Soon, Magic players will be shuffling in the likes of Thanos, Reed Richards, and a host of other Marvel heroes and villains into their decks with the impending launch of the Marvel Superheroes set. Superheroes marks the second big release of the multi-year partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Marvel and marks a Galactus-sized jump in what’s on offer over last year’s Spider-Man product. I recently got to chat a bit with Dave Humpherys, the Design Lead for the latest set who’s also a former professional Magic player. We spoke about some of the unique challenges that came with designing the Marvel Superheroes Universes Beyond set (his first one as set lead), hear about some neat easter eggs that got worked into the set, and more.

Marvel Superheroes is a vastly different beast than Spider-Man, which was much more focused – both in terms of the characters offered and the scope in the greater Marvel Universe being contained to just New York. This new set expands to include galactic threats like Thanos and Galactus, but to answer the call, Avengers from across the comic’s history and beyond are here. Whittling down such a legacy to a set of 600-ish cards between all the products was a task in itself, and for Humpherys, tackling this as his first UB set proved different from what he was used to.

“When I'm making a normal set like the ones we described, there might be some characters from our world guide and creative team that are like, 'this is this character, this is what they do in the story, this is what you should focus on, but that's not a lot of characters,” Humpherys explains. “There might be some sort of reference, but even that's pretty open-ended on what I'm trying to capture. So for these, normally I design a card, and often a lot of the cards are very mechanical. If I want a card that lets you draw two cards, or one that works with non-creature spells or whatever, and then the creative team will be like, ‘Oh, that's a cool design, now I'm going to design a concept to go with it.’ For this [Universes Beyond], largely Mark and the creative team, say, ‘These are all the cards you’ll make, these are the card names, design the cards that work with them.’ So yeah, a very different set of challenges.”

It’s easy to see the care and creativity that the team has put into Marvel Superheroes.“

Even with those challenges, it’s easy to see the care and creativity that the team has put into Marvel Superheroes. The set features cards like “Quicksilver, Brash Blur,” which channels the speedy mutant by giving him a leyline-esque ability, allowing him to begin the game on the battlefield if he is in your opening hand, or “Thanos, the Mad Titan,” being able to blow up creatures across the field with just a snap of his fingers. And by "snap of fingers," I mean for each of the five colors of mana, plus a colorless, giving off Infinity Gauntlet vibes. Perhaps my favorite of these little nods is with the “Super-Skrull” card. Being one of the Fantastic Four's most powerful foes, this Black card has four unique mana abilities, one for each of the other colors, and each based on the powers of the fantastic family. With White, he can create 0/4 defensive wall tokens, Green pumps him up +4/+4, Red lets him burn creatures for 4 damage, and lastly, with Blue, he lets you reach into your deck and draw 4 cards. Everything is four! Pretty damn clever.

Great care has also been taken in developing mechanics and themes for the ten main color pairs of cards in Marvel Superheroes that make sense both in line with what longtime players expect from established MTG pair behaviors and in correlation with the comics. Humpherys lays out his process: “I sort of tried to internalize and develop pretty much all of these color pairs. We're like, if white and blue come together, what does that look like? It's about, like, teamwork, one of the new mechanics, which is when you cast an instance or sorcery with ‘Teamwork’, you can tap creatures with a combined power indicated after the Teamwork mechanic number. You can make your instance and sorceries more powerful. A lot of that's trying to show heroes and villains working together. More than the sum of their parts, you get synergy between them, showing that they’re teaming up and doing stuff together.”

One thing I have been particularly curious about is the upcoming change to Magic Arena. A massive pivot, while not specifically tied to this new set, is that Marvel cards can now be included in Wizards’ digital Magic Arena client. Previously, cards could not feature Marvel characters, giving birth to the “Through the Omen Paths” line, which replaced names and images for mechanically identical non-Marvel variants. At least with these properties, that will no longer be the case, with all your favorite characters showing up in Arena going forward and retroactively allowing the Spider-friends to as well. Asking Humpherys about this change, whether it was in the works when Spider-Man released, and the timing just didn’t work out, or if matters changed after its release, Dave, in a very neutral tone, simply said he couldn’t say anything about it, just that he is really glad that Arena players get to use stuff from Marvel.

Marvel Superheroes looks to be a big improvement over the initial release of this massive collaboration, and after speaking with Dave, I’m more excited than ever to get my hands on some of these cards. For a more detailed breakdown of the set, Wizards of the Coast has posted a near-complete spoiler of all the cards on the site.

The Marvel Superheroes pre-release events begin on June 19th, with the set’s official launch a week later on June 26. Fans will be able to crack both play and collector boosters, but in an official blog post, Wizards unfortunately revealed that a number of the sets' other products, including Bundles, Commander precons (both standard and collector varieties), Welcome Decks, and the Jumpstart Boosters, will be delayed.

Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.