Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel's Spider-Man and Pick-Two Draft
"With great power, there must also come great responsibility!"
Howdy! I'm Corey Bowen, a senior game designer for Magic: The Gathering. I've had the amazing privilege of leading the game design for Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel's Spider-Man! This set is the first Magic: The Gathering set specifically designed to prioritize Pick-Two Draft play! It's also our very first booster product to kick off our series of Marvel collaboration sets. Today, I'll be talking a lot about Pick-Two Draft, how we got there, and what we learned. I'd also like to gush a little about bringing Marvel to life within Magic: The Gathering and a few small elements in the set that go a long way in conveying comics on cardboard.
First, a little about myself. I love solving weird problems in Magic sets! Previously, I led the game design on especially tricky and offbeat path sets like Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate and Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin's Creed®. Both of those sets included non-traditional boosters and had their own host of quirks and wrinkles which required some tuning to get to their ultimate shape. Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man, the third booster set that I led, would be no different. So, let's get into it!
Please note: In this article I'll refer to Pick-Two Draft and reference four-player draft. Pick-Two Draft is the official name of the format. When I refer to four-player draft, I'm referring to the concept of a four-player draft in general, which we used in the middle of designing this set.
What Is Pick-Two Draft?
Pick-Two Draft is a new way to draft Magic sets! Rather than assembling the typical pod of eight players to draft, this format only requires four players to get together so players are able to draft faster and play faster. The other difference is in the name: you pick two cards for each pick instead of one! You can click here to read the article that introduced Pick-Two Draft.
Why Pick-Two Draft?
We decided on Pick-Two Draft for this set for many reasons. Some were to solve problems about this specific set, and some were to act on new opportunities this set allowed. Mostly, it felt like the perfect fit with respect to what we thought a Spider-Man-centric set would look like!
To boil it down:
1. We wanted a better experience for a smaller Universes Beyond set. How could we represent an amazing corner of the Marvel Universe without trying to fill over 300 card concepts? If we were focusing only on Spider-Man, there are tons of great stories, characters, and depth, but not enough to meet the demanding threshold of a full Magic set. We also believed solving this problem now would allow us to consider more partnerships that may not to fill the shoes of a full Magic set.
2. Pick-Two Draft is a good casual draft experience. This set is a great entry point for new Magic players. So, what could we do to make an easier drafting experience? When we were surveying our options, we really liked how quick Pick-Two Draft was to pick up and play. Draft can be an incredibly daunting format for newer players. Something that was quicker, higher variance, and a little less competitive felt like a great start!
3. More so than at any prior point in Magic's history, players are meeting up in groups of four to play Magic together. (Thanks, Commander!) Finding space to experiment with a four-player draft format was top of mind for many of us working on Magic design. This set posed the following question: "How should this set play differently with its unique shape?" A four-player draft format was first on our list of options to explore.
How Did We Develop Pick-Two Draft?
As I mentioned above, a four-player draft had been on the minds of Magic designers for a while. Early in their career, Chris Mooney led a team to look for improvements in the basic draft structure. Chris, along with Bryan Hawley and Erik Lauer, explored four-player draft. They first established the solution of picking two cards per pick. They tried many other modifications, yet it seemed picking two cards would solve most of the issues with a smaller draft pod! Personally, I was extremely enamored at the upsides of bringing draft to a four-player table. So, early in set design, I made the call to lock in four-player draft as our play expression for the set.
Now, we get to all the problems that needed solving.
Play Booster Shapes
When we began working on the set's draft gameplay, we had very recently swapped over to Play Boosters from Draft Boosters. Smaller sets in the past used a very different spread of rarities, and our power level targets for draft are very in comparison. So, in lots of subtle ways, there's this background level of complexity when returning to a smaller set environment after we changed a bunch of variables.
Repetition in Draft Picks
The next big problem is repetitiveness. In a normal, eight-player draft, if you open a pack, you'll see that pack another time. You'll pick your first card from it and your ninth card from it. In a four-player draft, you'll see it twice as often as you'll take your first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth pick from it. Seeing the same cards can get pretty boring in a draft. While wheeling a card across the table is a fun experience, it gets dull if it happens too frequently.
So, the first change we made was the most impactful: each player picks two cards each pick. Kapow! Pick-Two Draft was born! This feature also reaped more benefits, such as a faster draft and a more unique feel. I had a lot of experience designing pick-two formats with Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate as well, so I was also confident in my skillset to design the set and format around this core feature of the experience.
Identifying Lanes
Okay, now we're picking two cards. And like any game system that's over 30 years old, that broke a lot of the draft's inherent dynamics. First off, it's easy to cut colors now. You can just first-pick two red cards and starve the player to your left from red. If two players pick a bunch of cards in the same archetype early on, it can often be frustrating for one (or both) to pivot. Pick-Two Draft also made it too easy to pick all the rares and mythic rares in a Play Booster if fixing was too good.
So, we reduced the amount of color-fixing cards a bit and started focusing a lot on making sure that players could identify their lanes early while still feeling flexible enough to change course if they collided with a neighbor's strategy. Making sure players identified the colors of their deck early in the draft, while being able to pivot if needed, was a big challenge and the key to getting this set right.
Hybrid Cards
Before we talk about increasing players' ability to pivot, let's talk about having five two-color archetypes rather than the typical ten. In a typical eight-player draft, a set supports ten archetypes divided among eight players. Erik Lauer, retired Magic designer, suggested that five two-color archetypes would divide a lot more cleanly into four players. With ten archetypes, players can find their lanes (let's say white-blue, blue-black, black-red, and red-green). Then, a couple of red-white cards or cards specific to that archetype's strategy could go unpicked until the very end, which would feel unsatisfying. If we went down to five archetypes, then only one archetype wouldn't be drafted, and we would have an easier time making sure the five archetypes had enough cross-synergy for each card in the draft to be playable.
