After last week’s absolute deluge of Spider-Man spoilers, it seemed likely that the rest would wait until the full preview season started in September. Turns out this isn’t the case at all. In a social media post earlier today, Wizards revealed The Soul Stone, the first of Marvel’s legendary Infinity Stones to come to MTG.
For those well-versed in Marvel, this may seem like a strange move. While Spider-Man is certainly involved in the Infinity War story, he has no strong, specific connection to the Stones themselves. Based on the reveal, however, it looks like the set will just have the one Infinity Stone. The rest will likely form part of a huge, multi-set scavenger hunt as the Marvel project continues. Serious collectors, start your engines.
The Soul Stone MTG
- Mana Value: 1B
- Type: Legendary Artifact – Infinity Stone
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: Indestructible.
Tap: Add B.
6B, Tap, Exile a creature you control: Harness The Soul Stone. (Once harnessed, its ∞ ability is active.)
∞ — At the beginning of your upkeep, return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield.
There’s an awful lot to unpack with The Soul Stone. First of all, it’s a very solid mana rock for the cost. In Commander it’s outclassed by Arcane Signet, the Talismans, and maybe Fellwar Stone, but after that, it’s a fantastic option. In non-green decks, in particular, color-specific ramp like this doesn’t come along very often. Indestructible is also a very relevant upside, since artifact hate and cards like Culling Ritual are very common in Commander.
In Standard, this effect has far less precedent. Ramp is so often restricted to green only that it’s hard to predict how this will perform. Being legendary is a real downside in 60-card Magic, but it’s hard to imagine a two-mana rock like this not seeing play somewhere.
Of course, the rest of The Soul Stone’s text is where things get really interesting. The flavor here is spot-on: you need to pay a hefty cost and make a significant sacrifice. In exchange, you gain access to some serious power. Seven mana is a ton, even in Commander, and exiling a creature is way worse than sacrificing one. You also have to wait until your next upkeep to start using the free reanimation here. For such a steep cost, this could easily have triggered at the start of combat.
Taken as a whole, The Soul Stone is a mixed bag of an MTG card. The second ability is far too clunky for Constructed, and not super-strong in Commander either. That said, it really didn’t need to have an upside at all. A two-mana, color-specific mana rock with Indestructible is more than good enough to see play, in multiple formats.
Collect ‘Em All
“We know it doesn’t make sense to do just one Infinity Stone. People have certain expectations around being able to get them all and doing something cool with them. We will certainly pay off everybody’s expectations in that vein.”
Max McCall, via X
The Soul Stone was revealed in a social media video from Wizards, in which MTG Head Designer Mark Rosewater and Executive Producer Max McCall talked a bit more about the Infinity Stones in general. While they didn’t give much concrete information away, it’s clear we’re getting more of these, likely all six. McCall’s quote above heavily implies as much. As does Rosewater’s pluralization in “They are powerful cards, as the Stones are powerful Stones.”
How exactly the additional Stones will be delivered is a mystery for now. It’s pretty unlikely all six will be printed in Spider-Man, so the current favored theory online is that they’ll be spread out across multiple Marvel sets. Depending on how many of these sets we end up getting, this could be a six-card supercycle.
The fact that we saw a textless version of The Soul Stone revealed today very much supports that theory. While it doesn’t appear to be Serialized at this moment, it might be a similar approach to that of the Singularity Foil Sothera. Wizards has so far only done treatments like this once per set, so maybe we’re getting six Marvel sets in total. Alternatively, some could be printed in Secret Lairs.
However the rest of the Stones are distributed, there’s clearly the basis of a cycle here. Each Stone will likely be an Indestructible two-mana rock of a different color, one being colorless. They’ll all likely have ‘Harness’ abilities too, possibly all as overcosted as The Soul Stone’s, which do something wild once you’ve used them all. A Thanos card that exiles half of your opponent’s cards seems flavorful here. That said, the payoff would honestly need to straight-up say ‘you win the game’ to be worth it based on The Soul Stone.
A Thorny Typing Situation
- Mana Value: 3UR
- Type: Legendary Creature – Time Lord Doctor
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: Allons-y! — Whenever you attack, exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card. Put three time counters on it. If it doesn’t have suspend, it gains suspend.
Timey-Wimey — 7: Time travel three times. Activate only as a sorcery. (For each suspended card you own and each permanent you control with a time counter on it, you may add or remove a time counter. Then do it two more times.)- Stats: 3/5
As exciting as The Soul Stone is, it also dredges up an issue MTG encountered with Universes Beyond in the past. As the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed, The Soul Stone comes with the artifact type ‘Infinity Stone’ attached.
While it’s possible that this is actually two separate types, ‘Infinity’ and ‘Stone,’ this seems very unlikely. Stone could certainly be applied to plenty of artifacts in Magic, but Infinity wouldn’t really work as a general artifact type. Because of this, we’re likely looking at a two-word type here: something that Mark Rosewater has noted strong opposition to in the past.
For the Doctor Who Commander decks, we got our first two-word type in ‘Time Lord.’ Since all other types in MTG are single-word, this created some confusion among players. When asked about it on Blogatog earlier this year, Rosewater noted that “I believe it was a mistake and shouldn’t be repeated.” Despite this, it appears the same potential mistake has been seen again.
Rosewater has spoken several times in the past about the “restrictions” that come with Universes Beyond sets. The use of two-word types like these is just another one for designers and players to deal with. While neither example is a massive deal in isolation, the fact that we’re seeing this again is a bit worrying. Hopefully, no more of Magic’s core design tenets need to be compromised for Universes Beyond in the future.
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