Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel's Spider-Man: Swinging Into Design

"We're doing Magic: The Gathering sets with Marvel! It's happening!"

That's what I found out when I walked into Wizards in mid-2022. I had heard rumors that we were talking to Marvel about a potential Universes Beyond collaboration, but just rumors. No one was more excited about this than Mark Rosewater, he was the happiest I'd ever seen him (and he's generally a very happy guy). But I think perhaps my excitement that day was a close second.

Now, I am a true Marvel fan. Apart from owning over 20,000 Marvel comics, having a "THANOS" license plate, and writing for the Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe, I'd also spent twelve years as the lead designer of a Marvel-themed collectible game prior to my time at Wizards. I'd already shipped over 40 sets with Marvel characters, and I'd been eagerly awaiting the chance to put some of that knowledge to use on Magic.

After a few months of planning and organizing how we'd all collectively approach this enormous task, we developed a blueprint. We'd lead with drops then release our first Marvel-themed set in 2025.

I helped on the Secret Lair Marvel Superdrop cards, offering some feedback and a suggestion that made it to print, but my focus was going to be on the first Marvel set, which would be Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel's Spider-Man!

Spider-Man is one of my favorite characters of all time. I wrote many Spider-Man comic reviews for major Spider-Man websites, and I'm probably the world expert on Spidey Super Stories, an obscure 1970s Spider-Man kids comic. (Go, Thanos-Copter!)

Prior to being assigned to Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man, I was working as the "strong second" under Glenn Jones for a different set's Exploratory Design team. With the schedule updated, we started on the set and paused this other set. What became of this other set? Well, check back in six months or so. I'll have plenty more to write about that set, as I went on to become its lead designer.

The Structure of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man

Our initial design for the set looked like this:

• 100 Cards
• No commons
• No draft format
• Legal in Legacy, Vintage, and Commander, with a focus on Commander
• Glenn Jones as the lead designer with me as the "strong second"

But what we ended up making was this:

• 188 Cards (a new draftable Magic set size)
• Designed for Pick-Two Draft (a new Limited format)
• Legal in all formats
• Corey Bowen as the lead designer with me as the "strong second"

How we got from there to here was more of a journey than most sets go through. Spider-Man comics are known for their twists and turns, and this set did not disappoint in that regard. But thanks to this journey we embarked upon, this set ended up in an amazing, spectacular, sensational place that's going to be much more rewarding for Magic players and Spider-Man fans!

Step One: Exploratory Design (October to December 2022)

With no draftable format and only 100 cards to make, this set was initially a small team consisting of just Glenn and myself. We started by generating lists of characters we wanted to appear in the set. Here's a very, very early version of that list:

This was just our initial character list. There were plenty of unlikely things on it. We just wanted to capture potential characters and see what resonated with us.

We started designing flavorful top-down cards for many of those characters and began testing them. Top-down cards are where we try to translate something into Magic mechanics as flavorfully as possible, without much regard for the rest of the set. The early stages of designing a Universes Beyond set design is about looking for where the set wants to go and seeing what mechanical themes emerge from very top-down cards.

Now, the real trick of Universes Beyond design is balancing between the most flavorful execution and the needs of the set structure. As a set moves through the design process, we sometimes need to sacrifice a bit of flavor to synergize cards. As we learn what mechanics the set wants to care about, we preserve the flavor so that players can still point at a card and say, "Yeah, that feels like this character." But during this first phase of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man's design, we didn't need to worry about that. We just designed as direct translations of Marvel characters into Magic that we could!

We did talk about making new mechanics during this phase but decided against it, instead focusing on cool, flavorful designs. We included a bunch of existing "cameo" mechanics like support and training, since this was being designed for Commander. We did have five mythic rare "secret identity" TDFCs and five Sagas representing famous Spider-Man stories, but very little else about this initial structure remains in the final set.

Of the cards that we designed during this phase, none are exactly what's printed, but a few came close. None of the preliminary cards we designed during this phase went through Play Design's balancing. Instead, they were meant to be demonstrations of what the set could be.

Black Cat 1BB
1/3
Skulk (This creature can't be blocked by creatures with greater power.)
Whenever CARDNAME deals combat damage to a player, that player mills nine cards, then you may exile an artifact card from that player's graveyard. For as long as that card remains exiled, you may cast it and spend mana of any color to do so.

Here is the final version of Black Cat's card, which is also my preview card!

The "nine lives" gag is still there, the stealing opponent's cards is there, but the focus on artifacts, though flavorful, was eventually deemed too narrow. The final card can steal anything. Two anythings, even! Felicia has always been a favorite character of mine (I have her first comic appearance signed by her creators), and I think we did her justice! (Maybe not justice … This is less-heroic Felicia after all. Hmm … maybe "we did her 'Robin Hood-style crime'!")

