ward

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Explanation

Magicite decks aren’t as complicated as they pretend to be. The whole process of assembling them seems really intimidating but it’s really just a matter of having the right passives for the job, and with how little those jobs vary in FFRK it narrows down the amount of magicites you need to keep around to make sure you’re well equipped.

The only magicite that truly matters in a deck is the Main, since their active use abilities can vary wildly in how they affect a fight. Beyond that, your deck is merely a collection of passives. Yeah, different magicites have different stats but that doesn’t end up mattering enough due to you being forced to use specific magicites for certain tasks.

So when I put together a deck for a team, what I’m really thinking is “What Empowers/Dampens/Wards/Boons do I need?” and then just take the five magicites that I’ve got that best fulfill those conditions. This is why there are so many ways to go about this and you’ve likely come across other such guides, who are probably all “right” and “correct” as I believe my way is, because theirs are just a different way to assemble a collection of passives. It’s also why 4star magicites, with the same four passive slots, work almost as well or sometimes just as well as 5star in decks and people shouldn’t be discouraged from using them if that’s the best they’ve got.

So what passives do I want when making a team? Usually it’s clear cut and simple, like when fighting magicites. Some torment fights can make you think a little on what you can afford to miss out on. Here’s a list of what I’ll typically want:
Empowers of the element most in need
Dampens of the element most in need
Two Health Boons
At least one Surging Power, preferably two
Two Attack or Magic Boons depending on team type
Balanced use of Blade Wards(Max 2)/Spell Wards(Max 2) and Defense Boons(Max 1)/Resistance Boons(Max 1) against the boss’s strengths

I’ll go into a couple examples of how I’d use these guidelines to put a team together.

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Example of Use

The base team that I’ll use for the most typical of situations(single damage type team, single element boss) is set in stone:
Empower Magicite
Dampen Magicite
Defensive Magicite
Two Offensive Magicites

5* Water Magicite Famfrit

For a more specific example, out of my magicites above, let’s compile a team to face what is widely considered to be the easiest 5star magicite, Famfrit.

What passives do I want? I’m going to be using a physical lightning team, so that gets two magicites out of the way immediately:
Behemoth King, with Empower Lightning, Precise Strikes, and Two Inherited Empower Lightnings
Madeen, with Empower Holy, Surging Power, and Two Inherited Attack Boons

We know Famfrit uses water damage, so that picks another spot for me:
Quetzalcoatl, with Dampen Water, Fast Act, Inherited Dampen Water, and Inherited Health Boon

That’s the base three that get taken care of pretty easily in many fights. The remaining two slots is where the customization happens.

Looking at Famfrit’s AI Script, I see a clear and obvious leaning toward Piercing Magic Damage. This makes choosing my defensive magicite easy:
Phoenix, with Dampen Ice, Health Boon, and Two Inherited Spell Wards

Spell Wards reduce all magical damage as well as gravity damage(which Famfrit also has from Graviga), while Resistance Boons are strong but only reduce the damage from Non-Piercing attacks. This makes the double Spell Ward defensive magicite the clear choice.

Lastly, since defenses have been taken care of we can use a second Madeen. Having Fast Act from Quetzalcoatl makes this a fairly easy call. Two more Fast Acts on top of that would be a terrible idea due to diminishing returns in passives, so we have a choice between Fast Act+Precise Strikes and Deadly Strikes+Deadly Strikes. Because of how undesirable spiky damage is thanks to damage caps, I dislike forcing Deadly Strikes onto a team that has less than an 80% chance to crit. Even with Onion Knight pUSB and the Precise Strikes on Behemoth King that only brings the team to 60%. The value of Deadly Strikes on this team would not be very high in that scenario, so the most common physical Madeen(besides Attack Boons) is the best choice here:
Madeen, with Empower Holy, Surging Power, Inherited Fast Act, and Inherited Precise Strikes

Five magicites chosen. Let’s see how the passives align with what I outlined above as my ideal:
3x Empower Lightnings
2x Dampen Waters
2x Attack Boons
2x Fast Acts
2x Precise Strikes
2x Health Boons
2x Spell Wards
2x Surging Powers
3x Dead Passives(Dampen Ice, 2x Empower Holy)

After the three expected dead passives, that’s the perfect team. The Famfrit fight benefits from having the two forced passives, Fast Act and Precise Strikes, being very valuable for the fight. For example, the other water magicite, Geosgaeno, is also forced to bring along Behemoth King, but the Precise Strikes on that magicite is useless for a magical team. The stars just happen to align for poor old Famfrit, the 5star punching bag.

Magicite fights are, by and large, simple and easy to build for. So for the second example let’s try something with more flair.

FFIII Torment Ahriman

That’s more fun. Also more advanced so you may want to skip this section for fear of being overwhelmed before you get a hang of using magicites. You’ve been warned.

Because of the variance in damage types and elements on our torment teams, I won’t be able to be as specific as I was for Famfrit, who I’d obviously be assaulting with a physical lightning team. So to start, I’m going to focus on the most constant between players which is defending against Ahriman’s damage. Working on a variable team like this means it’s probably better to decide which passives I want before choosing the magicites to represent them.

Looking at the AI, I see… A whole lot of Non-Piercing magic damage! Which is pretty fortunate, because it would be hard to defend against specific elements here given how many of them there are(6 in all. Fire, Ice, Lightning, Earth, Wind, Dark). Being mostly non-piercing means two passives will blanket reduce all of the damage. Spell Ward and Resistance Boon. So I’m gonna ask for two Spell Wards and a Resistance Boon from my team to help deal with this.

