Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1264: San Diego Comic-Con 2025

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

In this podcast, I talk all about my trip to this year's San Diego Comic-Con.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time with their drive to work. Okay, today I'm going to talk all about San Diego Comic-Con in 2025. I just got back. So I was going to tell you everything that went on at San Diego. Okay, so, now for those regular listeners, I go to San Diego Comic-Con every year. And normally I run a panel. This year, there's an extra. extra bonus panel we had to talk about. Okay, so I guess the first big thing that's important is the big announcement we made at San Diego Comic-Con

was about Spider-Man. So we are doing a series of Marvel sets, and the very first one is coming out this September, September 24th. And it is Spider-Man. And so I will be doing a podcast all about Spider-Man, and you get to hear about how Spiderman. Spider-Man came to be, but today, though, was about San Diego Comic-Con, although Spider-Man

plays a pretty big role. I think from a timing perspective, it's not exactly when we wanted to be making a big push on Spider-Man, because it was the pre-release weekend for Edge of Eternities, but the synergy between announcing Spider-Man at San Diego Comic-Con was just too big, too exciting, so we did. It's a little earlier that we would normally do the kind of preview information we did, But like I said, sometimes you've got to lean into the synergy. So we did a bunch of things at San Diego Comic-Con. One of the things we did is we did what's called a Spider-Man Activation,

which was over at the Hard Rock Cafe. We sort of took one of the ballrooms and turned it into Queens, New York. And you get, like, there's this various, basically the idea was you could go. There were picture opportunities. There are a lot of cool. you could pose with the Spider-Man card and there was like a daily bugle and there were just different things set up

when you were there one of the things you could get is we had a Marvel had made a reprint of Spider-Man 1 or Amazing Spider-Man 1 I think it was with a brand new cover that was referencing

we had turned one of our Spider-Man cards we have this series where we're doing we convert them into covers famous covers and so it looks just like like the cover, but it has information for the card. And so they had a cover that we had, it looked like the first issue that represent one of our

Spider-Man's. So you can get that comic. We also, for the event, or not for the event, but we had made what we call starter decks or welcome decks, which are 30 card decks. So there are five different decks. Each one, the white deck has Peter Parker. The blue deck has Spider-Man 29-9. the black deck has venom, the red deck has spider, has Gwen Stacy, a ghost spider,

and the green one has Miles Morales, is also Spider-Man. And so the idea is when you get these, you're guaranteed a 30-card deck of the color on the box, and then you get a random other color. And the idea is with this, you can play somebody. Now there's two 30-card decks, and it's designed to be more introductory. It's designed to be something to introduce people. But anyway, one of the things we had at the activation was there were people teaching you how to play. So if you didn't already know how to play, you can learn how to play.

Or if you already know how to play, you can just have fun and you can play the welcome necks. So anyway, Wednesday night, normally San Diego Comic-Con has a preview night on Wednesday night. But instead of going to preview night, I went to the Spider-Man activation. And the idea was we did, it was press night. So we invited a lot of press, a lot of influencers. and then Aaron Forsyth and I, who both went to the event because we were both on the Spider-Man panel, we did interviews, and so I interviewed with a whole bunch of different people,

some video, some audio, but I did, and there was someone named Jesse Falcon, who was from Marvel, and Jesse and I did a whole bunch of interviews together, which was a lot of fun, so, you know, he talked to the Marvel perspective, and I talked to the Wizards perspective. But anyway, so we did that. The other really cool thing of Wednesday night was, they had got Daryl McDaniels of Run DMC to come perform and it turns out, I did not know this,

Aaron Forsyth is a giant run DMC fan. I guess he listened to a lot in his youth and he like won a rap battle on a bus, one of the school buses. I don't know. He, is this something where he, it's something he knows and he had met him ahead of time and then all during the concert, he kept calling out to Aaron.

and name-checking Aaron. In the end, he pulled Aaron on stage. They took a bunch of pictures. And it was fun watching Aaron at the concert because Aaron knew all the lyrics of all the songs. So anyway, I think it was a really fun moment for Aaron. And for all the people there, you've got an actual get-de-hearren DMC,

which was super fun. Okay, that was Wednesday night. So the actual event, the standard of Comic-com, I mean, preview night is Wednesday night, but the event starts on Thursday. So I had to get up early Thursday morning to go to the Hasbro Press Breakfast.

