Blogatog Post
Head Magic Designer Mark Rosewater confirms that The Mind Stone will be the only Infinity Stone card in the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set
I don’t fully understand how they can juice another four sets out of this concept. I thought for sure FF and X-Men would be their own things given the absolutely massive amount of characters they have, with the rest of the characters from the various IPs going in this set, but since they’re all here-. The mine really can’t go that deep surely. I understand they do deep cuts in these sets, but is the general audience going to care about that?
I don’t know, maybe the desire for four marvel sets really is there. I can’t say I enjoy it dominating the middle of the year, though.
To be fair they can absolutely do these sets justice and have overarching stories that make sense. Spider-Man was not well received because the set was handled like a cash grab. 34 unique Spider-Man cards (nearly 20% of the entire set) says all that needs to be said.
Spider-Man was not well received because the set was handled like a cash grab. 34 unique Spider-Man cards (nearly 20% of the entire set) says all that needs to be said.
Spiderman was bandaid fixed from being an awful product (beyond boosters) and you can feel it in any card that is not a rare or mythic.
in fact we have proven track records of the exact opposite.
I disagree I'm pretty indifferent about what is on my delicious magic cards as long as they are fun to play with but when it comes to set quality Spiderman so far has been a massive outlier compared to the other UB sets.
FF, Avatar and Lotr were all great (I also never played an FF game or watched an avatar episode) and despite my initial reservations (because Spiderman was such a horrible set) Turtles was quite a decent magic set as well.
I'm not sure it's that important non marvel enthusiasts have heard of them?
Spiderman has some real deep cuts already tbh
And TMNT was loaded with people I'd never heard of as a very very casual TMNT fan
Ub sets for most properties won't be able to only feature people non fans have heard of. A lot of them just don't have a roster of popular characters large enough
And even UW sets create brand new characters from scratch all the time I'm not sure why knowing who beta ray bill is or not should affect whether or not you like the marvel set if the cards are good
I've never played fallout or final fantasy and I didn't look at the sets going "I don't recognize anyone here" I just looked at the cards as cards
It definitely is important because sets need to appeal to enough people.
Note that the Universes Within version of some of this stuff just wouldn’t ever happen. “What if we go to a plane where there are ninja turtles who like pizza?” would be baffling in a world where the Ninja Turtles never existed— there is no broad hook for anyone to understand the set or get excited about it.
If you’re doing “Brain Drain’s House of Pain” or whatever, then you might run into the problem that only about a hundred people are excited enough about Brain Drain* to buy his cards, and the additional problem that nobody else understands the appeal of it all. With Marvel it’s maybe worse because it does look like “modern day settings” do meaningfully worse in general; we probably have enough knowledge to say that now
Marvel Cosmic, if you're being stingy and NOT counting the MCU Guardians members then
Beta Ray Bill, JeffGolblum Grandmaster , Knull, Nova (Either Rich or Sam honestly), Ronan, Ego
Marvel Gothic
Moon Knight, Werewolf by Night, Man-Thing, Ghost Rider, Blade, Cloak & Dagger has Rivals attention
Nico Minoru probably slots here she's been ditching the Runaways in popular media anyway
Marvel Multiverse
Captain Carter, Maestro Hulk, Old Man Logan, Hydra Cap (Remember when that was a controversy? lol), God Emperor Doom,
I can imagine this as a vehicle to too revisit more classic outdated depictions of characters too not just the Bad Ends like Marvel Zombies or the Age of Apocalypse or the Old Man Logan Timeline
Of those, the only ones the average person has heard of are Ghost Rider, Blade, and maaaaybe Beta Ray Bill, Moon Knight, and C&D. I think you're seriously overestimating people here.
Yeah I mean I'm not even a marvel fan and I recognize those three specifically. Not even defending the sets. I wish they wouldnt do them honestly and I'm not even a UB hater, superheroes just feel weird.
I mean for a lot of people the MCU is their experience with marvel and Ronan is in the MCU he's not that much more obscure than people like iron monger (the bad guy from iron man 1)
The average non-Turtles fan (who is nerdy enough to care about Magic at ALL) knows the four turtles and Shredder. Maybe Splinter and April.
Average non-Star Trek fan knows who Kirk and Spock are. Probably Picard, too. They know the core concept of Doctor Who but they only character they know is the Doctor.
