It's no secret that the MTG Spider-Man set sucks. It's gotten many Magic: The Gathering players as riled up as J. Jonah Jameson on a slow news day, and collector booster prices have plummeted quite as fast as Peter Parker would with broken web slinger (that's enough now - Ed.) There are many reasons this set didn't stick the landing, but for me, the biggest is that its all-important Limited gameplay simply isn't fun. Spider-Man drafts are poorly balanced, and, above all, Red cards are almost unusable.
For a start, Marvel's Spider-Man features only five draft archetypes (deliberately designed deckbuilding strategies for different color combos) where most MTG sets have ten. That's already pretty dismal, given booster draft is the third most popular format, after Commander and Standard, and under-serving one of those big three is a black mark on any new set's scorecard.
But, worse, two of the five are critically underpowered. The archetypes featuring red - red/black Mayhem and red/green Large Spells - simply aren't as super as they should be. 'Red Deck Wins', goes the old Magic adage, but in Spidey drafts, I'm afraid the opposite is true.
Mayhem decks just ask too much. Players need to discard their own cards for pay-offs that just aren't worth it. Large Spells decks, meanwhile, are simply too slow, and struggle to get going before they've already lost due to over costed key cards.
Rhino, Battering Brute, for example, may be a very scary 6/7 Red and Green battering ram when he bursts his way onto the battlefield, and Vigilance, Trample, and Haste are a very nasty trio to have. But, with a converted mana cost of seven, Rhino's so costly that he barely ever gets to charge out and do his stuff.
You don't just have to take my word for it: high profile luminaries of the game are lining up to mourn for Red in Spider-Man.
Luis Scott Vargas, a member of the MTG Hall of Fame and co-host of the Limited Resources podcast, tells the pod's 50,000 YouTube subscribers that "red is just not a playable color" in this set.
The hosts of the Lords of Limited Podcast agree, describing Red as "the problem child" of the format in their latest episode, aired this week.
Of course, Magic sets are difficult to balance, and it's not unusual for certain MTG color combinations or archetypes to end up weaker than the rest. In 2023's Phyrexia: All Will Be One, for instance, Blue was infamously terrible. One bad apple doesn't always spoil the barrel.
The issue with Spider-Man is that, because it's such a small set, with only five draft strategies available, Red being awful means that a huge proportion of deck builds just don't work. Two fifths of MTG Spider-Man's archetypes are left in the dust because one color's been made too weak - and a lack of diversity among viable deck archetypes can so often be a set's death knell.
But what's your take? Will you be defiantly drafting red to stick up for the underdog, or will you be avoiding it like it's a particularly unpleasant strain of the Venom Symbiote? Join the free Wargamer Discord community and let us know - if there's one thing we love to hear about, it's folks defying the hive mind to win with off meta choices!
Alternately, if you just can't wait for this to be over and for another set to come along and knock Spider-Man out of the spotlight, check out the 2025/2026 MTG release schedule. From The Hobbit to an honest-to-goodness MTG Star Trek set, there's a lot on the horizon…