So what that is, is Hasbro, we rent out this room at one of the hotels, and then we set up, everybody has their own table. So the action figures have a table, and Furby has a table, and all the different subsections of Hasbro get a little table, including

us and Dungeon Dragons. And so I was there for the magic portion. The one thing about it is a lot of these are setting up toys that the public hasn't seen yet. So there's a lot of action figures and things that are like, this is the first time

for the press to come see these things. So they're super excited in taking pictures. We had a setup for Spider-Man, but nothing we were showing was something you hadn't seen before. And so I just, we get less questions,

our setup with not as exciting as here's brand-new action figures you've never seen. So during the course of the breakfast, I want to answer questions. I didn't answer a ton of questions. But also, it's a breakfast. It's a press breakfast.

So I did get breakfast. But it's fun in seeing all the press, and I talked to a bunch of different press who, a bunch of them, you know, like a lot of the press might not be aware of magic, but some of them actually had played magic. So I talked to the press that was more aware of magic. And because we were doing Spider-Man,

the one interesting thing about universes beyond is, you know, if we're doing a magic in multiverse, there's a lot of explanation about what the thing is. But when you're doing a universe beyond, like, okay, Spider-Man's a very known quantity. Oh, you're doing Spider-Man. you know, the people sort of know what Spider-Man is. So it makes it a little bit easier at the press breakfast

to sort of explain what's going on. Not in a bad way, just it makes it a little easier. And you get a little bit more press because when they see Spider-Man, who's Spider-Man? What's going with Spider-Man? Okay, so the rest of Thursday, I was at the booth. So, oh, we have a booth, let me explain. So Hasbro has a booth set up on the floor.

So those that have never been to Comic-Con, there is a marketplace. I don't know what a marketplace. There's an exhibition floor, which is the entire length of the, there are a lot, like, if you've never been to the San Diego Convention Center, it's long. And it takes up the entire length of it. And it's, I don't know exactly how many, but I mean, 30, 40, I don't know, it's many, many rows long.

And at it, Hasbro has a booth set up. So at the Hasbro booth, the magic things you could get at Hasbro booth, one, was in the morning they had Edge of Eternities pre-release packs those got sold up pretty fast and then there was a a secret lair that's exclusive to conventions not just any of Comic-Con but exclusive to conventions that you could buy there and then the part of the coolest thing was if you bought anything in Hasbro anything not even magic related if you brought anything in Hasbro you got a free

Spider-Man welcome deck and so there were, so I spent some time at the booth wore my little purple Hasbro shirt, Hasbro Pulse shirt, and then answer questions. We had two displays set up. It showed, one of the things we'd announced, or we were announcing at the panel was there's a line of action figures that we are doing for action figures. Let's see if I remember. Spider-Man, Iron Spider, anti-venom and man-wolf and each of them came with the um a spider i sorry a magic card three of which are from the

spider-man set so spider-man and anti-venom and iron spider are all from the set man-wolf was a skin of hunt master of the felds so it's the card hunt matcher of the felds skinned as manwool so mann wolf for those who don't know, Jay Joseph Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle who causes, who gets Peter so much gruff, he has a son,

who's an astronaut, who went into space, and because of a moon rock got turned into a white werewolf, anyway, named Manwolf. So that was the card there. So we had those figures

up in our case. We had some of the packaging was for Spider-Man. We had the secret layer that you could purchase. And then there were a bunch of, like, there were some Final Fantasy packages.

There was some packaging for Tarkir. But anyway, you can come and see and you to ask questions. And there's really a gamut of questions from people who are like, I don't know this at all, what is magic, to diehard fans of magic. Like, where can I get this? Where can I get that? You know? And it's always fun.