With primary defenses taken care of, I’m going to switch to offense for a second and hope we have enough room afterward to sneak a dampen or two onto the team for the most problematic of Ahriman’s elements.

When I did this fight, I used Luneth, Cloud of Darkness, Arc, Onion Knight, and Aria. Offensively, this is a mess. ATK, MAG, and MND are all used and there’s no elemental consistency. Thankfully, Onion Knight is extremely flexible so I aligned his element with Luneth(since OK’s Holy and Dark are pitiful if I were to match him with CoD or Arc). This gave me a physical Wind character, a magical Wind character, a magical Dark character, and a magical Holy character. This lines up well! Having two Wind characters makes me inclined to bring Typhon along for the ride, who serves many purposes here. In my opinion, Ahriman’s most dangerous element is Earth, so not only is Typhon providing Empower Winds for my two wind characters and give an Attack Boon to Luneth, but he also makes for a strong choice for Main Magicite since he reduces the boss’s earth damage once activated. I’m sold.

With some offense and defense established, let’s inject what passives I’ve decided I want and see where that leaves us:
Typhon, with Empower Wind, Attack Boon, and two Inherited Empower Winds
Phoenix, Dampen Ice, Health Boon, Inherited Spell Ward, and Inherited Resistance Boon

That piercing dark attack that nails the third slot is scary. I use Cloud of Darkness to mitigate it with EnDark, but it still hurts. With the way I’ve built them, Lakshmi makes a great addition to any team anyway, so benefitting from all four passives makes this a strong inclusion:
Lakshmi, Dampen Dark, Healing Boon, Inherited Health Boon, and Inherited Spell Ward

Having such a varied team means it’s best to go with the generic/magical Madeen for everyone’s benefit, who also helps out Arc’s damage with an Empower:
Madeen, Empower Holy, Surging Power, and two Inherited Fast Acts

So, despite having such a messy team, I’ve managed to Empower 3/4 of the damage dealers, Dampen the two most dangerous elements, have two Health Boons, two Spell Wards, and a Resistance Boon. Finally, I somehow have one magicite slot left after all of that. So what to do? Places I could bolster would be: One more Surging Power, Dampen Wind for that powerful piercing Wind attack at the start of the fourth phase, and Magic Boons to assist my two mages. Given that I can slay two of those with a single magicite makes it a fairly easy call of the Magic Boon Madeen, especially since I already have two Health Boons and Mateus’s Blade Ward helps not a lick in this fight:
Madeen, Empower Holy, Surging Power, and two Inherited Magic Boons

I sacrificed many letters to it, but once you look at the process and understand why the decisions were made, most decks fill themselves.

Typhon, to Empower Luneth and OK while reducing the boss’s Earth damage
Phoenix, to defend against magic damage, add a Health Boon, and even get benefit out of its Dampen Ice
Lakshmi, to defend against Dark damage while adding the second Spell Ward and the always welcome Healing Boon
Madeen, with two Fast Acts to speed up our Hybrid team
Madeen, with a second Surging Power and two Magic Boons to help the two black mages in much the same way that Typhon helped the two Wind characters

Frequently Asked Questions

Why three empowers? And on the same magicite?
It’s true, the drop-off in effectiveness on your third empower is quite large, but a third Empower Lvl15 is still worth an extra 4% of elemental damage, which is about as high as other passives as well as being equally as good for physical and magical teams, regardless of the situation or other magicite it’s paired up with. I can’t say the same for any of the other passive options.

I purposefully stack all three Empowers on a single magicite for the sake of keeping them modular. Magicites aren’t the only fights we use these things in, which means we can encounter fights where we deal and/or take damage of more than one element. Spreading out my Empowers(or Dampens) over multiple magicites makes me weaker when I have more than one thing to cover.

Why all the Phoenixes?
I originally settled on using Deathgaze as my “wild card” magicite because I felt their Hand of Vengeance was the most offensively focused thing I could use after Madeen’s Surging Power. After some thought I decided there wasn’t a single team I would not want two Health Boons on and including a Phoenix on every team just makes inheriting other passives easier. Given how it works, Hand of Vengeance doesn’t do enough for me anyway, so using Phoenix as a defensive flex just made more sense.

Why two Madeens per deck instead of one?
It’s true that a second Evrae doesn’t help much and being stuck with Empower Holy and a weak Surging Power makes it a lesser option, but that’s only if you look at them from the very end game of 4* magicites where you’ve got a perfect team for everything, which I never reached. I purposefully never reached it because The Global Advantage told me that I’d be wasting a whole lot of Arcana for nothing since those 4* would be superseded by 5* anyway. So I built my 4* decks around using four Evraes that I rotated across every team that I made, saving a ton of Arcana for when 5* eventually launched as the number of leveled magicite my decks required dropped considerably for only a slight loss of strength.

Madeen is a super-powered version of Evrae, with a 23% Surging Power to Evrae’s 15% after inclusion of two in a deck. Add in that Madeens don’t waste inherit slots with Attack Boons like Evraes do, so I can better custom tailor each Madeen for the team I’m fielding. Less Arcana spent on these two magicite slots means I can spend more souping up the other magicites.

And the rest? These teams will take a long time to assemble, even with so much overlap in Madeens and Phoenixes.
This is something that’ll be more personal depending on how your 4* experience was, if it existed at all. If you already have a decent spread of leveled 4* magicite like me, it becomes easy to get started on every team. Empowers and Dampens are the same strength from 4* to 5* so all of those passives can be inherited to the new breed. That’s almost all of the work done right there. It’s also worth noting that you can inherit more than one passive from one magicite to a 5*. This makes it easier to fill up those slots.