Clone Saga 3UU
I, II — Create a token that's a copy of target creature you control, except the token isn't legendary.
III — Choose a card name, then draw a card for each creature you control with the chosen name.

Turns out, almost every property we work with has a "clone" storyline, so we try not to do one every set. However, the prospect of doing The Clone Saga as a Saga was just so charming we went for it here. Though the initial design focused more on the 1990s iteration of the event where Spider-Man was cloned many, many times, the final card focuses more on the 1970s iteration that just focused on Ben Reilly, which is a better flavor fit.

Hydro-Man UUU
3/3
Whenever you cast a blue spell, Hydro-Man gets +1/+1 until end of turn. He can't be blocked this turn.
At the beginning of your end step, untap Hydro-Man. Until your next turn, he becomes an Island. (He's not a creature.)

I think this initial design is the closest one to the version that made it to print. We knew Hydro-Man wanted to be all about the blue mana symbol and blue spells in some way. At one point he untapped every time you cast a blue spell instead of at end step, but that proved to be a bit too powerful.

Now, why doesn't the final card just become an Island? I mean, the flavor is so much better. We know! We know! Hydro-Man spent over a year with "become an Island" text until, near the end of the process, our kindly editor reminded us that would cause him to lose all other abilities, which causes numerous weird rules interactions.

Step Two: Vision Design (December 2022 to May 2023)

Glenn went on to leave Wizards to work on other games, so we got a new lead in Corey Bowen. I'd never worked with Corey before, but he quickly became a friend and mentor, the Ezekiel to my Peter. If you get the reference, that means you know Spider-Man comics, good job! Or you read Mark's article and looked it up.

Corey and I took a hard look at the set, and decided we wanted to up the count of Spider-Heroes and pull in some lesser-known ones. We wanted the pack opening experience to showcase both Spider-Heroes and Villains, and we were a bit Villain heavy at that time. We also knew some upcoming media would shine a spotlight on more Spider-Heroes, so we hoped to include some of them in the set.

We also re-examined the idea of having a new mechanic in the set. With more Spider-Heroes, doing a "web-slinging" mechanic felt more natural. So we started experimenting. One version involved tapping and stunning other creatures, while another tried flying during your turn. We also tried combining them in part or whole. Those mechanics just didn't play that well at scale. A lot of tapping and stunning leads to frustrating gameplay and so does having everyone fly. We wanted a mechanic we could put on a whole lot of Spider-Heroes.

Our fourth attempt got us to the current web-slinging text. Rather than focus on webbing up your opponents' creatures, we focused on the rescuing and swinging in (unexpectedly) aspects of web-slinging. That was something we could build a broad mechanic around!

During this era, we also started creating "synergy packages." These were planned to be groups of thematic cards that would all play well together. If you want to build a Miles Morales deck, we themed him around Naya +1/+1 counters (representing his growth as a hero) and created supporting cards for him that worked in that deck. Same for Gwen, whose theme was "cast from exile" to capture her dimension hopping, though that theme ended up small. The most notable package from this era was adding madness to the set as the theme of the Green Goblin-related characters.

As an aside, there were lots of ongoing debates between creative and design and honestly just about everyone over creature types for this set. Is Spider-Man a spider? He does have "spider-altered DNA", does that count? It wasn't too contentious, we all quickly agreed that he should be subtype Spider, and we extended it to Spider-Heroes in general, though some of their origins are a little less connected to spiders than others. Goblin was trickier and more debatable—the Green Goblin wasn't subtype Goblin in the Magic sense of the word, but in the Marvel Universe, he's exactly what comes to mind when you think of a goblin. He's also genetically modified by a "goblin formula." In the end, we wanted cards with "Spider" and "Goblin" in the title to have those subtypes—it just opens up a lot more cool interactions, both within the set and Magic as a whole.

Green Goblin, Revenant 4R
4/3
Flying, haste
CARDNAME can't block.
3RR: Return CARDNAME from your graveyard to the battlefield. This ability costs 1 less to activate for each card that has been discarded this turn.

We knew we wanted the Harry Osborn version of the Green Goblin to come back from the dead. That's where his epithet of "Revenant" and Phoenix-style design came from. This card would go on to change many times before reaching print.

Raging Goblinoids 5R
6/4
Haste
Madness {o2oR} (If you discard this card, discard it into exile. When you do, cast it for its madness cost or put it into your graveyard.)

This card barely changed from what we made during vision design. The spell costs less and has 1 less power. Madness, though, became mayhem, which both is and isn't a change.

Madness is a classic Magic mechanic. It takes a lot of setup and infrastructure in a set, but it's fun to draft around and reasonably popular. The real problem is with the flavor. While we could maybe say exactly Norman Osborn was "mad," it's actually pretty awkward to imply that another company's characters are insane.

