As you’re probably aware, Wizards of the Coast is releasing several Universes Beyond sets this year. These are sets that draw on the stories and characters of other intellectual properties. So far this year we’ve already seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Still to come this year are Marvel: Superheroes (releases June 26th), The Hobbit (August 14th), and Star Trek (November 20th).
While releasing sets like this has some serious advantages – like bringing new players into the game. There are also some disadvantages to them. One of the biggest issues revolves around how to reprint cards from these types of sets. After all, they use licenses for IPs that Wizards of the Coast only has access to for a limited amount of time.
The inability to reprint cards from these sets in the future is reminiscent of one of Wizards of the Coast’s oldest policies – The Reserved List.
WHAT’S THE RESERVED LIST?
The Reserved List is a list of Magic cards that Wizards of the Coast has promised to never reprint. This policy was put in place in 1996, and was the result of massive backlash to how much Wizards of the Coast was reprinting cards during the first few years of the game. Chronicles was a heavily distributed reprint set that was the last straw for many collectors.
This Reserved List remained in full force until 2002. Up until that point, even new cards at Rare were added to the list. Since 2002, no new cards have been added to the list, but Wizards of the Coast has honored all cards that were placed on it until then.
REPRINTS AND UNIVERSES BEYOND
Wizards of the Coast has never outright stated that they will never reprint cards from Universes Beyond, so the situation here isn’t identical to The Reserved List. Rather, there are some practical limitations that make it very difficult for Wizards of the Coast to print some cards in these sets.
Intellectual property licensing is typically very strict. Wizards of the Coast has a limited amount of time in which to release sets that use those IPs. Furthermore, the contracts with IPs are usually restricted to only a single set in most cases.
This gets to be particularly difficult especially when a card has a name or text that can only be printed on sets for that specific IP. For example, Wizards of the Coast can’t use the Infinity Stone or Utrom subtypes in a regular Magic set.
WHAT ABOUT UNIVERSES WITHIN?
Wizards of the Coast does have one avenue to reprint these cards – and that’s as “Universes Within” cards. The official name of these reprints is “the SLX program.” These are in-universe functional reprints of UB cards. They have done this with Stranger Things, Street Fighter, The Walking Dead, and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
However, it’s important to note that none of those were full-blown Magic sets. They were just Secret Lairs with a handful of cards. So far, no Universes Within cards have been printed for a card that appears in a set with a full release. And indeed, Mark Rosewater has publicly stated that doing so is completely untenable for business reasons.
In other words, we can’t count on in-universe reprints of any cards that have appeared in sets that had Booster Packs and Commander decks.
So while it may not be entirely impossible for us to get functional reprints of Universes Beyond cards, it’s currently very unlikely. In that way, cards in UB sets that make very blatant use of these IPs feel a whole lot like Reserved List cards. Cards even tend to have a significant increase to their price when they have names or types that are particularly difficult to reprint outside of a UB set.
SETS LIKE THE HOBBIT AND MARVEL CAN HAVE REPRINTS
There is one way for Wizards of the Coast to give us Universes Beyond reprints, though! And that’s through even more Universes Beyond sets that are sets that go back and use different aspects of a particular IP.
For example, it’s very clear that we’re going to see several more Marvel sets, even beyond Marvel Superheroes. After all, they’re ultimately going to give us all 7 of the Infinity Stones, right? There’s also a whole lot of the Marvel universe that still hasn’t been explored – like the X-Men.
For example, we know that Marvel Superheroes is going to have a focus on the Avengers. That means that Wizards of the Coast has a license to use those characters in particular. Spider-Man has been a member of the Avengers at various times, making it possible we could see one of his many incarnations in Spider-Man get reprinted.
We don’t have to speculate about whether or not The Hobbit will have Lord of the Rings reprints, though. It’s already been revealed that it will – we’ll be getting new printings of The One Ring, Sauron, the Dark Lord, and Tom Bombadil in the Commander set.
The reprints probably won’t end there either, as there are a lot of possible ones on the table with various characters, objects, and locations that appear in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. For example, we could get Gandalf the Grey and/or his sword Glamdring, Bilbo’s sword Sting as well as his Mithril Coat, or the hobbit hometown of The Shire.
There are of course some Lord of the Rings cards in really high demand. Perhaps the most notable of these is Orcish Bowmasters. However, that’s the kind of card that has a generic enough name that it might be possible for Wizards of the Coast to reprint it in any of Magic’s settings that have Orcs, so I don’t know that it’s going to take high priority as a reprint.
There are, however, some cards from Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth that are in very high demand and unlikely to get reprinted because of what they depict. These will continue to feel like de facto Reserved List cards.
For example, Last March of the Ents depicts a very specific event in Lord of the Rings – the Ents marching on Isengard. And Ents don’t make an appearance at all in The Hobbit. Neither do the Palantir of Orthanc, the Nazgul, or Lotho.
If these cards do make an appearance, perhaps they’ll do so on a bonus sheet of some kind – but it’s very difficult for these cards to show up in the main set. They are all cards that could really use reprints, and they’re only going to continue to feel like Reserved List cards in the future.
END STEP
What do you think? Does Universes Beyond make it harder to get reprints? What cards do you hope get reprinted in the future? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.
Jacob has been playing Magic for the better part of 24 years, and he especially loves playing Magic’s Limited formats. He also holds a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015, he started his YouTube channel, “Nizzahon Magic,” where he combines his interests with many videos covering Magic’s competitive history. When he’s not playing Magic or making Magic content, he can be found teaching college-level history courses or caring for a menagerie of pets with his wife.