Universes Beyond Haters Embrace Arena’s Through the Omenpaths Reveal

Last updated on September 11, 2025

Wardens of Silverweb Summit]/card] | Illustration by Jesper Ejsing

Magic: The Gathering backed itself into an awkward little corner with its first Marvel crossover set. Marvel's Spider-Man releases soon, but it'll look much different on digital platforms—namely, Magic: Online and Magic Arena.

It's been known for a while now that Wizards of the Coast can't put any copywrited Spider-Man material on these digital platforms, speculatively due to licensing stipulations, and yet, these cards sort of need to be there so people can practice Standard and play the cards in other formats where they're supposed to be legal. The solution was Through the Omenpaths.

Your Friendly Neighborhood… Arachno-Boy?

Wizards of the Coast announced Through the Omenpaths quite a while ago, and the immediate reaction was overwhelmingly negative. These new digital-only versions would be equivalent to their paper counter-parts, but there was going to basically be two versions of the set, the paper version featuring all the actual Spider-Man heroes, villains, locale, etc., and the hamfisted Arena version.

Players started speculating immediately how this might be accomplished. Were they going to 1-for-1 try and recreate the Spider-Verse, but just use a thesaurus to change the names as closely as possible? Instead of Spider-Man, were we going to get Arachno-Boy and his rogues' gallery of villains like the Chartreuse Goblin, Dirt-Man, and Dr. Cephalopod?

The answers were revealed as the full Through the Omenpaths gallery was unveiled Monday morning, and the response was… overwhelmingly positive! Turns out, many people liked the alternate digital version of Spider-Man way more than the intended Universes Beyond version.

The Death of Arachno-Boy

Despite being a very muddy, inelegant solution to the licensing problem, MTG's designers used this opportunity to check in on a bunch of different planes that already exist in the Magic universe.

There were nods to Duskmourn, Edge of Eternities, Streets of New Capenna, Ravnica, and more. It almost has a Core Set vibe to it, with no particular through-line to the art and flavor choices other than there being a bunch of spiders everywhere.

And there are a lot of spiders. Except, instead of it being Peter Parker or Miles Morales as a masked superhero, it's just a bunch of 8-legged spiders doing normal spider things. It's a bit weird that many of them are heroes, but they sort of had to keep the creature types intact to preserve the intent of the original cards.

They also had to make some stylistic changes due to what's already printed on the paper version of these cards. For example, the creature type “symbiote” remained intact for the digital cards, so they had to determine what the MTG equivalent of a symbiote looked like. They're actually pretty darn cool.

Player Reaction

[card]Fires of Victory – art by Sidharth Chaturvedi

Those who immediately fell in love with the Through the Omenpaths version of the set did so for two main reasons. The first first camp of people are the Universes Beyond haters who are just excited to play with something that's not Marvel or Spider-Man related. There's a healthy number of people who just don't want anything to do with Universes Beyond, and this provides an opportunity to play with the set without having to cast Eddie Brock, or Gwen Stacy, or what have you. Sure, you have to say “enweb” instead of web-slinging, but it's a small sacrifice.

The second camp are people who just though the Omenpaths version of the set looks great. A bunch of random legendary dudes, quick check-ins on everyone's favorite MTG planes, and enormous frickin' spiders everywhere… what's not to love?

Further Implications

Wisecrack – art by Wayne Reynolds

Yes, the whole thing is a murky solution to a problem, and that means there are going to be some complications moving forward, mainly differentiating and remembering the Arena/MTGO vs. Paper equivalent of cards. Standard grinders who practice on Arena, for example, will get used to the name and art of a particular card, and have to swap that mental image with an entirely different card when it comes time to play in paper.

There's also the matter of just searching for cards in general. Thankfully, the Arena team has implemented a solution already, so importing decks on Arena using the original Spider-Man card names should auto-swap them to their digital equivalents.

People also seem pleased that the bonus sheet cards that were originally using Spider-Man comic book art have their normal paper equivalents added to Arena. Cards like Mystic Confluence and Opposition Agent are coming to the platform in their original form, whereas others like Ponder and Saw in Half are using more recent art. Either way, people are glad they didn't try to “Omenpath” these reprints, and just went with are that people are already familiar with.