Gavin Verhey explains the biggest difficulties of adapting Universes Beyond into Magic: The Gathering — from avoiding five-color soup, to ‘Figuring out what Green means’

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been seeing how Reality Fracture will conclude the multiverse-tearing Omenpath saga of Magic: The Gathering ’s story.

Jace’s domination of his Echoverse rings through his presence on seemingly every other card as the Empower Jace mechanic — which brings forth a Planeswalker token of himself, as a sort of simulacrum of the popular Amass mechanic.

But before Jace attempted to break the multiverse, Wizards of the Coast was already dabbling in powers beyond their control with Universes Beyond .

This sees non-native IP break into the Magic: The Gathering game, and it has proven itself both incredibly popular and divisive.

One setting that has managed to unite both sides of the aisle, however, is Middle Earth: the land of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and dark forces attempting to enact Sauron’s corrupting plans on the world.

We recently returned to this setting through The Hobbit set, a return which felt much more like a return to a classic Magic world such as Ravnica, Lorwyn, or Dominaria rather than a return to a UB world like… New York City, which we experienced through both Marvel Super Heroes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after first swinging through with Spider-Man .

Through his YouTube channel Good Morning Magic , Gavin Verhey (Principal Magic Designer at Wizards of the Coast) details the design philosophy and origins of cards from throughout Magic’s history, including its most recent releases.

At Gamescom , I got some time to chat with him, deep diving into Wizards’ approach for The Hobbit — and its approach to Universes Beyond more generally. (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast) A return to a Magic plane normally means the return of mechanics associated with that world.

Case in point, after debuting a variant of Amass with Amass Orcs in its Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle Earth set, another variation appeared with Amass Goblins in The Hobbit — enabling players to assemble a Goblin Army, one of the five armies that battled in the book’s climax.

However we didn’t see the return of The Ring Tempts You, not even as a cameo on a Bilbo or Gollum game piece (a term designers use to denote a mechanic we see on only a couple of cards rather than as a core feature).

Verhey explained the team did look into including it, but ultimately decided against it. (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast / MEE) “The Ring Tempts You was a mechanic that did not play out super great, and was quite complicated, and doesn’t make a lot of sense because the Ring is such a small part of The Hobbit, ” says Verhey.

He explained that it could have fit as a one-off cameo, but “There’s no reminder text on the card for what The Ring Tempts You does, that’s on an entirely different card you have to track.