Greetings, true believers! My name is Jeremy Geist, and I'm a senior game designer in Magic's Studio X. I was a runner-up in the Great Designer Search 3 and made my way to Wizards a few years later. I've been reading preview articles on DailyMTG for 20 years, so it's a true honor to be able to write one!

I was on the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams for Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes and was strong second for Mark Rosewater during vision design. Practically, this meant that I managed the file of cards and made changes as we tested different iterations of the set. This would sometimes result in staring at the card database on a late Friday afternoon, desperately trying to think of a sixth artifact to put on an uncommon card before a playtest on Monday.

However, the origin of my preview cards stems from earlier in the process during exploratory design. Rosewater typically spends a day or two going over existing Magic mechanics to see which ones are good fits for the set. Sometimes those mechanics make it into the set as is, and sometimes they change into new mechanics. For example, spree in Outlaws of Thunder Junction was originally the escalate mechanic from Eldritch Moon. There were many suggestions, but the one that immediately interested Set Design Lead Dave Humpherys—and made it into the final set—was bringing back connive from Streets of New Capenna as a Villain-only mechanic. You can see it on my first preview card, A.I.M. Scientists!

0044_MTGMSH_Main: A.I.M. Scientists

A lot of this set's premier villains are cool because they're smart. My favorite Marvel character, Doctor Doom, is a great example. He's widely considered one of the most powerful villains in the Marvel Universe because he's a brilliant inventor that can outthink almost anyone. There are a lot more intelligent, scheming Super Villains in this set, too— Kang, M.O.D.O.K., the Leader, and Baron Zemo to name a few. Connive was a great way to capture the concept of a Super Villain outthinking the Super Heroes, and all of the characters I just mentioned have cards that connive in some way.

Connive is more than just a flavor slam dunk—it has a lot of mechanical benefits, too. Limited games of Magic are better with "smoothing," or the ability to control your draws so you are less subject to variance. Connive smooths your draws while challenging you to decide if it's better to ditch a land to keep more powerful cards in hand or discard a nonland card to put a counter on the creature that's conniving. In fact, the largest issue with connive as a smoothing mechanic was that white, red, and green don't normally get access to it, so we had to give those colors an increased amount of effects like scry to compensate.

Additionally, connive is what I call a "textured mechanic." Textured mechanics have a lot of small details that other cards can hook into for synergy. To break down connive step by step:

  1. Draw a card.
  2. Discard a card.
  3. Put a +1/+1 counter on the creature that connived (sometimes).

At minimum, this gives you three things to care about, and the cards that care about them will do so in very different ways. To illustrate this, let's look at two more preview cards.

0101_MTGMSH_Main: HYDRA Troopers 0113_MTGMSH_Main: Roxxon Brutes

HYDRA Troopers wants you to have two creature cards in your graveyard. If you have a lot of these effects, you'll want to build a deck with self-mill, sacrifice, and creatures that you're okay with trading off in the early game. Connive works great with this kind of deck, since you're given additional incentive to discard a creature card and you don't need to spend mana to play the creature first.

Roxxon Brutes cares about when you draw your second card each turn. If you have a lot of "second card draw matters" cards, you'll want to build a deck that can reliably draw cards for cheap, and (depending on the set) stall the game while you build up advantage. Connive also works great with this kind of deck; besides the obvious fact that it draws you a card, it's weaker than getting a full card, so it could go on more cards in the set and we can make some of those cards cheaper. It gives you more on-board advantage by making your creatures larger so you can rumble against more aggressive decks.

While Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes doesn't explicitly hinge on +1/+1 counters, Streets of New Capenna, where connive originated, had a counters subtheme that bridged connive (the white-blue-black Obscura mechanic) and shield counters (the green-white-blue Brokers mechanic). This is a trick we do often in three-color faction sets. Tarkir: Dragonstorm has lots of textured mechanics that share a subtheme with their neighbors. If connive returns in force for a future Magic set, there's a good chance that counters will matter there, too!

We were so happy with connive in Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes that we retroactively added it to Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man, which was still in set design at the time, to provide more of a mechanical throughline between our Marvel sets and enable cards with mayhem. I hope that when you play Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Limited, you have tons of fun drawing, discarding, and demonstrating your superior intelligence to that accursed Reed Richards!

Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes releases on June 26, 2026, and is available for preorder now from your local game store, TCGplayer, Amazon, and elsewhere Magic is sold.