Why Universes Beyond Won't Last
The following is a lightly-edited transcription of the strategic portion of the Eternal Durdles episode published on Sept. 23, 2025. The full video can be seen below:
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Zac Clark: Universes Beyond is a fad. It's not going to stick around. We'll remember this era of Magic as cringe that didn't stick around for as long as we thought it would.
ForceofPhil: I disagree; this is the world. Not everything can be Final Fantasy, but The Lord of the Rings was the best-selling set of all time. Then, Final Fantasy was the best-selling set of all time before the set even came out. If Spider-Man or any of the other Marvel stuff doesn't match Final Fantasy, that's okay.
From Wizards of the Coast (WotC) always wants more because that's how corporations work. However, they recognize that not everything can always be better than the previous thing. The service is less for the game and more for Hasbro's shareholders.
Zac Clark: Great point about the shareholders. Magic has never been as expensive as it is now, and it will never be as cheap as it is now in the future. Every time a new set comes out that performs well, it will become the best-selling set ever.
The MSRP doesn't really exist for WotC. They can set their costs at whatever they like, and every time they pay too much money for an IP, they get to say, 'Well, yeah, it's going to be $10 for booster packs this time. Oh, it's $20 for Spider-Man packs. For Avatar, it's $40 for a pack.' They can repeat that as much as they want. For now, they will be able to replicate that success.
Eventually, scalpers can't sell to real people, only to other scalpers. When that dries up, someone's left holding the bag on a set. Eventually, scalpers will stop trying to do that. Scalpers are the only things holding up the economy in Universes Beyond.
ForceofPhil: What is the timeframe for that? Before we're dead?
Zac Clark: Within five years. The era of Universes Beyond began with The Walking Dead. We are currently in an era where it has been incorporated into the Standard. It's almost a mandatory product if you want to play competitively. It's not just fun treatments on cards.
In two years, you'll see a significant drop-off. Still, in five years we will have moved beyond doing Universes Beyond to just Secret Lairs reprints of staples with a skin on them similar to the Princess Bride stuff, which to me is totally fine.
Do you remember the Big Score and other extras in expansions? All of it was designed around about the same time, but there was something before: Aftermath. Aftermath for March of the Machines; people were like, 'No, thanks.' They opted out and this caused a real problem.
Many of these IPs already existed, and WotC was thinking, 'We're going to create these cool additional sets,' but the business model didn't work; no one wanted that stuff.
ForceofPhil: Would that business model have worked if Aftermath were just UB?
Zac Clark: Perhaps but we can tell you that they didn't give that a try because that's what Assassin's Creed was supposed to be. Assassin's Creed was it was a Big Score style. We don't hear a lot about that set. People largely ignored it despite being a direct-to-Modern set.
Assassin's Creed failed and Spider-Man was supposed to be like Aftermath. They didn't want to piss Marvel off because Marvel's a huge IP. So they jammed it into Standard to make people have to buy it. But it was only supposed to be a hundred-ish card set. It's like 50 to 100 extra cards.
A standard set has to be more than a hundred cards. So they jammed a bunch of random designs in. That's where you get Spider-UK, random cards that don't make sense.
As a result, many people will likely skip it because they're not interested in Spider-Man on its own, and the cards are not powerful enough to make it into competitive play.
For the people who entered Magic: The Gathering because they like Spider-Man, which is a tiny percentage of people who want to play a Spider-Man-themed game, they buy all their Spider-Man cards. They build their Spider-Man Commander deck, then they put it on their shelf, and they bring it out unchanged when they want to play with their Spider-Man deck with their friends.
I love Legend of Zelda. I'm not going to start playing Yu-Gi-Oh! if there was a crossover set. I'm not interested in that.
If Funko Pop makes its next thing that's not Zelda related, I'm not buying Funko Pops. I don't care about Funko Pops. I care about Zelda. That's how people feel about Universes Beyond when they come into Magic: The Gathering with it.
