Retrospective: Magic's 2025 Sets Ranked

The year is drawing to a close, and we can't deny that 2025 was definitely a busy year for Magic: The Gathering.

With six major releases, this was the first year that the Universes Beyond series had three expansions, all directly included in Standard, and while Final Fantasy was one of the biggest commercial successes, Marvel's Spider-Man was seen by the community as a failure and one of the worst sets of all time.

Amidst the collaborations, three major Magic sets also came out, all with major competitive and market potential and bringing distinct themes to the narrative and overall aesthetics of the card game, with Edge of Eternities and Tarkir: Dragonstorm being commonly celebrated by players, while Aetherdrift received criticism for its interplanar racing theme.

In this article, we evaluate and rank the Magic releases of 2025, considering their pros and cons to decide which was the best set of the year for the card game.

6 - Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel’s Spider-Man was originally conceived as a “mini-set” in the style of March of the Machine: Aftermath and Assassin’s Creed, but due to the low popularity of those sets, it was reworked and expanded into a complete mainline edition, and this change was felt by the consumer audience.

The Spider-Man universe is very extensive and has brought some iconic competitive cards, such as Spectacular Spider-Man and Superior Spider-Man, which became a staple of Reanimator decks in Standard. However, the problem lies in a dozen factors, especially in how much it insists on the same themes for various cards and brings too many versions of Spider-Man while neglecting other characters like Uncle Ben, who only "shows up" at the bonus sheet reprint of Rest in Peace.

As a bonus, due to contractual issues, Magic does not have the right to use the images and names of Marvel properties on digital platforms, forcing the card game to create its own card collection in a separate set from the collaboration, named Through the Omenpaths, which, in addition to making everything even more confusing for players who need to pay attention to cards with identical text and different names, also created a dangerous precedent for future Universes Beyond releases, and a line of integrity that Magic should preserve above all else was broken.

The result was a very unpopular set, and as mentioned in one of our videos during the year, Marvel’s Spider-Man became known as one of, if not the worst Magic sets in history, with a collective feeling of lazy, repetitive, uninspiring design, demonstrating that not every Universes Beyond set will have the same commercial success if it is not done properly.

5 - Aetherdrift

The first release of the year, Aetherdrift, was a remnant of a design that Magic has used in the last two years and intends to move away from in future expansions: the “hat sets” that take a specific theme and insert Magic characters and elements into them without necessarily creating a coherent aesthetic, as seen before in Murder at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

The "car racing through planes" theme is an interesting way to showcase the technological advancements the Omenpaths brought to the Multiverse, even serving as one of the in-game motivators for renaming Kaladesh to Avishkar, but it stands out too much from the rest of the Magic universe and makes the characters and cards presented in the set seem a a bit too forced.

However, the competitive value of Aetherdrift cannot be denied: Ketramose, the New Dawn became a fundamental piece in various formats and gave resources to Modern Blink decks, enabling a strategy that would later become the core of one of the best competitive archetypes in the format.

Stock Up also gained major competitive relevance and was frequently compared to Dig Through Time in formats like Legacy, where it added a lot of consistency to combo decks, and Monument to Endurance restructured Greasefang, Okiba Boss lists in Pioneer while also establishing its own archetypes in Standard, featuring the main win condition of the list that Seth Manfield used to win the World Championship 31.

4 - Edge of Eternities

Magic's space opera set seemed like another one that would stand out for its theme, but it delivered much more coherence than most recent releases. Edge of Eternities was an excellent blend of impactful cards and visual and narrative aesthetics that combine well with the idea of ​​exploring new layers of the Multiverse (or beyond it), something we haven't done much of in recent years due to constant returns to old planes.

From a competitive standpoint, the set was one of the most impactful of the year. Besides the release of Quantum Riddler, a staple across multiple formats, cards like Ouroboroid and Cosmogrand Zenith gained prominence in Pioneer and Standard, where the release of EOE spearheaded the format's rotation and a brief moment of innovation before the Metagame was resolved by the Izzet Cauldron.