Like I said, interacting with people is always fun. So it's nice to get a little FaceTime. I also got a little bit of chance to go and do some convention. My favorite thing I did is Robert Kirkman, who is the creator of Walking Dead, Invincible, my favorite comic, and other stuff. He had a talk, so I got to go see him talk, which was super fun. He's very fun in person, and one of the fun things about Comic-Con is that you can go and see comics creators that you adore up on stage and talking, so that was a lot of fun. Okay, speaking of panels, let's get to Friday. because Friday was our panel.

So the panel was me and Aaron. Sarah, who does one of our art, she does a lot of the booster font art and a lot of the, she's an art director. And then C.B. Savolsky, who's the editor-in-chief of the duelist. And then we had a moderator. I'm blinking on her name. I apologize. So the idea was we were going to talk through many things, Spider-Man.

In fact, we had a panel so packed, so packed, that we ended up, I think we misjudged a couple things. One is, I think we had more content than probably we should have had. Second of which, just when you have a live audience, they react to things. It just, you know, the pace of doing the panel was a little bit slower than we had done through run through. But in it, we showed off a lot, a lot of cards. We talked about some of the things we talked about. We talked about how we for Marvel have the comics license and that what the sets are, the sets represent the characters as they are portrayed in the comics with their powers from

the comics, but we are very aware of the movies and TV shows and other things that people might be familiar with. So, for example, in Spider-Man, when we were picking characters to put into the set, we were well aware, for example, of the animated Spider-Man movies, that it really brought the Spider-Man verse to the forefront. And that is in the comics. All that stuff came from the comics. But we could sort of choose characters,

and so we could have Spider-Man noir or Penny, Spider-Binney, or Spider-Ham, or Spider-Punk and stuff like that. We could have characters that we know people know because of the movie. Once again, that are in the comic, but. So we showed off a lot of different characters. We showed off Spider-Man. Oh, we showed off, so we showed off the double. There's a double-faced, so one of the things Marvel is doing, I explained this in the panel, is before we began, we said to ourselves, what things can we do that are very marvel-y, right?

What can we do, what magic things that exist lean into like Marvel superheroes, what leads into that? And one of the things we realized early on was the idea of double-faced cards capturing the idea of a secret identity and a hero identity. Yeah, he's Spider-Man, but he's also Peter Parker. So one of the things we showed off is, we have a bunch of something we've never done before. They are modal transforming double-faced cards. What? So, industry and introduced transforming double-face cards.

Those are cards with an A-side and a B-side. You always play the A-side, and then under some means, you can change it to the B-side. Sometimes it'll go back to the A-side. A modal double-face card introduced, I guess, in Zendika Rising, have A and B, and you can play A or play B, but whatever you play, that's the side it stays on. Well, we finally figured out how to combine modal and transforming double-face cards.

So the way it works, I'll use Spider-Man example. There's Spider-Man on one side. It's Peter Parker on one side, Amazing Spider-Man on the other side. So you can play Peter Parker. I think he costs two mana. Amazing Spider-Man costs one white-blue green, or one green white-blue. And the idea is that you can play Peter Parker for two mana, you can play Amazing Spider-Man for four-manner,

or if you play Peter Parker for that four-mana, you can transform him into Spider-Man. You can't transform him back. The Spider-Man side is more exciting to Peter Parker's side. So the idea is that you can play this card early in the game. If you can't yet play Spider-Man, you can start him as Peter Parker. And anyway, so we showed off that. So Spider-Man had a double-faced card.

We showed off a Miles Morales double-face card. a Gwen Stacy double-faced card. Those are kind of the three big spider people that we focused on. Spider-Man was white-blue green. Miles was white-red green and Gwen was white-blue-red.

And so, anyway, we showed off, and the other thing that was fun, and the reason we had CB there was we spent a lot of time talking about the history of the characters, where they came from. You know, we wouldn't just say, oh, this is this character. Like, we introduced Spider-Man noir and say,

You know, a lot of you might know him from the movie, but he actually started because they did a series of noir comics and like Iron Man Noir. And when they did the Spider-Verse years later, they remembered back to that noir series and brought in Spider-Man Noir, who they thought it was a fun character. So Spider-Man Noir is like Spider-Man said in the 30s, and he's more like a gumshoe. It's more like the hard-boiled noir novels, you know. And anyway, so we spent a lot of time sort of walking through things. The other thing that I spent some time talking about, which I guess I could bring here, is when we make universes beyond, we always have what we call a SME, which stands for subject matter expert.

