How You Distill 80 Years of Marvel Comics Into Magic: The Gathering Cards

As I filled my hand with Magic: The Gathering cards from the brand-new Marvel Super Heroes set, I saw the surreality of childhood hobbies layered over each other. I drew and played Spider-Man, who prevented my opponent’s Advanced Idea Mechanics goon from blocking as if they’d been webbed up. My foe and I slammed heroes, villains, minions and spells against each other, replicating a comic panel brawl between opposing super teams made of cardboard rectangles. 

At Summer Game Fest 2026, I got a chance to play the new Marvel Superheroes set, which launched on June 26. Better still, I got to go up against Mark Rosewater, lead designer of the set and over 30-year veteran of Magic: The Gathering, a pillar of the game who’s seen it rise into the biggest trading-and-combat card game in the world — one that’s branched out in recent years to adapt famous nerd properties like Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy into its rulesets through Universes Beyond expansions.

Under the design prowess of Rosewater and his Magic team at Wizards of the Coast, over 80 years of Marvel history from comics, shows, films and video games have been adapted to their newest format: 2.5-inch by 3.5-inch cards. With a core set, decks built for Commander rules and special reprints with new art, there’re around 600 unique Magic cards featuring Marvel characters for fans to play with (and more coming later, Rosewater hinted).

And while a universe of costumed heroes and villains may not seem like the easiest to bring to Magic (which has traditionally been a fantasy setting), Rosewater described Marvel as having an “embarrassment of riches” of characters and elements that worked in the long-standing card game.

“Magic players love dragons. Well, guess what? There’s a dragon in Marvel, Fin Fang Foom,” Rosewater said. “Whatever you want, Marvel’s got it.”

The set has its own pair of new mechanics that fit the theme of costumed superheroes. Power Up lets you boost a card after you play it (even after it’s on the board, unlike the Kicker mechanic), while Team Up allows creatures to contribute to making spells better (similar to the vehicle-only Crew mechanic). 

But the most important question for any comic collector is: Did my favorite hero make the cut?

How to choose who made it into the Marvel Super Heroes set

When Rosewater sat down in a meeting with Marvel, they gave him a list of their top 40 characters, but the Magic team had already researched way more than that. To wit, Rosewater looked up every character that’s been in the Avengers and ended up with a giant list from street level heroes to the Fantastic Four. Being aware of the popularity of Marvel characters fans know well thanks to noncomics media like films and TV shows, Rosewater’s team got to work trimming their list down.

The biggest rule for who made it into this Marvel set and its supplementary additions is that characters portrayed have to originate from the comics — nobody who’s only appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The loophole, as Marvel senior product designer Amanda Barker explained, was that heroes and villains created on other mediums sometimes get so popular that they find their way into the comics anyway. The characters of Mobius and Miss Minutes, who debuted on the TV show Loki, for instance, have migrated to Marvel’s pages. 

This led to a careful dance of inclusion. When making choices, Rosewater added, they might pick one that people knew from the MCU, even though they would always stick with the comic version of the character.

Magic has its own trove of classic cards, too — and with a little tweaking, they fit right in with the other Marvel cards. As with other Universes Beyond sets, while most of the cards have entirely new abilities attached to unique characters, there are some that are reprinted versions of existing Magic cards. They do get new art that fits the set, replicating iconic events from the universe being adapted — and boy, does Marvel have something that fit well for Extinction Event, which Barker felt was satisfying to adapt.

“That’s a card that already existed in Magic where you wipe out half the board, and so to lay the Marvel art of the Thanos snap on top of it, it’s just really fun,” Barker said.

Adapting heroes from the page to the card

The careful sifting of who to include in the set was the first challenge. The next was figuring out how to distill the essence of a hero’s talents, powers and personality into a card. When I played my Spider-Man card in my match with Rosewater, his card text preventing an opposing creature from blocking his attack fit the web-slinging spirit of the hero. But it’s a complicated process to get there.

After 33 years of making Magic cards, Rosewater and his team have a lot of tools at their discretion. For the Marvel set, Rosewater made a file of the most important thing that needs to be captured for each character. That’s tough for complex heroes with facets, so in several cases — as they’ve done for many cards in Magic’s past — they’ve had several cards of the same name but with different abilities. A Captain America who’s a tactical leader, Rosewater explained, would have a distinct role in the battlefield than one that threw his shield. 

“My note to my design team is if you make the most Captain America that at every level represents Captain America, but nobody wants to put it in their deck, then you fail. That’s not a good card,” Rosewater said. 

Aha! Well, that may be true for some characters, I said, but others are easy. Hulk, for instance, is a big green guy that just gets bigger. That makes it easy to slot him in another of Magic’s categorizations: color. Cards are split between five colors (black, white, green, red, blue), which represent distinct strategies to win. Decks filled with green cards overwhelm their opponents with giant, tough-to-kill creatures, an easy fit for the Hulk.

Au contraire, Rosewater said — anger is also a big part of the Hulk’s character. Red cards are all about impulsivity, passion and anger, so Hulk is also partly red. Green too, he conceded, but undeniably a hybrid within Magic’s color identities. 

Now complicate that with 60 to 80 years of stories depending on the character’s longevity, and you’ve got many versions written, drawn and colored differently. The team had to nail down the aspect they wanted to most spotlight in a card, which was a challenge. Iron Man is a good example of characters embodying the rainbow, Rosewater said: His selfishness over the years (no better embodied than the classic Demon in a Bottle arc) is fitting for black, but he values the greater good and thus would fit in white. 

“In the end, probably the most important thing about him is he’s all about invention and smarts so he’s very blue, and also another very impulsive character, so he’s really blue-red,” Rosewater said.

Another Marvel alignment: Panel illustrations to card art

As I played out more heroes, villains, spells and lands from my hand against Rosewater, winning one match and losing the second, I made another observation that seemed obvious in hindsight: The cards themselves are basically comic panels. The genius of Magic is the potent storytelling its stats, abilities and art all tell with such a limited amount of space on flat cardboard. But the biggest factor is the visual aspect.

When the call went out to make art for the set’s cards, Rosewater was flooded with applications — from both sides of the collaboration. His team wanted the set to feel like Marvel, so they asked artists who had never done a magic card before, and they were really excited to do it. On the other end, legacy Magic artists leapt at the chance to draw icons like Spider-Man and Iron Man. 

I wondered if there were, shall we say, more experimental art styles Wizards and Marvel allowed on its cards. The answer was yes, the artists can do whatever style comes naturally to them to bring their voice into the mix, Barker said, “as long as the costume is correct.” But there’s a place for some of the most iconic artists ever to grace the comic page, too, though it’ll be on reprints of classic Magic cards. These are inserted randomly in packs, though at a higher rate in so-called collector packs.

“You can get Steve Ditko on a Magic card, you can get Jack Kirby on a Magic card, you can get Alex Ross,” Rosewater said. 

As our third game spilled over the hour-long mark when Rosewater and I had to get to our next appointments, we called it a draw. With a win each and a tie at the end, we’d taken hits and given them in return — only to end on a fond note having learned more about each other through a good scrap. If that’s not a Marvel plot of heroes fighting their way to friendship, I don’t know what is.