Last updated on March 6, 2026
Spider | Illustration by Domenico Cava
If you ask Magic players, Spider-Man was a pretty disappointing MTG set… to the point that some consider that it might actually be the worst Standard set ever made. There is tons of anecdotal evidence that SPM pre-releases were largely a failure, and Through the Omenpaths (SPM's digital version on MTG Arena) was objectively the least drafted set when it launched.
So it really came as a big surprise what Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater revealed this yesterday:
“Spider-Man did,” Mark wrote. “Edge of Eternities did great and beat our expectations, but Spider-Man is one of the top ten best-selling sets of all-time.”
Even if you read “one of the top ten” as “at the bottom of the top ten,” that's not how a lot of players remember SPM.
SPM Is One of the Top Ten Best-Selling MTG Sets
Ultimate Spider-Man – Illustration by LA Draws
Back in September 2025, we covered widespread reports of low Marvel’s Spider-Man prerelease turnout, with commenters citing everything from price to burnout.
“My LGS had to cancel the Spider-Man FNMs halfway through the set because there were never enough people signing up. Instead, they held a weekly poll to ask which other set people would like to play,” remembers u/Naerlyn on Reddit. “By comparison, in successful sets, all tables are full more than a week in advance.”
And content creators were struggling to attract viewers with SPM content. “Youtube channels posting Spiderman videos are dropping their views like flies,” wrote u/PinPalsA7x four months ago. “Jim Davis went from 6k average views in EOE draft to 2k in Spiderman.”
And the price of Play Booster Boxes also suggest SPM was not well-received: after an initial spike, SPM Play Boosters went down to around $100…
Source: MTGStocks
… while EOE sits at about $135:
Source: MTGStocks
And that's even when SPM's MSRP is higher!
So how can SPM not just outsell EOE, but make it into the the Top Ten of Magic's all-time best-sellers?
WotC Does Not Sell Packs to Players
Revel In Riches – Illustration by Eric Deschamps
“WotC doesn't sell to us“, notes u/Icy-Ad29 in a thread discussing Mark Rosewater's post. “They sell to distributors who then sell it on.”
In other words, if Amazon buys ten warehouses worth of boosters, but they never sell and end up in a landfill, that's a huge loss for Amazon but WotC still sold ten warehouses worth of Spider-Man.
“There’s clearly a disconnect with what Wizards counts best selling, and what actually sells well after it hits the shelves. And that disconnect is what gets bought up by distributors, and what actually makes LGS’ money,” notes u/Charming-Check5605. “I feel anyone with eyes saw that Spider-Man was not a success. There were full shelves of it at my LGS’ and Microcenters far longer than any set to my recent memory.”
It's clear that retailers bought into Spider-Man like there was no tomorrow, probably because it came right after the insane success that was the Final Fantasy set. In that sense, it's definitely a best-seller for Wizards of the Coast. But there are endless reports of players finding lots of SPM product available, often at a heavy discount, and they are not buying it.
On the other hand, Edge of Eternities seems to have been underprinted, lots of Magic players say that they would have bought more but found none in stock.
“It honestly seems more likely this number is just based off how much they managed to sell to retailers,” writes u/Nyte_Crawler, “and not how much consumers actually purchased.”
There's a somewhat tangential way to reconcile the disconnect between Mark Rosewater's post, and what players are reporting: The upcoming prerelease event of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
TMT is as close as you get to a franchise that is very similar to Spider-Man: smallish set, foreign IP, New York as the background. If distributors and LGSs found buying too many SPM (and left holding the bag when players didn't buy it from them), it's very likely they'll order a lot less TMT product this time around.
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3 Comments
Unfortunately, EoE was severely overshadowed by Spider-Man, despite Edge of Eternities being the vastly superior set. And frankly, I think the same happened with Lorwyn Eclipsed and TMNT. I heard and saw way more about TMNT than I did Lorwyn Eclipsed, and the same thing is happening with the next two releases (Secrets of Strixhaven & Marvel Super Heroes[UB])
I keep hearing more about the UB sets than the Universe Within sets, which is wrong.
If WOTC was smart, they would retroactively revoke all UB sets from being Standard legal, and focus more on the in universe sets.
Feedback from a smaller, yet consistent, singles seller on tcgPlayer – we track actual sales by set and covert that number into a measure of Actual Sales/Play Booster Box (actual sales / # Play Booster Boxes purchased). We’ve been tracking this since the Duskmourn set release. Over that range, SPM has the lowest $’s/Box return ($76) of any set we’ve sold – Top sellers have been Modern Horizons II (purchased/sold starting in 2024), Edge of Eternities and Final Fantasy (all well over $150/box).
not really surprising that spiderman outsold edge when they completely shafted edge to sell more spiderman :/
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