The Unintended Consequences of MTG's Universes Beyond | Extra Credits Gaming

As long-time viewers of this channel know, we at Extra Credits love a bit of Magic the Gathering. We've done multiple episodes on it. Will plays all the time. I was just on a jet-lag Magic collaboration over on Wizards' YouTube channel. And if you choose to time walk back a few years, our good friend Eddie Webb joined James and myself in a Magic tournament at Gen Con, in which we avoided ending up in last place, and I will take that as a victory, thank you very much. But then when we were chatting with Eddie about how things were going since he moved overseas, he mentioned that he'd been filling his days trying to keep up with the giant growth of IP that Wizards of the Coast has been injecting into Magic the Gathering. And his opinions seem to mirror our own. Sure, it's making a lot of money, but this Aether burst of cards has some players mad or worried that the Fortnite-ification of Magic will cause long-term damage to the game in the same way it changed the core experience of PUBG Battlegrounds, Rainbow Six Siege, and well, you know, Fortnite. Yeah, it might not be all birds of paradise for us planeswalkers these days. Wait, hold on a second.

Oh no, this whole episode's going to be wall-to-wall Magic references baked into the script, isn't it? Okay, screw it. You know, I'm down to be a goblin battle jester if it means we can talk the potential perils of Universes Beyond. Today's magical multiversal mashup is brought to you by the new Nebula exclusive series Legends of Zelda from Liam Triforce, but more on that after the episode. By the way, it's a your turn. In the last few years, a lot of the concern and profit of Magic the Gathering seems to center around the release of Universes Beyond, the name for the line of card releases that feature characters, locations, and objects that aren't directly related to the Magic multiverse. Now, there are technically a few exceptions. For example, Dungeons & Dragons is not officially part of Universes Beyond because it's a property Wizards owns. Secret Lairs releases are just reskins of existing cards, and some upcoming releases won't even use the Universes Beyond branding. But, for ease's sake,

we'll just chaos warp this massive injection of IP and refer to it under the Universes Beyond label. And, since this brand's inception in 2021, there has been a landslide in releases. Actually, as of the time I'm recording this, it covers Oh my god. I have to read all of these? Okay, well, time to channel my inner Micro Machines man again. Here we go. Arcane, Assassin's Creed, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Child's Play, Clue, Creepshow, Dungeons & Dragons, Doctor Who, Evil Dead, Fallout, Final Fantasy, Fortnite, Furby, Ghost of Tsushima, Ghostbusters, God of War, Hatsune Miku, Horizon Forbidden West, Iron Maiden, Jaws, Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, Lord of the Rings, Marvel Superheroes, Monster Hunter, Monty Python, My Little Pony, Sonic the Hedgehog, Spider-Man, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Stranger Things, Street Fighter, The Last of Us, The Office, The Princess Bride, The Walking Dead, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tomb Raider, Transformers, Twisted Metal, Uncharted, and Warhammer 40,000. I think I sprung a mana leak from reading that. So, why did our good old gathering go from zero to 60 in introducing all of these new cards and concepts into Magic? Well, Eddie's

theory is that it actually has to do with Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon. Okay, follow us down this rabbit hole. Back in the 1990s, when Magic kicked off the tsunami that was the trading card game craze, there were hundreds of TCGs of all kinds because the idea caught on like Bale Fire all over the world. But, the two biggest homegrown Japanese trading card games, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon, had their own ties to Magic. Yu-Gi-Oh! started as a manga, which introduced a fictional Magic the Gathering clone as part of its storyline, which was then reverse-engineered into a real card game. So, there's a bit of Magic DNA right there from the start. While the Pokémon Trading Card Game, on the other hand, started off as a promotional tie-in for the Pokémon Red and Blue Game Boy games in 1996, but between 1998 and 2003, the US translations and distribution of the game was handled by I think you know where this is going, you know, the real pocket monsters of money, Wizards of the Coast. Oh, wait, sorry, pocket monsters is a Pokémon reference, not a magic one. What a

rookie mistake. By the early 2000s, however, many of the other trading card games had died out or faded away. But Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon still kept making and selling cards as the market got smaller and smaller. So, they're kind of like the staple. Now, fast forward to 2020, and suddenly everyone was stuck at home with a lot of free time on their hands. So, many people dug out their old Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon cards that they'd had since they were kids. Some decided to sell them, only to discover there was still a rabid fan base for both games eager to get some of these classic cards, while others got back into playing the games themselves or even teaching their own kids how to play. Which means that individual card prices skyrocketed during the 2020 lockdowns, while sales of new sets of both games sold like Goblin Gangbusters. Meaning, trading card games as a whole actually did really well during that time. Now, Eddie does not know this for certain. He is just speculating here, but it's entirely possible that this uptick in trading card sales got the attention of

