Last updated on February 27, 2025
Spider-Man x MTG Promotional Art
Spider-Man‘s Universes Beyond crossover, the MTG set scheduled to release around September or October this year, will have a surprising number of Commander precons: zero.
Last week, Hasbro held its Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. During the Q&A section with industry analysts, when answering a question from J.P. Morgan Chase’s Christopher Horvers, Hasbro’s CEO Chris Cocks said that the Spider-Man MTG set will be smaller – and with no EDH precons.
“I think the important thing to note on Spider-Man is it’s a little bit of a different complexion of a set in terms of what’s incorporated into it. Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings had Commander decks, which usually constitute a fairly big hunk of a set’s total volume. Spider-Man will be Standard-only cards. There won’t be any kind of precon decks. So that will make it a bit smaller.”
Looks like Wizards of the Coast wasn’t kidding when they said earlier this month that they intend to cut down on the number of Commander precons they release, and Cocks offered no reason for why Spider-Man, of all sets, will go Commanderless this year.
An Honest Man
Turns out many Magic fans may now owe Gavin Verhey an apology. A month ago Gavin released a YouTube video explaining why Aetherdrift only has two Commander precons, where he clearly said that based on the feedback they’ve got from players, WotC is purposefully cutting down on the number of Commander precons they release. This ties into what Magic’s Head Designer Mark Rosewater has recently noted: They are aware that product exhaustion is a thing.
But when it was revealed last week that Final Fantasy is getting four precons, and Tarkir: Dragonstorm is getting five, it was easy to dismiss Gavin’s remarks as something that maybe WotC would do in the long run, but not this year.
Yet he was dead serious: With zero Spidey precons, the average number of EDH decks for the first five Magic sets this year will drop to nearly 2.5 precons per set. And even if Avatar: The Last Airbender pulls a Dragonstrom and pushes out five precons, it’d be at exactly 3 precons per MTG set on average – a whopping 33% reduction to the usual 4 per Magic set we’ve come to expect as of late.
Sorry to have doubted you, Gavin!
A Web of Reasons
The MTG community’s response to this news could be summarized as: “Huh, wild.”
“It’s weird because UB is much more generally loved in Commander,” notes u/neotic_reaper in one of the most upvoted replies. “I think people would rather [have] the inverse where the cards are made for commander with decks not in standard.”
“I 1000% get being over too much product,” says u/Cobajonicle, “but I feel like Spider-Man specifically is something people would look forward to for commander stuff.”
Judging from a large number of replies, u/Cobajonicle is right about the latter. In particular, lots of players said that they were eagerly expecting Spidey’s precons not for themselves, but to introduce others to Magic.
“I am actually incredibly disappointed in this,” writes u/begging4n00dz. “I was very excited to get my friend, who is a crazy big spiderman fan and does not play magic, a Spiderman precon as a collectible. It might have got him into the game, but at very least it was an overlap on some of our favorite franchises.” Quite a lot of other replies mention a similar issue, with long-time players wishing to introduce friends and family to Magic via their favorite non-MTG franchise.
Some players have advanced the theory that it’s an art issue (in the sense that Marvel’s license fee may have been too high), but that seems doubtful. It’s already known that there will be multiple Marvel x MTG sets, and we’ve already got insta-sell Secret Lairs, so it’s hard to imagine how WotC would move forward with a multi-year license without having a lot of latitude on card art.
Yet others have the more cynical view that we’ll get flooded with other types of products.
“Just the other day, we launched preorders for gift bundles for Final Fantasy, Commander gifts and gift bundles,” noted Hasbro’s CEO (gloatingly) during the conference. “For Lord of the Rings, that took a week to sell out. For Final Fantasy, it took an hour to sell out.”
So, perhaps “fewer EDH decks” will imply “other stuff we can sell to our dear customers.”
A third explanation is that WotC is trying to nudge new players into Standard, as they are clearly trying to do with Foundations and by making all UB sets Standard-legal.
But the main driver could always be something Mark Rosewater wrote about a few months ago: this is not about the new players.
Homecoming
Serra Angel – Illustration by Jodie Muir
“Let me correct another misconception,” Rosewater wrote in his personal blog back in November last year, explaining who they design Universes Beyond for.
He listed the four basic audiences for a Universes Beyond product: existing players (currently playing), new players (have never played), lapsed players (used to play, but no longer do), and collectors.
He explained that, by a huge margin, the vast majority of Universes Beyond purchasers are people who currently play Magic (and sometimes have been playing for a very long time).
And then he asked: “Okay, which group is second?” Reading reddit would lead you to believe it’s new players, in many cases even enticed by their friends and relatives that already play Magic. But that would be wrong – and it turns out that it’s lapsed players who are the second biggest UB fans.
“Universes Beyond has proven very good at bringing back people who used to play Magic,” Rosewater wrote. So perhaps there’s a mix of reasons:
- WotC wants to address player fatigue, decides to make less precons,
- WotC also wants to nudge new players into Standard rather than Commander,
- Between new and returning players, UB sets have more traction among returning players, who are less likely to need a precon to jump back into the fray.
And, of course, WotC can still sell us a ton of Marvel EDH precons later down the road – there are still years of Marvel sets ahead of us.
At any rate, though, we’ve heard it from the CEO: With great power comes no precons.
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