I am one of the SMEs on Marvel. We've done a lot of it. I've worked on a lot of other universes beyond, and some of which I was fans of. It's not like I like Lord of the Rings. but I wasn't a super fan I was a fan and some things like Final Fantasy I didn't even play Final Fantasy

so you know but we finally got to the license that I know really heavily like when I was a young kid you know one day I woke up and my dad had brought me a bunch of comics but one of which was Spider-Man

and I had read comics before that but I didn't really think of like owning comics and once I owned a comic I'm like I must have more comics and became a lifelong just absolute I mean, to this day, I still read comics. I'm a huge fan of comic books, Marvel, you know, specifically. And so one of the neat things, in fact, the story I always tell is when Aaron first pitched the idea of universe is beyond,

he called me in his office to sort of run through the deck he had put together. I think I think I was one of the first people to see it. And he said, well, what do you think? And my response to him was dibs on Marvel. So as I, well, if I haven't talked about elsewhere, originally Spider-Man was going to be a smaller set and the second set was going to be a large set so I led the design

for the second set. I ended up advising for the first set. Corrie Bowen was the lead designer, set designer of the Spider-Man set. And like I said, when we get into it, Spider-Man started being a small set and ended up being more of a medium set. But anyway, so we showed

off in the panel, lots of different characters told lots of stories. The the uh anyway it was it was uh other than the fact that we got to the end we we like we had a section in the end that was on the welcome decks and we were going to talk a little bit more about the welcome decks we ended up speeding through the welcome decks a little faster uh than we had planned although we had actually made sure all the most important information was up front so the welcome the welcome deck was more just showing off the cards in the welcome deck um which were already online

so it wasn't that big a deal um but anyway so we did that uh the panel was full i believe the room there were people, at my panel, I asked people who had seen the first panel, and a lot of people wanted to see the panel, but didn't get in. So, anyway, it was very exciting, and it was fun showing stuff off. It was fun being with CB. It was great to meet him. So anyway, that went well. And then, oh, one of the fun things, so Friday night, Aaron Forsyth and I, after the event,

we drove away to go see Fantastic Four was opening up. And so Aaron and I had gone to London for, I'm not sure, a Grand Prix or some big event in London. And it was the same weekend that Endgame was opening. So Aaron got his tickets to Endgame, and he and I went and saw Endgame in London. So I did the same thing this time. I got the tickets to the Fantastic Four. So Friday night, he and I went out, we had dinner, and we saw the Fantastic Four. which I adored.

Obviously, Marvel Superfan, but it's lots of fun. Okay, so we get to Saturday. So Saturday is my panel, blog-a-tog live. So I do my panel every year. It's really got into routine by the schedule. They always scheduled me 630 to 7.30 in room 24 ABC. And so I think I've been in the same room and time slot for at least 10 years, maybe even longer than that. But anyway, it's the way I always end my, I end my San Diego Comic-Con at.

So it's always a fun thing. So obviously this year, oh, sorry, before I get to my panel, one other thing I did not talk about. Let's talk a little bit about Avatar of a last airbender. So we actually did, while Spider-Man was the main focus, we had a little bit of focus on Avatar. So the one thing we did is over at Petco Field, we had set up, among other things, there was a cabbage cart, which is referencing the show. And if you went over, there was a, we had a preview card we were giving away. At some point, it became, the preview card moved from the cabbage cart to somewhere else.

But anyway, there was a preview card that you could acquire. I signed a bunch of them. And then I know Chris Mooney, who was the lead set designer for Avatar, was part of, there was an Avatar panel. and Chris had a section of the avatar panel to talk about magic doing avatar and they showed off a card and such. So anyway, there was an avatar presence. I mean, Spider-Man was probably the larger presence.

