Hasbro-Nintendo Partnership Puts MTG One Step Closer to a Legend of Zelda Collaboration

Last updated on July 16, 2026

Illustration from The Legend of Zelda: Art and Artifacts

We can learn a lot about the future of Magic: The Gathering by paying attention to the moves taking place at the top of the ladder. Hasbro, the parent company that owns MTG, has announced a partnership with Nintendo, licensing the rights to the Legend of Zelda franchise (per Business Wire).

Does This Mean an MTG x Zelda Set Is Coming?

The details we know so far are fairly sparse. Starting in 2027, Hasbro will be releasing products based on the Legend of Zelda mega-franchise, with a number of figurines being revealed at San Diego Comic Con next week. That's it as far as confirmed products go, though the partnership is supposedly a multi-year collaboration.

A Magic: The Gathering crossover is not confirmed, but fairly likely. Magic's Universes Beyond initiative has been a colossal financial success for Hasbro, so it makes sense that they'd want to target any and all remaining mega-IPs for a crossover with their most lucrative brand. That, and a Zelda x MTG crossover is actually a hotly requested collab from MTG players.

Up until this point, it seemed like any sort of Nintendo crossovers with MTG were off the table, since Nintendo is notoriously protective of their intellectual properties. But this new partnership opens the door to so many more future projects between Hasbro, and more specifically Magic: The Gathering, and Nintendo. If we were to see a Legend of Zelda UB set, that'd basically kick the door down on other collabs like Pokemon, Mario, Metroids, and more.

Universes Beyond Timeline

Kratos, God of War | Illustration by Magali Villeneuve

One thing to note about Universes Beyond sets is that their development cycle is fairly long, up to four years as stated by designers who worked on sets like Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender. That means if Hasbro and Nintendo signed a deal for a Legend of Zelda MTG set today, it probably wouldn't come to fruition until closer to 2029-2030.

Of course, it's possible that some sort of deal already existed behind the curtains, and it's only been made public now. Which means if the two entities had some prior agreement to make a LoZ MTG set, it could already be in the works and might arrive sooner than expected.

There's also the possibility that Zelda gets the Secret Lair treatment, a la the Playstation Secret Lairs from 2025. There's plenty of material across Zelda‘s almost 40 years to make a full set, but we also saw franchises like God of War, Uncharted, and The Last of Us reduced to a Secret Lair superdrop. The good news is that Secret Lairs take much less time to develop, so if Zelda were to arrive to MTG in the form of a Secret Lair Drop, we'd probably be seeing it much sooner than a full Standard set.

There is the dismal alternative option that there will be no MTG crossover at all, and this is strictly a toy/figuring licensing deal. I choose to believe that's not the case, but time will tell.

That's Alotta Links

Blood Moon | Illustration by Franz Vohwinkel

There is the question of what a fully-fleshed out Legend of Zelda MTG set would even look like. LoZ spans multiple timelines and universes with tons of variations on the same characters. That hasn't stopped Magic in the past, with sets like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Trek perfectly happy to cross the paths and dump a bunch of alternate-reality versions of the same characters in the same set.

Commander precons go a long way here: You can segment Commander decks a little more easily than you can cards within the same Standard set. You could easily envision a precon focused on Toon link and the Windwaker timeline, while another captures the iconic Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and yet another takes the Link from Twilight Princess and focuses an entire precon around his specific journey. Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom as its own Commander precon also sounds cool, though I wonder if they'd have the gall to put a Blood Moon reprint in a Commander precon.

Point is, there are elegant ways to mix all the different versions of Zelda into one product line-up and still have all the timelines feel distinct from one another.

Whether this ends up happening at all is still up in the air, but myself and many other Zelda fans are hopeful. Also, what better way to bring back the venture into the dungeon mechanic from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, except with iconic Zelda dungeons like Ocarina‘s Water Dungeon or Dodongo Cavern, or Twilight Princess‘s City in the Sky?