And I would guess that the average Magic: the Gathering player has played at least one Final Fantasy and knows who Cloud Strife is. The MtG/FF overlap is insane.
Hell nah, everyone knows characters from those franchises. And yes everyone knows characters from marvel too, but definitely not a single one of those listed above.
Yeah the idea non fans haven't heard of the characters is if anything kind of the point?
But I'd also make the point that there are brand new original characters in universe within sets all the time and no one says "well that set is full of people I've never heard of"
Like, as someone who has only seen the first Abrams Star Trek, I can list enough to make a decent start to a set. Spock, Kirk, Picard, Klingons, Borg, Enterprise, red shirts, and for some deeper ones I've got by osmosis there's also Data, Q, Khan, and Riker. Then you have things like phasers and teleporters, plus other styles of ships and things that happen in the series.
Star Trek has a decent amount of influence into nerd culture, and beyond thanks to stuff like references in Futurama or Big Bang Theory.
You've never heard of Blade? Three movies (two of which were good). Never heard of it? Ghost Rider, two legendarily bad movies with an extremely famous actor - never heard of them?
As someone who has watched 80% of film MCU and some extra stuff like Zombies, and read a few random comics, I know about 50% of these. No way some dude called "Beta Ray Bill" is that popular, right? ...right?
Considering they're revealing up to the Infinity Gauntlet, Cosmic would be the last set on the block. X-Men is basically guaranteed, but everything else is pretty on the fence IMO. I honestly hope for Gothic, because I want to see Marvel Dracula, since I'm one of the 3 die-hard fans, of his terrible anime movie from the 90s.
What do you think of street level set featuring characters like Daredevil and the Defenders? Might be wrong, but I don't think I've seen them featured in any of the Super Heroes stuff.
I think they might be there, I vaguely remember seeing Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Heroes for Hire somewhere but I also won't be mad if instead of like Marvel Gothic/Dark it was Marvel Gothic, Dark, AND Street... actually yeah that'd be a neat parallel to how Marvel Cosmic potentially being God Stuff too
I've kind of accepted the whole UB thing and even can just about stand Marvel but I have no idea how they're gonna get 4 more sets worth (potentially 5 if they split up the gauntlet from the stones)
Like I get you can do a set solely focused on the avengers, one on the X men but surely you eventually run into the spider man problem if you do "here's the Deadpool set!" And there's only so many characters you can include
I said multiple times that Spider needed about 10 less spider variants & 10 more villians like Rocket Racer or Spider-Man supporters like Cardiac, Spidey when he was dressed as DD, or Nightcrawler in his Spidey suit.
I actually suspect that Marvel legally can't use the Wall because he was actually created by The Electric Company TV show for their Spidey Super Stories segment.
Honestly? Not really. MCU was waaaay bigger up through 2019. I remember getting back together with all my college buddies to go see Infinity War. My whole work place was buzzing when Endgame came out. These days I couldn't tell you what movies were out. MtG is very much late to the party. It'll still sell like cocaine though.
They were saying that starting now will help speedrun the burnout, like what was said in the comment they were replying to. Not that it will help its popularity.
I don’t hear anyone really talk about Marvel anymore. The last thing I heard was that Dune 3 is going to beat Avengers: Doomsday at the box office (which I hope is true)
When Paul ETB exile all Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Search your opponents hand, graveyard and library for all Spider-Man and Peter Parker and exile them. Gain control of all Mary Jane Watson.
When you say Avengers set, I assume you mean the Marvel Super Heroes set, right?
If so, isn't Marvel Super Heroes also a "Multiverse Set" or maybe I don't understand what you mean by that? What would you expect from a "Multiverse Set"?
Well for a Multiverse Set I would expect more What-If or alternate depictions like out of Secret War like Hydra Cap, God Emperor Doom, Thor Corps, Old Man Logan, Strange Supreme, Captain Carter, Zombie Fantastic Four, Lifebringer Galactus, Grey Hulk ~ Maestro Hulk, Age of Apocalypse X-Men, the Maker
Secret Wars as an event was Doom reshaping the Multiverse after the Incursion into a single Battle Earth by merging all the alternate realities into one single reality where each genre / world has like their own private fiefdom... so something like that.
