Let’s cut right to the chase. If you’re here for the Worst MTG Moments 2025, you already know what’s sitting on the throne. It’s Magic: The Gathering | Marvel’s Spider-Man, and it’s not close.
2025 wasn’t “all bad.” Magic still had great games, great decks, and plenty of reasons to keep shuffling. But Wizards made a handful of choices this year that didn’t just land weird. They piled extra friction on top of a hobby that already asks you to memorize 30 years of cardboard and a rotating list of rules exceptions.
This list is about those choices. Not player drama. Not your local store. Not the guy who brought stax to casual Commander and then acted surprised when nobody invited him back.
Worst MTG Moments 2025: Spider-Man and the Paper vs Digital Split
The core issue with Spider-Man isn’t that it exists. It’s that it exists in a way that breaks Magic’s usual “same game everywhere” expectation.
Wizards announced that Marvel’s Spider-Man (and future Marvel sets) would not be coming to MTG Arena or Magic Online, and that digital would instead get “Through the Omenpaths” versions that are mechanically identical but have different names and art. On paper, that sounds like a clean patch. In practice, it’s a permanent translation problem.
If you play both paper and digital, you now have homework.
- You need to know two names for the same card.
- You need to convert decklists manually.
- You need to explain to friends why your Arena list doesn’t match your paper list.
- And every time you do any of that, you lose a little bit of the “Magic is one game” feeling.
It’s not one huge disaster in a single moment. It’s a thousand tiny annoyances that never stop.
And that’s before we even get to how Spider-Man got built. According to Wizards’ own design write-up, the set started as a smaller, non-draft product (100 cards, no commons, no draft format) and later became a larger draftable set (188 cards) with a brand-new “Pick-Two Draft” format and full Constructed legality. That’s a massive structural pivot midstream. You can feel it in the product. Not always in a charming “wow, they took risks” way, either.
If you want the simplest summary: Spider-Man didn’t just add cards to Magic. It added translation layers, platform gaps, and a long-term “wait, which version is this?” tax.
That is why it’s the headline for Worst MTG Moments 2025.
Dishonorable Mention: Secret Lair Scarcity and the Queue Experience
Secret Lair has been sliding for a while, but 2025 kept leaning into the same two bad habits:
- “Anything can be a Secret Lair now,” which turns the line into a content sludge pipe.
- Artificial scarcity, which turns buying into a timed event where the main gameplay mechanic is “refresh and pray.”
I’m not even mad about weird crossovers anymore. I’m tired. Secret Lair used to feel like a neat side thing. Now it often feels like Wizards trying to recreate sneaker drops, except the reward is a $40 pile of cardboard you may or may not receive before the next rotation window.
Print to demand was boring, and boring was good.
Number Five: Aetherdrift and the “In-Universe” Set That Felt Like a Crossover
Aetherdrift is officially an in-universe Magic set. It’s also literally pitched as a multiversal race “across three planes,” which is how you get Magic branded Mario Kart energy without technically licensing Mario Kart.
Flavor is subjective, so I won’t tell you you’re wrong if you loved it. But if you wanted Magic to feel like Magic in 2025, Aetherdrift was a rough start to the year. It wasn’t just “we’re doing Vehicles.” It was “we paved over a bunch of cool worldbuilding so we could do a race poster.”
The bigger problem is what this does to the release calendar. When your in-universe sets are chasing gimmicks, your Universes Beyond sets start to feel less like special events and more like the main identity of the game. That’s not great when the game is called Magic: The Gathering and not Magic Presents: Whatever We’re Promoting This Quarter.
Number Four: Source Material Cards and the Screenshot Era
“Source material cards” are reprints that use direct shots from the partner property (screenshots, comic panels, episode stills) instead of commissioning new art that’s made for a Magic card frame.
And yeah, they often look like it.
This isn’t a “kids these days don’t respect art” rant. It’s a readability and craft problem. Magic cards have tight real estate. If the image wasn’t composed for this frame, you get awkward crops, cramped text, and a layout that feels like a rush job.
The part that stings is the vibe of it. Magic built its identity on illustration. When you swap that out for “here’s the screenshot, good luck,” it feels less like a celebration and more like a shortcut.
Wizards has framed Source Material as a feature, and plenty of players enjoy them. But if you’re ranking Worst MTG Moments 2025, it’s hard to ignore how much this pushes Magic toward “brand asset collage” instead of “made-for-Magic art.”
Number Three: Universes Beyond Hype Eating Magic’s Own Preview Season
This year had a steady pattern: hype the next thing early, then hype the next thing even earlier, and eventually you’re previewing something six months out while the current set is still trying to exist.
Wizards has even said they’re experimenting with shorter preview seasons and fewer preview outlets for some sets. That might be fine in a vacuum. But paired with the constant spotlight on big crossover releases, it can make in-universe Magic feel like it’s getting the “also available” treatment.
If you want people to care about Lorwyn, Tarkir, or whatever wild new plane you cooked up, you have to let the community live with it for more than five minutes before the next crossover trailer drops.
Number Two: Standard Got Bigger, Faster, and Meaner
This is the one that affects the most players, even if they never touch a Marvel card.
Standard is already dealing with three-year rotation, and Wizards also reshaped Universes Beyond to be legal across major Constructed formats starting in 2025. The result is a card pool that’s just… a lot. More sets, more interactions, more chances for development misses, and more fatigue for people who want to keep up.
And 2025 gave us the receipts: Wizards issued two major Standard ban announcements in 2025, banning seven cards in June and three more in November.
If you want a deeper breakdown of how the ban timing itself made things worse, this PrintMTG post lays it out clearly: 2025 MTG ban schedule mistake: what Wizards changed
Here’s what Standard felt like for a lot of players this year:
- A deck dominates.
- Everyone knows what’s getting banned.
- Everyone waits anyway because the window is the window.
- Then we repeat the cycle two sets later.
That’s not “fresh and exciting.” That’s churn.
So What Do You Do With All This?
If you’re still playing Magic after 2025, you’ve already learned the secret: the game survives because the core gameplay is still good.
But you can make the surrounding chaos less painful.
- If Standard is volatile, test before you buy. Don’t go all-in on a deck until you’ve played enough games to know you actually like it.
- If paper and digital names don’t match, keep one “translation” decklist you can reference instead of trying to remember everything in your head.
- If you’re using proxies for casual playtesting (especially to keep up with bans and meta swings), be clear about it and keep it ethical. If you need a quick refresher on where proxies are allowed and where they aren’t, start here: Are Proxies Legal in MTG? Understanding Proxy Cards
That’s the real takeaway from Worst MTG Moments 2025. The game is still worth playing. It just didn’t need to be this exhausting.
