Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1350: Marvel Super Heroes Design

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In this episode, I talk about designing Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. And today, I get to talk about a set that I've been dying to talk about. Today is about the design of Marvel superheroes. Match of the Gathering, Marvel Superheroes. Very exciting. Okay, so let's go to the very beginning.

So when Aaron Forsyth first pitched the idea of Universes Beyond, he made a little presentation, and he talked to a couple individual presentations. people. I was one people we talked to. He showed me and he goes, what do you think? And the little first words out of my mouth were dibs on Marvel. So he came to me about, I don't know, a year and a half later, and he goes, we're pitching to Marvel. And I want you to make the cards. So I had to make, I think I had to make seven cards. It had to be in all the colors, various card types, various rarities. And for one of them, he said, mostly I want you to just,

if they'd expect, but we should do one deep cut just to demonstrate that we're fans of the property. And I'm trying to remember, I did, I did like a Scarlet Witch and I did Rocket, and I did Thanos. I did like a member of Shield

to show a Common. I think I did Cap Shield. But anyway, my deep cut was Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl. I'm a job, I mean, I'm a big, I've been a Marvel fan, just, I guess, clear, this isn't clear yet. I've been reading comics since I was little.

I'm a huge fan of Marvel. You know, one of the things, like one of the things were interesting. When we first started doing universes beyond, I mean, I intellectually understood the idea behind it. I got that, oh, you know, people really connect to things and we're now connecting magic to that. But when I had my first playtest,

when I was able, because, like, there are some properties that go beyond just being, like, there's something that go to the core of your being. Like, for example, for those that don't know my attire, I tend to wear flannel shirts and sort of my stereotypical look is a superhero t-shirt, of which I have many, many, many, lots of which are Marvel. I'm just, like I said, comics are so much a part of my being that it's just, it's been a love of mine my whole life. And so the first time I sat down and played Marvel, but with magic, and like magic, obviously another huge love of my life. Like just the, these two things that are sort of at the core of my being coming together was so much fun, was so enjoyable that it, even though I intellectually kind of understood the attraction to universes beyond, it made me understand it from an emotional level. So anyway, suffice to say, I was very excited to make it.

The reason I made Squirrel Girl, by the way, is I really wanted to demonstrate that we could do something that both would be something that Marvel, fans would really enjoy. She's a fun character that, you know, popular among franchised Marvel readers. But also, she makes an awesome magic card that, you know, squirrels are this fun thing in magic. And, you know, if you're a squirrel player, even if you've never, ever seen a Marvel comic or Marvel TV show or anything, you're going to like Squirrel Girl. She's awesome with Squirrels. So if you love squirrels, she's good. And that's one of the cool things about doing Uyroses Beyond is, you know, We very much want to tap into what people love about the property.

Marvel has a lot to love, as I'm the evidence of. But we also want to do things that are cool, even if you don't know the property. And Squirrel Girl, to me, felt like... So, one of the cool things is Squirrel Girl is in the set, almost as I designed her. Some cost change. And I think her stats just slightly tweaked.

But the essence of what I designed is basically in the final set. And if you are a squirrel fan, or a fan of Squirrel Girl, I think you'll really love the card. It's very cool. So anyway, so we made the cards. We set them into Marvel. Marvel said, we like it.

Let's do it. And the thing about Marvel, so Marvel has been making comics for over 60 years. You know, it's a shared universe. There's just infinite stories that are told. And on top of movies and TV shows and cartoons. And, I mean, Marvel is a pretty big presence. And there's just so much there.

Like I said, they've been telling stories for so long. And there's just so much material that we realized that we needed to be more than one set. There's just, there's no way to capture everything that the Marvel is in a single set. So what we did is, we did the first ever deal where we're doing multiple sets with one IP. And then we had a big meeting where we figured out how we wanted to chop it up. I can't get into specifics of that because we haven't announced future things. But obviously one of them was Spider-Man. So basically what we called Marvel Superheroes

was sort of Avengers Plus. It was doing the Avengers, and there's lots of incarnations of the Avengers, plus related teams, Fantastic Four, the Young Avengers, Heroes for Hire, just the Street Heroes in New York, Shield, a lot of sort of Avengers, Avengers and Avengers-adjacent heroes. So one of the things that we did when we started working on the set was

we went and we made a list on the whiteboard as we normally do and we just listed okay what would you expect to see in an Avengers plus set. So for example we listed all the Avengers. I actually went through I made a full list of every single person who's ever been in the Avengers and for those who don't know real quickly. So the Avengers got created back in the 60s and one of the ideas

was you know Marvel had a lot of different comic books with different comic heroes. The idea of sort of a team book is, what if we take all these heroes that you know from their own separate books and you bring them all together? So the original Avengers was The Hulk,

