Having spent much of the past 40 years cris-crossing the planes, Magic: The Gathering is now expanding its horizons even further, setting its sights on other, familiar looking, universes. First announced in 2021, Magic the Gathering: Universes Beyond is Wizards of the Coast's strategy to introduce outside intellectual properties to the game, hopefully luring fans from far flung, disparate corners of the fantasy and science-fiction scene into the card game’s fold.
Unofficially starting with The Walking Dead in 2020, Universes Beyond has since expanded to incorporate franchises such as Fortnite, Arcane (League of Legends), Street Fighter and Stranger Things, and last year brought the grim dark Warhammer 40,000 universe to Magic. The collaboration with Games Workshop has so far spawned four prebuilt Commander decks, that spotlight some of the most iconic characters from 40K universe, such as Magnus the Red and Inquisitor Eisenhorn.
‘Working with Games Workshop was great,’ says Max McCall, Principal Product Designer at Wizards of the Coast. ‘Games Workshop is every bit as obsessed as we are with sculpting delight and joy for their fans, and collaborating with them on the Commander decks was a lot of fun.
‘Wizards employ a ton of Warhammer fans, and we hit it off right away—lots of “Hey, here’s our take on this character—what do you think?” “Oh, that’s awesome, you could even go further by emphasising this in the art or that ability word” “Oh, that’s brilliant, we’ll do that for sure!” They were lots of fun to work with.’
Fun as that does sound, when two titans of the tabletop scene like these come together, that also means two, often notoriously hard to please, audiences to contend with. Always a challenge but especially in the case of a setting as vast as Warhammer 40,000’s where it's always hard to make every fan happy, something McCall admits.
‘By far the trickiest thing about bringing Warhammer to Magic was having to pick and choose what we could include in the decks and what we’d have to leave behind. Warhammer’s lore is so rich and detailed that we knew we’d be heartbroken by some of the characters and factions we’d leave out,’ McCall reflects. ‘We went with the Imperium of Man, the forces of Chaos, the Tyranids, and the Necrons, but even within those groups, there were so many cool characters and moments we couldn’t find a card for.’
Despite these limitations, Wizards were still able to reference many of the defining events from Warhammer 40,000's history into the new Magic cards. ‘The folks at Games Workshop were great about helping us find ways to sneak new references onto cards, ‘ explains McCall. ‘Like using the fall of Cadia as the art for Past in Flames. It was super cool to work with folks so reverent of their past.’
From the hundreds of Black Library novels to the vast amounts of art produced over the years, one of the key things that Warhammer 40,000 is known for is the depth of its world building and Wizards were fully aware of the high expectations they had to meet with this project.