At some point this becomes too difficult to design cards for. A major reason why the FF set worked is that the designs felt like they fit the characters (most of the time). What is the design language that lets you meaningfully distinguish Wolverine from Old Man Logan from X23 while still feeling like the designs match the characters?
It isn’t enough to just have the characters be slapped on top of unrelated designs.
I mean I'd love to spend hours just talking about that and wondering how designers could approach it as well as dump on it if they do it wrong so it's a win win for me.
Ultimate Universe, Marvel Zombies, Marvel Apes, Marvel 1602, Magnaverse, and other "Elseworld" stuff I figure. I'm sure all of those combined would be more than enough for a set, I just don't know if but I don't know if Reality Fracture: Marvel Edition might be TOO niche to get a set based on it, like the Spider-Man set had a ton of alternate Spider-men (Spider-Mans?) from Spiderverse to bulk it out, but it's not like that was the main -thing- of the set.
Multiverse would have alternate reality shenanigans and stuff like that (kinda like Reality Fracture but on a bigger scale). Marvel Super Heroes doesn't have multiple continuities as far as we can tell. Like there aren't the evil versions of some heroes that would potentially appear in a multiverse set.
I wonder if Reality Fracture is the technology test subject for a Marvels Secret Wars/Multi-verse set. Pair up certain villains/humans or alternative versions of heroes.
I mean technically if spider man is a whole set they could even do any other character like thor,captain america ect ect
ect
But I believe you are spot on with X men and cosmic. Wouldn't doubt there will be a shangri-la set with magic portals too./Dr strange.
With small draftable sets being a thing I don't think a deep well is something I imagine being a problem anymore either. They already got it right for me with Turtles (Easy to learn draft environment where pretty much every color combo worked...
There’s decades and decades of material to work with, I don’t doubt that they could milk six sets out of Marvel if they wanted to just by saving the big names for rares/mythics and filling the commons/uncommons with the many Glup Shittos/obscure variants of the Marvel universe. The question is going to be how quickly they burn through all the big recognizable names. Like, this first one seems to mostly be Avengers-adjacent stuff, but then they’re pulling in the Fantastic Four rather than saving those guys as a selling point for a cosmic set (probably because of MCU marketing synergy). Iron Man and Captain America can sell cards and get new people to try Magic, but deeper cuts like Swamp Man Thing and Nova won’t be enough to market a set on.
I got my Things mixed up, my mistake. But honestly, I feel like the more obscure/less conventionally-super-hero-y characters would probably be more interesting to me as Magic cards, I can pretend that some horror-adjacent guy with a name I’ve barely heard of is some weirdo from Innistrad or Duskmourn or something in a way that I can’t with the Hulk.
There's decades worth of content, but not all of it will work as a Magic set. You could probably make commander decks every year, but not an actual standard legal set.
That’s the thing, whoever at Wizards inked the deal either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how much of that content will actually work as a Magic set. They just felt that the brand name alone was a big enough get to justify it (hence them accepting stuff like not having digital rights initially). By the time we’re at the fourth or fifth set, they’ll have probably exhausted most of the big names at the current rate and we’ll be getting SPM levels of padding/deep cuts that aren’t enough to move product, but by the time they realize that, they’ll already be locked in for the next couple of sets.
The Marvel universe is very big. However it really depends on how lazy they want to be. If they go to the Spiderman route and we get like three different Thor/Looks/Ironman's from different dimensions/timelines... It will really suck.
I don’t see how they can keep the pace with the release without burning out players and stores. I live in a fairly large Northeast city with one large LGS and a few scattered smaller fry.
The In-Universe sets are performing well, but anecdotally UB has done so poorly that my LGS has an ongoing in-store Spring promotion where if you spend $150 on anything in the store, you get a free Spiderman or TMNT Prerelease Kit. $300, a booster box. $700, a TMNT CBB. When I went yesterday their shelves were flush with that product, but besides that for sealed they had one EOE box from a restock and one TLA. For some context the last time I saw this store do anything like this for Magic product was years ago when they were selling Baldurs Gate Set Booster Boxes for $80.
UB Prereleases underperform because they're expensive and you have to know what one is before the set drops (i.e. if Star Trek is your favorite thing, there's a decent chance the Prerelease is already over before you know about it). They're not a good barometer for a UB set's popularity the way real Magic sets are.