Iron Man, Thor, and then Ant Man and the Wasth. We're in the comic together. And so the idea was, here's all these characters you already recognize, but now all together. And over the years, many, many different people have been in the

Avengers. It's one of the things about the team is, you know, the roster sort of keeps changing as different writers entered. And anyway, there's been a long, illustrious roster of the Avengers. And like I said, we weren't just the Avengers looking Fantastic Four and all the various teams. So we made a long list of the characters, the objects, the places, the events. What are all the things we wanted to capture? Oh, so one of the things is on Universes Beyond, sets. We have what we call SMEES, which stands for subject matter expert, of which I was a Smee. We like to have SMEs lead to design if they can. We don't necessarily always have a Smee capable of leading every set. If not, then there are other people on the team that are Smees.

So there's always Smees on the design team. And in my team, we had a bunch of Smees. It's a Marvel. Like, there's a lot of Marvel fans at Wizards and an R&D. Okay, so when we first got together to figure out what we want, in the Marvel sets. We did figure out a few things that we thought would be through lines that would be in a lot of the

Marvel sets. And those things pretty much are in Marvel superheroes. First off is Mortal Transforming Double Face Cards. One of the things

we realized very early on was that double-faced cards actually worked really well with comic books. For example, the idea of secret identity and the hero identity, right?

And there's a lot of lot of heroes that have different roles or different forms. It just lends itself very well. But something that we introduced in Spider-Man was the idea of a card where you could play the front side or play the backside that both have a cost, like it's a modal double-faced card. But if you play the front side first,

you can't transform it into the back side. Often the front side is like the secret identity. So the idea is that you could play the character at the low cost if you want, and later transform it into the hero. And so it was, there was an awesome idea. It worked well. We wanted to continue doing it, so we did.

Also, sagas are, we made sagas back in Dominaire to represent stories. Well, if Marvel is anything, in spades, it's amazing stories. Lots and lots of classic stories. And so using sagas to represent them, we do this fun, boost or fun thing where it looks like a comic book page.

Anyway, so lots of fun there, more sagas. And the other thing we realized early on is we wanted to do some typal, and so we ended up putting hero and villain. So something you'll see in the Marvel sets are heroes and villains, and we wanted to be able to do typel with those. And so in Marvel superheroes,

you'll see hero and villain typo. There was villain typel in Spider-Man for the first time there'll be hero typel in Marvel superheroes. Okay, so that was stuff that we knew we were doing going into it. So one of the things, when we sort of stood back and looked at what we were trying to do, one of the things that hit me very quickly is, I think Marvel Strength as a property is its characters. It just has so many amazing characters. I mean, many, many amazing characters. And someone who's been reading comics my whole life, they're just, there's just so, I mean, it is a world just chockful

of just tons and tons of great characters. So one of the things I realized when we were making the set, was, you know, you want your set to embody what the strength of your property is. Our strength is about colorful characters. And so we wanted to make sure that we can make fun, you know, amazing top-down designs for the character. So I wanted the mechanics not to get in the way of that. I wanted the mechanics to be something that reinforce the uniqueness. And so I wanted to be careful to make very open-ended mechanics, things that allowed us

a lot of flexibility to make sure that the time. Top-down designs were as flavorful as possible. Okay, so in Vision, Vision Design, we ended up turning in three main mechanics, three named mechanics. And the idea at the time was we would do one mechanic for the heroes, one mechanic for the villains, and then one mechanic that was both hero and villain. So let me start with the hero and villain mechanic. So we originally called it TeamUp. It's got printed as teamwork because there's another mechanic called PowerUp that I will

get to. Anyway, so team up slash teamwork. The way it worked was, we said, okay, what is, what is the most important thing about a team up, a team? And it could be a hero team, a villain team. And the idea is that you're getting to see that heroes work, or villains, work together. And the idea of a team up, you know, there's a whole comic book in Marvel, called Marvel Team Up. The idea of getting heroes together and working together, it was very core of the idea of a team. And like I said, Avengers Plus was very much about heroes coming together, hero teams. And so the idea of having a team-up teamwork mechanic seemed very apropro. What we ended up doing was it's kind of an extra cost. And the way you, rather than mana, you're tapping a creature.

