The recent Magic: The Gathering 30th anniversary panel at GenCon included some big surprises regarding the Universes Beyond line, which recently resulted in a popular Lord of the Rings crossover. It’ll be picking up a couple more names of particular note to videogame-likers. The post-apocalyptic world of Fallout and the many worlds of Final Fantasy will be coming to Magic in the next two years, and we should expect to see some Jurassic World cards too.
Fallout is first on the bill, and will arrive in the form of preconstructed decks for use in Commander. Commander is the format where four-or-so players go head to head with 100-card decks, each led by a single legendary Commander who can be played at any time, and even brought back from the dead.
It’s a chaotic and casual format that’s become the most popular official way to play Magic, ahead of even the one-on-one competitions of Standard format. Like the crossovers for Warhammer 40,000 and Doctor Who, the Fallout cards will only be legal in Commander, and will be packaged as multiple preconstructed decks “each representing one of the wasteland’s many colorful factions.”
Final Fantasy is a ways further off, scheduled for 2025. Unlike the Fallout cards, the Final Fantasy set will be a tentpole release available in booster packs, and presumably legal across various formats. “The set will encompass each main Final Fantasy game that has been released to date,” Wizards of the Coast said, “from the original Final Fantasy to the recently released Final Fantasy 16. The set will also be available to play on Magic Arena.”
We also got some more detail on the previously announced Assassin’s Creed crossover. Coming in July of 2024, this one will be arriving in the form of “Beyond boosters”, a new flavor of booster pack that contains both new cards and reprints, and is legal in formats including Modern, but not draft. It still sounds a bit confusing, but we’ll hear more as its release date gets closer.
Finally, the Jurassic World cards will be arriving in the form of booster inserts, meaning they’ll be tucked away inside booster packs for a mainline set, like the Transformers cards in boosters for The Brothers’ War. The dino-themed Jurassic World cards will be part of an upcoming set called The Lost Caverns of Ixalan.
The GenCon panel also laid out the details of other upcoming releases that don’t involve crossmedia marketing, like Ravnica Remastered and Murders at Karlov Manor, which are both on the slate for the first quarter of 2024, as well as the year’s subsequent sets, which are called Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Modern Horizons 3, Bloomburrow, and Duskmourn: House of Horror.
