Magic: The Gathering‘s latest “Universes Beyond” set, “Marvel Super Heroes” will be released later this month and Variety has an exclusive reveal of a new card from the collection featuring one of the characters from Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
Releasing June 26, the highly anticipated “Marvel Super Heroes” collection is the latest tie-in set produced for the Wizards of the Coast-owned tabletop trading card card. As more of these sets have been produced in recent years, the Magic team has heard some push back from longtime players who want to continue to see Magic’s own internal IP. The game designers say they hear you, and they are doing their best to balance the workflow so Magic’s own stories — which will be showcased in an upcoming Netflix animated series and a live-action movie set at Legendary — still shine through.
“I’m on a team called the arc planning team, so we work way ahead of time. For example, most sets take three years to make,” Wizards’ Mark Rosewater told Variety during an interview at MagicCon in Las Vegas last month. “UB sets take four years to make because we have to interact with the partners — sometimes even longer. The cadence we like is we want to do roughly six sets a year. We want three to be in-universe Magic sets, three to be Universes Beyond sets. We care very much about Magic in universe. We’re doing an animated show on Netflix. We have a deal with Legendary to make a movie. We love our IP. There’s a lot of cool things about it and we have fans that it’s really big deal to them. So we keep inventing new worlds and stuff. But also, Universes Beyond has been a giant success for us. It’s actually proven to be one of the best tools ever for getting new players into the game. Part of Magic is, it’s something for everybody. So 50/50 is our current plan. It’s possible, maybe over time, at some point, we run out of the properties and maybe we start doing more in-universe Magic stuff. But right now, we have enough stuff that 50/50 seems to be where we want to be.”
Magic designer Gavin Verhey added: “It’s really important to me and the whole team that the story and the worlds of Magic still stay strong and still stay as well built as well built as ever. Like we have an incredible creative team that spends so much time building these worlds. It was described to me once as, imagine you did everything you needed to do for a huge blockbuster movie, and you did a single Magic set out of it. We build out a whole world with all these characters, with a whole plot line. We commissioned all this art for all these cards. We did a whole concept push, all this stuff. And so we want to keep making sure those worlds are awesome. And looking ahead, we have some amazing stuff in store.”
According to Verhey, the “2027 Magic in-world sets are some of the best we’ve ever done.” “I’m so excited for the sets next year,” he said. “It is incredible. I feel really good about the world building that we’re doing. I cannot stress enough that we care about that, and we are not sacrificing any of that for what we’re doing. And we want Magic’s worlds to be as robust and awesome as ever.”
See Variety’s exclusive reveal of a new card from the upcoming “Marvel Super Heroes” set:
Read Variety‘s interview with “Marvel Super Heroes” team members Dave Humpherys (Game Design Architect) and Aaron Mesburne (Senior Narrative Game Designer) about the making of the set below.
How were the different “super heroes” selected for this set? There’s a lot to choose from, and you could go from greatest hits to deep cuts and still not cover them all.
Aaron Mesburne: You are absolutely right — there is no way we could cover all of Marvel’s vast library of characters in a single set. Our Marvel collaboration was always planned as a multi-set endeavor. The main goal of this set was to cast our lens across Marvel’s more Earth-centric stories and characters: What heroes defend our planet? What villains, from Earth or elsewhere, are most known to threaten humanity? As we continue this partnership with Marvel, we want to make cards for as many Marvel characters as we can. Curating the roster for this set was a fun but certainly challenging puzzle; we aimed for a character lineup that included a wide range of popular Marvel all-stars and a generous helping of deeper, more niche legends. That said, there were definitely some hard cuts we had to make when considering our set size limits and what characters could also fit into the theming of future sets.
Keeping in mind the other Marvel collabs Magic has done and more that are still to come, how does that affect the way you design these cards and what you choose to focus on in a set that has a more general theme than say Spider Man?
Dave Humpherys: I felt that the more general theme let me focus more on designs that were especially resonant to the cards. The keyword mechanics here are less directional, so I can focus more text on capturing the flavor of the characters, place, actions, and items. We were mindful of capturing stories that made sense for the focus of this set while saving for the future.
How much are you balancing the design of the whole set around The Mind Stone? Does it matter for every card or only some?
Humpherys: There are so many cards that are strong to ‘flicker’ throughout Magic’s history and various formats that the cards within this set weren’t a huge consideration in how they interacted with the Mind Stone. As a mythic, The Mind Stone doesn’t impact draft and sealed games very often. Perhaps one of the most relevant in-set interactions was with the Power-up mechanic where The Mind Stone could reset those once per turn abilities, and so those abilities were something we had to keep an eye on.
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