Where Edge of Eternities falters, however, is in its lore. The expansion raises several questions regarding the Multiverse, the Eldrazi, Fomori, and many other elements of Magic lore, but provides few answers, and its story deviates too much from the current arc and chronology of the game, being treated as a standalone tale—and in the end, being a plot without much connection or chronology to the rest of the lore makes the events of EOE and the characters involved in it matter a bit too little right now.

3 - Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender may have been the most impactful set of the year for Standard, perhaps not only for its own merits, but also because it was released shortly after a maintenance of banned and restricted cards aimed at addressing issues that the rotation brought.

The result was a set that, through a coherent design with interactive themes and individually impactful cards, managed to establish several new archetypes in the format: from lists of Badgermole Cub with mana dorks, through Allies and Azorius Tempo, and finally arriving at Izzet Lessons, a standout deck at the World Championship.

Furthermore, Avatar was also exemplary from a game design perspective: cards like Zuko Conflicted exemplify the care taken by the team working on the set to provide the proper narrative representations of the Nickelodeon animation for the card game, creating a sense of nostalgia for longtime fans while presenting, without loose ends, an expansion with a sufficiently high level of combined power for all competitive scenarios.

Its flaw, however, was the absence of Commander decks. When questioned about the lack of this product in the collaboration, Wizards of the Coast justified it by mentioning that the characters develop during the plot and, as they do, gain new colors — a somewhat unreasonable or incoherent explanation given how many distinct versions each character received between the main set and the JumpStart mini-set released alongside them. And just like other Universes Beyond expansions, Commander decks are essential to give fans of that franchise an accessible entry point into Magic's most famous format.

2 - Final Fantasy

My all-time favorite set. The most anticipated set of the year was also, in almost every sense, the most successful Magic expansion of 2025, and in some aspects, in the game's history — Final Fantasy was the best-selling Magic collection of all time and brought the universes of Square Enix's famous anthology game franchise to the card game.

The set offered a little bit of everything: the card designs were very well crafted, largely to be narratively cohesive with the story of the character or moment represented; the power level had its ups and downs, but notable peaks in cards like Vivi Ornitier, now banned from Standard; and unlike Avatar, the set featured the complete line of Commander decks and products like Starter Kits for new players, opening the doors of Magic: The Gathering to a new audience that, due to the already well-established collectible culture among Final Fantasy fans, embraced the expansion.

Final Fantasy became an example of how to make Universes Beyond and improved upon almost everything Magic did with Lord of the Rings, but while it's my all-time favorite set, it becomes impossible to ignore its two biggest flaws: problems involving low product availability and scalping, and the subsequent release of the Chocobo Bundle with exclusive cards that only come out in that product, which leaves the feeling that Wizards of the Coast endorses this type of practice by creating a holiday product that is basically a perfect cash grab for this segment of the audience.

1 - Tarkir: Dragonstorm

Tarkir: Dragonstorm took us back to one of Magic: The Gathering's most iconic planes with the complete package of a set packed with powerful cards, five Commander decks—one for each clan—and the closure of the game's current narrative arc with a cliffhanger that made the long months until the story continues feel like an eternity.

From a competitive standpoint, Dragonstorm brought Cori-Steel Cutter, perhaps the strongest card of the year, to competitive Magic and the main cause of the Standard breakdown before rotation, while also motivating the creation and/or rise of a dozen other powerful archetypes in other formats: Boros Hammer in Pioneer, Izzet Prowess in Modern, and aggressive Izzet variants in Legacy, where it became a staple.

Other contributions included Voice of Victory, which became a staple in Modern and now in Standard, and also cards like Ugin, Eye of the Storms and Nature’s Rhythm, with occasional appearances in different formats.

Despite not having the same sales success as Final Fantasy, Tarkir: Dragonstorm was one of the most commercially successful expansions of the year and has virtually no clear flaws in either design or products — it's an amalgamation of Magic's tradition as a brand, blending a memorable aesthetic for longtime fans while opening up space and making products available for newcomers to experience the game's universe in an accessible way and offering a wide variety of choices in Commander decks.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thank you for reading!