We showed a lot more cards. But there was a little bit of an avatar presence. Avatar also is the kind, like I said, there was a panel at Comic-Con. So it's also the kind of thing that made a lot of sense to talk about at San Diego Comic-Con. Okay. Okay, now we can get back to my panel.

Now that I made sure to mention the avatar, which, like I said, was also there. Okay, so my panel, basically, early on on the panel, we used to have more people, and eventually they decided that I could just run the panel. And so I do what I call Blog or Talk Live,

which is like Blog and Talk, for those that that I don't know that, but listen to my podcast. I do a blog, daily blog, in which I answer questions from all of you. So the idea is I go, I talk a little bit about magic, and then I answer questions. So about 20, 30 minutes, I'll talk about stuff. So what I did was, because I knew there were a lot of people that wouldn't get into the Spider-Man panel, I started by going through Spider-Man.

I told a little bit of my Spider-Man origin. I show off my Spider-Man comic. In my car, I have a little Spider-Man thing that hangs from my River Mirror. I showed that off. and I told a little bit about my passion for Marvel the one thing by the way that I think I've talked about this before

but it's a good point one of the things that really made me emotionally understand universes beyond I mean I intellectually understood it was the first time I got to play with Marvel cards it was just so exciting that taking my love for Marvel which really is something that's baked in

it's part of who I am and combining that with magic which I also loved dearly and just taking my two loves and mixing them together was so much fun. It really made me see, like, just the awesomeness, like getting to experience the sort of highest high of what universe is beyond can be when it just taps into something that is so primally exciting to you. So it's a property that really speaks to you.

But anyway, so I talked a little bit about my love of Spider-Man and Marvel in general. And then I showed off a lot of cards. and I talked through we told stories there were a bunch of stories that we told on the Friday panel some other stories I told on the Saturday panel we talked through stuff like why Spider-Man is a spider

or why Green Goblin is a Goblin that goblin the Spider-Man being a spider was not actually that big a fight if you read the comics there's a thing called the Spider Totum where the different spider people are all connected and you know because he was bit by a weird after spider he had some spider DNA

like him having an essence of spider is pretty supported by the comics. The Green Goblin was a little trickier only because, you know, what a goblin means in the Mumuers is a little more nebulous. But anyway, we really, we decided that it would just be a lot of fun for Magic Players and that it was something that we could justify. But anyway, I showed off a bunch of different cards

and I walked through sort of how we made different things and different thought processes and, you know, questions like, should Spider-Men fly and a lot of things that came up. I did, in fact, have a few new things. One is I had some art that people hadn't seen. I had like Spider-Men fighting Mysterio and fighting the scorpion and fighting I had Peter and Miles fighting Venom.

And I even had one of Peter fighting the Grizzly, which is a good example of the Grizzlies, kind of a silly villain. a guy that dresses in a bear suit, that he wasn't big enough for us to make a card for him, but we did find an opportunity to have a spell card where we could put him in the art. And so I try to mention that there's a lot of Easter eggs in the set where even when we couldn't get something specifically mentioned

on a card by itself, oftentimes it'll show up on a card in art or be referenced and flavor text or, you know, there's a lot going on in the world of Spider-Man. So we spent a lot of time of energy trying to flesh that out. I did get to show off one brand new card. So, at Friday, we had shown off the very first saga. So in the set, there's a series of five sagas. So sagas are magic.

Back when I talked about the very beginning, we were talking about what could Marvel do. One of the ideas, after we got the double-faced cards, was the idea, I mean, we talked about, like, hero and villain typel being a thing. And we also talked about the idea that, you know, Marvel is great because they have all these stories. There's all these classic storylines they've told. and we have a thing in magic to represent stories, sagas. So wouldn't it be fun to have the sagas represent classic storylines?

