You can find the full Marvel Commander Decks set list here.
Magic: The Gathering and Marvel Comics are a partnership that was considered unfathomable before the two sides announced it in October 2023. Since then, we’ve seen Secret Lair drops, a set featuring the world and characters of Spider-Man, and now we’re on to Marvel Super Heroes, a set celebrating the wider world of the comics.
There are over 600 unique cards in this set, with many of them falling in the specially-designed preconstructed Commander decks. At Summer Game Fest, I sat down with Daniel Holt, senior game designer at Wizards of the Coast, and the lead for these Commander Decks.
In our time together, he spoke about the challenges of condensing decades of comic history into 100-card decks, how he was able to design a deck with his favorite Marvel hero of all time, and how he was able to shock another Magic designer with an out-of-left-field inclusion.
In-universe Commander Decks vs. Universes Beyond
First, I asked Daniel if he finds designing commander decks for Universes Beyond sets more or less difficult than in-universe decks; along with these Marvel decks, Holt also designed decks for last year’s Final Fantasy expansion, as well as the recent Secrets of Strixhaven in-universe set. He answered that he takes a similar approach, in that he just tries to stuff as much flavor and reference as he can into his designs.
“I led Final Fantasy Commander last year, and then Marvel technically came next in the timeline because UBs take a little bit longer, and then Strixhaven was after that,” Holt said. “The fun thought was, ‘I just did these Universes Beyond, and now I’m on a Magic set again, how do I treat this like a Universes Beyond set?’”
That approach comes from the Commander deck’s unique ability to focus on the lore of the specific themes of the deck; for example, the Secrets of Strixhaven decks each focused on one of the five schools that make up Strixhaven.
“For MIP (the internal shorthand for “Magic IP”) decks, I try to get 60 percent of those cards to feel like they’re on Strixhaven,” Holt said. “That includes reprints, so I was looking back on not just the original Strixhaven, but cards from March of the Machine or Foundations, or for the Quintorius deck, cards from his time on Ixalan, or Zimone in Duskmourn; it’s a smattering of the multiverse in those Commander decks.”
Villainous counters
When creating these decks, Holt said he felt there was less restriction than there was on Final Fantasy, because of how they could use the source material.
“With Final Fantasy, if you bought the Final Fantasy 7 deck, every card had to be from FF7, it was its own game, so there was a lot of research to get everything to work out,” Holt said. “But I think the only restriction here with Marvel was the association between the character and theme; was this character loosely associated with Fantastic Four, or this deck needs to be Avenger-focused, there’s a superhero restriction there, but planning these was mostly a lot more fluid.”
However, the villain-themed deck of the four, Doom Prevails, presented a unique obstacle for Holt and the team. While the other three decks are themed around the Avengers, Wakanda, and the Fantastic Four, this fourth deck was just villains. The team dodged designing a deck that just served as a “catch-all” for villains; however, by throwing in a fun twist.
“I did a cool cycle of cards in this villain deck involving the villains of the heroes the other decks are themed around, and those villains counter those decks’ strategies,” Holt explained. “So there’s a villain of Wakanda in here that hurts their artifacts, and there’s a villain of the Fantastic Four that punishes them for playing non-creature spells, things like that.”
The Marvel Commander Decks Are Going Obscure
The topic then switched to the Marvel Super Heroes decks themselves; how far did Marvel open the vault for these designs? Holt says that he essentially had free rein, so long as he stayed within the parameters of the set itself.
“This Marvel Super Heroes set is very much themed around the characters on Earth; the Avengers, Wakanda, the Fantastic Four, etc.” Holt said. “When picking themes for the decks, we had heroes and villains, so there’s two right there, then I pushed for Fantastic Four because Invisible Woman is my favorite hero of all time, and Wakanda just made sense because they have their own empire. Those themes all fell into place, and then we chose characters and themes to fit those.”
Some of those included characters, in fact, were born of suggestions from other designers that turned into a personal challenge for Holt. “[VP of design] Aaron Forsythe asked if I could fit three characters into the Fantastic Four deck, and one of them is so obscure, so minor, with no superpowers, and I took that as a challenge. I think he was half-joking, but I got it in there.”
(Holt has since confirmed to me that the character in question is Willie Lumpkin, Postman.)