For everyone except Hasbro stockholders, Magic: The Gathering's crossover era has produced notoriously mixed feelings: On one hand, that Lord of the Rings set was pretty excellent. On the other, there are now six Magic cards of Dwight Schrute from the Office—a truth with a terrible psychic weight.
Magic: The Gathering's next Secret Lair collaboration, however, makes so much intuitive sense that it might as well have been fated since Wizards of the Coast inked its first crossover contract. Magic's premier stable of megafauna artists have taken a crack at Monster Hunter, and the results are as excellent as you'd expect.
Announced earlier today, the Secret Lair: Monster Hunter superdrop will land on December 1, bringing four sets of Magic cards reimagined with Monster Hunter theming in non-foil and foil bundles at costs of up to an inadvisable $560. And considering that MtG's artists have produced some of the coolest dinosaurs and dragons to ever grace bits of cardboard, it should come as no surprise that they've done some excellent adaptive work with Capcom's beloved creature designs.
They've clearly done their homework: Anyone who's brought a bow to a Kushala Daora hunt expecting a normal fight should recognize the hopelessness of the hunter who's having a very bad day on the Kushala Daora's Fury card.
While the spell and hunter-focused subsets have some lovely imagery—there's some real good Yian Garuga content on one of the sorcery cards—the highlights are the two "The Monsters" subsets. Artist Brock Grossman's Rathalos is a fittingly imposing rendition for the series mascot, while illustrator Oxygen's Nergigante art has the World flagship monster in a frothing berserker rage. It's good stuff.
I'm less convinced by some of the pairings between monsters and the Magic creatures they're standing in for: I don't know that Wasitora, Nekoru Queen's ability to spawn other creatures really feels like Nargacuga to me, but "Cat Dragon" probably isn't a creature type that provides a lot of options to work with.
Luckily, I've long since accepted that I'm more interested in Magic's art than actually playing it. It's cheaper that way. Until today, at least.
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