Magic: The Gathering’s Marvel Set Gets A Tricky Technical Card With A Key Young Avenger [Exclusive]

Magic: The Gathering has been having a lot of fun over the last few years with the “Universes Beyond” imprint. The approach allows the game creators to collaborate with other mainstream franchises across pop culture, bringing the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fantasy, The Walking Dead, and Doctor Who into the game. One of the best of these sets may be Marvel’s Spider-Man, which had a lot of fun playing with the heroes and villains of the Wall-Crawler’s corner of the Marvel Universe.

The newest set, “Marvel Super Heroes,” expands that focus to the larger scope of the universe, with several Avengers, X-Men, and Fantastic Four heroes (and villains) set to be included in the set. ComicBook.com is getting the chance to debut one of the cards, a key member of the Young Avengers who brings some unique versatility to the battlefield, even beyond his very useful abilities. ComicBook also got the chance to speak with some of the team that worked on the set about the process of bringing Marvel into Magic.

Iron Lad’s Magic: The Gathering Power Set Could Be Devastating

Iron Lad, Diverging Destiny, is a good indicator of the technical play that may come into effect with the new Marvel Super Heroes set. This blue creature costs 3 mana — two Islands and an additional mana on top of it. However, the card’s unique attributes and versatility make that a small price to pay for a very effective technical addition to the battlefield.

The Legendary Artifact Creature, a member of the Young Avengers who has traveled back in time in hopes of changing his future, comes with the natural ability to have the player look at the top card of their deck. Tapping Iron Lad will allow the player to reveal the top card, drawing it if it’s an artifact card. On top of that, the creature’s flying and vigilance make this 2/2 creature a useful character to have on the field for offensive, defensive, and technical reasons. With the right artifacts in the deck, Iron Lad’s power could become a game-breaking ability, allowing the user to burn through their deck at a faster rate in search of the right weapons or gear to upgrade their creatures or unleash hell on their opponent.

How Magic: The Gathering’s New Marvel Set Is Building On The Past

The 2024 Marvel Superdrop served as a teaser for the 2025 set, Marvel’s Spider-Man. That set brought the titular Web-Swinger, along with his amazing friends and deadly enemies, to the battlefield. The new Marvel Super Heroes set is building off the success of those prior drops, at least according to the team at Wizards of the Coast, especially when it comes to the ways that the game’s art team is approaching bringing the Marvel characters into the MTG aesthetic.

Senior Art Director Mike Thomas explained that “Creatively, this was initially defined by Matt Cavotta, Universes Beyond’s Principal Art Director, as ‘Magic does Marvel.’ Knowing that the partner was open to style interpretations, let us see how the best Magic artists paint Marvel’s top characters. In turn, we brought in Marvel painters who had never worked for Magic, or hadn’t in a long time, and did “Marvel does Magic.” These two approaches gave the set its visual identity. We saw a lot of excitement from both sides: Magic artists who had grown up on Marvel and never thought they’d get to paint their favorite characters, and Marvel artists who had always hoped to work with Magic someday… My surprise came before we started the art, realizing how many incredible Marvel artists had never done Magic cards, and how many stellar Magic artists had never painted Marvel characters! Both sides were really excited to get to play in these new sandboxes — or comic-boxes, I guess.”

Dave Humphreys, the Game Design Architect, revealed that the tight production cycle for the Universes Beyond sets can make building on one another a tricky proposition. “The timelines on making this set didn’t allow us the opportunity to gain a feedback cycle from the public on our prior Marvel offerings. Generally speaking, I’d mostly taken to heart that trying to nail the flavor of the cards needs to be a huge priority for Universes Beyond content. Sometimes gameplay still wins out in the end, but we need to put in the reps to keep trying to get the flavor as charming as we can. Knowing that any character could be someone’s favorite, I also put a lot of extra work into the uncommons in the set, since all those creatures are legendary to make them feel special and unique.”

Part of the fun of the Universes Beyond format is the way it forces Wizards of the Coast to reimagine other franchises through the MTG lens. Humphreys related how, when designing characters for the game, “The choice of colors largely started from a place where colors were most emblematic of a given character. For characters with more than one version, we sought to show the character at different points in their character development, where we might be able to highlight a different color. From there, we adjusted occasionally so that characters that often teamed up would be easier to fit into the same decks by having better color overlap. I don’t recall any interesting answers to the easiest or most difficult fit, but more generally, I know it was a bit more challenging to fill out characters in green for this setting; a lot of Heroes more naturally fit into White and Red, and Villains into Black and Blue.”

Iron Lad is a great example of how finding the right power set and stylish touches can make the Marvel Super Heroes feel right at home in the typically fantastical landscapes of Magic: The Gathering. The art and card abilities are befitting Iron Lad’s history from the comics as a time-traveler, while also giving him an adaptability that can slot him naturally into different deck archetypes. It speaks to the set’s adaptability, even as it leans heavily into the hodgepodge of genre influences that make up the DNA of the Marvel Universe. It’s a great card to see in the Marvel Super Heroes set and a fun tease for what else might be coming out as part of the set.