Wizards of the Coast. And maybe they got interested in trying to get this dormant outside audience who were just suddenly hungry ghouls for trading card games to also start buying Magic the Gathering cards again. Though, my personal pet theory is also that Wizards of the Coast saw the monetary success Epic had been having over in Fortnite's unthemed world space and wanted to get in on slurping up that tasty IP slurry like a dream drinker vampire, but I digress. Whatever the reason, it does seem to be working from a business perspective. According to a Hasbro investor call, Magic the Gathering revenue grew, causing it to become their first brand to earn over a billion dollars in 2022. Further, in 2025, Hasbro's Q2 financial report stated that the Final Fantasy set became the highest grossing Magic set of all time, leading to 23% revenue growth for the tabletop division and earning $200 million worth of revenue in a single day, something that took The Lord of the Rings set 6 months to accomplish.

There's also been a 40% increase in unique players in organized play in the first half of 2025. So, with numbers like that, it's clear that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have to be pretty happy with Universes Beyond. Therefore, it's no surprise they've already announced even more sets for 2026. And you know, besides the utterly mind-boggling narrative implications of Optimus Prime hero throwing lightning bolt at Peter Parker and Leonardo sewer samurai, you might be asking yourself, like, what's the big deal here? I mean, why should we worry if folks are slamming their cardboard action figures together? Well, the way that we see it, there are actually three potential concerns that could end up hurting the game in the long run. The first being plain old oversaturation. In 2025 alone, there were 18 different IPs released between individual card drops and full sets, including non-Universes Beyond sets. That's over 3,000 cards released in 1 year alone. With this toxic deluge of releases, it's clear that not every

set is going to get a chance to shine. Sure, a few of those releases might be big hits like Final Fantasy, but others like Sonic the Hedgehog and The Last of Us might end up sliding into a creeping tar pit of forgotten releases. And that's not even considering that licensing agreements are often for a limited time, so the window from signing on the dotted line to taking your product out of a store can be short. Now, Wizards has to get those cards in and out the door quickly to take advantage of the gold rush and not step on their own toes. The second concern relates to playtesting. Between the limited release window inherent to licenses and the sheer number of cards being put out over the course of a year, that does not leave much time for playtesting and cohesive wide line design. Even changing a few words on a card can have unforeseen long-term consequences, and when you have to crank out so many of them, it's highly unlikely each card is getting the same level of scrutiny that it used to, and probably less consideration of how they intersect with the larger body of magic

cards released over the course of the game's life. Plus, there's another fly in this ointment with licensers often having specifically and surprisingly firm limits around language. For instance, Eddie's done a lot of license work in his career, and he's told us some stories. Like once he was working on a wrestling RPG, and every use of the word wrestler had to be replaced with the word superstar. And that's just one example of many, right? So, each of these licensers for a tied-in magic set probably has different legal and aesthetic concerns, and any of those tweaks might lead to card text changes that designers simply wouldn't have time to work around. This also ties somewhat confusingly into tournament play. While many folks play Magic the Gathering just fine without ever joining a tournament, tournaments are a big part of the brand. If people enjoy the game, they might want to play with others beyond their friends, right? So, they buy more cards to make better decks to play more people, and then throughout that process get interested in tournaments, which

permeates that buying cycle even more. You don't need a crystal ball to see how this makes Wizards money, but then tie that into the point about textual changes. With Universes Beyond sets sometimes adjusting rules or naming conventions to fit better with the IP in question. So, all that means that if you first come to Magic as say a Transformers fan, you might end up learning rules or getting attached to cards that might not be relevant to tournaments at best, or even contradict the way the game is played on tournament grounds at worst. For example, Transformers cards require the use of the keyword convert, which works the same way as the transform keyword action on other cards. Why have two words do the same thing? Why to be totally not confusing at all, of course. And this kind of thing can lead to market confusion and player confusion, which might turn some players away from engaging in tournaments. And those problems are entirely of Wizards own making due to working with other IP in their process. Though speaking of problems that are of Wizards own making,

the third reason we think this all could be an issue is that we've seen it be an issue before. In the past, Wizards has done experimental releases. Although many of these were often done as jokes more than serious IP extensions. They're lovingly called the un-sets because each set starts with an un. Unglued, Unhinged, Unstable, Unsanctioned, and my personal favorite Unfinity. Now, these sets are a heck of a lot of fun, but the whole point of them is to twist, mutilate, and distort the Magic experience. But a lot of early players, when they were released, considered them to be the infernal spawn of the evil. Over time, players got used to the joke, and now many enjoy the humor they bring to the table. But they were not reprinted for a very long time. So, if history is anything to go by, putting out a lot of weird and quirky cards that twist and distort the core gameplay might end up causing a stronger community backlash than they might think. One of the reasons that Magic has lasted this long is because it's a well-balanced game. There aren't any single decks that always win, and