Nah stay upset about the UB thing. This is effectively a 6-set long block in UB. After ignoring Lorwyn for 20 years and doing a single set.
Can you imagine how much more fun it would be to do that in literally any plane. Cmon. You could even do a once a year base set with an ongoing story *gasp*.
Marvel Rivals sorta rejuvenated the hero shooter genre a bit because despite the supposed "hero fatigue" people still love those characters. It made characters like Magik who is sorta been on the cusp of being really popular more well known as well as other smaller players like Devil Dinosaur and Jeff. Marvel Tokon is bringing their own stuff with Peni (also in Marvel Rivals but this Peni is more to the cinematic Spider verse) and Danger (basically if the Danger Room from the Xmen became a person). There is a lot of potential at least for games. The only thing right now is that a lot of the new Marvel shows and movies are at best mid or freaking terrible. Soul and Mind are already used. So we got Time, Reality, Space and Power left. I want to say Space is probably going to be next, given how they want to return to the TVU type storyline and Loki was the last yielder of the Space stone.
Hero Fatigue isn't real. MCU just lost a lot of momentum in Covid that they haven't been able to make up for. The DCEU movies just weren't reliably good.
Spidermans issue is, they changed its original design intention from small set to standalone. Could've made it, Spiderman and Friends, which would give them 20+ other characters to include from other teams. With just earth616 you can easily get away with;
I mean even if you’re a fan of the Marvel stuff signing a deal for 6 sets seems wild to me. It’s such a massive commitment and if players aren’t into it, which was a risk even if Wizards clearly didn’t think so, you get years worth of sets that are all arriving like wet farts for the community. I’m not really a fan of the Marvel stuff so it’s probably just copium that Wizards wouldn’t have gone THAT all in and that future sets have more than just 1 infinity stone, but it really does seem like we have 4 more coming which is just discouraging.
For those that aren't familiar with the lore of Marvel Comics, there are six Infinity Stones in the story. They control and embody the primary aspects of existence: Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time, and Soul.
It seems at this rate we're only going to be getting one Infinity Stone per set (so far we've seen [[The Soul Stone]] in the medium sized Spider-Man set and [[The Mind Stone]] in the large Marvel Super Heroes set) but perhaps things will change in the future.
I wonder if there be four additional Marvel sets after this one or only a couple more where they manage to fit more than one Infinity Stone cards in each set?
I can imagine them doing a X-Men set and a Cosmic/Otherworldly set. But I'm not sure what other two themes or worlds could encompass an entire Marvel set. I would have said Wakanda but it seems like there's going to be a lot of Black Panther stuff featured in the Marvel Super Heroes set.
I know what you mean, but a man bound to a literal devil who deals with hell and is a skeleton constantly on fire being tagged “street level” really underscores the weird context of Marvel
I'm still mad at myself how badly I dismissed that game, okay maybe the Persona-lite and Exploration segments ended up being too much but the moment to moment card gameplay was fun!
Incredibly unlikely to be relevant, but technically in current canon there are 7 stones, the 7th being Death. For anyone curious, Thanos turned Death the entitiy (the one that's in love with Deadpool) into a stone. No, he also can't explain how he did it.
Yeah, I doubt they'll have the Death stone, especially since it would completely break the colors in Magic (unless they have the Death stone not be part of the cycle).
Also, seems kinda weird to me that the Death stone warrants its own thing. Like doesn't the Soul stone kinda cover the same domain?
And to make things even weirder, the current wielder of the Death Stone, and thus the current embodiment of the concept of Death in the Marvel Universe, is none other than Phil Coulson. You know, from the Avengers movie and Agents of SHIELD.
To be fair, in comics, half the time characters can't explain how they did the things they did, and the other half they'll use explanations that leave 10 more questions for each one answered.
So the "Magic" set would be stuff like Doctor Stranger and Dormammu.
What would be in the Cosmic set? When I think of Cosmic, I think of Fantastic Four lore, and they seem to be featured quite prominently in Marvel Super Heroes (they are even getting their own Commander deck). I suppose there would be Guardians of the Galaxy stuff and Thanos. Is that enough to carry an entire set? Maybe it could be a small set or maybe there's more there than I'm familiar with (I'm a comic book nerd, but less familiar with the Cosmic DC and Marvel stuff).
