Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast revealed the full set for the upcoming Universes Beyond Magic: the Gathering expansion, Marvel: Super Heroes. The set seems fine, if a bit simple. This approach makes sense both as the big summer release for the game and to play on WotC’s hopes that the Marvel IP will draw a massive wave of new players to the game, as was the case for Final Fantasy last year during a similar release window.

However, this goal of simplicity is opposed by a greater tension: how do you represent the many famous and beloved characters from the whole of Marvel into game pieces? In Magic, named characters are typically made into “Legendary creatures”, which means they have more rules baggage attached and there’s a greater expectation for the character to do something novel or thematically relevant.

Their answer? Don’t worry about how “legendary” the creatures are in practice, the most aggressive version of a design strategy that allowed most main characters in The Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy a chance to be found in the Command Zone. A secondary outcome here is that Marvel Super Heroes has more legendary creatures than any expansion prior, 128 in total. That’s nearly 30 more than the runner-up, Final Fantasy.

More important than the raw number of legendary creatures is how much of the expansion they take up, or “how many of the creatures in this set are legendary?”. For a long time, the 1994 expansion Legends had the highest rate of legendary creatures, with 37% of its battlers sporting the super type. The first set to have a “Legendary Creatures matter” theme, 2004’s Champions of Kamigawa, had the same ratio, and it continues to hold the record amongst premiere expansions.

But Marvel Super Heroes has decimated the previous ratio set by Universes Beyond sets like Spider-Man before it. A whopping 75% of Marvel Super Heroes‘ creatures are legendary. So as we tend to do here at Cardboard by the Numbers, we decided to get the rates for recent sets and put it in a nice visual for you:

The typical in-universe set has had a 17% legendary rate since Dominaria soft-reset the game’s design in 2018. At 75%, Marvel Super Heroes is a bit of an outlier amongst the 62% average amongst Universes Beyond expansions, but it’s not significantly higher than something like Marvel’s Spider-Man. For a lot of reasons, I imagine this will be the game’s peak for share of legendary creatures.

While it’s certainly a positive to limited gameplay that Marvel Super Heroes opted to avoid common rarity legends (a slight annoyance in both 2025’s Spider-Man and the underrated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles expansion from earlier this year), the legendary creatures in Marvel Super Heroes feel less “legendary” than in any expansion previously. This seems necessary to make a draft format that allows newer players to engage deeply with the IP that’s bringing them into the world of Magic, but it’s certainly not my preference.

Please note that this analysis only includes the main set, so things like the accompanying Jumpstart set and Commander decks are not included here, and neither is the intro box. I’ve seen folks critical of some of the vanilla common legendaries, but those don’t exist in the main booster product and are part of a guided experience explicitly intended for a new player’s first time firing up the cardboard.

I don’t imagine the high volume of legendary creatures will create awkward situations too frequently in sealed and draft formats due to the set’s size, but it’s certainly a challenge for the format for the sake of more popular ways to play Magic like Commander, and to satisfy fans who want to see as many named characters as is humanly possible. Looking at past Universes Beyond sets, it seems like the rate of 50-70% is going to be the norm for these.

Analysis from White Box Entertainment shows that Marvel has a significantly higher audience crossover with Magic: the Gathering fans than any previous Universes Beyond IP according to ad targeting data and surveys. I think this point is a helpful one to consider, but can just as easily be misleading: I do not expect this set to perform as well as last summer’s Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy may have a much lower inherent crossover with Magic, but the IP are more closely aligned aesthetically, and fans of Final Fantasy are fiercely loyal to the franchise. With Marvel, there’s huge awareness and interest, but it’s not a defining IP for most of its fans any longer thanks to the MCU expanding the audience so far beyond the hardcore. Additionally, the set seems much less interesting than Final Fantasy, which is hailed as one of the best limited environments of all time by some of the game’s best players (and I definitely agree with them).

What do you think of the high share of legendary creatures? Let us know in the comments or on our social channels, and thanks so much for reading! If you’ve enjoyed this article, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads!!

Miles Atherton is the editor-in-chief of “Cardboard by the Numbers” and has been playing Magic since 2006. Since studying Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, he’s built a career as an award-winning marketer with a love of data journalism. He currently runs the anime & manga consulting firm White Box Entertainment and serves on the board for Manga Mavericks and Anime Trending. He’s previously written for Anime Trending, Anime Buscience, Anime News Network, and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the Crunchyroll News from 2016 to 2021.