Transformers cards are coming to Magic: The Gathering

Megatron as a Magic: The Gathering card — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Since the Unicron-sized toy company Hasbro owns both Magic: The Gathering and the Transformers, maybe it's not the strangest thing in the world that the robots in disguise will soon be appearing in Wizards of the Coast's collectible card game—at least from a brand synergy viewpoint. (In fact, there was a convention-exclusive Grimlock Magic card available at HasCon 2017.) During Hasbro's recent PulseCon it was revealed that 15 double-sided cards representing characters like Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Soundwave, Arcee, and Goldbug will be appearing in Magic: The Gathering. They'll be spread throughout booster packs for upcoming expansion The Brothers' War, a retelling of a classic Magic storyline from 1994 that will have its global release on November 18.

On one side the Transformers cards depict characters in their robot forms, and on the other as vehicles or stereos or whatever. Each card will be printed in two art styles, one looking like the 1980s cartoon, and the other resembling the recent Transformers: Shattered Glass comic books, which are set in a kind of mirror universe where the Autobots are the bad guys and the Decepticons are the heroes.

IGN has a preview showing six of the Transformers cards, which feature two new mechanics. There's More Than Meets the Eye, which lets them be cast transformed for a different price, and Living Metal, which means Transformers in vehicle mode don't need to be crewed like regular vehicle-type artifact cards. It notes that these cards will only be legal in the Commander, Legacy, and Vintage formats.

The NME reports that Outright Games is working on a Transformers videogame based on Earthspark, an animated series coming out on Paramount+ in November. Outright previously published Transformers: Battlegrounds, a turn-based squad tactics game that was released on Steam in 2020. The new game is scheduled to come out on PC in 2023.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.