One Broken Vehicle, One Dead Common: Marvel Super Heroes Across Ten Formats
Eleven days after release, Marvel Super Heroes has put a Commander-deck Vehicle into 18% of the Vintage corpus, gotten a 1997 common banned in Pauper, and left one format untouched forever. We ran all ten formats through our own tournament data — nearly 8,400 scraped lists plus 7,925 cEDH decks — to sort the real damage from the preview-season hype.
As of July 7, 2026. Marvel Super Heroes has been legal for eleven days, and it has already banned a card from 1997, put a Commander-deck Vehicle into a fifth of the Vintage field, and — in one format — done absolutely nothing at all, forever, by rule. That spread is the story. Ask "is the new Marvel set strong?" and you'll get ten different answers depending on which tables you play at, so we pulled our own tournament corpus — nearly 8,400 scraped 1v1 lists across eight constructed formats, plus 7,925 cEDH lists, June 7 to July 7 — and checked, format by format, where the set actually landed. Spoiler: the most format-warping card in the release isn't even legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern.
One methodological note before the tour, because the set is eleven days old and every number below covers a thirty-day window: the set was only legal for the last ~11 days of everything we measured. Every presence figure you're about to read understates the real adoption rate. When a card shows up in 18% of a month's worth of decklists after existing for a third of that month, the post-release rate is far scarier.
The damage report at a glance
Shares below are decklist-appearance shares of our scraped tournament lists (MTGO Challenges and Leagues plus MTGTop8-hosted paper events) — not field share, not performance-weighted metagame share, and not match win rate, which we don't track.
| Format | Our sample (1 month) | Most-played new card | Verdict | |---|---|---|---| | Vintage | 446 lists | The Fantasticar — 82 lists (18.4%) | Warped. Restriction watch is real. | | Legacy | 959 lists | The Fantasticar — 111 lists (11.6%) | Adopted by the format's #1 deck. | | Pauper | 2,286 lists | Hawkeye's Bow — 77 lists (3.4%) | Combo found, combo killed — in three days. | | Standard | 1,097 lists | Jennifer Walters // The Sensational She-Hulk — 106 lists (9.7%) | Role-players everywhere, no new archetype. | | Pioneer | 884 lists | Jennifer Walters — 26 lists (2.9%) | Modest, and the hype cards are missing. | | Modern | 2,007 lists | Hex Magic — 65 lists (3.2%) | One real pickup (Storm), several fringes. | | cEDH | 7,925 lists | Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu — 407 lists (5.1%) | Two instant staples, no format-breaker. | | Duel Commander | 319 lists | The Wondrous Wasp — 18 lists (5.6%) | Quiet adoption; the Vehicle looms. | | Casual Commander | (EDHREC, external) | Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor — 12,560 decks | The set's true home. | | Premodern | 399 lists | — | Zero cards. Zero, forever. |
Frank Karsten's Metagame Mentor on magic.gg (July 2) called the set one that "largely strengthened existing archetypes without creating entirely new ones," with efficient role-players as the biggest winners. Our data agrees with him in six formats — and tells a much less polite story in the other four.
Vintage: the Fantasticar ate the Workshop room
Start with the exact text, because everything follows from it. The Fantasticar is a three-mana legendary artifact Vehicle, a 4/4 with flying, and it never needs a crew: "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, you may have The Fantasticar become an artifact creature until end of turn. Whenever you cast your fourth noncreature spell each turn, you may sacrifice The Fantasticar. If you do, create four 4/4 colorless Construct artifact creature tokens with flying and haste." Four spells in a turn — and in Vintage, Force of Will pitched for free is a noncreature spell — converts one Vehicle into sixteen flying, hasty power. Wizards' own June 29 B&R announcement spelled out the problem in plain English: it's "immediately castable off of Mishra's Workshop's mana" and "has the potential to attack for 16 damage out of nowhere on very early turns."
Our corpus says the adoption was instant. 82 of 446 Vintage lists in the last month — 18.4% — play The Fantasticar, and remember, it existed for only a third of that window. The shell is the deck our classifier labels Fleshraker MUD (the same deck older labels call Raker Shops): the two casing-split labels merge to 71 lists, 18.0% of the classified corpus, the single most-played deck in the format. Count the whole Mishra's Workshop family — we verified that the Golos MUD and Coveted Jewel lists all run Workshop too — and Workshop decks are 124 of 395 classified lists, 31.4% of the month's Vintage corpus.
