With over 300 million units sold, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, so it only follows that the team behind Magic: the Gathering would be interested in collaborations, crossovers, and references. The latest Magic expansion features the latter of those, but this is not the first time the two IP have teamed up!

Minecraft’s Markus Persson, aka “Notch”, designed a Magic card for Magic 2015 in 2014. Persson was the original creator and a primary developer for Minecraft in the game’s formative years, and Aggressive Mining reflects the aesthetics of the game in this clever enchantment.

Magic 2015 had several dozen collaborations with notable game designers and developers like this, many with loose allusions to the properties that made those developers famous; this was long before Universes Beyond, so every card was still flavored as Magic.

On Reddit at the time the card was first revealed, Persson discussed his design process, saying he “tried so hard to sneak something very broken past them”.

Minecraft returned the favor in 2017 with a collection of Magic-themed character skins. For 490 Minecraft coins, you can still pick up the set of 15 skins on the Minecraft store, including Jace, Chandra, Ajani, Nicol Bolas, Emrakul and more Magic favorites of the era.

In 2023’s The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Minecraft fans get a more subtle nod with “Diamond Pick-Axe”. Diamond may not be the most common material for pick-axes in the real world, but in both the fantasy MesoAmerican-styled Ixalan and in Minecraft, it’s one of the best ways to dig!