Marvel’s Spider-Man and Through the Omenpaths Are A Bad Omen For Magic’s Future

By Cameron Kunzelman | October 2, 2025 | 12:00pm

Art from Wizards of the Coast

Tabletop Features Magic: The Gathering

Marvel’s Spider-Man and Through the Omenpaths Are A Bad Omen For Magic’s Future

Magic: The Gathering’s Spider-Man set has been out for a few days now, and I’ve played enough to know that it is personally not very interesting to me and, I think, not very good to play with. Not being very invested in Spiders or Villains, two of the most impactful creature types in the set, there’s not much for me to insert into decks I have sitting around. The new draft format that they invented for the set is actively bad and makes for thinner, worse games due to the small number of cards in the set. There’s a clear reason for it: the set changed dramatically mid development, and it seems like no one had enough time or resources to pivot from what it was to what it became. That’s it. That’s the short review of Marvel’s Spider-Man as a set. It’s not fun to play and it doesn’t have many cards that are interesting to me.

You might not even realize that there is a Spider-Man Magic set out, though, if you’re a Magic Arena player. You might instead have booted the client up over the past few days to see the release of Through the Omenpaths. Instead of releasing Marvel’s Spider-Man digitally, presumably due to a rights issue, Wizards of the Coast has created a set of equivalent cards. They are mechanically identical. They have different names. They have different art. They are simply a way of getting the functionality of a set that cannot be replicated fully in digital form due to some complex legal situation that the average player has no knowledge about or access to.

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Worse, they have codified a four-player draft format that has players picking two cards from each pack instead of one. This means decks are more predictable—a player picking two cards can stake out a better position on their colors and strategy than a player picking one card—and more straightforward—you get all of the things that synergize with what you have rather than taking a chance on some new cards picked one-by-one. Maybe it is just the Omenpaths cards, maybe it is the format, but I honestly believe that the games I’ve played of Omenpaths are the most boring I have experienced in a very long time. It makes me actively yearn for Edge of Eternity, a set I was very cold on, because at least that stuff felt like it was creative and engaged in different and new play patterns, even if I did not like them.

I hate all these things. They feel bad.

There’s never a moment where the economics of Magic are not weighing on its players. The packs cost money, the cards cost money, playing at a store has entry fees, the special products are priced at the level that the market will bear, and on and on. I have been playing and enjoying Magic for 20 years and I cannot tell you the last time that I felt like I got a deal in terms of playing the game. At best, the amount of money I put into it felt fair for the fun I get out of it—and really, that’s a perfectly fine deal to make.

Marvel’s Spider-Man, and the weird doppelganger product that is Omenpaths, makes it brutally clear that the player is the dog getting wagged by the tail of pure brand expansion. I can deal with Final Fantasy and Spongebob and Street Fighter and everything else coming into Magic because I understand that the game has growth potential and sees tactical expansion into those spaces as a way of exercising that growth. That’s great, I guess, in the sense that I want the game that I enjoy to continue to grow and be more popular.

I do find it a little embarrassing for all of us, especially Wizards, when they do this kind of brand expansion and they can’t even manage to make it extend through all the places I might play the game. The Magic staff are profoundly successful at selling the feel and tone of both their internal stories and the external brands that they bring into the game—if Magic’s power could be distilled into one idea, it’s that these simple cards with text can make you feel like you are another person. A wizard, Doctor Who, an adventurer in Middle Earth, whatever.

So when they make a boatload of Spider-Man cards that are meant to make me feel like I am engaging in the expansive world of Marvel, that seems neat. When I log into Arena and all of those really evocative designs are scattered into the wind and peppered with seemingly random art and titles vaguely associated with Magic’s multiverse, it doesn’t really work. It’s like I went to the bakery with a picture of Spider-Man to put on my birthday sheet cake and when I came back later to pick it up they had drawn Red Bug Fighting Man, the man who fights red bugs. I might still eat the cake, but it isn’t why I went to that bakery. And since just a few months ago they made a perfect Final Fantasy Cloud Strife cake, I’m a little confused as to why Red Bug Fighting Man is the best they could come up with.

I know logically and rationally that it’s a legal issue and that it probably came from several different negotiations. But I also know that instead of simply taking the L and saying that we wouldn’t be getting Spider-Man on Arena, Wizards made the decision to create a clunky replacement that, in my opinion, actively works against all of the visual and cultural work that the company has been putting in for more than 30 years. They need to sell an Arena set. They need to monetize this release on all platforms.

Magic: The Gathering seems to be going through a crisis. They are creating a true deluge of product, and those products are coming quickly. The company recently announced that there will be seven marquee set releases coming in 2026. That’s a lot of cards, and four of those sets are going to be Universes Beyond, meaning that they are external intellectual property being brought into the Magic fold. These sets are affirming if you like these brands, but the more there are, and the more they are inconsistently released across the various places you can play Magic, the more it feels like the whole apparatus is an excuse for monetizing brands and not a delicate meeting of designer efforts, corporate demands, and player desires.

I’m asking for the illusion to be maintained, however thinly, that I am more than a suckling hog greedily scrabbling after booster packs with cool characters printed in foil in them. Please allow me to imagine myself as anything other than a money hose, Wizards of the Coast. I am begging you.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.