The Gathering reveals Fin Fang Foom for Marvel Super Heroes

Magic: The Gathering‘s upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set includes some of the most recognizable characters in comics history, from Spider-Man and Captain America to the Avengers and X-Men. But according to Wizards of the Coast, one of the goals behind its ongoing collaboration with Marvel is introducing players to some of the stranger and more obscure Marvel Comics characters.

“It is always a joy to find a spot for niche, fan-favorite characters,” senior narrative game designer Aaron Mesburne told Polygon via email. The ongoing Marvel collaboration includes last year’s Spider-Man set, with an unconfirmed number of future sets planned over multiple years. “One of our goals for this multi-release collaboration with Marvel is to put at least one ‘dragon’ in each Marvel set,” Mesburne said.

For Marvel Super Heroes, the obvious choice was Fin Fang Foom — a card that Polygon can exclusively reveal.

“Fin Fang Foom, as one of the more charmingly ridiculous and bizarrely enduring early Marvel monsters and foes of Iron Man, was the obvious front-runner to be the dragon of our more Earth-centric Marvel Super Heroes set,” Mesburne said.

Fin Fang Foom was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appeared in Strange Tales #89 in October 1961. He’s a Makluan, a member of an intelligent race of shapeshifting alien dragons, and came to conquer Earth — specifically China — in ancient times to begin conquering the planet. While the rest of his crew integrated with human society, Fin Fang Foom was placed in a tomb to hibernate for centuries, emerging sporadically to become something of a legend. Eventually, he established himself as one of Iron Man’s villains.

As a Magic card, Fin Fang Foom is a four-cost, mono-red legendary creature with flying on a 3/5 alien dragon villain body. Whenever you cast an instant or a sorcery that targets an artifact or a land, you copy that spell and may choose new targets for it. Then Fin Fang Foom gets two +1/+1 counters.

The power fantasy is straightforward: Fin Fang Foom is a classic kaiju. He stomps through cities, destroys vehicles, and leaves devastation in his wake. The card’s mechanics reflect that fantasy by rewarding players for targeting artifacts and lands — Magic‘s closest analogs to buildings, vehicles, and terrain.

According to game design architect Dave Humpherys, the card originally took a much more direct approach.

“I’d originally planned to design a card that looked somewhat like Magmatic Hellkite for Fin Fang Foom, but that was already in the pipeline,” Humpherys said. “I thought the idea of a card that created incentives to include other destructive spells would be an amusing direction for this card. We could start him lower in the curve and let him grow along with his destruction.”

Humpherys said the card evolved further once he saw early artwork depicting the monster tearing through a city.

“Once I saw sketches come in, I leaned more into this direction of the kaiju feel as the card designs evolved,” Humpherys told Polygon via email. “I added in artifacts as a match for the flying vehicles in the art, since they were likely to fall victim to his wake of destruction — and to widen the range of cards a player could consider in decks with him.”

From a gameplay perspective, Fin Fang Foom naturally slots into spellslinger-style Commander decks. Cards like Abrade, Shattering Spree, Rack and Ruin, Untimely Malfunction, and Fiery Confluence can all trigger his ability while clearing opposing threats — especially if you use Mycosynth Lattice to make all permanent cards artifacts. Meanwhile, effects that target your own artifacts and lands can generate surprisingly explosive turns.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

“A lot of the potential of this card is in finding more proactive interactions that might more incidentally target your own lands or artifacts with cards like Applied Geometry,” Humpherys explained. “You’d, for example, suddenly have two 6/6 lands and a 5/7 flying Fin Fang Foom.”

Using Applied Geometry from Secrets of Strixhaven would, of course, require a Temur deck (red-green-blue). You could also aim for Gruul (red-green) and go back to the Avatar: The Last Airbender set to dabble in Earthbending, which transforms your lands into creatures and stacks counters on them.

Humpherys said the design team built in a specific interaction with another Marvel Super Heroes card: “We have one very notable card that targets lands, Avengers Disassembled, where we made sure to engineer the stats on Fin Fang Foom so that he survives the mass destruction of copying that spell.”

Fin Fang Foom’s visual design also contains a nod to comic-book history. Mesburne said the team’s biggest inspiration came from the cult-favorite series Nextwave, while the artwork balances the monster’s destructive power with some of his more absurd comic roots.

“Visually, we wanted to make him feel genuinely powerful and destructive while still retaining some of the authentic, goofy elements of his comic book design,” Mesburne said. “If you look closely at the upper part of his leg, you can see the edge of his famous purple briefs.”

Much like the Incredible Hulk, Fin Fang Foom may be green — and capable of leveling a city — but both Marvel and Wizards of the Coast insist he keep at least part of his purple pants on.