And the idea is this creature is coming to age you to help you. You're working together. So it was, it kind of borrows a little bit from crew, from how vehicles work. But instead of it being something to activate, not an activated ability, it is an additional cost. And we thought that was kind of neat. Other than the name-changing, teamwork stuck all the way through. We handed off a vision design,

and it stayed all the way through set design to print. The villain mechanic was called Knaive. So Knaiv's a reprint mechanic. It's from the obscure faction in Streets in Nukipena. And the way Knaive works is Knaive is a keyword action.

when you can I, if you draw a card, then discard a card. If you discard it a non-land card, then you put a plus one plus-mon counter on the creature who connived. And so the thing we liked, there's a bunch of things we liked about. I mean, the flavor was great. It allowed us to, you know, plus one plus-meconters and mechanical tie-ins we could do. And so because there's so many amazing characters,

one of the things we realized was, look, we just wanted to show off all the characters. So every creature, uncommon or higher, not common. Every creature Uncommon and Higher is a legendary creature that we are showing you classic, famous heroes and villains from all across Marvel, like I said, in this Avenger-adjacent space. And because of that, because of so many legends, we knew that it's possible for you to get, like,

the second legend caught in your hand. So we want to make sure there's a mechanic that allows you to make use of mechanics that maybe you can't play. So Knive is really good for that. that if I have two copies of something, too uncommon is unlimited, you know, I can't connive and discard the one I don't need to enhance the creature,

even plus a plus one counter. Anyway, Knaive actually worked so well that we later went back and talked to Corey. Corey led Spider-Man and convinced him to put in Spider-Man because even though we want each Marvel set to sort of stand on its own, we do want some continuity,

like the sagas, like the modal Transforming Double-Face Cards. So Knaive does show up, in Spider-Man and shows up in Marvel Superheroes. Okay. The third mechanic, which was our hero mechanic, which isn't in the set, by the way, it's called Signal. The way Signal work, it was also a keyword action.

It came with a number, Signal 3, Signal 4. So what would happen is you would look at the top N cards of your library. So it said Signal 4. Look at the top four cards of your library. And then you could take any creature from among those four and either put it in your hand or if its man of value was equal to or less than the signal number, you can put it onto the battlefield.

The idea we were playing into is that one of the things about being on a team is that you have each other. So like in the Avengers, they have a little identical card where they can call other members of the Avengers if they need their help. And so the idea was, oh, well, part of being part of a team is we need help. You can call somebody else that signals about. Signal tested the worst in our Vision Summit.

it got the lowest marks. And so we ended up deciding to replace it. We all had some other suggestions, but set design ended up replacing it in set design. So what they replaced it with was what we called PowerUp. So Power Up started as a Kicker variant. But one of the challenges, so here's a classic story. So Kicker first showed up in invasion. So I at the time, I used to play in the FFL, said,

or the Future Future League. We have to play cards that aren't out yet so we can figure out whether we need to tweak them or stuff. I wasn't a great competitive deck builder. It was more of a Johnny deck builder. But other people would build me a deck. So Randy Bueller, who Jeff started the company, built me in this deck.

And in it were four grizzly bears. It was a red-green deck. So anyway, I go 4-0, which is very good for me. Most of the people in R&D were like former pro players, which I was not. So anyway, Randy then informs me that the four grizzly bears in my deck, aren't in fact grizzly bears.

There was a card Cabu Titan, which was an invasion. Cabot Titans are one in a green for a two-two, but for three-green green-green, you can get a five-five trampling creature. So the idea was, well, it was a grizzly bear if I played it for two-manna, but for five-man, I could make it a five-five trampler. So once he informs me of that,

I played the same deck, and the next week I go two and two. And the lesson there was that the correct way to play Cabo Titan is, when it can be a grizzly bear, make it a grizzly bear. And when I played it that way, when I treated it like a grizzly bear, I won. And when I said about, oh, this could be better. And I didn't maximize its usage.

I didn't win as much. And there's a core essence, I think, of how one of the challenges with kicker is there's a lot of tension about do I play it now or do I play it later. So they then said, okay, well, what if we did a kicker cost that also was like a monstrosity cost or an exhaust cost? that you can pay this when you cast it, or you can pay it when you later in the game and make it better. Now, the challenge they found was the cost it needed to be a monstrosity, to be it, to be it activated, was higher than it needed to be when you played it. And so what ended up happening was nobody actually,

or very rarely did you sort of kick it. You mostly played it on the battlefield and then later what activated. So they then made a change with that, okay, the turn you play it, we will subtract the cost of the mana value, the mana cost, meaning that when you play the card, you can kind of just pay the power-up cost, and the creature will get better. And power-up represents using your powers.

Obviously, you know, Marvel's all about characters with great powers and superpowers and such. So anyway, and the nice thing about power-up and teamwork also is both of them were very flexible in what they did, that you could put them on cards, and it didn't really get in the way of doing flavorful things because a lot of what we want to do was very flavorful top-down designs.

