Magic’s Head Designer Confirms Spider‑Man Was Built for New MTG Format

Last updated on July 28, 2025

Spider-Man, Web-Slinger – art by Ryan Pancoast

Wizards of the Coast has been talking about a new draft format, called “Pick Two,” since June. Yesterday, Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater just made the key point explicit: the upcoming Marvel’s Spider‑Man crossover was built for Pick‑Two Draft.

“Spider-Man was designed specifically for our new Pick Two draft format,” Rosewater said in his personal blog. “It’s a much faster draft format (and requires half the people).”

The upcoming Universes Beyond MTG set featuring your friendly neighborhood spider will release in late September, and will officially introduce the new draft variant it was built for. According to Rosewater, Spider-Man x MTG will still support “normal” eight‑player Booster Draft, but its Limited skeleton was tuned for four‑player pods and two picks per pick.

What’s Pick‑Two Draft?

Pick Your Poison – Illustration by Julia Metzger

Wizards’ June 20 announcement laid out the basics of Pick Two drafts: Four players, three Play Boosters each, and you draft two cards every time you pick.

You then play against one of the players you've just drafted with, with the winning players from the first round pairing up for a second game.

Wizards' introductory video features principal game designer Gavin Verhey, who's also WotC's representative in the Pauper Format Panel, and head of the Commander Format Panel. Gavin says that, in their playtests, they finished draft + builds + matches in ~90 minutes, which is a big part of Pick Two's appeal.

He also mentions the other obvious connection: Pick Two drafts require the exact same number of players as a regular Commander pod.

Spider-Man: Literally Built Differently

In the last couple of days, Mark Rosewater has also revealed on his personal blog that Spider-Man will not just formally introduce Pick Two drafts: It has been specifically designed for this new format.

“There are five core draft archetypes, not ten,” Rosewater said, when asked about the differences with an 8-player draft. “You can do a normal draft with it“, he clarified, “it’s just a bit smaller than most premier sets, so it has all the ramifications of that (things like more repetition of cards, less archetypal themes, etc.)”

Rosewater also revealed that the five main SPM archetypes will be two-colored, rather than three.

During development, Spider-Man went from a small set to a medium-sized set; it will only have about 200 cards, so about 80-ish less cards to draft with when compared with recent Standard sets like Edge of Eternities, Final Fantasy, or Tarkir: Dragonstorm. This smaller size was one of the reasons for why WotC tailored SPM for Pick Two rather than normal drafts, and the number of draft archetypes (five in this case) is the biggest difference between Magic sets designed mainly for Pick Two draft, versus those designed for normal drafts.

In other of his Blogatog posts, Rosewater further clarified that 8-player drafts will still be the norm for normally sized sets (albeit with 4-player draft also being thought of).

Wizards’ official Collecting Marvel's Spider-Man also confirms that SPM is “our first set to be designed with Pick‑Two Draft at the forefront,” and stores will host Pick‑Two events for it.

Arena Has Entered the Chat

Pick Two drafts are not the only way in which Spider-Man is built differently. It will also be reskinned for Magic's digital versions, namely MTGO and MTG Arena.

As announced last April in WotC's Through the Omenpaths and Digital Universes Beyond Updates article, and for reasons that are not too clear (probably some copyright limitations), Spider-Man cards will get new names and art in the digital clients.

But MTG Arena will still be able to play Pick Two drafts with the reskinned cards:

There will be at least one difference between tabletop and MTGA, according to WotC_Jay: On Arena, you'll draft in a 4-player pod (exactly like tabletop), but then play in a general queue rather than against your pod (in this case, pretty much like Premier and Traditional drafts work on Arena).

We have no information at the time of writing about how the “Arachno-Boy” digital reskin will look like, or when exactly will Pick Two drafts arrive to MTGA –  but since SPM is a Standard set, it's reasonable to expect both the new set and the new draft format to land the same week as Spider-Man debuts on tabletop.

Community Reactions

The Battle of Bywater – Illustration by Tomas Duchek

Back when Pick Two drafts were announced, the news that WotC will officially support a new, faster draft variant was in general well received by Magic players.

“Sweet, this should easily cut down on the amount of non‑events we have at my LGS,” said u/HairiestHobo when the new Pick Two draft format was revealed.

“Interesting!” agreed u/aerothorn. “Definitely seems like a good introduction to drafting if nothing else (and good when you don’t have 8 people IRL).”

“Attended a draft of Final Fantasy last weekend where only four of us turned up, so we decided to give the pick two draft a go and it made things a lot smoother!” says u/giselamancer.

Current news that Spider-Man has a simplified draft structure have found a lot more negativity, though.

“If you had told me 6 months ago that the Spider Man set was going to be shaky, I could not have possibly foreseen how,” said u/HeyApples on r/lrcast, a subreddit populated by experienced drafters. “But between this news, the ham-handed alternate arts on Arena, and the completely lukewarm, uninteresting designs spoiled so far, I am so far completely un-interested in this release.”

“They jumped through so many hoops to make this set happen in standard, didn't they?” says u/FOmar_Eis in the most-upvoted reply on another thread discussing Rosewater's revelations.

Comments on a third thread were so negative that, at the time of writing, it was locked by the moderators.