If you're reading this website, you probably know that I don't care much about American comic books. I'm also not a fan of Magic: The Gathering's Universes Beyond imprint despite the fact that I seem to keep making custom fan designs with the concept and mess around with crossover ideas a lot (and have a history as being a journal RPer and slightly less as a fanfiction writer). This writeup is a lot about that.
There are a lot of reasons to be disappointed in the new Magic: The Gathering expansion, Marvel's Spider-Man. For a start, its tiny size and its underdeveloped nature (it's been theorized - as by Tolarian Community College, who made me think about this - that it started out as a small straight-to-Eternal "Beyond Booster"-based set like Assassin's Creed (EDIT 10 SEP 2025: all but confirmed)). Maybe you don't like the repetitive mechanics (also very similar to Assassin's Creed!). For the hat trick of Assassin's Creed comparisons, maybe you think it sucks that Wizards of the Coast is working with such a fundamentally evil company as Disney (Ubisoft is a different kind of "fundamentally evil" but it still is!). Maybe you just don't like Spider-Man media very much. Whatever. Here's one that might have breezed right past you.
Hold up. I need a visual aid. Scryfall, help me!
Okay. There we go. So, what do you notice about this first? Okay, yes, it's not the Jared Leto Morbius and the text doesn't have a "stand back, I'm about to morb" joke. Massive fail. Zero out of ten. But no, this one is subtler.
Actually, here's something that might help you out:
Now do you see it? On some level I think this might be a bit subtler than what I was thinking, but it's pretty crucial. So take as long as you ne
They used the normal card border.
With no context, I confess this probably sounds esoteric and slightly weird. But as you can tell, the cards have different borders; for non-Magic-player folks, the card frame used on the Marvel's Spider-Man cards is the same as they have used for all cards for sets based on things in Magic lore since the Dominaria expansion a little over five ye- sorry, a little over seven years ago (what in the hot-buttered fuck, dawg). Technically they've used the basic border since Magic 2015 (released mid-2014, so over a decade) with a few tweaks being added in Dominaria (and I guess some design choices finalized in Foundations or there abouts).
But you're not really here for that level of in-depth history, you just want to hear me say something that sounds completely unhinged about a game I haveen't played for over five years and do not intend to start buying new product for ever again because I think the company making it burned up all their goodwill a while back.
Well, okay, here you go. First, why did they do this? Well, the actual reason is probably just because of shareholder nonsense as usual. I looked this up and came up short, but I assume that, if there's any player-base complaints, it's that the frame is bland or perhaps suggests the card isn't a real Magic card. Which, I mean, I'm not sure most of them are, but I'll keep that to myself.
But I've had this conspiracy theory about Universes Beyond for a while.
It's a little deranged, but it is a conspiracy theory. It goes like this:
Hasbro has been looking for an excuse to end Magic lore for a while in favor of an all-Universes Beyond product lineup.
Look, we all know how corporations are. They're only concerned with making as much profit as possible, and not with providing you a quality product. Magic's lore - sorry to any Magic lore-heads, including and perhaps especially myself - has zero foothold in the zeitgeist. Randos will not point out how things look Phyrexian or discuss what Urza's deal was and how much of it was acceptable versus how much was reprehensible, or anything like that, unless they are very entrenched in this nerd game for nerds that was originally designed as a lightweight between-RPG-sessions wind-down game in an era where tabletop RPGs had minimal cultural attaché except as a shorthand for "everyone who enjoys these is a loser virgin" (because sexual prowess is one of the most aspirational things a man can have (but a woman who does it is permanently sullied - don't know how that was ever supposed to add up without either absolutely despising women and considering ~defiling~ them to be a badge of honor, or not being extreme homophobes, but we'll think about that some other time 'cause I'm getting distracted now)). By itself, Magic is and will forever be a niche product. Getting into it as a story is a total mess of having to read through scattered chunks across decaying web pages and long out-of-print novels. Card games are just not conducive to lore. Even one of the best I know for this - Mark Rein-Hagen's Z-G, which had the benefit of putting the card list in lore order so the flavor texts could all be taken together to form a story - ain't great at it and it does sort of ask you to effectively gamble to get story fragments.
Not to mention the many times where Wizards of the Coast absolutely fails to make compelling lore. I feel like I'm aware of a truly wild amount of lore failures. Most any Magic fan knows of the resounding failure that was War of the Spark: Forsaken (a turd so severe that I think its awfulness even leaked out into several significantly less-enfranchised internet spaces due to memes), but let's not forget such messes as the end of the Otaria Cycle, Test of Metal (one of only a handful of pieces of Magic lore I know to be explicitly retconned), and even March of the Machine, wherein Elesh Norn drifts hard from her usual motivations (in a way that is at least sensible for an allegory for fascism) and demonstrates that she too has special bad ideas. So, it's really not as simple as "just write a better story :4Head:" - quality takes skill, effort and time. No surprise that Hasbro doesn't want to invest in it.
