The team at Magic: The Gathering didn't think crafting an entirely original Marvel character was on the cards, but it's funny how collaborations work sometimes. As it turns out, the newest Universes Beyond set 'Darkhold Destiny' was the perfect place for a new character to be born, and one that Marvel had been trying to make on their own, but couldn't quite figure out.
While there is an extensive roster of Marvel characters that play in the dark magic space this new expansion is set in, principal game designer Dillon Deveney kept searching for the right character.
"I kept running into this narrative hole," he says. "This creative space where I kept coming back to this one thing. I was like, 'Maybe this character could be what I'm looking for.' And then I tried and I was like, 'That's not right.' And then I tried another character and then I felt like I was just forcing them into something. I was like, 'I'd rather just make the coolest card for you because you already have such a bespoke thing.' But mechanically, creatively, we need this thing that seemingly doesn't exist."
Darkhold Destiny is Magic's third Marvel crossover, and it revolves around the supernatural as well as teamups with "a pantheon of gods." It's available to pre-order now at Amazon with four Commander decks, the usual Play/Collector Boosters, two Scene Boxes, various bundles, and a Draft Night set.
It becomes tricky when you're balancing mechanics and a narrative throughline in the best card games. Even though Marvel heroes have an incredibly broad range of powers, a card can only have so many abilities without breaking everything.
"From a card design standpoint, really what you want to figure out is what's the coolest thing about the character," says head designer Mark Rosewater. "Because you don't get to do infinite things. Like good card design is really about one major thing."
So with this problem in mind the team went and pitched the problem to Marvel, in hopes that they would accept this vision for a brand new character in the Marvel universe. Deveney tells me "I pitched it to them all and was like, 'Hey, here's kind of the thing we need to solve for. This is a potential solution we had. We were curious if you would be open to this.' And then the Marvel team was like 'You know, we've been trying to figure out a character that's kind of like this for a while. We aren't really satisfied. We haven't found anything that really kind of makes sense. We would love to do this. We can help each other out.'"
Of course, heroes aren't always born overnight. So after a lot of ideation, the team felt like they had some solid pitches to bring to Marvel.
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