The Gathering Spider-Man Card is Virtually Unbeatable

Magic: The Gathering has been enjoying a very successful streak over the past few months, thanks to the great sales figures of sets like Final Fantasy first and foremost, with in-multiverse releases like Tarkir: Dragonstorm and Edge of Eternities delivering on all fronts for fans and WotC alike. Wizards of the Coast is firing on all cylinders with the Spider-Man previews ahead of the set’s debut on September 26, in just three weeks, and there are already some fan-favorite cards in the mix. While the Spider-Man pointing fingers meme was not received enthusiastically by some Magic: The Gathering and Spidey fans due to its art, there is one card that is already a clear winner, at least in terms of gameplay.

There were some OP cards in MTG‘s Final Fantasy set, and it doesn’t come as a surprise that Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender will follow suit. Spider-Man fans can look forward to the various Spider-personas from the series appearing in the game alongside most of the antagonists, with more prominent ones getting even multiple dedicated cards, such as Green Goblin. Interestingly, one of the most powerful cards to be printed this year is included in the Spider-Man set, and it is aptly called Spider-Sense.

Magic: The Gathering is Adding an OP 1-Mana Counterspell With Spider-Man

Spider-Sense is a 2-CMC instant (1 generic and 1 Blue) that counters a target instant spell, sorcery spell, or triggered ability. This alone is pretty powerful, as the most iconic counterspell in Magic: The Gathering is indeed called Counterspell, and it counters any spell for 2 Blue mana, but doesn’t interact with triggered abilities. Spider-Sense does that at the cost of not being able to counter other types of spells, like creatures, enchantments, artifacts, battles, or planeswalkers. More importantly, however, Spider-Sense has the web-slinging mechanic in MTG‘s Spider-Man set, which allows players to cast it for just 1 Blue mana as long as they return a tapped creature under their control to its owner’s hand.

Why Spider-Man’s Web-Slinging Mechanic May Be a Boon in MTG

This is intended to be an extra cost to pay in order to make Spider-Sense cheaper to cast, which is often the goal with several cards with the web-slinging mechanic in the upcoming set, but in this case, it goes a bit too far. Not only is a 1-mana counterspell that affects instants, sorceries, and triggered abilities incredibly strong, but the web-slinging mechanic may not even be a problem, to begin with. For example, among MTG‘s new revealed Spider-Man cards is Tombstone, Career Criminal, which returns a villain creature from the graveyard to the player’s hand when it enters.

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This means that returning Tombstone to the hand with web-slinging may not be a downside at all if one wants to retrieve a specific villain from the graveyard. Likewise, one could return City Pigeon to hand as part of Spider-Sense’s web-slinging cost, thus creating a Food token. There are many options for this to be great in Magic: The Gathering‘s Spider-Man set, as a lot of its creatures do have ETB (enters the battlefield) effects on them.

More importantly, there are many Commander decks in MTG dedicated to self-bouncing creatures to gain various benefits from it, such as the Simic frog deck with Bloomburrow’s Clement, the Worrywort. This applies to other formats as well, though they are more volatile and depend on the current meta. Still, a 1-mana counterspell with the option to target triggered abilities is incredibly strong on its own, and making its downside a positive simply makes it go to the next level.

Spider-Sense is bound to be an amazing card for MTG across multiple formats and at all levels of play, from Limited drafts to cEDH Commander. Since there are so few 1-mana counterspells in the game, and since most of them either have downsides or limitations to keep them in check, Spider-Sense is in a prime position to become one of the best in its niche.