After Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cards accidentally showed up in Lorwyn Eclipsed packs earlier this year, Magic: The Gathering leaks have become increasingly common. The release of each new set seems to lead to leaks for the next one — maybe that’s inevitable when these sets are less than two months apart. Now, an image of four uncommon cards from the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set, due to arrive in June, hit Reddit over the weekend, with the poster alleging that the cards were accidentally included in packs from a Secrets of Strixhaven draft.
Despite there only being four cards in total — that remain unconfirmed, by the way — together they seem to reveal a lot we didn’t previously know about the set.
Teamwork as a core set mechanic
Agent Maria Hill is arguably the most interesting card in this little batch. Whenever she “becomes tapped to pay a teamwork cost,” you put a +1/+1 counter on her and draw a card. As a one-cost white 2/1 creature, you don’t really want to be attacking with her anyway, so you’ll want to keep her out of combat to capitalize on those teamwork benefits. But what even is teamwork?
If she specifically taps to pay a teamwork cost, then teamwork is likely an instant or sorcery subtype or perhaps a type of activated ability on creatures. Functionally, it most likely works similarly to convoke, saddling mounts, or crewing vehicles — or perhaps even like generating charge counters the spacecraft and planet lands from Edge of Eternities. Clearly, teamwork involves tapping creatures to do something — most likely some kind of collaborating attack between your hero creatures — and Agent Maria Hill is one of perhaps many hero cards that produces a secondary effect when tapped for this purpose.
Assuming teamwork cards are prominent in the set, this card will wind up feeling like a solid staple that scales in power while also drawing cards for you. That’s excellent for a one-cost drop.
Powerful uncommons for core Avengers
Ronin, Shadow Stalker seems pretty solid for black, equipment-heavy decks. But it’s going to rely on you having a lot of cheap, weak pieces of equipment you’re willing to sacrifice to pay for his second ability. You’ll also likely want some kind of lifegain to counteract his top ability, which generates two mana for equipment costs if you sacrifice two life. All things considered, he’s pretty niche, but does demand an interesting deck strategy: equipment-heavy Orzhov (black-white) that invests equally in life as a resource with lifegain and other cards that let you spend life.
The top two leaked Marvel cards, however, seem to invest in what’s become a common trend with Universes Beyond sets: lots of repeat legendaries at various rarities.
At the uncommon rarity level, we get Iron Man, Master of Machines, and Thor Odinson. Both have flying and vigilance, but Iron Man also gets +1/+0 for each artifact you control and draws a card when he attacks if an artifact entered the battlefield under your control that turn. Izzet (blue-red) artifacts was a major archetype in the TMNT set, and it looks like Marvel Super Heroes will also invest heavily in that color combo.
Thor Odinson boasts double prowess with a base of 4/4, so he’ll get +2/+2 until the end of your turn for every noncreature spell you play — and don’t forget about that flying and vigilance. Boros (red-white) just showed up big in Secrets of Strixhaven for the Lorehold college. The elder dragon Lorehold, the Historian, in particular, would make for a devastating combo engine with Thor. It lets you play any instant or sorcery you draw first that turn for a miracle cost of two colorless mana. This version of Thor doesn’t really synergize with Lorehold’s broader focus on graveyard recursion, but the college does lean into spellslinging strategies. Magic-powered brawn is thematically perfect for the God of Thunder.
All this to say that both of these Avengers seem hugely powerful for cards that are uncommon, and they probably hint at a printing strategy that Wizards of the Coast have used for the most recent Universes Beyond sets. Last year’s Avatar: The Last Airbender set and Turtles featured multiple iterations of the same characters across rarities. In the former, there was a lot of variety to convey the journey that characters like Aang and Katara embarked on in the show, with rarer versions of their cards showing their growth as characters.
TMNT took a looser and perhaps more exhausting approach. Every single play booster pack had a turtle slot so you were guaranteed at least one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in every single pack. While that sounds practical, anyone who got a lot of boosters from that set now has more mostly useless common- and uncommon-rarity turtles than they know what to do with.
How much is the Marvel Super Heroes set going to lean on similar printing strategies? Does every pack have an Avengers slot where we’ll get a core Avenger at a random rarity? These are just the uncommon Thor and Iron Man. Considering these are two of the biggest heroes in Marvel canon, they’re almost certainly going to get rares and mythic rares as well. Are those going to be that much more powerful than these? If so, that’s kind of scary.
The official Marvel Super Heroes card gallery so far only has mythic rare versions of Captain America and Bruce Banner // The Incredible Hulk. Players have already pinpointed infinite combo strategies with the Hulk and the Caltrops artifact. And Cap gives all of your heroes hexproof as long as he retains his shield counter.
Marvel Super Heroes preview season is just around the corner, but the power creep is already starting to feel very real.
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