And so what we did is, we did the thing, we do these things called hackathons, where every once in a while we'll take a week off from our normal stuff and we'll have, like, projects we'll work on for the week. One of them was a Marvel hackathon. What are all the cool ways that magic could capture Marvel? And one of the things that came out of this hackathon was the idea of,

doing sagas where you use the comic panels, meaning there's three chapters, and each chapter has its own panel with its own art telling its own story, and then with like text, like they're in comics representing the chapters. So making it look like a comic book. So what we did is we have five sagas in the set, and then there are Booster Fun versions that do the comic book version of the saga. So we showed off the very first one called The Origin of Spider-Man, which is the white one. and Bill Simkevich, who's a very famous comic book artist,

who originally, by the way, did two cards in antiquities, by the way. Soldevi Steam Beast and one other artifact. But anyway, we had him do the main, the art on the front of the sagas. And then we had other comic book artists do the back, and we had shown off the one, but I got to show off Craven's Last Hunt, which is a very famous storyline. In fact, I gave a clue to the audience, and they were able to guess what the storyline was.

I tried out of how Spider-Man. The story begins with Spider-Man being buried in the grave. So Craven's last hunt. Yeah, Craven takes over and becomes Spider-Man for a while. Anyway, it's a fun story if you've never read it. So we showed off that card, and then I answer questions. It is funny because Aaron Forsyth, was at because he'd come to the convention because he was in the Friday panel. So he came

and watched my panel. And after we were all done, he commented that it was very clear that I have a blog or answer questions all the time just because I didn't seem flustered by any of the questions. Like I had answers to every question. So I said, yes, it does help when you answer questions constantly to be able to answer questions on the fly. Yeah, the one big difference, the one fun thing about blogger talk live is on my blog, I do answer questions from players, but I choose what questions answer. Where I blogger talk live, I answer what's after me. So there were a lot of fun questions asking about all sorts of different things. And I answered all the stuff that I could answer. Some people wanted to do my avatar. I'm like, well, we'll talk about avatar when we get to

avatar. But anyway, the panel went really well. It was very nice. Sanio Comic Con. So I'm at work, but let me quickly wrap up here. One of the most interesting things about San Diego Comic Con this year was you could just like right now I've mentioned this elsewhere magic is there are more people playing magic right now than I've ever played magic in its 32 year history um and it was just really palpable at the event um part of it I think was there's just a lot of synergy between doing Spider-Man and being a San Diego Comic-Con that was part of it but like um for example I walk I always walk around the floor I've done you know I've been a Comic-Con for over 20 years

and normally you know there's one or two people like if you want to buy magic cards on the floor there's one or two

places to buy it and this year there's like six or seven and just seeing more references to magic and it's just there is this or the Spider

activation was completely full up as was the avatar stuff and like everything dealing with magic was just full throttle I was

getting to stop more so than normal stopped in random places at San Diego Comic-Con to sign autographs and stuff and take pictures and so anyway one of the side effects of a lot of stuff is going on. Part of this is universe

is beyond and part of it is I just think even our in multiverse sets like Tarkir and Eddivert journeys have just been hitting on all cylinders. Magic is just sort of you know, magic keeps growing and it's just really interesting to see it just keep getting bigger and bigger

And as a fan of magic, that is quite exciting. But anyway, I had a great time to Stanley of Comic-Con. Both the panels I thought went really well. The activation was fun. I did infinite, I did a whole bunch of press stuff, a lot of interviews, and those all went well. Some of which you probably could see online. I did a bunch of video interviews, some of which have been posted. I did, like, local news interview.

Anyway, a lot of fun stuff. So that was really fun. So I had a great time. I mean, I always have a great time. That's why I love going to Stanley of Comic-Con. but this year was no different and once again the other thing that's been really fun for me

is we work years ahead of time so I've been working on Marvel for years I haven't been able to talk about it and so finally getting to the first Marvel release where I actually get to talk about Marvel and share my Marvel fandom

one of the fun things about both panels was how much I got to talk about Spider-Man that was that's a lot of fun for me I'm a huge Like I said, I'm a huge, huge Marvel fan, huge Spider-Man fan. And so it's fun to, like, just talk about things and explain things. So anyway, I had a great time. So I hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about the rundown of San Diego Comic-Con

2025. But I'm at work, so we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.