Magic adds Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, X-Men in Commander

Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair drops — limited-edition trading cards created in collaboration with other franchises and IP — have included themed crossovers with everything from Doctor Who to Monty Python. The latest drop, announced today at New York Comic Con, is a collaboration with Marvel. The cool part, at least according to this author, is that these TCG cards are a celebration of comic book history and aren’t confined to the well-trod (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 yet managed to join the MCU proper, but they are in Magic: The Gathering now. And soon Spider-Man will be, too, with a full “tentpole” set on the way in 2025.

In a preview video call with Polygon ahead of the official announcement, Wizards of the Coast vice president of 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 teaser for a partnership years to come,” said Nguyen, with more on the way.

An important caveat, however: Unlike other Secret Lair drops, this isn’t a print-on-demand situation.

“This one is an all-caps LIMITED RELEASE,” said Nguyen. “When I say ‘all caps,’ I mean there’s a lot of it. We made a lot of it. We’ve been gathering our numbers. So it’s not print-to-demand, but we’ve printed quite a bit.”

Let’s go through the five Commanders and the comic book storylines that inspired each of their accompanying cards and their designs. These are Marvel Comics we’re talking about, so there were tough decisions to be made about which bits could most easily fit the mechanics of Magic: The Gathering.

The first thing that Magic players will likely notice here are the color delineations for Cap at the top of his personal card: red, white, and blue. But the colors are depicted in a strange way — they’re “out of WUBRG order,” Nguyen pointed out. “How dare we!? But in service of this red-white-and-blue joke — joke is not the right word, but you know what I’m saying — it’s just too perfect. Couldn’t not do it.”

Even a casual viewer of Marvel movies knows that Captain America’s shield is his primary weapon, just like in the comics. And so too on his collection of Magic cards.

“We see Captain America throwing his iconic shield for each of these cards,” said Nguyen. “You take an equipment — it’s already on Captain America — he chucks it, bounces it off a couple of baddies and then right before combat comes back and sticks right back onto Captain America. You can just hear it bouncing off baddies’ skulls. It’s just a wonderful design. Super fun.”

Of course, the way the turn order plays out there’s always the chance that someone could misdirect that shield on the way back. It’s not like it’s Thor’s hammer, after all.

Despite the word “black” being in his assumed superhero name, that sure isn’t what’s going to appear on T’Challa’s Magic card. As Nguyen put it: “Black Panther, Wakandan king, as a white/green card that cares about lands, cares about creatures coming into play [was an effort to] represent the leadership of this character, the connection to the land, the connection to the super-valuable resource Vibranium. So you’ll notice right away that this Black Panther is not black. It is a white/green character.”

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

Forsythe emphasized this aspect of the design: “Typically when a Magic card does have a color word in its title, we like to make the card that color. It just eases the understanding of what’s going on. We tried designing some versions of Black Panther that had black mana in them. We tried leaning into an old comic story where he was the king of the dead. We tried leaning into saying that when he’s in charge of Wakanda, that they were isolationist and they didn’t share their resources with the rest of the world.

“But any time we showed that to our internal playtesters, or other people, just to gauge how we’re doing as we made these, they bounced off that really hard. They’re like, ‘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 typically associate with the color black.’ No problem. We took it off and just executed on the green/white design.”

“We have fan favorite Wolverine here,” said Nguyen. “The best there is. A little truncation of that catchphrase that Wolverine has. [This card is] showing Wolverine in the snow, in the midst of a heated battle. There’s a hand behind the rules text there — it could be Sabertooth’s hand? Who’s to say?”

Naturally, Wolverine is classed as a “mutant beserker hero,” Nguyen continued. “A really nice callback here is that ‘regenerate’ keyword. […] Could have easily been ‘indestructible,’ could have easily been ‘doesn’t take damage,’ [or] any number of [other] things expressing Wolverine’s healing factor. But ‘regenerate’ just feels great and is a deep cut and kind of reflects the history of Magic and the history of Marvel and how they both have these really interesting places to pull from and how the pairing just worked perfectly here.”

