is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Over the last five years, Magic: The Gathering games have gotten a bit strange. Cards featuring characters from Final Fantasy, Spider-Man, and, in a few weeks, Avatar: The Last Airbender are starting to show up with increasing frequency, making a typical Friday Night Magic game look more like a match in Fortnite. For some, this is a welcome change, allowing Magic to entice newcomers and invigorate existing players with properties they know and love. But others feel this focus on licensed sets comes at the expense of Magic’s identity, quality, and longevity.
Depending on who you talk to, Magic crossover sets have been around since the early days of the game with the Arabian Nights set released in 1994. But the modern idea started in 2020 with Magic’s Secret Lair product. Originally, Secret Lair products weren’t full sets, or even original cards. Existing Magic cards were revamped with new art from popular artists or IPs and sold at a premium as collector’s items. However, with The Walking Dead Secret Lair, Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast decided to create totally new cards set within Robert Kirkman’s zombie universe — and it blew up.
The Walking Dead Secret Lair was the first time Magic got totally new cards featuring a new IP. Image: Wizards of the Coast
“From Wizards’ side, it was a slam dunk,” said Shivam Bhatt, an MTG content creator and former MTG consultant who’s been a player for most of the game’s 30-year history. “Make six cards, sell a gillion of them, and you get a chance of getting people to come into the game.”
From there, Magic expanded on that formula, going from six-card Secret Lair drops to developing whole decks for the game’s Commander format. To set this new family of cards apart from cards set within Magic’s own storytelling universe, Wizards of the Coast called these crossovers Universes Beyond, or UB. These experiments sold so well that Magic decided to expand again into full sets, starting with Lord of the Rings, which, at the time, became Magic’s best-selling set ever. It was official: UB was a hit, which was a good thing for Wizards’ parent company, Hasbro.
“Ultimately, the reason Universes Beyond exists is because Hasbro is a dying company,” said Emma Partlow, MTG content editor at TCGPlayer, one of the biggest resources and retailers for collectible card games. “But if you put Wizards of the Coast in that they’re just breaking records every quarter, they’re one of the only things keeping Hasbro afloat.” (Hasbro’s Monopoly GO!, frequently at the top of most-downloaded mobile games lists, is the other.)
These successes led to WotC going all in on Universes Beyond, so much that it’s starting to cause concern among Magic’s core player base. Magic is a heavily stratified game with different formats in which different sets of cards are legal to use. These different sets were arranged on two different release tracks: standard and supplemental. On the standard track are all the sets that are legal in the Standard format — the main competitive format of Magic — and form the core of MTG’s yearly release schedule. The supplemental tracks are the sets that are for different formats, like Commander and Modern.
Up until this point, Universes Beyond has largely been kept on the supplemental track, and in 2021, Wizards of the Coast said that’s where it’ll stay. “Universes Beyond cards will not be Standard legal,” read a blog explaining Universes Beyond. “This is purely a cool thing we’re doing in addition to all the other cool things we’re already doing.”
... continue reading