“We’re Not Stopping At Two Infinity Stones:” Magic: The Gathering’s Head Designer Teases More Marvel Sets

Magic: The Gathering has found a lot of success in recent years, in large part thanks to the Universes Beyond imprint. These sets bring in new franchises like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Final Fantasy, and most recently, the Marvel Universe. It’s been a fascinating showcase for fans of both properties, with last year’s Spider-Man-centric set bringing the Spider-Verse headlong into the TCG.

It’s also been a unique challenge for the team, one that has no signs of slowing down anytime soon. During an interview with ComicBook.com during Summer Game Fest 2026, Magic: The Gathering Head Designer Mark Rosewater delved into the set — and teased that it’s far from the end of their collaboration with Marvel.

CB: Congratulations on the new set! It’s a fun expansion of the universe.

Mark Rosewater: We’re really calling this set “Avengers-plus.” It’s really focused on those kinds of characters. It’s the Young Avengers, it’s the Fantastic Four, and it’s a bit of the X-Men. But it’s X-Men who have connections to the Avengers.

CB: Does that mean we’ll see more of the Marvel Universe in future sets?

MR: I can say that this is not the last Marvel set. We made a deal with Marvel to do multiple sets. There are more coming. If there are things you don’t see in the set, well, maybe we’re planning to do it later. We’re fans of it all, the X-Men, the whole Marvel universe. One of the things we love is just how big it is. Marvel was our first multi-set [collaboration]. I’ll just say, we’ve only made two Infinity Stones. We’re not stopping at two Infinity Stones.

Continue below for the rest of our interview with Mark Rosewater, where we discuss finding the right power balance for the Marvel set, the lessons of Universes Beyond, and what makes the superhero brand a unique collaborator.

When playing with the full sandbox of Marvel characters, what’s the challenge of finding where each character slots into the established Magic gameplay?

MR: I’m a huge fan of the color pie. I’ve been a big advocate of it for a long time. With the heroes, it’s not hard to figure out what colors they are. The one interesting thing about Marvel is that they’ve been telling stories for so many years that there are a lot of takes on the characters. More so than other sets, a lot of the Marvel characters had a lot more options of where we could go, depending on what version of the character we wanted to talk about.

For the popular characters that we did multiple versions of, we purposely tried to do different color combinations to let more people have access to the card. That’s been super fun, and one of my favorite things about doing Universes Beyond is the challenge of figuring out what they all are. Our job is to find a way to make Magic cards out of them.

If I want to change something else in the game, I go to a creative team and ask, ‘Can we change this character?’ They go, “Yeah, sure.” But here, that’s Iron Man. I can’t change Iron Man! So, what is Iron Man? You figure that Tony Stark is blue and red, which makes a lot of sense. Maybe a little bit of white. Then you craft that out and build the character in ways that make sense.

It’s also a good excuse to experiment. Look at Wolverine, who gets a really unique ability to heal whenever he takes new damage. It’s a clever way to bring the healing factor into the game.

MR: It’s more of us making terminology. The game already has healing, so it’s not as if it’s a cool thing we haven’t done. It’s about how it fits into the game and how it works. The game does heal things. But normally, you heal at the end of the turn. Wolverine is going to heal at a different time, which reflects Wolverine’s whole thing, right? It’s his healing factor. That felt like a good way to represent that.

That’s one of the fun things about designing for something like Marvel. How do we capture the characters in a way that really shows them while letting them be a good Magic card? It’s not just our goal to capture it, but to capture it in a way that is still fun. A lot of that is learning about the most important aspect of the character and leaning into that aspect. Then the rest of the card can just be a good Magic card. You want that proper balance.

What have been the lessons from the previous Universes Beyond sets that informed your approach to Marvel?

Part of it is that Universes Beyond has been a runaway success. I believe that your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength pushed too far. One of the strengths of Magic is its depth. We’ve made 35,000 Magic cards. If you want to explore Magic, it’s a deep game — the flip side of that is that it is intimidating to learn. In game design circles, we call it “Barrier to Entry.” The gap between ‘I know nothing’ and ‘I know enough to play my first game’ is a decent gap.

One of the things we’ve been trying to figure out is how to make that gap smaller. Universes Beyond has been great for that. If it’s a property you really love, you’ll figure out the game because you care. It’s a really good way to get people to want to make that jump. Then, once they play Magic, people stick around. ‘I loved the Marvel sets, but now that I have learned the game, what else do you guys have?’ That’s a really fun part about it. The big lesson we learned from Universes Beyond has been a really good way to introduce people to the game.

The interesting thing was how organically this particular set blended in with normal Magic. I thought, when I first started out with this set, that it would be a little different from a normal Magic set. It’s ended up being just a really cool magic set. It blended more than I thought it would blend. The draft archetypes are these cool takes on Magic draft archetypes, and they make sense. It was more seamless than I ever thought it would be.

What’s been your favorite archetype in this set?

Black/Red Villains. It’s been my favorite to play. It’s the deck that I enjoy playing most in the draft, but there’s a lot of fun counters to that theme, like Green/White. One of the neat things about what we did here is that we made a very traditional Magic set, 10 two-color drafter archetypes. A lot of them are very traditional draft archetypes. A few of them are a little new, but we made something that I think is nice.

It’s an amazing Marvel set. If you love Marvel, we did a really good job of bringing everything you love about Marvel to life. It’s also just a good Magic set. If you know nothing about Marvel and just want to play a good Magic set, it’s an awesome Magic set. That’s the sweet spot for us. We want to make amazing sets that play into the property of our partners and make Magic players want to play just because it’s awesome.

Following select pre-release events, Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes will release on June 26, 2026.