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In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Marvel brand has taken over the world. Between the MCU, Marvel Animation, the Marvel Rivals video game, and Marvel Comics, obviously, you don’t have to look far to get your fix from the House of Ideas. With Marvel spread out across so many fields, there comes a question of brand synergy. Since the very beginning, the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t been afraid to take creative liberties from the source material. However, over time, the MCU has become the face of the Marvel brand. So what does this mean for collaborations, like Magic: The Gathering’s upcoming Marvel Universes Beyond sets? Will they be more in line with the MCU, or Marvel Comics? 

Magic: The Gathering design lead Mark Rosewater wrote on the MTG website that the future Marvel Universes Beyond sets will be chiefly based on the lore of the comics, rather than the MCU. While explaining how the upcoming Magic: The Gathering x Marvel's Spider-Man set came to be, Rosewater stated that Magic: The Gathering decided to go forward with a Marvel collaboration after Magic's design team had a "hackathon" event (a time when they "stop other designs for a week and work in teams on focused products") and concluded that Marvel was viable enough to build Universes Beyond sets around.

Rosewater wrote, "[The hackathon] led us to make a multi-product deal with Marvel. We would be making a number of randomized booster sets and additional products like Secret Lair drops. The randomized booster sets would focus on Marvel’s comic books. The reason this matters is that sometimes characters outside the comics are different than their comic book counterparts. For these sets, we are matching the comics."

Thus far, the cards from Magic: The Gathering x Marvel's Spider-Man have been a loving ode to the fabric of Spider-Man comics. Rosewater himself has spoken about his love of Spider-Man comics at San Diego Comic-Con this year. While I'm not much of a Spider-Man fan myself, I do find this commitment to Marvel's comics first before the MCU encouraging. 

Magic: The Gathering x Marvel's Spider-Man will be released on September 26, 2025. 

Whether you are a Commander player, a regular at your local game shop's FNM event, or simply love collecting Magic: The Gathering cards, you've landed in the right place. From Universes Beyond to the furthest reaches of the Magic Multiverse, we've got you covered here at Popverse. 

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