Magic: The Gathering's Spider-Man Set Explained (With Developer Quotes)

During a panel at PAX West, Wizards of the Coast revealed more cards coming to its highly anticipated Spider-Man Magic: The Gathering set. From iconic villains like the Green Goblin, to thematically goofy additions like the City Pigeon, there are tons of cards to be excited about when it hits store shelves on September 26th. We recently spoke with multiple people involved with the latest release to give some insight on how they brought everybody’s favorite wall-crawling superhero to the popular trading card game.

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When designing any set, the team at WotC uses what they call the “Color Pie.” To put it in the most basic and digestible way possible, it is essentially a guideline on how each mana color is supposed to act, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. Anyone interested in learning more about this particular aspect can explore it further here. The Senior Game Designer for the Spider-Man Magic: The Gathering set, Corey Bowen, discussed the challenges of fitting those iconic characters into that mold.

The Challenges of Bringing Spider-Man to Magic: The Gathering

“I think in Spider-Man, a lot of it was dividing a lot of the characters through the different colors,” says Bowen about the challenges of bringing the hero to Magic: The Gathering. “With Universes Beyond, you want to make sure the character’s personality feels like these colors. But what if their power sets feel like a different color? Magic is all about personality and your expression of magic. Like red is fire and emotionalness. So, balancing certain characters, making sure they’re true to either their power set or personality, and true to the mechanics we want to give them. Sometimes we want the mechanics to be so specific, and that will influence what colors we want to express that character as.”

Part of designing the Marvel Spider-Man Magic: The Gathering set involves implementing new or returning mechanics that fit the universe’s established mold. For this set, WotC created the new keyword “web-slinging,” which is an alternative cost to cast (typically at a lower cost), but the player returns a tapped creature they control to its owner’s hand. This attempts to simulate the feel of heroes “thwipping” into battle quickly, but at the cost of losing a creature on the field. The ability can also prove quite useful, especially if you need to clear any enchantments or other modifications off a specific creature.

Another mechanic introduced in the Marvel Spider-Man set is Mayhem. Prominently featured on Villain characters, or cards tied to Spidey’s foes, this allows players to cast a card from their graveyard for an alternate cost (typically at a lower cost), if it was discarded that turn. Additionally, timing rules for that card type apply. These cards might be good with mill or connive, which is a returning keyword in the set.

Bowen talked about their process of creating keywords that fit the web-slinging heroes.

“The first question you ask is, ‘What does Spider-Man do?’ And one of the easier answers to get to is Spider-Man should tap creatures and put stun counters on them because that feels like you’re webbing them up,” says Bowen. “But when we need to make 20 to 30 Spider heroes, that mechanic isn’t fun gameplay to have repeated over and over and over.”

“So, we really wanted to challenge ourselves and be a bit more creative, and think about what does it feel like to be Spider-Man,” continues Bowen. “That agility and moving cards back into your hand and onto the battlefield, we really thought that would be something we could do on so many cards and then use the rest of the textbox to talk about what specifically that character is doing.”

Elden Dragon Highlander (EDH), more commonly known as Commander, is one of the most played Magic: The Gathering formats. However, there are other popular formats, like Standard or Draft. When a set is revealed, there are some cards that feel designed for specific formats. Personally, I’m looking forward to brewing a Commander deck with Venom, Lethal Protector. Principal Game Designer for the Spider-Man set, Jadine Klomparens, talked about the process of balancing the number of cards designed for specific formats.

“It’s a lot of collaboration between the team that tests cards for Standard and the team that tests cards for Commander. Figuring out which format is the more natural home for each card,” says Klomparens. “And then at some point, we’ll assess where we’re at after we’ve looked all the cards, and be like are we short here or short there? We’ll move some stuff around, but for the most part we’re trying to make the most fun environment possible, and that’s about letting the designs we land on lead us where they want to go.”

Creating an Authentic Look That Pays Homage to the Comics

The stories in comic books may be the facet that makes us fall in love with the medium, but it is the art that draws people in. Spider-Man comics throughout the years have featured some of the most prolific artists. Household names like Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, John Romita Sr., Todd McFarlane, Alex Ross, and Mark Bagley are just some of the incredible artists that has shaped the fan-favorite characters we all know and love today. The character has produced some of the greatest comics and panels in history, which is partially why the character is so loved. Spider-Man just looks cool.

This is also somewhat true of Magic: The Gathering cards. Yes, utility is absolutely the number one reason to pick a card, but it helps when a card’s art looks cool. Luckily, there is an intrinsic cool factor to Spider-Man. The regular art cards in this set not only look great, but also pay homage in some very cool ways. This is doubly true of the alternate art cards that use art from some of the most popular pieces throughout Spider-Man’s history. The set’s Senior Art Director. Sarah Wassell and Bowen gave some insight into how they go about choosing specific art.

“A lot of times, we relied on collaborating with the artists themselves because we worked with a lot of Marvel artists,” said Wassell. “So, sometimes they knew better than we did. So, we can just give them an assignment and they would nail it.”

“For the normal versions of the cards, we also talked about types of character, and what is their most iconic costume we would want to express,” Bowen says. “So, for Miles [Morales], it was their most iconic costume. There are more side Spider heroes in the set, where we wanted to pick a costume that felt very different than the rest of them, but was still an iconic costume of theirs.”

Working With Marvel and More Universes Beyond Sets

Working with any company as big as Marvel, there are always questions of licensing or what the company is allowing another company to use and how to use it. In the case of WotC, there do seem to be some caveats, namely, Spider-Man and future Marvel Universes Beyond sets not being included in Magic: The Gathering Arena and Magic: The Gathering Online. However, in terms of the actual content of the cards and how characters are represented, it seems WotC had plenty of freedom when designing the new set.

“The general rule of thumb when we work with a partner is they’re the experts on the property and we’re the experts on the game,” said Magic: The Gathering’s Head Designer, Mark Rosewater. “So, everything gets run by the partner. They’ll give feedback like, ‘this word is not right, or doesn’t represent properly.’ And they’ll give really good feedback. All their feedback is a lot more about capturing the character. They don’t really make a lot of comments on gameplay. I mean, that’s just not their field, that’s our field. They’re not going to say, ‘make that one cheaper,’ or something.”

The Marvel Spider-Man set is part of Universes Beyond, WotC’s branding for sets that showcase other franchises. Other releases have included Fallout, Doctor Who, Assassin’s Creed, and most notably, the highly successful Final Fantasy set. After this Spider-Man set, the company will release a set based on the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender.

With that being said, the Universes Beyond releases for this year and beyond, like Final Fantasy, look to be more full-fledged sets rather than the reskins or reprints we’ve seen from Secret Lair drops, like the Monty Python or Ghostbusters drops. Rosewater remarked on how WotC plans to balance its release schedule between Universes Beyond and more traditional sets like Tarkir: Dragonstorm or Edge of Eternities.

“Our current plan is to have six standard releases a year. Have half be Universes Beyond, half be in Multiverse,’ Rosewater. “We generally want to alternate between each other. This year, it didn’t quite happen that way, but that is our intent.”

The Marvel Spider-Man Magic: The Gathering set is shaping up to be another hit Universes Beyond release. We’ll know for sure when it launches online and at local game stores on September 26th.