“That’s not a word, or an ability, we put in modern Magic sets,” added Forsythe. And that’s true. Regenerate hasn’t been used widely since the Oath of the Gatewatch in 2016.

“It’s like a legacy ability that was around at the beginning of Magic, but hey, it’s Secret Lair,” he continued. “We get to dig in the crates and pull out all those stops and try to make the best flavor match and do some stuff that’s going to excite and tickle the nostalgia strings for Magic players of all types. So yeah, happy to put regenerate here. The double damage ability, that’s kind of a shorter, newer template for that ability. Cleaned it up really nicely. It’s not double strike; it works really well with double strike. If you give Wolverine double strike, he’ll deal quadruple damage.”

Tony Stark’s card depicts “the scene we’re familiar with from the movies where the suit kind of assembles itself on Tony Stark as he’s floating around. […] You can see a hint of that where the left arm is still in his business suit,” said Nguyen.

“This is actually an artifact creature,” Nguyen went on, “because any card that would shut down a robot should probably shut down an Iron Man as well. We’ve seen that happen in the movies and comic books many times.”

Iron Man’s implementation in Magic also has, in Nguyen’s words, “this very interesting attack trigger where he makes a treasure token,” he continued. “You can turn this treasure token, which has a mana value of zero, into something with the mana value of one and kind of follow your way up the chain, which feels very much reflecting […] Tony Stark’s wealth, and also reflecting [entrepreneurial sense of] innovation, and [the] mechanized nature of tinkering and building things up [from nothing]. Hopefully players will do their own tinkering, making some cool effects off of this ability.”

Last and opposite of least is one of the most powerful X-Men characters ever created: Ororo Munroe, AKA Storm.

“Storm in the comics is known as an Omega level mutant,” said Nguyen, “Because she’s so powerful. And so this card’s iteration is trying to express her full nature goddess fury and might.”

In another deep cut from the Magic keyword archives, Storm actually gets to use the Magic ability that shares her name — “historically a very powerful ability,” said Nguyen.

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

“We made the card red, blue, and green. Those are the colors in Magic of weather phenomena,” he continued. “So all the floods and hurricanes and earthquakes and whatnot of the world of our game are in those colors. I think you could argue Storm is a white character: She’s a leader, she’s noble. But we wanted to show her […] in full fury mode, so that let us put her in these colors. Other versions will probably lean more into the white nature of the character — but those are also the colors that would play really well with the storm mechanic.”

The inclusion of Storm diversifies the Marvel lineup, so to speak, across multiple axes.

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

“Sometimes we do promo incentive cards,” Daniel Nguyen explained as he showed off the Earth’s Mightiest Emblem card. “This one is behind a $200 gate, which is conveniently the price tag if you were to buy one of each of these drops and get the whole cast. So that’s a nice little bit of gravy on top. And we’re including this Earth’s Mightiest Emblem as Arcane Signet, depicting 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 does seem to be notably absent from this lineup, especially given that the announcement of the other cards happened in Peter Parker’s hometown. The Secret Lair team told Polygon that, in 2025, they’ll have a tentpole booster release featuring Spider-Man. This is “a full-sized set. Not a small thing,” said Nguyen.

“Spider-Man comes with a lot of friends,” Forsythe added, and that’s also part of the messaging from today’s NYCC presenataion.

“You see all the deep cuts we’re doing,” Nguyen said. “You see how the mechanics tie perfectly in. You see how there’s all these cool things we can pull from. That’s just […] 25 cards. Imagine the runway that we have with a full set — maybe more sets, years of sets. It’s going to be crazy. It’s going to be nuts, people. Hold onto your butts.”

“He is the [most] iconic character that Marvel has,” piped up Forsythe. “He has cross-generational appeal, one of the longest-running heroes and huge media success recently with the Into the Spider-Verse movies, which […] hint at what the breadth of an offering based just around Spider-Man could be [in Magic]. And I’m not going to give away too much more, but it doesn’t get much bigger from Marvel than Spider-Man.”

The Magic: The Gathering x Marvel Secret Lair drop will be on sale starting Nov. 4, costing $39.99 in non-foil and $49.99 in foil with a limited print run.