Two honest caveats, because this is where the story usually gets inflated. First, the fireworks are concentrated: the Fleshraker lists run the full four copies, but the Golos MUD and Coveted Jewel lists we checked play Workshop without the car — "every Shops variant is a Fantasticar deck" isn't true in our data. Second, the famous week-one numbers — a ~60% non-mirror win rate and multiple day-one trophies, per MTGGoldfish's Vintage 101 — come from release-week events that are mostly not in our scrape; in the July 3–4 Challenges we did ingest, Fleshraker's best finish was #13. Most-played is a fact. Dominant-and-unbeatable is, so far, a rumor from a week we can't audit. Wizards left the card alone on June 29 while admitting it gets "extra scrutiny internally" and saying they won't hesitate if it becomes a problem — which is corporate for we know, we're watching. If you're jamming Vintage before August 10 (the next B&R), sideboard Consign to Memory and Mindbreak Trap and shave your creature removal that can't hit an artifact.
Legacy: the format's best deck said "yes, please"
The raw research on this set frames Legacy Fantasticar as a Doomsday-and-Storm curiosity. Our numbers say it went mainstream: 111 of 959 Legacy lists (11.6%) play it — more lists than in Vintage — and the adopters include the format's #1 archetype, Reanimator, at 9.3% of the classified corpus, whose top finishers jam the full playset as a graveyard-hate-proof plan B. The Doomsday archetype (3.2%) is where it's flashiest, though: chain Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal and cantrips and the fourth noncreature spell of the turn ships sixteen power into play out of a pile that was supposedly all about drawing Thassa's Oracle. Here's the July 4 Osaka tournament winner doing exactly that — four copies, first place:
The quieter Legacy story is Loki, God of Mischief — a 2/1 that draws a card, once each turn, whenever a player or permanent becomes the target of an ability you control. Thirteen Legacy lists so far. Any fetchland-adjacent activated ability, any Relic of Progenitus tick, and Loki pays you off; his honest ceiling is that a 2/1 dies to everything, Orcish Bowmasters very much included. The Merfolk package — Namor the Sub-Mariner plus Attuma, Atlantean Warlord — is real but fringe in our data (Namor: 2 Legacy lists). The mechanical hook holds up, though: Namor's tokens trigger on any noncreature spell with blue mana symbols in its mana cost, so a pitched Force of Will still makes two Merfolk, and Attuma is a Merfolk lord that draws you a card whenever one or more of your Merfolk attack a player. And no, the June 29 Legacy ban had nothing to do with Marvel — that was Candelabra of Tawnos, aimed at Tron.
Pauper: a 1997 common died so a Marvel common could live
The fastest, cleanest story of the release. Hawkeye's Bow is a one-mana red Equipment: +1/+0, reach, "Whenever equipped creature becomes tapped, it deals 1 damage to each opponent," equip . Seeker of Skybreak is a Tempest-era 2/1 Elf reading ": Untap target creature" — no "another," so it happily targets itself. Bow on Seeker: tap to untap yourself, ping on every tap, repeat until everyone without reach-based life insurance is dead. Unassisted that's a turn-three kill; a Lotus Petal makes it turn two. The shell that ran it was Naya Gates — here's a pre-ban list with the full four-and-four:
The Pauper Format Panel declined to pre-ban, watched one week of results, and on June 29 — three days after paper release — banned Seeker of Skybreak, keeping the Bow legal. Gavin Verhey's reasoning: unrestricted tap-to-untap-itself is an effect modern design simply doesn't print anymore, and future sets would keep colliding with it. Banning the 1997 half kills this combo and every future one. The Bow, meanwhile, is genuinely fine — it's in 77 of our 2,286 Pauper lists (3.4%) as fair reach-plus-drip damage. One label-trap for anyone reading tracker data: our classifier's "Bow Gates" archetype (2.1%) contains, in every list we opened, neither combo piece — the name outlived the cards. Check contents, not labels.