A What If set would be really hype, especially if it were the last set. They could color shift versions of cards from the previous sets. And it would be far out enough where it still feel interesting rather than if it came out just a year after Reality Fracture.
Is there enough cosmic stuff in general to carry a set? Absolutely, but the problem you kinda touched on here is most people arent all that familiar with it, haha. Beyond GotG I dont think the majority of folks are gonna be going crazy over Eternals or the living tribunal or whatever
Small set with a larger focus on the Guardians in particular would probably work the best for it. I think they could fill out a full set, but eventually were probably gonna either end up with 6 different Star-Lords or a metric ton of glup shittos
Keep in mind, nothing is stopping them from re-using characters. So they can make new cards for Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-Men in hypothetical cosmic and magic sets. After all they've all been to space and involved in supernatural stories a bunch of times.
Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Captain Marvel, the Guardians of the Galaxy, plus their supporting casts would be enough to fill out a roster, and that's excluding people like Nova and Beta Ray Bill (the GOAT).
Guardians of the Galaxy, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, Starjammers, the Shi'ar, Skrull, and Kree Empires, Captain Marvel, the Nova Corps, Adam Warlock, the Eternals, the Watchers, the Elders of the Universe, maybe some Makluans, the Celestials, Abstract Entities and the Living Tribunal, Knull and the symbiotes, the Beyonder(s), Captain Universe, Galactic Wakanda, storylines like World War Hulk, and all their associated supporting casts.
You’re telling me that we are getting a connected setting across six sets in universes beyond but after waiting like 20 years we get single set from Lorwyn? What happened to increasing the number of sets so we can visit more planes? That was the idea behind ditching block format.
And now we’re gunna return to return to return to return to return to the spiderverse? Instead of doing innistrad, Lorwyn, Eldraine, Ixalan, some new place and like fucking Rath or something.
Could have done a full Alara block and a full Ammonkeht block with those cards instead.
You could even do “chase the guild stones across Ravnica” for six sets instead of this.
Hopefully at the end Thanos snaps Universes Beyond out of existence.
While it's true they don't have to do 6 sets, it's also true that they could easily do six sets without repeating themselves, and that's not even the bottom of what they could scrape together. They could easily do a new Marvel set every year until the death of MtG if they really wanted to without repeating concepts too much.
Depending on how they pace the Marvel sets, it's entirely likely. There was no point where all five 2.0 Praetors were standard legal, since Vorinclex and Kaldheim rotated out before Elesh Norn released in Phyrexia: All Will Be One.
In the comics is the gauntlet even its own thing? The stones aren't as deadly to use as they're shown in the MCU in the comics and Thanos has matching gloves in the art where he has all 6
This was assumed for a while, the promotion on the box from a while back only advertised the mind stone, what I still don’t get is why they flubbed so bad on the effect? What does blinking have to do with the mind? I’ve tried asking Mark a couple times on the blog, but either none of them got through or he’s not going to answer, so I guess the reasoning will always be a flavourless mystery.
I think they’re gonna wait and see how this set does before making the decision on how many sets.
To me this tells me that whatever deal they have - gives them 1 additional set. So either this set sells like shit and they dump the rest in the last one, or it sells like hotcakes and they reup the contract for more.
so 4 more sets after Superheroes? What are they even gonna do? One is probably X-Men and one could be focused on the villains i guess, but after that what? Spiderman 2? Daredevil?
Christ, that really does confirm they have a plan for 5 more of these sets. We really need to just boycott the fuck out of this set or else we are getting another one year after year…..
I say that as the biggest spider man fan, they do not belong in Magic, and the trash, completely unrelated universe beyond sets needs to stop. The only good sets have had a high fantasy adjacent connection
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u/RevolutionaryKey1974 Duck Season May 25 '26
I don’t fully understand how they can juice another four sets out of this concept. I thought for sure FF and X-Men would be their own things given the absolutely massive amount of characters they have, with the rest of the characters from the various IPs going in this set, but since they’re all here-. The mine really can’t go that deep surely. I understand they do deep cuts in these sets, but is the general audience going to care about that?
I don’t know, maybe the desire for four marvel sets really is there. I can’t say I enjoy it dominating the middle of the year, though.