How to distill 80 years of Marvel comics into Magic: The Collector cards

As I filled my hands with Magic: The Gathering cards from the brand-new Marvel Super Heroes set, I saw the surreality of childhood hobbies intermingling with one another. I drew and played Spider-Man, who blocked my opponent’s Advanced Thought mechanics from blocking as if he were webbed. My enemy and I pitted heroes, villains, henchmen and spells against each other, replicating a comedic brawl between opposing superhero teams made of cardboard rectangles.

in Summer Games Festival 2026I had the opportunity to play the new Marvel Superheroes collection, which launched on June 26th. Better yet, I got to face Mark Rosewater, the set’s lead designer and a 30-plus year veteran of Magic: The Gathering, a pillar of the game that has seen it become the world’s biggest trading and combat card game — a game that has branched out in recent years to adapt nerd properties like Lord of the Rings and Final fantasy In its bases through the 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″ x 3.5″ cards. With a base set, sets designed for the Commander rules and special reprints with new art, there are around 600 unique Magic cards featuring Marvel characters for fans to play with (and more to come later, Rosewater hinted).

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

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

The set includes its own pair of new mechs that fit the superhero theme. 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 improving spells (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 makes it into the Marvel Super Heroes collection

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 looked further than that. For example, Rosewater researched every character that had ever been in the Avengers and ended up with a giant list of street-level heroes to the Fantastic Four. Aware of the popularity with fans of the Marvel characters they know so well thanks to non-comic media like movies and TV shows, the Rosewater team worked to narrow down their roster.

The biggest rule for those who access this Marvel collection and its sequels is that the characters depicted must originate from the comics – no one who has only appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The loophole, as Marvel senior product designer Amanda Parker explained, is that heroes and villains created on other media sometimes get so popular that they find their way into comics anyway. For example, the characters Mobius and Miss Minutes, who first appeared in the TV show Loki, have moved to the pages of Marvel.

This led to a cautious dance of inclusion. Rosewater added that when making choices, they may choose an option that people know from the MCU, though they will always stick to the comic version of the character.

Magic also has its own set of classic cards – and with a little tweaking, they fit in perfectly with other Marvel cards. As with other Universes Beyond sets, while most cards have entirely new abilities tied to unique characters, some are reprints of existing magic cards. They’re getting new art to fit the set, repeating famous events from the universe being adapted – and boy, does Marvel have something that fits well with the Extinction event, which Parker felt was satisfying to adapt.

“This is a card that was already in Magic where you clear half the board, so to put Marvel’s image of Thanos on top of it, it’s really fun,” Parker said.

Adapting heroes from page to card

Carefully sorting out who to include in the group was the first challenge. Next was to figure 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 that prevents an opposing creature from blocking its attack matched the hero’s web-slinging spirit. But getting there is a complicated process.

After 33 years of making magic cards, Rosewater and his team have a lot of tools to their credit. For the Marvel set, Rosewater created a binder of the most important things to pick up for each character. This is difficult for complex heroes with aspects, so in many cases – as they did with many cards in Magic’s past – they would have multiple cards with the same name but with different abilities. Rosewater explained that Captain America, a tactical leader, would have a distinct role on the battlefield from one where he laid down his shield.

“My observation to my design team is that if you make the most of Captain America that represents Captain America on every level, but no one wants to put it in their deck, it will fail. That’s not a good card,” Rosewater said.

Aha! I said well, that might be true for some characters, but others are easy. Hulk, for example, is a big green guy who grows up. This makes it easy to include in other Magic: Color classifications. The cards are divided between five colors (black, white, green, red, blue), which represent distinct strategies for winning. Decks full of green cards overwhelm their opponents with giant, hard-to-kill creatures that are an easy fit for the Hulk.

On the contrary, Rosewater said – anger is also a big part of Hulk’s personality. Red cards relate to impulsiveness, passion, and anger, so Hulk is also partly red. He admitted that green too, but it is undoubtedly a hybrid within Magic’s color identities.

Now compound that through 60 to 80 years of stories depending on the longevity of the character, and you have many differently written, drawn, and colored versions. The team had to decide which aspect of the card they wanted to highlight most, which was a challenge. Iron Man is a good example of a character who embodies the rainbow, Rosewater said: his selfishness over the years (no better embodied than in the classic Devil in a Bottle arc) suits the color black, but he values ​​the greater good and thus suits the color white.

“Ultimately, probably the most important thing about him is that he’s all about invention and intelligence, so he’s very blue, and also another very reckless character, so he’s really a reddish blue,” Rosewater said.

Other Marvel Alignment: Artboard Illustrations

When I played more heroes, villains, spells, and lands from my hand against Rosewater, winning one game and losing a second, I made another observation that seems obvious in hindsight: the cards themselves are essentially comic panels. The genius of Magic is its strong storytelling, telling its stats, abilities, and arts with limited space on flat cardboard. But the biggest factor is the visual aspect.

When the call went out to create artwork for the set’s cards, Rosewater received a flood of requests — from both sides of the collaboration. His team wanted the set to feel like Marvel, so they asked artists who had never used a magic card before, and were really excited to do so. On the other hand, ancient wizarding artists took the opportunity to draw icons like Spider-Man and Iron Man.

I wondered if there were, shall we say, more experimental art styles allowed for Wizards and Marvel on their cards. The answer was yes, artists can do whatever style comes naturally to them to bring their voices into the mix, Parker said, “as long as the outfit is right.” But there’s room for some of the most famous artists of all time to grace the comic page as well, though it will be on reprints of classic Magic cards. They are randomly inserted into packages, but at a higher rate in so-called wrapper packages.

“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.

Since our third match lasted over an hour when Rosewater and I had to get to our next dates, we called it a draw. With both of us winning and a draw in the end, we took hits and gave back – only to end on an endearing note having learned more about each other through a good encounter. If this isn’t a Marvel plot of heroes fighting their way to friendship, I don’t know what is.