Standard: role-players, everywhere, and one genuinely new deck
Standard got the healthy version of the Marvel treatment. Our top ten new-to-Standard cards by deck count (of 1,097 scraped lists):
| Card | Lists | Share | |---|---|---| | Jennifer Walters // The Sensational She-Hulk | 106 | 9.7% | | Avengers Disassembled | 44 | 4.0% | | Hidden Lair | 29 | 2.6% | | M.O.D.O.K. | 27 | 2.5% | | Namor the Sub-Mariner | 19 | 1.7% | | Thor, God of Thunder | 14 | 1.3% | | Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu | 10 | 0.9% | | The Mind Stone | 9 | 0.8% | | The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl | 9 | 0.8% | | Gleaming Bastion | 8 | 0.7% |
Jennifer Walters is the headline and deserves it. Two mana, 2/3, "Your opponents can't cast spells during your turn" — a static that shuts off instant-speed interaction during your alpha strike — with a late-game transform into a 6/6 reach-trample She-Hulk that redirects damage. She anchors the deck magic.gg calls "Selesnya Offense"; our classifier splits the same deck across two labels ("Selesnya Nature's Rhythm" + "Selesnya Aggro") that merge to 19.6% of our classified corpus — 188 lists, statistically neck-and-neck with Izzet Prowess's 17.9% for best deck in the format. The July 6 Challenge winner is that deck, Walters in the 75:
Namor remains the Izzet pickup — his Merfolk-per-blue-pip trigger turns a cantrip chain into a board — and M.O.D.O.K. (flying, lifelink, a pay-3-life connive, and a static −1/−1 to opposing creatures) plus the Hidden Lair land slot into the Superior Doomsday control shell. Avengers Disassembled is the format's new safety valve: "choose one or both" — 3 damage to each creature, and/or destroy target land (its controller may fetch a tapped basic) — which per magic.gg's copy counts lives almost entirely in sideboards. And the unglamorous winner: the five allied rare lands — Gleaming Bastion, Hidden Lair, Dark Fortress, Training Compound, Gathering Place — which always tap for and give both their colors as long as they entered this turn or you control a basic land. Two-color decks will play these for years. The June 29 B&R changed nothing in Standard, and nothing here argues it should have.
Pioneer: the hype cards didn't show up
Pioneer is where preview-season projection meets our corpus and loses. Jennifer Walters leads at 26 of 884 lists (2.9%) — the Collected-Company-adjacent shells want her for the same reason Voice of Victory sees play, and she's arguably the better card there since the same static sits on a body that blocks and later becomes a 6/6. M.O.D.O.K. at 21 lists (2.4%) is the pickup nobody wrote articles about. After that it thins fast: Avengers Disassembled in 8, Speedball, New Warrior in 7 — a card the raw research placed in "Boros Heroic," which is a neat trick for a hybrid blue-red card; validate your color identities, folks — and Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu in 5.
The reality checks: Super-Soldier Serum, pitched as the new Hammer Time engine (its attack trigger attaches any number of target Equipment you control — Colossus Hammer math gets silly), has exactly one Pioneer list. Bruce Banner // The Incredible Hulk has two. And on Banner: the front face is a one-mana 1/1 with ", : Draw X cards" — with Intruder Alarm that's a genuine draw engine, since every creature entering untaps him, but it is not the "clean infinite with Intruder Alarm or Kiki-Jiki" of preview lore. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker copies target nonlegendary creature; Banner is legendary. That line was never real. The touted build-arounds — Fin Fang Foom, The Vision, Construct a Cosmic Cube, King T'Challa // Black Panther, Hope Enduring, Tigra, Feline Fury — have zero Pioneer lists between them in our corpus. Give brews time, but as of today Pioneer took the smallest constructed hit of the non-frozen formats.
Modern: one real pickup, one sleeper, several corrections
The real pickup is Hex Magic: 65 of 2,007 Modern lists (3.2%) in a format where Ruby Storm counts 74 — you can guess the overlap. It's a Sorcery — Arcane: exile your hand, draw that many, and keep playing the exiled cards until the end of your next turn. That's a refill that banks your unspent rituals instead of wheeling them away (the "half a Memory Jar" framing is fair), and the Arcane type is not flavor text — Desperate Ritual splices onto it.
