So, there's a new set for Magic the Gathering, but it's got a secret identity.
I play Magic on Arena, the Hearthstone-like app that is purely digital (I have no idea if Magic Online still lets you redeem a digital set for a printed one - I suspect not - but Arena's whole economy is built not around actually trading, but being able to craft cards with "Wildcards," meaning that basically everyone can, fairly easily, have the absolute top-tier decks. Is this good for the game? Not sure, but it does mean that I think it's probably easier to limit how much money you spend on it).
For the past few years, MTG has been putting out "Universes Beyond" sets based in other IPs, usually owned by other companies. Most are print-only, and if you play Standard, the format that only allows for cards from the last three years of releases (it used to be two years. Also, as a note, while this format does require you to keep getting new cards and new decks, I think it's also probably the most inviting format because the constant rotation means that the power level doesn't get too high - you don't have to ensure your win on turn 2, necessarily,) tends not to allow them.
There have been a couple of exceptions. Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms came out a few years ago, and was Standard-legal. D&D, of course, is also owned by Wizards of the Coast, so the legal use of it as an IP was, I imagine, relatively simple to clear for the company. But on top of that, there's already been some crossover between the brands, such as a few campaign sourcebooks for D&D set in Magic planes (I myself have been running my longest-ever D&D campaign set primarily in Ravnica, one of Magic's most popular planes, and the first to get a full campaign setting book for D&D).
More recently, we got a set based in Final Fantasy. And this, honestly, felt like a bit more of a shock, because while Final Fantasy fits within the fantasy genre that Magic has always had, it's also probably a stronger brand than Magic the Gathering (D&D, as beloved and storied as it is, and as popular as it is today compared to earlier eras, has never been as big of a thing as MTG).
I will say that I actually enjoyed seeing the Final Fantasy set, even if there was a part of me that felt it odd as an addition, not as a kind of fun side-product like other Universes Beyond sets (which have done everything from Warhammer 40K to Doctor Who) but as a core, standard-legal set.
Which then brings us to this: the latest Standard-legal set is a Spider-Man set. I don't know the exact numbers, of course, but I'd guess that, at least in America, Spider-Man is a bigger brand than even Final Fantasy - probably the most popular and beloved of all the Marvel superheroes (though admittedly the MCU did really raise the profile of Iron Man and Captain America).
But if you play on Arena, it's not a Spider-Man set at all.
The folks on the Magic team at Wizards built an entire set around Spider-Man, and then their creative team (I'm assuming that was who was in charge of this) went through every single card and changed names and art to make mechanically identical digital cards that were just set in the Magic multiverse.
Spider-Man has been pushing a bit of its multiverse theming lately - which honestly probably has a lot to do with the fact that Sony still retains the rights to the character, and wants to make movies that focus specifically on Spider-Man and not branch out into the larger MCU, even while they've made agreements to allow Tom Holland's Peter Parker to play with Disney's cinematic universe (hope he gets better - apparently he had a nasty injury on the set of his fourth Spider-Man movie recently).
But Magic has also, within its lore, entered a new era in which inter-planar travel is far easier than it was after the Time Spiral block's Great Mending, which de-powered planeswalkers but also made them the only beings (other than Eldrazi) that could travel between planes. The conclusion of the Phyrexia arc a couple years ago ushered in a new era in which A: lots of planeswalkers became de-sparked and B: the paths the Phyrexians had used for their invasion made that less of a problem.
The point is, as seen particularly in sets like Aetherdrift, plane-hopping is now available to the masses, and so it makes sense for a set to explore what happens when the multiverse becomes more easily traversable.
But there is something very kludgy about all of this: one might ask why there's so much spider-theming in this set about people traveling the Omenpaths. The real answer is because it's a Spider-Man set with the serial numbers scrapped off.
As fun as it was to get the Final Fantasy set (I think mechanically my favorite thing was how they treated Summons) I do think in the long run I'd prefer that they keep these Universes Beyond sets out of at least the Standard set rotation. I believe lead designer (who has been in that job since I was in high school or even earlier - I remember discovering his weekly Making Magic posts back when, like, Onslaught block was coming out) Mark Rosewater has been not happy with this move, preferring to focus instead on in-universe (or in-multiverse) sets and build out Magic's own brand and IP, which I do think is probably the right position.
That said, I think that the re-skinning of this set is far more likely to be a legal thing - after all, the physical cards are being printed with the whole Spider-Man theming (otherwise what would be the point?). I think Sony might have some special rights to Spider-Man appearing in digital games (like their PlayStation games that have come out to some acclaim in recent years) on top of film rights and thus it might be a legal headache to wrangle those while also making a deal with Disney/Marvel to print the cards, so this re-skinning is probably just a way for Wizards of the Coast to be able to just fully make their own digital product without having to deal with any of that.
This is all pure speculation on my part, to be clear.
However, to me it feels like this suggests that perhaps this set should have just been like other Universes Beyond, and kept out of Arena entirely like most of them have been. Then again, I imagine that standard-legal sets sell better, and with an IP like Spider-Man, WotC decided that they wanted to increase the likelihood of selling more of this, even if the advantage from the IP didn't translate to Arena.
I'm with Rosewater here (assuming I got his opinion correct). The cosmos of Magic the Gathering has plenty of value to me, and I would prefer to see them continue to flesh it out - something I'm sure they'll still be doing, of course.
And maybe this is the wrong post for it, but I truly miss the Block model. Starting with probably Ice Age and then going until only a few years ago, each "standard year" of sets would tend to introduce a new plane (or, in those early years, not always a plane, but often an arc of some sort) and tell a three-act story, with a set introducing that plane in the first set, showing some dramatic disruption to it in the second, and then coming to some conclusion with the third. In particular, it gave years more mechanical cohesion, and it allowed new mechanics to grow and evolve. So many recent planes have introduced cool new mechanics, like Ikoria's mutate creatures or Duskmourn's rooms, that I'd have liked to see evolve. I think by jumping around from plane to plane, we also tend to see more generic deck archetypes dominate the formats. Mouse tribal was able to briefly have a moment in the spotlight when Bloomburrow came out, but with no subsequent sets enabling that archetype, it was naturally subsumed into a more generic Red Deck Wins (the archetype that I get the most bored playing against, as it seems to be the one that is popular every single set rotation).
More to the point, though, is that I think the old block model allowed for the worlds of Magic to grow and develop their lore. Ravnica would not, I think, be as beloved if we had been forced to learn about all ten guilds all at once in a single set.
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