Magic: The Gathering Marvel Superheroes set designer on the challenges and easter eggs baked into the cards

Dave Humpherys, Design Lead on Magic: The Gathering's Marvel Superheroes Universes Beyond set and a former pro Magic player, has opened up about what made this project unlike anything he'd worked on before. It's his first set as lead designer in the Universes Beyond line, and the workflow was almost completely inverted from a normal Magic set.

Usually, Humpherys designs a card mechanically first — something like a draw-two effect or a non-creature spell synergy — and the creative team finds a character to match it. On Marvel Superheroes, the creative team, led by Mark, handed him a full list of card names upfront and asked him to build mechanics around each one. The set spans roughly 600 cards across all products, a massive leap over last year's Spider-Man release, which was tightly scoped to New York and a narrower cast. This time the canvas stretches to cosmic threats like Thanos and Galactus, with Avengers pulled from across comics history to meet them. Some of the mechanical highlights show exactly how much thought went into translating Marvel iconography into card design. Quicksilver, Brash Blur gets a leyline-style ability — if he's in your opening hand, he starts the game already on the battlefield. Thanos, the Mad Titan wipes creatures with a literal snap, costing one mana of each of the five colors plus a colorless, a clear Infinity Gauntlet reference. The cleverest easter egg might be Super-Skrull — a Black card with four distinct mana abilities, one per other color, each mirroring a Fantastic Four member's power: White makes 0/4 defensive wall tokens, Green pumps him +4/+4, Red burns creatures for 4 damage, and Blue lets you draw 4 cards. Everything is four. It's a neat bit of design work.

Marvel Superheroes is the second major release from the multi-year Wizards of the Coast and Marvel partnership, following the Spider-Man product from last year. Where Spider-Man was deliberately contained, this set operates at a completely different scale — broader roster, bigger threats, and ten color pairs each getting their own themes and mechanics tied to specific Marvel factions and teams.

With the set approaching launch, the early card reveals suggest the design team took the source material seriously at a mechanical level, not just a cosmetic one. How well that translates to actual gameplay balance across 600 cards is something players will find out soon enough.