The sleeper our data flagged that the preview cycle ignored: The Ten Rings, an eight-mana legendary artifact — maximum hand size ten, refill to ten at your end step — in 28 Modern lists. Big-mana decks apparently wanted a colorless engine that refills the whole hand every turn, no questions asked. Avengers Disassembled (39 Modern lists) backs Boros Ponza (62 lists, 3.4%) as sweeper-plus-Stone-Rain in one card. Loki, God of Mischief shows up in 24 lists, fed by anything that activates targeting abilities every turn — the Esper Ketramose builds with Relic of Progenitus are the documented home, per content coverage. And the corrections file: The Wondrous Wasp — the flash flyer whose Wasp's Sting taps a creature and strips its abilities for as long as the Wasp sticks around, the budget cousin of Dress Down tricks like a Death's Shadow locked at 13/13 no matter your life total, or a blanked Urza's Saga Construct — sits at two Modern lists. Two. Preview-season "flexible role-player," meet sample size. Super-Soldier Serum (4 lists) and Namor the Sub-Mariner (8) round out the fringe.
cEDH: two staples on arrival, and the monster stayed home
The competitive-Commander numbers are the cleanest adoption curve in the whole release. Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu is in 407 of 7,925 cEDH lists — 5.1% — after eleven days. He's a two-mana green 2/2 that lets you activate your creatures' abilities as though they had haste, and taps himself for two mana of one color that only feeds creature activations. Every dork wakes up a turn early, he powers his own team, and Green Sun's Zenith finds him on demand. (He's the Thousand-Year Elixir comparison from the set reviews — minus the deathtouch-lifelink the reviews invented; the card has neither.) Jennifer Walters // The Sensational She-Hulk is second at 252 lists (3.2%) — "opponents can't cast spells during your turn" is exactly the cover a combo turn wants, and her only real crime is the green-white identity that locks her out of the Blue Farm shells.
Behind them: Hex Magic in 114 lists as the red "this is the turn" refill, and Crystal, Inhuman Princess in 70 — a WURG flying dork that pings each opponent for X on every noncreature cast, where X is the spell's color count, which is why brewers are pointing Isochron Scepter-plus-Dramatic Reversal loops at her. The counterweights: Immortus, Master of Eternity, the set review darling (his once-only Power-up is a Timetwister for everyone, stapled to a mana ability that scales with cards drawn this turn), has two cEDH lists. And the Vintage monster? The Fantasticar appears in exactly 4 of 7,925 cEDH decks. Multiplayer politics don't care about sixteen power aimed at one of three opponents.
Duel Commander: the Wasp's actual home
Here's the one that made us grin: The Wondrous Wasp, sold as a Modern role-player, is the top MSH card in Duel Commander — 18 of 319 lists, 5.6%. A flash flyer that neutralizes a commander's abilities for as long as it survives is a very different card in a singleton format where the commander is the deck. The Fantasticar is second at 13 lists (4.1%); the dedicated artifact-shell version that community reviews call polarizing and ban-watch material is real but, in our scrape, not yet dominant — and we can't quote you a DC metagame share at all, because no clean public corpus for it exists (that's an honesty note, not a shrug). The results column obliges anyway: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. took #4 at the Watermelon Champion Cup in Beijing on July 4 — a one-mana 2/1 whose once-only WUBRG Power-up digs seven cards deep and deploys a Hero, Equipment, or Vehicle.
The corrective: Black Widow, Super Spy, the review-circuit pick for most promising DC card (a menace 2/1 that, on connecting, makes the defending player exile off the top of their own library until a nonland card shows — you then grow her or get to cast that card), has zero lists in our DC corpus. Projection is fine; just label it. Same shelf: Hawkeye, Master Marksman (a tap-triggered modal archer read as a "worse Inti, Seneschal of the Sun") and Vision Quest — both at zero so far.
Casual Commander: where the set actually lives
DeckCortex doesn't scrape a casual corpus, so this section runs on EDHREC's numbers, which are external, live, and drift daily — treat them as adoption signal, not gospel. With that flag up: the raw research's top-ten list of MSH commanders checks out almost to the deck (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 4,108; Bruce Banner // The Incredible Hulk 4,026; Tony Stark // The Invincible Iron Man 3,225; Ultron, Artificial Malevolence 2,404; Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. 2,336; Namor the Sub-Mariner 2,106; The Serpent Society 1,971; The Astonishing Ant-Man 1,739; Baron Helmut Zemo 1,299; Thanos, the Mad Titan 1,289). But it missed the actual #1 of the release: Doctor Doom, King of Latveria, from the Commander decks, at 4,143 EDHREC decks — ahead of Squirrel Girl herself. Doom beats the heroes. Of course he does.
