How Magic: The Gathering’s space opera found its voice

After spending 40 minutes on Tarkir: Dragonstorm, the panel of Wizards of the Coast designers at last month’s MagicCon in Chicago still had a few announcements up their sleeves. The preview event had already shown off a handful of new cards and a glimpse of a familiar dragon-centric story, but these panels are never limited to just one Magic: The Gathering expansion. The fans were hungry for more.

That’s when Magic’s head designer and creative figurehead, Mark Rosewater, spoke up: “Magic is going someplace we have never gone to before… to space!” And the crowd went wild. 

Rosewater was referring to one of the game’s upcoming expansions, the fifth set of 2025, Edge of Eternities, officially scheduled to be released Aug. 1. Though Wizards had previously announced the concept for Edge of Eternities during a panel at its last MagicCon in Las Vegas, the initial reception to the news was a bit subdued, for a couple reasons. 

For one, the initial announcement lasted only a few minutes and had just a few pieces of art to convey the creative direction of the set. But perhaps more notably, the initial Edge of Eternities reveal arrived minutes after the controversial and game-changing announcement of Magic’s increase in Universes Beyond sets, including their entry into the game’s flagship competitive formats.  

Realistically, revealing cards or stories from Edge of Eternities probably would have felt premature at the Chicago panel. Not only because the set doesn’t arrive until August, but because there are two other expansions on the docket scheduled to come out first — Dragonstorm: Tarkir in April and the Final Fantasy crossover in June. So instead of cards, the Wizards team turned to its next-most-creative asset to essentially reintroduce their space odyssey to an audience primed for more of Magic’s own brand of world-building. 

According to Blake Rasmussen, Magic’s communications director and the panel’s emcee, the Chicago event showcased more art from an unreleased set than has ever been revealed before. 

“Magic has stretched what fantasy can be, where fantasy can go, what other genres can we join together with,” Rosewater told the crowd. “We’ve been talking about going to space for a long time […] and the idea was could we build what we’re calling a space fantasy set. 

“Not just going to space and ignoring what Magic is,” he added. “Could we do a space adventure that both feels like the genre of space odyssey, but also feels like Magic?”

In an era of Magic where the game’s 30 years of storytelling and character development are now meant to coexist with other fandoms, including Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, and Fallout, properly conveying the Magic of Edge of Eternities emerged as the most important aspect to promoting the expansion. 

“I have a blog where people write to me every day, and one of the things people have been saying is that one of the things they love about Magic is our world-building, and that some of the last year we’ve been doing things that are a little trope-ier, a little less deep in the world-building,” Rosewater shared with the audience. “We invented an entire world. An entire galaxy. This isn’t just like a city. This is planets. It’s a giant scope. This is, I think, what people love about Magic. It’s a real deep, involved, lovingly built world.” 

And one of the central facets of designing the world and story behind Edge of Eternities turned out to be how some of Magic’s familiar, if not iconic, creature types would appear in such a novel setting.    

“It’s not just about hard science. It’s about knights in space, and it’s about pirates, and it’s about miners,” said Sarah Wassell, one of the other panelists sitting alongside Rosewater in Chicago. “The alien races are really fun because we all know science fiction. One of the cool things about it is how things are unexpected and there’s strange creatures.”

“For example, what does a space angel look like?” Rosewater chimed in. “We had a lot of fun figuring that out.”

Among the revisited creature types set to appear in the expansion is Kavu, a mutant lizard that had been previously considered native and exclusive to Magic’s homeworld of Dominaria. 

“We made a space race of Kavu,” Rosewater revealed. 

Following the preview panel, Rosewater and a couple of his colleagues took questions from press and content creators at a private Q&A. And it was here that he discussed how the success of 2022’s Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, Magic’s first science fiction set, helped pave the way for Edge of Eternities. 

“One of the things that we did with Kamigawa was we were experimenting a little bit, and we pushed a little more technology than we ever had. And that set went over like gangbusters. People really loved it,” Rosewater explained. “We were very, very empowered by the success of Neon Dynasty to push a little bit more in that direction.”

However, the use of more imaginative technology, whether or not it’s through the Magic filter, isn’t enough to build an entire expansion for the card game. And that’s where the real nature of player feedback informed Rosewater and his team what they had to create from the ground up for Edge of Eternities to capture people’s imaginations. 

“We are very careful to listen to the audience. We put stuff out and they give us feedback,” Rosewater said in the Q&A. “And there’s a very strong piece of feedback, which is world-building is really important to the audience.

“We wanted to show [the audience] we did this with great care, and it’s not just random,” he added. “It’s not how anybody would do space. It’s how we would do space.”

Players will have to wait another six months before the card game finally takes to the stars. And though a couple sets arrive before Edge of Eternities, if the mood in Chicago was any indication, fans can’t wait to blast off.