They're printing cards that are sensibly broken to sell the set. Vivi Ornitier, which costs $35 at the cheapest even though they'll probably ban it. We live in a world where a card can excel at a professional tournament and significantly increase its price. But if it does too well, the price tanks because of its inevitable ban.
It's more proof of the design flaw: print cards that inflate the price of the packs so no one can afford it.
People are buying $800 boxes and then flipping them for $1,600 on the open market. But not there's no Black Lotuses in those boxes. Nothing will maintain that value. People will have spent $800 on a box of Spider-Man that aren't even like they're playable in Standard. That doesn't repeat itself over time.
ForceofPhil: Why wouldn't they print more Spider-Man cards to keep the Spider-Man die-hards?
Zac Clark: It costs money to license. They could come back to Spider-Man in five years or something.
ForceofPhil: We go back to Innistrad and to Ravnica. Why wouldn't they work with Tolkien's estate for more The Lord of the Rings?
Zac Clark: I would love that. I would love to see them go back. But they can leverage the success of Universes Beyond to other companies that are desperate to get a financial bump. The Lord of the Rings this much, but you know, Garfield only costs this much. So WotC can pay less and less for IPs they haven't used yet.
Their bottom line is all they care about. If they have to spend more money on something later on, I guarantee WotC will walk away from that. If they are in talks for a second Final Fantasy or a second Lord of the Rings, those IPs might cost more because of their success the first time around.
ForceofPhil: What if, instead of buying an $800 box, everyone who would have done that buys Hasbro stock?
Zac Clark: And then the stock buybacks occur, and Hasbro can still pursue its own initiatives. WotC will reach a point where they achieve this level of success, and that level of success is expected year after year. Eventually that will plateau, and when you plateau, that's failure.
A certain number of them will actually play Magic: The Gathering or something similar. They will buy Magic: The Gathering cards. Then there are people will buy Magic: The Gathering only when their IP of choice is collabing. Those people aren't monoliths. They have several different things they're into.
When Magic does like a Final Fantasy set, that's great. All those Final Fantasy people see Magic for the first time. Let's say they do a Legend of Zelda set. Let's go with that, right? A non-zero number of those people for the Legend of Zelda set saw are also Final Fantasy people.
Anyone they got with Final Fantasy, they already got. If there is another crossover for something else they like, they aren't a new customer anymore.
ForceofPhil: I wonder how much weight is the game being enjoyable?
Zac Clark: You should put a lot into that. Otherwise, what are we doing? Why aren't we selling baseball cards?
ForceofPhil: Well, that's what I mean. As you're saying, it seems like they're not going to print any more Spider-Man, and I'm a Spider-Man person. So like I'm out. But like
Zac Clark: If you only came in for Spider-Man, you'll never be back.
ForceofPhil: I'm just surprised that they didn't explore the public domain first to know how much pay-for IPs would be worth.
Zac Clark: Yeah, look at Legends, which has Cthulhu-like monsters and stuff in them.
ForceofPhil: They didn't print Sherlock Holmes. They didn't print the actual-factual Dracula. They did Dracula as a skin, but not a Dracula set with the Dracula storyline. They put Soron Markov in the Dracula role, but they didn't build a Dracula set and market it as such.
Zac Clark: It's a smart point. Other card games have fed on that. For example, Overpower used to be a DC versus Marvel battle but then started using public domain: John Carter of Mars versus Carson of Venus versus Sherlock Holmes versus Cthulhu versus King Arthur The whole game is public domain heroes. You still get the same effect: "Who would win in a fight: Sherlock Holmes or King Arthur?" The game Sorcery's second set was Arthurian Legends. They took a completely open-source, public-domain project and made it part of their world.
ForceofPhil: Arabian Nights in Magic.
Zac Clark: Arabian Nights! Successful set. I would love, in another episode, to talk about what public domains Magic: The Gathering should explore.
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