Love them or hate them, there’s now no getting away from Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond crossover sets. The TCG’s creator has announced some pretty serious changes to its release schedule and formats to accommodate these products, highly profitable tie-ins with franchises like Warhammer 40k or Final Fantasy. There will soon be more MTG Universes Beyond cards than ever, and they’ll be impossible to ignore.
The first big change is that the quantity of Universes Beyond is going up. The Magic: The Gathering release schedule for next year has three MTG sets focused on Wizards’ own original world and characters, and three Universes Beyond sets: Final Fantasy, Marvel Spiderman, and one more product it has not yet revealed.
That’s a significant step up from the last two years, where Wizards has released four original sets and (ignoring a swarm of smaller tie-ins) two big crossover products: Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who in 2023 and Fallout and Assassin’s Creed in 2024.
This is not a one off either, a 3:3 balance between original sets and UB tie-ins is expected to be the norm going forwards.
This third crossover product has bumped the Lorwyn return, expected to be the final set of 2025, off next year’s calendar. That’s sad news for fans looking forward to seeing more of this Celtic folklore-inspired MTG plane.
The other major change is that, starting with Final Fantasy, all future Universes Beyond sets are going to be legal in Magic’s Standard format. Passing through Standard means these sets will also be playable in Pioneer, Modern, and every other MTG format – no part of the game will be without them.
Wizards says this change is part of a simplification of set legality, and that everything will now either be eternal legal or Standard legal. That could mean more cards in Standard, if supplemental sets for other formats no longer get made.
But Communications Manager Blake Rasmussen says Magic’s creators can make exceptions, so they’re not precluded from dropping a Modern Horizons IV when the mood takes them.
In a press preview panel on Monday, Rasmussen presented the release schedule change as if it wasn’t a huge break from the norm.
“Traditionally, we’ve had four sets released in the Magic Multiverse every year, and we still do. We’re just not making fans re-buy one of them every year because Foundations is going to be there in the background.”
But I think it’s pretty clear this is a seismic shift. I I asked the obvious question: Was Wizards concerned about diluting its IP with all these crossovers?
“Absolutely not!” was Rasmussen’s reply “We have a ton of Magic IP story work coming with some partners, including the Netflix show and multiple publishing partners. If anything, we’ll have more Magic story running around.”
In all honesty, I’m surprised we didn’t see this coming sooner. MTG Lord of the Rings sold like hot cakes, becoming the second best selling set in just two months, and now wears the crown as the biggest release in Magic’s history.
Universes Beyond is seriously popular, and it makes Wizards of the Coast a truckload of money, so it only makes sense the company would try to grow it and inject it into as many parts of the trading card game as possible.
There’s no denying the quality either. I’ve sung Universes Beyond’s praises for its highly flavorful designs, great card art, and the care that’s clearly been put into each release. However, this announcement is sure to bring up fears of oversaturation. And for players like me who love Magic’s characters and worlds, having fewer made each year is certainly a shame.
Personally, crossover cards have always felt better to me as an ‘opt-in’ kind of thing. It’s been easy to stomach their inclusion in Commander, a melting pot format where anything goes. People aren’t bound to a meta, they can build decks to their own personal taste, and card alters were already common, so UB hasn’t felt out of place.
And in Modern, the number of tie-in cards has been so small, when you consider the vast card pool, that it’s basically homeopathic. Only a few extremely pushed Lord of the Rings cards see play (and surely The One Ring will hit the MTG banlist anytime now. Right? Right?).
But Standard has far fewer cards than these formats. It seems almost certain that in the next year or two there’ll be top decks dominated by UB-strategies, whether it’s a Mounts deck using Chocobos or a Hero typal deck led by Spiderman. And that is going to feel rather weird.
I wonder when Wizards made this decision, and if this change is why it’s been so late announcing next year’s sets, which are normally unveiled in August. Certainly, it seems the company had another plan last year, when a different rundown for 2025 was teased.
Source: Wargamer