And like I said, the key was to make mechanics that enhanced the flavor but doesn't limit... Like, if we did a mechanic that was very exacting in what it did, then you had all these characters that, well, they had to kind of do this thing and isn't exactly what represents them. And so... Anyway, the other thing that set design came up with

was one of the notes that they got is they wanted to have gameplay feel. There's a lot of teaming up and a lot of heroic things happening, but they wanted something that felt a little more like I was up to something. And so looking at the ordeals from Theros and the cases from Murder of Carlov Manor, they came up with a thing called Plan. And plan is an enchantment subtype. So the way it works is you play a plan.

Every time you do something, some hoop you have to jump through, you get a small reward. and you get a plan counter. And then if you do it enough times, you sacrifice the card and get a giant effect, a bigger effect. So the idea is you're working towards something. Ha-ha. And we named them after sort of like supervillain tropes and things.

Like what are master plans that the supervillains are up to? So plan ended up playing pretty fun. The one other thing that they also did is, and something we'd be doing more of, is the idea of cameos. So what a cameo is is once upon a time, a set would have evergreen mechanics, maybe it has one or two deciduous mechanics, and it has mechanics that are the set mechanics of that set. But one of the things we realize we'll do in commander deck design is sometimes there's an old mechanic that's just a flavor slam dunk. But you don't want to do a whole bunch of it. You just want it on one card.

So the rule of cameos is usually they appear in rare or mythic rare, and normally in small numbers, often on just one card. A classic example would be on Captain America. So the shield mechanic, shield counters, is from Streets in New Capena. And the idea is that it's a counter that a creature can get and that when you would sort of go to the graveyard instead, you can sack the shield counter, sort of protects you once. So what if Captain America came with a shield counter, right? He's Captain America.

Classically has a shield, pretty famously has a shield. And so that's a good example. I will give another... Actually, I have another example. I'll give in a second. Okay, so we had given the... We made the mechanics, set design, tweaked a few things. So normally when I design a set, what happens is

I will hand it off at the end of vision and then I'll poke my hand every once in a while, just see what's going on. Mostly, I'm just there to make sure that the vision hasn't gone off the rails or something. They haven't killed something that I think is fundamental. going on. That really happens, but I always check in. On this particular set, I also function as the Smee, the subject matter expert, or one of the Smees. So one of the things I did, in fact,

before I handed the set over, I spent a lot of time and energy taking the skeleton, the set skeleton, and putting different characters and objects and events, like slotting things out. Like, I figured out what characters have to show up, what things they, and sort of figured out what we really wanted to represent. And I put all the different things in different places. And then once the set got made, I would come back and I give notes. Now, notes tended to fall in two major categories, and I will give examples of each category. So category one was what I'll call incremental improvements, where I'm not necessarily even changing how the card plays. There's just a little bit of flavor to it. So my example here was Sue Storm. For those that aren't aware, Sue Storm is Invisible Woman.

She is part of the Fantastic Four, one of the founding members. in the Fantastic Four, though most of them, I guess, are the founding members. But anyway, she has the ability to turn invisible and to create invisible force fields. So to represent her force fields, the character can make a wall. I think it's a zero-four wall, zero-four-14. She makes a wall, and originally the wall was white. It was a white wall. Because I think she's white.

But the note I made is, oh, this should be a colorless wall because she's making an invisible wall and colorless subtly implies invisible more so than white does you know and like I said it doesn't really change how the card plays a wall is a wall it's going to block where it's going to block but like it's a little

kind of thing we're just oh it has a little extra flavor to it and that's the kind of thing that I made a lot of small notes about small incremental changes also there are what I will call more fundamental changes and this is another of our cameo mechanics so we were doing the Hulk so I did actually

one of the cards I designed for the original Marvel handoff was the Hulk. And it was a two-face, a double-faced card. Bruce Banner on one side, Hulk's the other side. They ended up doing different than my design. But the idea of a two-faced, you know, of a double-faced banner Hulk, obviously we had early on. So one of the things they decided to do on the Hulk is they gave it enrage. Enrage is a mechanic from Ixelon. It was on the dinosaurs, I believe, in Xelon.

and whenever something gets damaged, it triggers. And so they had enraged on Hulk. It's great. When the Hulk is angry, he turns into the Hulk. You don't like me when I'm angry. You know, like, like... So anyway, but the effect on the card didn't change the stats of the card.

And so my moment, this was my most geeky moment where I had to go to Dave and go, Dave. Canonically, when the Hulk gets madder, he gets stronger. he gets stronger. It's an important part of the character. It makes him very hard to defeat because the madder he gets, the harder he is to defeat.