there's many things you can play to be competitive, and even more you can play just for fun. Whereas games that traditionally see many unbalanced cards released end up with just one or two dominant strategies, which ends up making those games feel boring and repetitive, and robs them of long-term fun. And because these are physical games, you can't just patch broken cards, right? Wizards doesn't have many balancing options once a card has been released into the wild beyond banning them. Unlike say a video game, you could just do an update with and fix some things. And between Wizards banning an absolute dragon storm of cards between 2017 and 2020, some serious problems with the One Ring set in modern format tournaments, and the recent rise and fall of Vivian friends in standard, they're already having problems on that front. So, it is really important to do strong design work and lots of balance testing. Otherwise, you don't just poison the cup that is that set's release. You end up poisoning the well

of all Magic cards for years to come, and some in tournament formats forever. Even though Eddie tends to snap about this noxious revival of bad Magic card habits, we should point out that a lot of these concerns are theoretical at this point. Right now, from the corpo perspective, it is hard to argue with the short-term strategy because people are buying a lot of Magic cards, and Wizards is making Hasbro a lot of money. But, there are some valid and real concerns about the long-term sustainability of the game going down this path. Too many sets released too quickly can lead to less time to market sets when they're released almost on top of each other due to various licensing deals that need to be fulfilled. Plus, there's a chance of burning out the market as customers run out of money and interest because it's too hard to keep up with everything coming out. Not to mention the big elephant in the room, gestures broadly to the overall economy because lots of folks have less and less cash to spend on leisure activities these days. So, this could all just be

some old beans screaming at the internet cloud, and it's possible the explosive success of Universes Beyond is something that Wizards can keep building on in a sustainable way. But, the cycle of life means that every bubble will eventually burst, and we just hope that the decisions made today won't end up hurting Magic in the long run because we truly love this game so much. But, what say you, fellow Planeswalkers? Are you loving Universes Beyond, or do you wish Hasbro would move beyond tying their whole TCG universe to it? I know you've got a lot of thoughts on this if you made it to this point in the video, so please let us know. I want to hear what you think. As for me right now, I'm just going to keep loving throwing together decks that are fun and weird. Heck, give me a Soul Ring, a Mox Diamond, and a Darksteel Forge, and I'll see what I can do with it. Ooh, and actually, if I'm feeling nasty, I might throw in a Sephiroth the Savior just for the overextended katana of it. You know I love a villain in black. Well, if that's not a Faded Return, I don't know what is. Get it? Faded Return goes there with the

chair. You You get it, right, Joey? Okay, okay, you win this one. Geez. Uh I know, why don't we just watch The Legends of Zelda? It's a new series from Liam Triforce that showcases the stories of the incredible individuals who contributed to the Zelda games, creating a detailed picture of, you know, the legends behind Legend of Zelda. In the first episode, Liam chronicles how Fujibayashi came in from Capcom, having worked on the Oracle series, Four Swords, Minish Cap, Skyward Sword, and of course Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and uses his outsider expertise to help redefine the formula for Zelda, while also still making it feel intrinsically Zelda. It's an awesome and heartfelt analysis that is available exclusively right now over on Nebula, a streaming service a bunch of my creator friends and I helped build. But now I can hear you saying through the magic of the one-way internet that you don't yet have a Nebula account. Well, that is actually no problem, because you can use our link below to get that episode plus so many gaming

shows that you can't see anywhere else for less than the price of a cup of coffee. And you know, while you're there, why not check out a few other Nebula originals, like Masterful Mimicry, which explores the intersection of inspiration and interactivity in video games, Abolish Everything, the hilarious comedy show which I am back on and competing so hard in, and thousands of other thoughtful human-made shows from us and over 200 of your favorite creators early and ad-free. Folks like TierZoo, Abigail Thorn, People Make Games, Lindsay Ellis, Jacob Geller who has tons of Nebula exclusives, and with his return to the internet, Tom Scott. Welcome back, sir. We have missed you. So, to get access to all of that and more for just $2.50 a month when you sign up for an annual plan, click the link below and the QR code right over here. And when you do, you will be directly supporting our channel in making more gaming videos like the one you just watched. It means the world to us. Thank you so much. Again, check out Nebula and Legends of Zelda by clicking

or scanning here, or stay on YouTube and check out our next video here. You know, I once heard the tale of Angelo Valenciana, Dominic Valenciana, Frizo Van Santen, Hunter Z, Joseph Blain, Lotus Wolf, Pyro Vermeil, and Ziliads Architectures. And I got to tell you, they are legendary patrons.