The latest premium Magic: The Gathering expansion, Marvel’s Spider-Man, is hitting store shelves this weekend. We’ve gone from an extended, hype-filled preview cycle to what looks to be the lowest prerelease attendance and interest for some time. Spider-Man, and by extension Marvel, is a premium brand for Wizards of the Coast to partner with. But what happened? Why is the invested player momentum seemingly gone overnight with the hyped turned to unimpressed, the unimpressed turned cynical and the cynical turned disgusted? I have a few bullet-point ideas as to why people aren’t as happy with the set as originally envisioned.
Its Small & Non-Cohesive
Let’s start with the most obvious, and probably most important items here. Marvel’s Spider-Man is small—it’s 188 new cards, well past the recent mark of 270-300 cards present in other recent Standard-legal sets. Why so small? It’s pretty simple. This expansion was originally designed to be in the lineage of Assassin’s Creed.
In the WotC Mothership article “Swinging Into Design,” Eric Engelhard shares that the set was originally envisioned (and designed) as a 100 card set headed direct to eternal legality, with a specific focus of making a splash in Commander. Have we ever heard that before? It would not be draft able and specifically also include no Commons. This article is an excellent look into what was obviously a troubled product pulled in many different directions.
You can learn a lot if you read between the lines. There’s references to it being inserted into the general set release schedule, forcing work to be paused on another set. It wasn’t decided to make it into a Standard-legal set until after it had moved through both Exploratory and Vision design. At the time it was decided, in June of 2023, only three people were working on it. The reader will note that March of the Machine: Aftermath, an extremely small set, had been released the previous month, to a combination of apathy and boos.
In an effort to make it both a viable Standard-legal release and, by their telling, to get in some version of limited play, the set was expanded by 88 cards, many of them taking up the role of the pawns of limited and representing glue to make such a format work. The version that came out of the effort is… something! But more about that latter. This new set size makes it easy to be unimpressed—or outright disappointed.
This constant pushing and pulling and context switching cannot produce a good product. It simply can’t.
It’s no surprise then that, despite the best efforts by the incredibly capable team at Wizards, what came out of the building feels non-cohesive, especially by modern standards. It feels both over and under-designed, with the complexity of some cards running into monumental territory, while some of the commons feel like Rivals of Ixalan cast-offs. This is the natural result of the set originally being designed for one purpose—to make cool Spider-Man cards aimed at Commander. It ends up with another purpose—a set with cool Spider-Man cards that also has to be safe for Standard legality and function as a draft format. Those are two pretty misaligned goals.
What we’re left with is what looks and feels like a mess. Of important note, this is the first Universes Beyond that feels like a pile of references rather than a single, cohesive love-letter. That has been the saving grace of every Universe’s Beyond product so far, with each representing a well-rendered look into what the intellectual property would look like in the context of Magic: the Gathering. They tell stories on cards. Marvel’s Spider-Man feels like nothing more than referential legendary creature after referential legendary creature with nothing else to tie it together.
It Doesn’t Work for Traditional Limited.
When it was announced that the upcoming Pro Tour would feature Edge of Eternities draft, not Marvel’s Spider-Man, the speculation was rampant. Do they not have the rights? Do they not believe in it? Do they want to put more shine on their own IP? Now, the answer is pretty obvious. While the set does have limited, it is a new format. Pick-Two Draft calls for four players instead of eight with each player taking two cards for every draft pick. This is a format we have seen before, most notably for products like Double Masters and Commander Legends where larger pack sizes required players to take a few more cards to speed up the draft cycle.
It’s an interesting solution to the problem of a miniscule set size. Unfortunately it still isn’t… real limited. People play Draft because they enjoy all of the trappings—highs and lows of the normal experience. It’s been ironed out into a skill-testing crucible that requires reps, format knowledge, mechanics, and more to be successful. Pick-Two very well may be the same eventually, but it isn’t now.
Past it not being on the Pro Tour, there already has been constant movement and confusion about what and won’t be done with the set for Regional Championship Qualifiers (Pick two? Normal? Sealed?) and also on Arena and Magic: The Gathering Online. People aren’t happy with Pick-Two being the plan—but do we want to try and normally draft a set is this small and has only FIVE archetypes? I can’t imagine that would work very well.
Aren’t we supposed to be having fun here?
