After Final Fantasy, I started having some high hopes for the new Universes Beyond set. The flavour, the art, the set design, the cards mechanics – everything was a home run. Then Magic went back in-universe with Edge of Eternities, which was yet another absolute banger of a set. So surely there had to be an underwhelming set eventually, right? Unfortunately, yes, and we have it now. It’s not bad; it’s not brilliant.
Was that a bit negative?
It’s a hard line to walk here, as there is a lot to like about the set, and I will go through it below. Unfortunately, throughout the prerelease and draft experience, I found it underwhelming. The biggest issue is the way the set was created. Spider-Man was initially meant to be a tiny set like Assassin’s Creed or March of the Machine: The Aftermath. That would have been an undraftable experience, which was personally my biggest gripe with the Assassin’s Creed set.
So Wizards heard us and made the set draftable, boosting it up to 188 cards plus some unique lands and a handful of dual lands. Then on top of that are the 40 cards from the bonus sheet, which are reprints of old cards with stunning art but only appear in one in every 24 boosters. So they don’t add too much to the draft experience.
So yeah, the draft and sealed experience has been underwhelming. Not bad, far from it, but man, after the high of the last two sets, underwhelming feels like quite a drop.
Do I have anything positive to say?
Honestly, bloody heaps. The first thing I will say is that playing the set sealed at pre-release, I had a lot of fun. The new mechanics are great, and the archetypes that have been designed work well. The thing is when there is a fully fledged series of archetypes available, you can smash your way through colour pairs that can always work, but with five archetypes, the lanes get a bit too narrow.
Crap, getting negative again. I do like this set, I swear. The art, the mechanics – there is so much to like about the set. There are those minor aspects that aren’t quite right.
The mechanics
The biggest new mechanic is web slinging. Here you can play a card for usually a lower cost, or a higher cost with an additional benefit, by returning a tapped creature to your hand. The kicker here is that it’s sorcery speed. So unlike ninjitsu, you can’t attack and then surprise your opponent by swapping your creature out. Instead, you need to get your creature tapped without it dying, and then you can swap them out. It’s not overly powerful, but it is a whole lot of fun to play with.
Mayhem is Madness, except it uses normal turn timing. Here you can discard a card, and then you can play it during your turn for the mayhem cost, which is usually lower. So if you play Romantic Rendezvous and discard a Mayhem card, you can then play the card at its lower cost and essentially get to draw two cards. It’s a lot of fun.
Then there are some returning mechanics like Connive, Modified, and double-sided cards. With the double-sided cards you can play it for the front side and then later pay the higher cost to make it stronger. But unlike Final Fantasy’s double-sided cards, these ones can be cast for the full cost to plop them on the table flipped. It’s a nice spin.
On the whole, I enjoy the mechanics of the set, and they were fun to play with. I don’t see them making a splash in Standard or other 60-card formats, but that depends on what other sets pop up that may synergise with them. Being able to tap a mana dork and then web sling in your thing has me intrigued to try it.
The art
There is so much fantastic artwork in this set. The base cards alone have stunning versions of our favourite heroes and villains. Then there are the special treatments like beautiful full art cards, but much better than that are the comic panel cards. Things like the Sagas with multiple comic boxes look bloody brilliant.
The borderless scene cards take it to the next level, looking like they were lifted straight out of a comic book. There are the single scenes like Myles and Gwen, but then there are ones that combine together to make a panoramic art image.
There is also the scene box, which comes with nine cards in a package that all form one cool image. You can nab these in collector boosters as well, but if you are after that scene, the scene box is probably a smart buy.
There are of course the super rare chase cards, which are two versions of the Soul Stone. One has Thanos holding up the Infinity Gauntlet, and one has the Soul Stone looking stunning in the middle. I haven’t seen either of these two in person, but I want to!
The art on the reprint cards is next level. Where Final Fantasy had good cards and some great art on their reprints, there was an issue where the art didn’t fit the card. In Spider-Man they have nailed this. Shock has Shocker, Reanimate has Venom rising from the grave, and Rest In Peace has Peter Parker at Uncle Ben’s grave. That last one might be dark, but hot damn, it’s a good fit.
So how can you buy Magic: The Gathering | Marvel’s Spider-Man?
Play Boosters, as normal, are the standard way of getting cards. Some people crack for fun; some use them for draft and sealed. However you use them, they’re there. Collector Boosters, like usual, are far more expensive. They have way more fancy art variants but also offer a guaranteed bonus sheet card, which is dope.
There is the bundle and an upcoming gift bundle. The bundle comes with a cool red and blue spin-down dice, a bunch of lands, a beautiful Radioactive Spider card, nine play boosters, and the card box that it comes in. I haven’t checked out the Gift Bundle yet, but I am looking forward to cracking one open.
There is also a scene box which has six cards that all combine to make a cool scene, and then three play boosters. If you love the art on them, then it’s cool, but if you are looking for value, it’s not necessarily there. But this is subjective, as I loved the Lord of the Rings scene boxes.
Should you play Magic: The Gathering | Marvel’s Spider-Man?
Trying to be as fair as possible, this isn’t the easiest sell. There are a handful of cards I will use in other decks, and I suspect that playing limited formats will get pretty repetitive pretty quickly. Having said that, with what I have played so far, I have been enjoying the set. It feels like it could be a set, that after a few drafts, you put it away for a while and then bring it back out every so often. So it’s a good set, it’s a fun set, it’s just not as excellent as the last few sets.
Marvel's Spider-Man is a fun set with some fun cards and fantastic art. It was so close to being an excellent set, but the limited environment just holds it back. It is easily worth checking out though, especially for Spider-Man fans.