The most-adopted cards tell a different story than the commanders: Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor (12,560 EDHREC decks — 4 damage to a creature on entry, a damage doubler for its bearer, and "Equip worthy " for red and/or white legendary non-Villains), The Mind Stone (11,682), The Ten Rings (10,990), Ultron (10,063), and Cosmic Cube (9,365). One rules correction worth your money: The Mind Stone's isn't a per-use flicker cost — it Harnesses the Stone once, and from then on the ∞ ability blinks a permanent every end step for free. That once-then-forever design is why an indestructible white mana rock is the set's most expensive card at $71 Scryfall paper (the Fantasticar sits at ~$35 and climbing). The four precons slot in as Captain America, Team Leader ( Avengers Assemble), T'Challa, the Black Panther ( Wakanda Forever), Doctor Doom, King of Latveria ( Doom Prevails), and The Fantastic Four ( — yes, WURG, The Thing is green). And the brewer bait is deep: The Scarlet Witch discounts your four-plus-mana instants and sorceries by her power, Thanos, the Mad Titan is a three-mana Mardu-cost 4/4 whose WUBRG-plus- Power-up wraths every other creature of odd or even mana value (your pick, zero is even), Molecule Man gives every nonland card in your hand miracle , Baron Helmut Zemo wants fifteen black pips in your graveyard, and Scientist Supreme of A.I.M. copies one of your artifact-source abilities for 2 life, once each of your turns. Casual Commander is what this set is for, and eleven days of adoption data already shows it.
Premodern: the control group
Our Premodern corpus logged 399 lists this month, and the number of Marvel Super Heroes cards in them is zero — the pool is frozen at 1995–2003 and bars Universes Beyond by rule, so zero it stays. Every "does the Marvel set ruin Magic?" debate has a control group, and it plays Scourge-era cards in peace.
Bottom line
The set is exactly as strong as the format you bring it to. Vintage and Legacy players have a genuine problem child: The Fantasticar is the most-played deck's engine in one format and the best deck's plan B in the other, Wizards has said out loud that it's under extra scrutiny, and August 10 is the date to circle. Pauper already got its surgery — the Bow is fair, the Seeker is gone, and the format moved on within a week. Standard players should be testing the Selesnya Walters deck (it's tied for best deck in our data) or the cheap allied duals, not waiting for a Marvel combo that doesn't exist. Pioneer and Modern owe the set little beyond Hex Magic in Storm and a stack of sideboard cards. cEDH picked up two immediate staples in Shang-Chi and Jennifer Walters, and casual Commander got the deepest legendary buffet ever printed for it, with Doctor Doom quietly ahead of every hero on EDHREC. And if all of this exhausts you — Premodern is right there, untouched by design.
Data: DeckCortex scraped tournament corpora, one-month window 2026-06-07 → 2026-07-07 (prod): Standard n=1,097, Modern n=2,007, Pioneer n=884, Legacy n=959, Vintage n=446, Pauper n=2,286, cEDH n=7,925, Duel Commander n=319, Premodern n=399 snapshots for card-presence lookups; archetype shares use the classified subsets (Standard n=960, Modern n=1,812, Pioneer n=777, Legacy n=884, Vintage n=395, Pauper n=2,194). Marvel Super Heroes was legal for only ~11 days of that window (paper release June 26; MTGO June 23 per coverage), so presence figures understate post-release adoption. All shares are decklist-appearance shares, not field share and not match win rate (we don't track match results); label merges (Fleshraker MUD casing split, the two Selesnya labels) were verified by opening the underlying lists, and Workshop-family membership was verified per label. Duel Commander has no archetype-share corpus — presence and event results only. Casual Commander figures are EDHREC's (external, fetched July 7, 2026 — live counts that drift); magic.gg (Frank Karsten) and MTGGoldfish figures are quoted with attribution and use different metrics than ours. B&R facts (Candelabra of Tawnos and Seeker of Skybreak banned June 29, 2026; Fantasticar scrutiny language; next announcement August 10, 2026) were re-verified against the official announcement on July 7, 2026. Card prices are Scryfall paper aggregates, not a live TCGPlayer feed. Embedded decklists resolve via numeric snapshot ids verified July 7, 2026 (ids can change on re-scrape). Every card named was validated against live Oracle text before publication.