Through the Omenpaths’ Unfortunate Situation

Written By: Jay Edwards

With the upcoming Spiderman set, Wizards of the Coast ran into an issue. Disney owns the rights to produce JPEGs with Spiderman on cards, so Magic: Arena would be left out. Now, in yee olden days of… a few years ago, this wouldn’t be an issue since Arena could just not get the set. But since the hivemind of corporate businesspeople running the show decided to make this set Standard-legal, Arena would need to have the set since it’s currently the only thing keeping Standard alive thanks to the last Universes Beyond set. So, how do you make the cards you want to sell people online without getting the Pinkertons called on you? You make 2 sets. Obviously.

Through the Omenpaths is a brilliant set with some amazing art. It gives us a glimpse into various worlds and the different arachnids across the multiverse. I absolutely love it and I’m going to be using it whenever I want to use cards from the Spiderman set, not just because I’m not a Spiderman fan. There are genuinely interesting character designs that are presented in the set (Ur-Spider, Goben and Gleem, Nia to name a few) and it fleshes out the lore of some planes that we might not see for a while. Sadly though, we’re not going to get these in paper and they are going to basically remain digital-only “legally” and most players won’t get to enjoy playing with them.

It’s at this point that I have to ask if it was even worth it for WotC. I’m sure they are going to get a return on the paper set thanks to scalpers and speculators, but was it worth the effort to get something that was never going to eclipse the Final Fantasy set? They have had to effectively create 2 entire sets while paying to license one of them. Yeah sure the text on the cards is the same (mostly), but they had to commission twice as much art while also creating a division between paper and Arena players (can’t wait for the first judge call asking “what’s the name of the paper version of Sarn of the Silken Throne?”) and generally tarnishing their reputation even more. Through the Omenpaths proves that WotC didn’t need to make this an entire set because they are out of ideas as the creative teams clearly knew how to handle the concept.

Now, what’s a ranty old man article without proposing a solution? What I would have suggested is using the license to sell complete sets in Spiderman skins straight from the WotC site. Fans of Spiderman get what they want with their favourite characters on Magic cards and we get the Through the Omenpaths set in paper. It allows for it to be a Standard-legal set without having to worry about a digital/paper split, WotC gets to sell directly to players/scalpers, and the playerbase gets to keep things in-universe. Or, maybe even a new plane that has a lot of spiders even? 

I know that the world of TCGs isn’t as simplistic as I might make it seem, but boy do I wish the game developers at WotC got to make choices and not just follow orders from the C-Suite. Through the Omenpaths shows what that world could be like. Instead, we get “this property is popular, let’s strike while the iron’s hot!”. Or, in the case of Avatar, “let’s strike while the iron is still kinda lukewarm!”.