So that Spider-Man set, huh?

The release date of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man was September 26th. It's now three weeks later and everybody agrees that the set was a dud. Heck, the only cheaper Standard set sealed play booster box on Cardmarket is for Aetherdrift (the last "worst set ever" since Karlov Manor).

Now, I'm not going to go all hyperbolic here and suggest that this is a catastrophe for Wizards of the Coast, but considering that both boxes contain the same number of boosters (both are post box shrinking down to 30 packs) and Spider-Man, being a Universes Beyond set, comes with a significant price hike to its MSRP and higher retailer price - meaning that in LGS profit terms, it's by far the worst set in standard for box value.

Universes Beyond was always going to be a balancing act for WotC. Fan appeal versus mechanical depth versus mechanical depth versus nostalgia versus novelty versus alignment to MTG's core identity - and with four sets that could easily be argued to be gimmick sets filling the bottom four slots on box price (What if MTG but Wacky Races, Spider-Man, Sherlock Holmes or Star Trek respectively), it certainly looks like the recent trend to a "Plane of Hats" model isn't translating well into customer satisfaction.

I'd also argue that Spider-Man isn't as strong as a brand as it might appear on the surface. It's big and loud - you don't get so many reboots that the latest one pokes fun at how many times the Spider-Man origin story has been covered in film this century without being both of those things - but that bigness and loudness is all presented in a way that allows Sony to keep the film rights and is spent attracting Summer Blockbuster film goers, rather than the actual die-hard Spider-Man fans (who are going to go anyway, but don't need persuading)

Beyond that, licensing concerns have forced SPM to be a paper-only set. For Arena and Magic Online, we got "Through the Omenpaths". Spider-Man without the Spider-Man, rebuilt to look more like Magic - a set many of my cEDH-playing friends want to use as their playtest cards instead of the Spider-Man themed paper cards. 

Add in the consideration that the set's power level, heading into an insane Standard, dominated by Vivi and mono-red, and you get a set on track to break all the wrong kinds of records.

All I can hope is that the upcoming Avatar set has a better outlook - and the four, yes, four Universes beyond sets planned to hit Standard next year, including another ageing franchise set in New York City learn from the problems that Magic: the Gathering | Marvel's Spider-Man