We did like the gameplay feeling of madness and thought it fit well for the Goblins. So, we eventually asked our Creative team if they could give it a new name that'd be easier to put on a variety of cards. We (and Play Design) were also interested in tweaking a few things about how it technically worked to get simpler words and interactions, but the gameplay is similar. It no longer lets you cast every spell at instant speed, but that allows us to make cooler cards at better rates. Mayhem was one of the archetypes that got a Constructed focus, so you can bring a mayhem-themed deck to a Friday Night Magic soon!

Narrative Lead Aaron Mesburne really wanted a few more places to show Peter Parker moments. You can thank Aaron for the card Hide on the Ceiling, which he really wanted to get on a card. We collaborated with him to add a cycle of modal instant and sorcery spells, where one side was basically "pay attention to Peter's life" and the other was "do the heroic thing as Spider-Man." Two of those made it into the final set as civilian and hero moments, and a few others moved away from that specific flavor, while retaining their modal card shapes.

Scattered Studies 1U
Instant
Choose one —
• Do Homework — Surveil 2, then draw a card.
• Fight Crime — Counter target spell that targets you or a permanent you control.

This was our initial attempt. I submitted the version that got printed later in set design, though it originally had a third mode that read "Target player shuffles their graveyard into their library. Draw a card." that was quickly cut.

Date Night 1R
Sorcery
Choose one —
• Take MJ Out — Until end of turn, gain control of target creature with power 3 or less. Untap it. It gains haste until end of turn.
• Hero Overtime — Exile the top two cards of your library. You may play those cards this turn.

The specific characters on the date ended up changing, as we wanted more Miles and Gwen moments and this fit perfectly. We also changed the impulsive draw mode to get the cost down to , but the idea is still there. The other mode changed to capture more of the flavor by targeting up to two creatures. I think having them both going on hero patrol is a much cooler idea than MJ being stood up (again).

Steps Three and Four: Set Design (June to December 2023) and Play Design (January to July 2024)

Mark wrote about this in his Spider-Man article, so I won't repeat it here, but at this point we made a major change to the set structure.

I'm primarily a player of Limited Magic formats (Sealed and Draft), so sets without Limited aren't as interesting to me personally, and it turns out I wasn't alone. There were many factors at play when we made this change around June 2023, but the original vision of the set not having a Limited format was a pretty big reason. We decided we really wanted players to be able to play with all these cool characters in Limited.

Ok, let's talk about a concept that we as designers need to think a lot about before starting to design any Universes Beyond sets but the public never really needs to worry about: the depth of a property. Some properties have near-infinite depth. The Forgotten Realms, for example, has every fantasy trope we could ever need when making a Magic set. But for others, we need to drill down and examine if there are enough concepts for what we need. That includes things like the number of named characters, common-level card concepts, or card concepts for fliers.

Marvel has absolutely everything we need. There are decades of stories, along with tens of thousands of comics. It's one of the largest properties out there. For this set, however, there's a specific subset of characters that fall under the Spider-Man umbrella. Don't worry, this only affected two characters that we wanted to put in this set, and they're both in future Marvel sets. But it did mean that we didn't have access to every character in the Marvel Universe when making this set. We'd need to make a whole lot of cards for characters with similar power sets.

Everyone really wanted to add a Limited format to this set. The problem was that stretching to cover a full 270 card Magic set of just Spider-Man was asking a lot. We had a lot more material than we could fit in a 100-card set, but a 270-card set is huge, and that requires a much larger lift from all levels of the studio. We could stretch our sources and make it work, but "the villain that appeared four times in the 1990s" (looking at you Façade and Coldheart!) isn't the most compelling Magic card. We want to deliver fans the best, coolest Spider-Man stuff and not overwhelm it with things we added just to hit set size.

Erik Lauer was added to the team with Corey and I in June, and we all brainstormed solutions and talked to many others in Studio X. We also learned somewhere around this time that the set would be legal in Standard. By the end of the month, after consulting with Aaron Forsythe and many, many other wonderful coworkers, we had a plan: we were going to do a set size that had never been done before.

We wanted to find the proper size for this set, and that would dictate the Limited environment. We know a lot about how 270-card sets draft, but establishing new paradigms for this new set size would take a lot of work. Mark talks a lot more about how we ended up with Pick-Two Draft as the format of choice in his article.

We added more team members to make this new format work, and play designer Ben Weitz was the first of those new additions. We iterated a lot to get to the proper set size and the specifics of the draft format right, but Corey's going to cover some of that and a bunch more in his article, which covers the set design and play design processes in depth. I swung off the team in November 2023 after having spent more than a year with spiders living in my head (not literally, I hope). I cannot wait to see you all experience both the well-known Spider-Man characters you already love and discover a few deeper cuts that might become your new favorites! Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man releases on September 26, 2025 and I’ll see you at the table!