Through the Omenpaths Rules
We can only speculate as to why Marvel’s Spider-Man isn’t being put onto Magic: The Gathering Arena (or MTGO, for that matter). Heck, we can speculate a lot about everything for this set. Realistically, the decision to make it a limited, standard-legal set came long after all of the legal paperwork was signed & that paperwork did NOT include rights to digital platforms. It is, instead, being replaced with a mechanically identical set with unique, in-universe flavor which, to be frank, rocks. The slick characters and fun references remind me of older Core sets which took the opportunity to remind us of the places out there throughout the multi-verse through reprints and new cards alike. The spider-heros are all cool and it’s obvious they put thought into how to treat stuff like the Symbiotes. Mix in the cult-classic-already-Fleem and you have yourself a home run of flavor that makes a bland set pale in comparison, save for the moments where fans say “wow, they actually put Anti-Venon onto a Magic Card Wow!!”. Through the Omenpaths oozes something that Marvel’s Spider-Man just doesn’t. The reveal of the online version is where it felt like the air went out of the room for this Universe’s Beyond set.
Does It Matter?
Internet Shaquille is a guy on Youtube who consistently publishes my favorite stuff on the platform, about his technical domain of cooking or otherwise. A Short he made has stuck with me, during which he tells of a critical video he made which, ironically enough, exploded the popularity of the product he didn’t like. He gave a mantra as a takeaway—Don’t criticize, ignore. Ignoring something you don’t like is better in most ways than broadcasting your hate for it, because criticism, or even outright hatred, simply gives more press and airtime to the thing you’re opposed to. Obviously, this is only applicable to things with low stakes, like card games and the things we see printed on them. There are plenty of things and people and ideas in the world worthy of loud criticism.
The more I’ve considered Magic criticism in this regard, I’m not sure if it matters. Maybe it does? I don’t think I’m extolling or condemning virtues about the set that aren’t immediately obvious to most other invested fans, who themselves were initially interested in the set and slowly felt it slip away. Critique has its place in all forms of art as well, of which Magic definitely is one. I think this is probably my last time delving this far into it. I’m sure there are some deeper ideas that could be leveraged here in coming months with hindsight—or with more internal knowledge of what happened surrounding the set, or with a bespoke game design background holding up the critique. I am sure of one thing though: this set is not for me and if you’re reading this, it almost definitely isn’t for you either.
Lesson #11: If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail
The most famous Mark Rosewater-isms all come from his series of articles (and Game Developer’s Conference talk) entitled Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons. Like they say on the tin, they look back on the twenty major game design lessons Mark learned during his first twenty years of working on Magic: The Gathering. Lesson #11 is often relevant.
“If everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail.”
While the headline captures the positive, the more expanded versions in his articles and talk also include the negative mirroring. It’s much better practice to make cards that half of players will rate 10, even if the trade off is for the other half to rate them 1, than it is to make piles of cards that everyone would rate in the six through eight range. Making something worth being excited about is worth the haters that come along with it.
I think this is where Wizards ended up missing the mark on this product. Development hell aside, this product intended to be an easy opening salvo of more Marvel sets to come, made with the casual Commander and other new players in mind. It was instead forced into the spotlight of being Standard-and-RCQ-Limited-Season-Load-Bearing. Immediately, the context switches. Rather than ending up with Spider-Men that people will cheer or boo, we’ve ended up with piles of commons that are 5s at best—and plenty of Spider-People that fit the mold too. Universes Beyond is the natural outcropping of MaRo’s Lesson #11 – inserting beloved IP into Magic at the expense of other somewhat-beloved IP (i.e. Magic’s own) will create a range of 1s and 10s. Realistically, probably more 10s because at least the cards will be powerful.
Marvel’s Spider-Man is a product that was not supposed to be for me was instead turned into a product that is implicitly for me due to its chokehold on the news cycle, Standard rotation, and my FNM draft rotation down at the local game store. It creates a cycle of frustration that is hard to ignore—and I’ve seen plenty of people falling prey to, myself included!
This set will be successful, regardless of how the prereleases looked (comically empty) or how quickly the over-inflated collector booster boxes have cratered ($850 at the beginning of the month to $560 at day of writing, and still going down). As Magic trots out the latest Not-For-Me set, this one is somehow the most frustrating yet. The best I can hope is that Wizards doesn’t repeat another mistake like this again. I think the thing most frustrating to me is that so many new players, interested in Spider-Man, will be introduced via such an un-cohesive set without a story to tell. Critique probably has a point, even if I’m not an expert. Most of the things I’ve written that I’ve considered to be best were critique. I can celebrate the wins too, and loudly, and will continue to do so. At the same time, I will point out what is wrong to my engaged audience of other people who are frustrated, raising the profile of the set at the same time, and wonder about change in the future—but I won’t hope for it.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, DanDan fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack.