*spider-man pointing*
Spider-Man Magic: The Gathering cards are already swinging on to shelves after the prerelease event last weekend but strangely you won’t see them in your Magic Arena client when they launch later this week, and it's all due to an intellectual property rights issue.
The Spider-Man franchise is no stranger to IP troubles and similar issues have occurred across the Spider-Man & Marvel Cinematic Universe films. While Disney owns Spider-Man, Sony Pictures has the exclusive rights to live action films, creating a bit of a tricky space that had to be navigated for the MCU cameos.
So how did Magic: The Gathering get tangled in the Spider-Man IP web? It’s all due to the online card game Disney owns called Marvel Snap, a game that effectively competes with Magic: The Gathering Arena in the digital card game space.
Disney suits seem happy to let pictures of Spider-Man hit the printing press but they have no interest in Spidey fans on the wide world web logging into Magic Arena when they could be snapping up some Marvel cards instead.
It was a big problem for Wizards of the Coast as Arena has a design aim to match parity with paper sets. Competitive players attending tournaments often have to play across both paper and digital spaces, so any friction to that experience is undesirable.
The solution? Through the Omenpaths, a 100% functionally identical new set with in-universe art and card names just for Magic Arena!
Arena planeswalkers will either be disappointed or delighted by this news, depending how they feel about Spider-Man and his modern day antics crawling into their science-fantasy setting. For paper planeswalkers, these cards will be hanging around in eternal formats potentially forever.
So is this going to keep happening with future MTG cross-overs? For any IPs featured in Marvel Snap, then yes it’s already been confirmed by Wizards of the Coast.
For other IPs? It will likely depend on the digital offerings those rights holders have in play, so we’ll have to wait and see I guess. At the very least, Wizards of the Coast now has a stratgey in place to keep paper and digital Magic in mechanical alignment.
If you want to read more about Through the Omenpaths you can do so here at Wizards of the Coast website.
You should also check out the release notes for Through the Omenpaths. Since keyword mechanics like Web-slinging can't be used in Through the Omenpaths you'll have to become familiar with their Arena names.
SIFTER will have our Magic: The Gathering Spider-Man set review up soon. In the meantime why not check out some of the Through the Omenpaths artwork gallery, while some are reprints there are a number of beautiful additions to the long tapestry of Magic art history.
