The first Marvel characters in Magic are Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, Wolverine, and Storm.

Magic: The GatheringSecret Lair releases (limited edition trading cards created in collaboration with other franchises and IPs) have included themed crossovers with everything from Doctor Who to Monty Python. The latest release, announced today at New York Comic Con, is a collaboration with Marvel. The good thing, at least according to this author, is that these TCG cards are a celebration of comic book history and are not limited to the well-traveled (but comparatively limited) Marvel Cinematic Universe. Feast your eyes on this first batch of characters: Captain America, Black Panther, Iron Man, Wolverine, and Storm. That's right: the X-Men may not have managed to join the MCU proper yet, but are in Magic: The Gathering now. And soon Spider-Man will be too, with a full “tent” on the way in 2025.

In a previous video call with Polygon before the official announcement, Wizards of the Coast VP Magic Design Aaron Forsythe and Senior Product Designer Daniel Nguyen showed off the cards, talked mechanics and art, and even hinted at some future plans. This first set of Marvel cards is “kind of a preview of a partnership in the coming years,” Nguyen said, and more are on the way.

One important caveat, though: unlike other Secret Lair releases, this is not a print-on-demand situation.

“This is a LIMITED RELEASE in all caps,” Nguyen said. “When I say 'all caps,' I mean there's a lot. We did a lot of that. We've been gathering our numbers. So it's not print on demand, but we have printed quite a bit.”

Let's review the five Commanders and the comic stories that inspired each of their accompanying cards and their designs. We're talking about Marvel Comics, so tough decisions had to be made about which parts could most easily adapt to Marvel's mechanics. Magic: The Gathering.

The first thing that Magic Players will probably notice that here are Cap's color delineations at the top of his personal card: red, white, and blue. But the colors are represented in a strange way: They are “out of the WUBRG order,” Nguyen noted. “How dare we!? But in service of this red, white, and blue joke (joke isn't the right word, but you know what I'm saying), it's just too perfect. “I couldn't not do it.”

Even a casual viewer of Marvel movies knows that Captain America's shield is his main weapon, just like in the comics. And the same goes for your collection of Magic cards.

“We see Captain America throwing his iconic shield for each of these cards,” Nguyen said. “You take a piece of equipment, which is already on Captain America, he throws it, bounces it off a couple of bad guys, and then right before the fight, he comes back and sticks it back to Captain America. You can hear it bouncing off the bad guys' skulls. It's just a wonderful design. “Super fun.”

Of course, the way the turn order works out there's always the chance that someone could deflect that shield on the way back. After all, it's not like it's Thor's hammer.

Even though the word “black” is in his supposed superhero name, that's certainly not what will appear in T'Challa's movie. Magic card. As Nguyen put it: “Black Panther, King of Wakanda, as a white/green card that cares about the lands, cares about the creatures that come into play. [was an effort to] They represent this character's leadership, connection to the earth, connection to the super valuable resource Vibranium. Then you'll notice right away that this Black Panther is not black. He is a white/green character.”

He continued: “This character is doing something new. We don't generally see 1/1 tokens and lands combined in this very specific way.”

“But every time we showed it to our internal testers, or other people, just to evaluate how we were doing while we were making them, they bounced back very strongly. They say, 'This character is not evil.' This character is none of the things, he's not ruthless, he's none of the things that you would normally associate with the color black.' No problem. “We took it out and just ran the green/white design.”

“Here we have Wolverine, the fan favorite,” Nguyen said. “The best there is. A little truncation of that catchphrase that Wolverine has. [This card is] showing Wolverine in the snow, in the middle of a heated battle. There is a hand behind the rules text – could it be Sabertooth's hand? Who can say?

Naturally, Wolverine is classified as a “mutant beserker hero,” Nguyen continued. “A really interesting callback here is the 'regenerate' keyword. […] It could easily have been “indestructible”, it could easily have been “takes no damage”. [or] any number of [other] things that express Wolverine's healing factor. But 'regenerate' just feels great and is a deep cut and reflects the story of Magic and the history of Marvel and how they both have really interesting places to draw from and how the pairing worked perfectly here.”

“That's not a word or a skill that we put in the Magic sets,” Forsythe added. And that's true. Regenerate has not been widely used since Oath of the Guardians in 2016.

