As I filled my hand with Magic: The Gathering cards from the brand new Marvel Super Heroes set, I saw the authenticity of childhood hobbies stacked on top of each other. I drew and played Spider-Man, blocking my opponent’s Advanced Idea Mechanics from blocking as if it were woven. My enemy and I clashed with heroes, villains, villains and spells, and repeated the comical duel between large opposing teams made of cardboard rectangles.
In Summer Game Fest 2026I got a chance to play the new Marvel Superheroes set, which launched on June 26. Even better, I got to battle Mark Rosewater, lead set designer and veteran of Magic: The Gathering, a pillar of the game that has seen him rise to the world’s biggest trading and fighting card game — just as successful as a Lord in recent years as R. The last dream enter its rules by using Universes Beyond Expansions.
Under the design expertise of Rosewater and his Magic team at Wizards of the Coast, more than 80 years of Marvel history from comics, programs, films and video games have been adapted to its new format: 2.5-inch by 3.5-inch cards. With a core set, decks built around Commander rules and special reprints with new art, there are nearly 600 unique Magic cards featuring Marvel characters for fans to play with (and more to come later, Rosewater hinted).
CNET Managing Editor David Lumb (left) plays with Magic: The Gathering’s lead designer, Mark Rosewater (right), who has worked with the company for more than 30 years.
And while the universe of costumed heroes and villains may not seem so easy to bring to Magic (which used to be a fantasy setting), Rosewater described Marvel as having an “embarrassing wealth” of characters and elements that have worked in the long-running card game.
“Magicians 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 new mechanics that fit the theme of the iconic heroes. Power Up allows you to upgrade 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 Team Car mechanic only).
But the most important question for any comic collector is: Did my favorite hero make the cut?
Lumb (left) plays with Rosewater (center) and Marvel’s senior product designer, Amanda Barker (right).
How to choose who’s in the Marvel Super Heroes set
When Rosewater sat down for a meeting with Marvel, they gave him a list of their top 40 characters, but the Magic team had researched way more than that. Basically, Rosewater looked at all the actors who have ever played in the Avengers and ended up with a huge list from street level heroes to the Fantastic Four. Recognizing the popularity of Marvel characters that fans know well thanks to non-comic media such as movies and TV shows, Rosewater’s team got the job of trimming down their roster.
A big rule of thumb for who’s on this Marvel set and its sequel is that the characters featured have to be from the comics — none from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The loophole, as Marvel’s senior product designer Amanda Barker explains, is that heroes and villains created for other speakers are sometimes so popular that they end up in the comics anyway. The characters of Mobius and Miss Minutes, who first appeared in the TV show Loki, for example, have migrated to the pages of Marvel.
This led to a careful choreography of the installation. When making decisions, Rosewater added, they might choose one that people know from the MCU, or stick with the comics version of the character.
Magic has classic cards, too — and with a little tweaking, they’re on par with other Marvel cards. As with other Universes Beyond sets, while most of the cards have completely new abilities combined with unique characters, there are some reprinted versions of existing magic cards. They’re getting new art that fits the set, recreating iconic events from the alternate universe — and boy, does Marvel have a good match for the Extinction Event, which Barker feels is satisfying to adapt.
“That’s a card that already exists in Magic where you wipe half the board, and to put Marvel’s Thanos snap on top of it, it’s really cool,” Barker said.
Adapting heroes from the page to the card
Carefully sifting through who to include in the team was the first challenge. The next step was to find a way to infuse the essence of the hero’s abilities, strengths and personality into the card. When I played my Spider-Man card in my match with Rosewater, the text of his card that prevents the opposing creature from blocking its attack fits the spirit of the hero’s web simulation. But it’s a complicated process to get there.
After 33 years of making magic cards, Rosewater and his team have many tools at their disposal. On the Marvel set, Rosewater made a file of the most important thing that needed to be photographed for each character. That’s difficult for complex heroes with features, so in a few cases — as they’ve done with many cards in Magic’s past — they’ve had several cards with the same name but different abilities. Captain America who is a strategic leader, Rosewater explained, will have a different role on the battlefield than one who threw away his shield.
“My note to my design team when you do Captain America a lot is that on every level he represents Captain America, but no one wants to put it in his place, then you fail. That’s not a good card,” said Rosewater.
After all! Well, that may be true for some characters, I said, but others are easy. The Hulk, for example, is a big green guy who just got bigger. That makes it easy to include him in another category of Magic: color. The cards are divided between five colors (black, white, green, red, blue), which represent different winning strategies. Decks filled with green cards overwhelm opponents with huge, hard-to-kill beasts, easily the size of the Hulk.
On the contrary, Rosewater said — anger is also a big part of the Hulk’s character. Red cards are about passion, love and anger, so Hulk is also partly red. Green, too, agreed, but it’s arguably a mix between Magic’s color identities.
Now compound that with 60 to 80 years of stories depending on the longevity of the character, and you have multiple versions written, drawn and colored differently. The team had to nail the feature they wanted to highlight on the card, which was a challenge. Iron Man is a good example of a character that combines the rainbow, Rosewater said: His selfishness over the years (better integrated than the old Demon in the Bottle arc) is suitable for the black color, but he values the greater good so it can fit into the white.
“In the end, probably the most important thing about him is that he’s very creative and intelligent so he’s blue, and another impulsive character, so he’s blue-red,” Rosewater said.
The Marvel Super Heroes set, from course to Commander decks to cosmetic reprints, is 600 cards in size.
Another Awesome Alignment: Card art panel illustrations
As I played more heroes, villains, spells and lands in my hand against Rosewater, winning one game and losing the second, I made another observation that seemed obvious in retrospect: The cards themselves are comic panels. Master of Magic is powerful storytelling with its stats, skills and creativity all told in the limited amount of flat cardboard space. But the biggest feature is the visual feature.
When the call went out to create card art for the set, Rosewater was inundated with requests — 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 were more than happy to do it. On the other hand, legacy Magic artists jumped at the chance to draw icons like Spider-Man and Iron Man.
I wondered if there were, shall we say, more experimental art styles that Wizards and Marvel allowed in their cards. The answer was yes, singers can do whatever style comes naturally to bring their voice into the mix, Barker said, “as long as the costume is right.” But there is room for some of the most iconic artists to ever grace the comic page, too, although it will be a rewrite of classic magic cards. These are placed randomly in the pockets, although at a higher level in what are called collector’s pockets.
“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 an hour before Rosewater and I had to get to our next session, we called it a draw. With each win and tie at the end, we took the hits and made them payback — to end on a happy note having learned more about each other through a good scrap. If that’s not Marvel’s plan for superheroes fighting their way to friendship, I don’t know what is.