We wanted more cards to be playable in more decks to help with pivotability. If two adjacent drafters both believe they have a good start to black-red, how can we help make sure there are enough cards for both players? Well, if black cards in blue-black or red cards in red-green have a lot of cross-synergies with black-red, then there will often be enough pickable cards for them! An extensive use of hybrid cards also helps remedy this symptom. A black-red hybrid card, for example, is playable in blue-black, black-red, and red-green. So, three out of five of the archetypes can play it! In this set, there are hybrid cards at common, uncommon, and rare, and each solves different needs for the set. While the hybrid card roles seem somewhat similar, they have subtle distinctions in the goals they were set out to achieve.
Common hybrid cards: These cards are meant to be playable in any of the archetypes that can play them, but they also teach you what their primary color-pair archetype is about. For example, Skyward Spider's primary color pair would be white-blue. The card shows off the white-blue modified archetype.
Uncommon hybrid cards: These are slightly stronger cards that are decent in any deck, but especially better for decks that are leaning into their primary color pair. These reward you for going in on a strategy but they can still be played if you need to pivot away from their primary color pair.
Rare hybrid cards: These are awesome cards that are good in any deck. Often, rares will be a popular first pick in your draft. If you first-pick one of these hybrid rares, you should be flexible in picking your lanes. Even if you first pick black-red rare hybrid card like Ultimate Green Goblin, you could still comfortably draft blue-black, black-red, or red-green.
Multi-Archetype Cards
As we iterated, we also realized more and more that the archetypes wanted to be closer together and have less A+B synergy. City Pigeon is a card that enables web-slinging for green-white, but it's also great to modify on for white-blue! The Beetle is great to connive away in blue-black, since it has a graveyard ability, but that graveyard ability is also significantly useful to modify creatures in white-blue. Swarm has mayhem to link up with the black-red discard deck, but it's also a Villain that works well with blue-black's connive theme. Spider-Islanders is another mayhem card for black-red, but it's also a cheap way to cast a spell with mana value 4 or greater for red-green! Spider-Man, Brooklyn Visionary is a common card that's another cheap way to cast a large spell for red-green, this time using green-white's cost-reduction mechanic rather than black-red's mechanic. There are tons of commons in this set that are trying to make sure there are valid picks in your pack for any deck you draft!
While we wanted more blending and less high-synergy decks, we still have mayhem in the set, a mechanic that requires a lot of synergy. Essentially, it requires you to draft cards that discard and cards that like being discarded to function. Learning that we needed more blending was iterative, and we slowly moved archetypes closer and closer together to help functionality. Mayhem and web-slinging were both mechanics we liked early on to demonstrate some of the top-down flavor of Spider-Man, which is why they stuck around so long despite the lessons we learned about Pick-Two Draft liking lower-synergy decks. As a result, red-green's big spell theme was born out of an explicit desire to connect these two mechanics by a single shared feature between them: cost reduction. It's also a theme that works generically, but just by building a deck that ramps and plays more late-game spells than other decks.
There's also a cycle of colorless cards with monocolor activations at common that serve a couple of roles in the set. These cards, like the set's hybrid cards, are meant to be pickable by any player who needs their utility, but they also provide some direction in color. Again, the idea is to find the right density of cards with different levels of pick competition. These cards are designed to be weak enough to never really be first picks while acting as workhorse cards to fill any slots for drafters who find themselves in a difficult position late in the draft.
From these goals, these cards naturally wheeled around the table quite often until players needed them. We wanted to take advantage of the fact that they were passed, and thus seen, so much by players. Working with our Creative team, we concepted these cards as New York City "set pieces" to help demonstrate a sense of place in the draft. Now, every draft undeniably feels like New York City.
Another pattern that emerged with these cards is that you might have more of them if your draft isn't going smoothly. So, there's a small amount of "sideways strategy" in the set to support a more artifact-heavy draft archetype with cards like Living Brain and Iron Spider! If you feel like you're failing the draft, being able to flip the narrative and make your suboptimal cards into quirky deck-enablers can help turn a sour draft into a fun experiment.
We tried one thing that didn't end up making the cut: drafting left all the time. A typical draft usually passes to the left for the first pack, to the right for the second pack, then back to the left for the third pack. One idea to increase the ability to pick up on your opponent's colors, and thus decrease trainwreck drafts, was to never switch the direction of the draft. That way, you could make more consistent deductions about which colors are unlikely to be passed to you. This made it so highly skilled drafters would be able to read the draft a little easier and avoid pitfalls. While we thought left-only drafting was a slight improvement to the gameplay, we ultimately didn't want to add another rules change that players would have to learn. It was more important to us that the format was easy to adopt with a low barrier to entry, especially since we thought the potential improvement to gameplay was mostly localized to higher-skill players and not a significant enough improvement to warrant the rules change.
A Small Bit About Comics Flavor
I'm using this part of my article to specifically gush about how much I love the onomatopoeias! In comics, sound effects are often shown as these words-as-sound-effects with wacky graphics behind them. I love the idea that instead of saying "I Murder your Elf," in game, you can now say, "Kapow! My Spider-Man fights your Mysterio!" It adds so much whimsy, action, and a unique comics feel to the set.
Here are two other cards that I tried to pitch onomatopoeia on. Can you guess the sound effects we tried?
Well, that's a lot of yapping. I hope you found this interesting! There's a lot more to chew on for designing Pick-Two Draft, and we'll certainly learn a lot more when you all get your hands on it and start drafting. Be sure to let us know if you like it! Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man releases on September 26, 2025. The set is available for preorder now from your local game store, online retailers like Amazon, and elsewhere Magic products are sold.