If you have been holding out a last desperate scrap of hope for the Magic the Gathering animation series, announced all the way back in 2019, you can let go at last. According to Brandon Routh, the voice actor who was set to star as Gideon Jura, the show is long, long dead.
A reporter for the entertainment site Collider interviewed Routh at the Toronto film festival, where the actor was discussing his role in the upcoming horror flick Ick. When asked about the MTG animation project, Routh reportedly says that as best he understands it, the whole project is off, and it’s kind of old news.
You can find Routh’s exact words over on Collider, though it’s a very short interview snippet. Understandably so, when there’s so little to say: given the total lack of news since 2022 the project has long been suspected dead. Routh has effectively confirmed what Netflix hasn’t said.
Magic fans are perhaps spoiled by the sheer abundance of information we receive about the upcoming MTG release schedule. Every MTG set is exhaustively previewed months in advance of release, the roadmap looks ahead as far as projects that are merely codenames, and the head designer freely discusses the likelihood of specific MTG planes and MTG keywords returning in future sets. Most other media justisn’t like that.
The MTG animation was apparently fully written and recorded when all news of its development stopped abruptly in 2022. Around the same time Netflix announced that several animation projects it was working on were cancelled. There was no mention of the MTG show meeting the same fate, so some fans clung to hope it might live on.
We suppose that, since this is a claim by a voice actor and not a studio executive, you could still hold out hope that Routh is mistaken. But if you’ve moved onto the later stages of grief, we recommend you do something therapeutic. Check out our guide to all the MTG Arena codes that still work to grab some free digital boosters, and shuffle them into your Brawl or Historic MTG Arena decks, to aid the healing process.
Source: Wargamer
