Magic: The Gathering’s next mainline set is Marvel Super Heroes, a massive new Universes Beyond expansion with over 600 new cards. Featuring classic comic art and characters, locations and iconic story moments from Marvel’s decades-long history, this new Magic expansion is shaping up to be one for the ages. During Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, Temple of Geek had the opportunity to chat with some of Magic’s design team. This time, I sat down with Play Design Lead at Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), Jadine Klomparens. We chatted about card and character design, limited formats, and so much more.
We also, of course, played a few rounds of Magic. We used the new Marvel Super Heroes welcome decks, a collection of five premade decks designed to onboard new players. Each one is represented by one of the five mana colors (white, blue, black, red, and green) and features a popular Marvel hero. The heroes we could pick from were Black Panther, Iron Man, Black Widow, Spider-Man, and the Hulk, with each deck reflecting cards representing these characters from the set. I chose Black Panther, Jadine Iron Man, and we went a few rounds. Each box contains two single-colored premade deck. They can be used for a quick 1v1 game or shuffled together for a two-color deck with deeper synergies. The cards you get in each box are also semi-random. The color printed on the box is guaranteed, then the second set of sealed cards is another random batch of off-color cards.
Once we finished (and Jadine sufficiently stomped me into the ground), we chatted for a bit about Marvel Super Heroes. You can check out the transcript below, which has been edited slightly for clarity.
Making Marvel Magic
Temple of Geek: How much input did Marvel have on the card design of Marvel Super Heroes, and how much control did your team have?
Jadine Klomparens: It’s very much a collaboration, but we each have our expertise. We know Magic and Marvel knows Marvel. So a lot of it is, we make cards and show them then talk about what seems like the right fit. We go back and forth a little bit. But it is very much us designing the cards and trying to figure out how to represent the characters and getting input on what’s working and what’s not.
Temple of Geek: Speaking of representing the characters, [returning mechanic] Connive is used on Villain cards as a way to give them a mechanically-unique identity in the set. Were there any mechanics or abilities your team wanted to bring back that didn’t work out?
Klomparens: I think everything ended up making it in the end. We played around with a bunch of the different variants of [the new mechanics] Power-Up and Teamwork and changed those a lot. But there are no other reprints that we were [going to use].
Temple of Geek: There are 600+ mechanically unique cards when you add up the main set, Commander decks, and and Jumpstart. What were some of the specific challenges when designing that many new cards?
Klomparens: One [challenge was] art and trying to get this massive pipeline down. This is one of the biggest product sets we’ve ever made. And that just means there’s a lot of work. That also means there’s a lot of unique characters and concepts that we have to come with. So mostly budgeting time and resources and getting it all figured out.
“We Want to See All the Infinity Stones in Magic”
Temple of Geek: WOTC has confirmed that these cards are based primarily off of the comics, but are there any iterations of these characters where your design took inspiration from depictions from games, movies, or TV?
Klomparens: The comics are the basis for this, but all of the other Marvel things that have happened influenced what the public knows. So we’re aware of what the most popular characters are, what’s out in the zeitgeist. And that let’s us inform who should be higher rarity, what are the characters we expect the audience to know.
Temple of Geek: The Marvel Universe is vast with plenty of popular and obscure characters, but were there any characters that didn’t quite make the cut? Could we expect them in a future set?
Klomparens: We did show off a huge range of characters in this set, and there are certainly other characters that we did not include. We know about them, there are a lot of popular ones. So hopefully some day.
Temple of Geek: Kind of staying on that subject, we’ve so far seen two of the Infinity Stones represented as unique cards, one for each Marvel-themed set. Can we expect four more Marvel sets to complete the Infinity Stone collection?
Klomparens: We want to see all the Infinity Stones in Magic, that’s certainly in our plans.
Editor’s Note: Here I asked if the team was building up to an event in Magic, sort of like Avengers: Endgame. Jadine declined to provide further details.
Temple of Geek: Sticking with story and lore, Magic’s next in-universe expansion is Reality Fracture. This is a sort of What If? set with Magic characters and settings with alternate realities. Does this open the door for in-universe lore to cross over with Universes Beyond sets?
Klomparens: For the most part, no. Our IP is our IP and we love it and want it to be its own thing. We’re not looking to combine or mix and match.
“[T]here Is More Spider-Man in This Set”
Temple of Geek: How does the amount of Legendary creatures in the main set affect how you design limited formats like Draft and Sealed?
Klomparens: Great question, and one that I particularly love. So Marvel Super Heroes is build from the ground up, knowing that we were going to want to make a lot of Legendary creatures. But there are all these characters that fans love. So a lot of decisions around the set, like the mechanics, are all built to give us a set that is the best avenue for making a bunch of Legendary creature designs.
So one of the most interesting things that we did was [ASFAN, or what a pack looks like as you fan it out in your hands]. So if the ASFAN of common cards is five, that means when you open a pack you expect to see five commons. So what we did was turned some amount of the common ASFAN for creatures into uncommon ASFAN for creatures. So this set has less common creatures and more uncommon creatures than other sets because uncommon is a better home for the Legendary creatures that we wanted to make.
And my team Play Design spent a lot of time grappling with the ramifications and the balance there. Where instead of [Draft] and Sealed being a lot about the same common creatures that you can expect to see a ton of, the mainstays of the format were much more varied. You just had a bunch of different uncommons that changed the gameplay. So figuring out how that worked was a lot of what we were doing.
Temple of Geek: Last year, Spider-Man got his own dedicated mainline set. With Marvel Super Heroes, I’m curious how much more Spider-Man as a character will be represented on new cards?
Klomparens: I don’t have an exact number, but there is more Spider-Man in this set. [We played with the card Web Up], which is a reprint from the Spider-Man set that is in Marvel Super Heroes. The Spider-Man card in the main set is an uncommon because we had made a lot of Spider-Man cards. But we certainly still have him included here, and less of the Spider-Verse shows up.
Temple of Geek: From a competitive standpoint, were there any challenges with balancing Marvel Super Heroes to fit well into formats like Standard or Modern?
Klomparens: Absolutely, there always is. Like every main set, this goes through [Play Design] and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what are going to be the Standard decks here, what are the strongest cards. [Specifically the new Thanos card and modal double-faced cards] were things we spent a lot of time on. We also worked on trying to make a heroes and villains deck. Not necessarily as strong cards, but making sure that those tools are available for people who want to do that. This is always a challenge for a relatively new creature type. You’ve got the Spider-Man cards, you’ve got these, and maybe more in the future and trying to set all of these up
Temple of Geek: Finally, what can you tell us about Avengers: Doomsday?
They kicked me out.
Marvel Super Heroes prereleases start June 19. The set releases on Magic Arena June 23, with a tabletop release on June 26.