“It's like an inherited ability that existed at the beginning of Magicbut hey, it's Secret Lair,” he continued. “We have the opportunity to dig into the boxes and do everything we can to try to combine the best flavor and do some things that excite and tickle the nostalgia strings.” Magic players of all kinds. So yeah, happy to put regenerate here. The double damage ability, it's kind of a shorter, newer template for that ability. He cleaned it very well. It's not a double whammy; Works great with double hit. If you give Wolverine a double hit, he will deal quadruple damage.”

The Tony Stark card represents “the scene we know from the movies where the suit assembles on Tony Stark as he floats. […] You can see a hint of that where the left arm is still in his suit,” Nguyen said.

“This is actually an artifact creature,” Nguyen continued, “because any card that would turn off a robot should probably also turn off Iron Man. We've seen that happen many times in the movies and comics.”

The implementation of Iron Man in Magic It also has, in Nguyen's words, “this very interesting attack trigger where it creates a treasure token,” he continued. “You can turn this treasure token, which has a mana value of zero, into something with a mana value of one and work your way up the chain, which feels very reflexive. […] Tony Stark's wealth, and also reflecting [entrepreneurial sense of] innovation, and [the] mechanized nature of tinkering and building things [from nothing]. Hopefully, players will make their own adjustments and create some interesting effects with this ability.”

Lastly and opposite at least is one of the most powerful X-Men characters ever created: Ororo Munroe, also known as Storm.

“Storm in the comics is known as an Omega-level mutant,” Nguyen said, “because she's so powerful. And that is why the iteration of this card tries to express all her fury and power as a goddess of nature.”

“Storm, coincidentally, is one of the most powerful. Magic mechanics ever made,” Forsythe said. “We joke about having a storm scale internally, with the storm itself being the most powerful keyword we would ever put on a card. And as soon as we decided we were going to do an X-Men Storm card, it was [all about] How can we bring those two concepts together in a way that feels authentic?

“We did the red, blue and green card. Those are the colors in Magic of meteorological phenomena,” he continued. “So all the floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and so on in our game world are in those colors. I think you could argue that Storm is a white character: she's a leader, she's noble. But we wanted to show you […] in full fury mode, so let's put it in these colors. Other versions will probably lean more towards the white nature of the character, but those are also the colors that would pair very well with the storm mechanic.”

Storm's inclusion diversifies Marvel's lineup, so to speak, along multiple axes.

“If you only saw the first four cards, you might think we're just doing The Avengers or something, which isn't necessarily the case,” Nguyen said. “We had to do Captain America, we had to do Iron Man. Those are classic characters. And then the other characters that were cast try to give a sense of the breadth of all the characters and teams that we're trying to touch on in this partnership. It's not just Avengers-slash-Magic, right? It's all Marvel. So we're hinting at a little bit of that with the other character selections here.”

“Sometimes we make promotional incentive cards,” Daniel Nguyen explained while showing the Earth's Most Powerful Emblem card. “This one is behind a $200 gate, which is conveniently the price if you were to buy one of each of these drops and get the full cast. So there's a little sauce left on top. And we are including the most powerful emblem on this Earth as the Arcane Seal, which represents the Avengers Tower. classic card, [one that] everyone needs it in their deck, [and] It fits perfectly with this expression in this universe.”

The famous webslinger appears to be noticeably absent from this lineup, especially considering that the announcement of the other cards occurred in Peter Parker's hometown. The Secret Lair team told Polygon that in 2025, they will have a booster release with Spider-Man. This is “a full size set. “It’s no small feat,” Nguyen said.

“Spider-Man comes with a lot of friends,” Forsythe added, and that's also part of the message of today's presentation at NYCC.

“You see all the deep cuts we are making,” Nguyen said. “You see how the mechanics fit together perfectly. You see how there are all these interesting things that we can take advantage of. that's just […] 25 cards. Imagine the runway we have with a full set, maybe more sets, years of sets. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be crazy, people. “Hold your asses.”

“He is the [most] iconic character that Marvel has,” Forsythe intervened. “He has cross-generational appeal, one of the oldest heroes, and a huge media hit recently with the Into the Spider-Verse movies, which […] clue as to what the breadth of an offer based solely on Spider-Man could be [in Magic]. And I'm not going to reveal much more, but Marvel isn't much bigger than Spider-Man.”

He Magic: The Gathering x Marvel Secret Lair will be on sale starting November 4th and will cost $39.99 in non-metallic format and $49.99 in foil format with a limited print run.