But in 2020, Hasbro struck gold with their Secret Lair Drop: The Walking Dead release. Although fan outcry about sticking mechanically-unique cards into a short-print-run non-booster-pack product was pretty high (with many people also explicitly questioning the use of The Walking Dead as being too mature of a property, especially pointing at... I think it was Negan? I don't know The Walking Dead, because I have taste (okay, probably not that last part)), SLD:TWD was a huge seller. So in 2021, then-president of WotC (now CEO of Hasbro) Chris Cocks announced the Universes Beyond series, originally intended to not be Standard-legal. As Universes Beyond releases continued to be massive sellers dragging people into the game, this eventually became a no-longer-factual statement, Wizards increased the amount of sets they would release in a year (resulting now in a gigantic Standard that is apparently three years of six sets a pop, more than double what it was when I quit). Then they announced that Universes Beyond would account for half of all new sets.
Quality of lore aside, I feel like WotC/Hasbro have been trying to boil-the-frog the players on a state of affairs where nothing but Universes Beyond exists (because they are devils who do not care about the quality of the product they put out so long as they get their due) with Magic settings for about two years. People have pointed at Murders at Karlov Manor as the beginning of a not-good time for Magic lore, explicitly joking about everyone in funny hats for that set and Outlaws of Thunder Junction (which is an especially wild set of circumstances because I know fans had been crowing for a Wild West set for years; it might have helped if Thunder Junction had actually been about going on in a Wild West plane with a full new cast of interesting characters and maybe two outsiders; instead it's a formerly nearly-uninhabited world (and yes, there's some problematic stuff going on there, but we'll deal with it later) where Magic's rogues' gallery meet up, resulting in half of the characters or more of the set being a veritable who's-that from Magic history; even as a lore nerd I barely realized people like Rutstein mattered enough to get a new card). But for me, the moment when I had a feeling it was all going to go foul was Duskmourn: House of Horror, a slasher-movie set - incorporating a world of 1980s-style horror films into Magic's multiverse. Complete with such out-of-place items for Magic lore and worldbuilding as a baseball bat (so I guess baseball exists in Magic lore? Oh, why am I asking, nobody cares anymore) and an honest-to-Phenax television.
I have a rule. "Anywhere, anywhen can be fantasy except the here and now." (Perhaps in the future I'll remember to word it that way.)
This... is too close. This I think was the beginning of the end for the quality of Magic lore. Like I'm sure some people are still butthurt over Edge of Eternities (which I think is fine because it feels like it loops in nicely with a lot of the major aesthetic inspirations for early Magic art (god I love 60s-90s sci-fi fantasy art, and very few people are doing anything like it who weren't at the time; at least Steve R. Dodd does, I guess). People thought that that stupid Wacky Races set was bad. They're correct, and I hate it too. But I think Duskmourn ultimately bothers me more, even if there's the potential for a compelling story with Marina and Valgavoth. I think it's just because it's this particular point. Ask me again in a week and I'll think the set where everyone was detectives was more garbo, probably.
But this was a moment where it felt like suddenly everything would be permitted.
A lot of the Universes Beyond sets have failed to match the game's glamour. Fallout is a great example (also another instance of WotC/Hasbro working with a really awful company, and I ain't just talkin' about Microsoft!). Honestly, a great many of them are a little off, especially any of them that ever get into historical fiction or something even remotely askance of that (e.g. Assassin's Creed, Doctor Who). But, whatever. At least they were all separated by a little border, distinguishing them as objectively not being the same as Jace or whoever else you pretend to care about.
Like I said, I feel WotC/Hasbro have been trying to boil the frog here. Slowly get people to accept that this is the way of things now. Too-close references to SAW make it easier to accept a literal Child's Play crossover. And somehow it makes me mad that we didn't get a card named "Dream Warriors" in the set, so maybe it's really effective. But I still don't think I expected one of those frog-boiling devices to be Universes Beyond itself.
Is this kind of an over-the-top and ridiculous reaction? Probably. Should I stop caring about the state of something I don't even spend money on anymore, accepting that none of this matters in the greater scheme because it's not damaging my nostalgic feelings or affecting how much this game was a part of my personality in my younger years? Perhaps, yeah. But it still makes me deeply sad. When Magic's lore is eventually buried entirely to make way for a slurry of pop-culture crossovers stuck together with no regard for each other; no concern for how they would interact (which I think disqualifies them from "crossover" status, personally); just things that are coldly, calculatingly selected from the Big Box of Cultural Objects in order to maximize how much the line goes up off the backs of the most chumps; that'll be a sad motherfucking day. I might even hold a funeral. Perhaps this is nothing (other than corporate profit-optimization), but it feels like just another step toward that end.
Addendum — Card choices are a type of personal expression. This includes art you choose for cards with multiple art, or playing with alters, or anything. This is how I reconcile this with the amount of crossover card designs I've thrown together over the years. A corporation does this to bilk suckers out of their money only to enrich themselves. It is, effectively, artless. No action a corporation can undertake can match the level of self-expression a real human does with anything of theirs.
Additionally, even though I've frequently been harsh on Universes Beyond at the lowest level, I've accepted this as a reality. I suppose it helps that the idea of a no-UB house rule eliminates a surprising amount of perfectly fine cards that don't even need aliases to fit in a real set. I'm pretty sure I haven't even scratched the surface with these links.