And so what I said to him is, look, we really have to increase his power when he gets mad. Like, that's canonically important. And so Dave did. Now the creature gets a plus one, plus one counter. So the idea essentially is,

and that's a good example where, like, we want to capture the characters as best we can, And one of the things that's tricky, when you're working on a set, so let's say you're working on this ad, you can look up the characters on a wiki. There's a, you know, there's a Marvel wiki.

And there's pages and pages and pages that describe the characters. There's even a whole section that'll walk through what their superpowers are. But if you don't really know the character, it's hard to know what to focus on. One of the challenging things was, okay, well, this character can do a lot of things. what's the important thing? Like, what's the essence of the character? And also, as in the case, like the Hulk, oh, are there certain qualities to them that are important

that maybe I, you know, a lesson franchise that might not even realize. And that was a lot of the fun. One of the things I enjoyed so much about being a Smee on the set is, my joke was, I've spent years, years doing research, you know, because I've been reading comics for so long. And it really was fun to use all that knowledge.

I mean, like, one of the goals that I truly believe about universes beyond sets is it's trying to do two things. One is, for the people who are fans of the property, it wants to live and breathe that property. It wants to, through magic, bring alive that property. And, okay, how can I play a game of magic? And while playing that game of magic, feel like I am that property. And so we spend a lot of time and energy making sure it feels right. The other thing we do, though, is we want this to be.

a fun magic set, even if you don't know the property. Even if you've never read a Marvel comic or seen a Marvel movie or Marvel TV show. I know that's hard to do. There's some people out there. But if you have no exposure, you know nothing about it, you know, we still want you to sort of, we're making a magic set

that even for those unenfranchised with the property, it's still a really fun magic set. You know, if you've never ever, ever heard a squirrel girl, but you love squirrels, you should, this card should excite you. And we really worked all the way through of trying to find opportunities and places where we can do things that are really cool.

And there's some fun deep cut cards in the set where, yeah, Marvel fans will know who they are. Non-Marval fans might not know, but they are still super fun magic cards. And so, so anyway, guys, I try to think any final thoughts here. I got to work, but I got to work fast today. So we're going to... I think the thing that was interesting to me was I was...

Like I said, I called dibs when Aaron first told me the idea. Oh, the reason I ended up doing this set real quickly. So Spider-Man, although it came first, was a small set. In fact, started even smaller. And so I believe that actually

I started on this set before Corey even, I think, started on Spider-Man. they were very close. Just because this was a large set, it needed more time. And, you know, it was, I was so excited.

Like, one of the things, I mean, I love working on magic. Every magic set is fun. They're all my babies. I do love them all. But this one was a little extra special in that, I truly, like I said,

I am, Marvel is part of my psyche. you know, I really, I really am a huge fan of it. I've literally seen every movie, every TV show. I mean, I've seen, I mean, it's hard to see every Marvel thing ever because there's so many things have been made, but I've seen a lot. And I, like I said, I've been reading comics. Like, to this day, I read comics all the time. I read Marvel, you know, almost every day I read a Marvel comic.

And so I'm still really entrenched in the world. And so the idea of being able to bring this, to fruition, to making a magic set out, to make magic cards out of it. You know, there's a lot of, like, I did a little bit more card design than I normally do, just because one of the things that we do a lot of times in Vision is when there's really quirky top-down designs, we do a lot of that stuff. For example, you know, there's like a speedball design. The speedball is a fun character that, like, has a very weird sort of superpower,

and like I was very proud of the design that sort of captured what he did. And like I said, there's just so much fun of just trying to get every little, try every ounce to get as much Marvel in it as possible. So what I'm hoping is for all the Marvel fans out there that this rings true, that these characters feel right. And like I said, I remember this, the joy I had the first time I played with the set, that there's something so fun about bringing something you truly love, like mixing the love of of magic and the love of that property together.

And I hope for Marvel fans that we're able to recreate and do that for you. Like I said, so I did the vision design. I handed off to Dave Humphreys who did the set design. Dave and I are the most experience. I've done more vision design slash design than anyone in the building.

Dave has done more set design slash development anyone in the building. So, like, we wanted to do this right. You know, it's a large set. It's eight-person draft. It's got 10 arc draft archetypes. You know, it's super fun.

And so I would just say, for those out there, give it a try. It is a great set. And I am super proud of it. And I can't wait to start talking. As a set comes out, I can talk more about Marvel and dive in deep.

And like I said, it is fun. I love geeking out with Marvel. So they said, well, let me do that. But anyway, guys, that is, the design of Magic of the Gathering Marvel Superheroes. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this today, but I'm now at work, so we all know

that means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.