Most television projects pass through development hell. Netflix’s Magic: The Gathering cartoon has spent the best part of seven years in what card players would call the graveyard, and somebody has finally cast the resurrection spell. Netflix, Hasbro Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast have released a sneak peek of Planeswalker, the animated series based on Richard Garfield’s 1993 card game, and it is due on the streamer in 2027. No month yet. Let’s not get greedy.
For the uninitiated (and you know who you are, hiding behind your Warhammer army), a planeswalker is a mage who can hop between the planes of the Magic multiverse. The official blurb promises a fierce clash between these formidable folk, with Chandra Nalaar at the centre of it all: a volatile pyromancer, hunted for her gifts and haunted by her past. She and some of the most legendary planeswalkers must navigate treacherous alliances and battle their inner demons to stop a cataclysmic war. That’s also a fair description of a Friday night at the local games shop once somebody mentions the banned list.
The people steering the ship are encouraging. Terry Matalas and Cindy Appel are the co-showrunners. Matalas ran seasons two and three of Star Trek: Picard and Marvel’s VisionQuest, and Appel wrote on both. Matalas is the man who got the old Next Generation crew back on a bridge and made it feel earned, so he knows a thing or two about making devoted fans with long memories happy. Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for the Disney short Feast, is supervising director and executive producer. Digic is handling the animation. The studio is better known for video game cinematics, including work on Warcraft III: Reforged and Halo.
As for the footage, the sneak peek is mostly concept art and previsualisation, with only a few seconds of what looks like near-finished animation. Those few seconds have already been compared, not unreasonably, to Netflix’s own Arcane: painterly CG with an expressive, hand-touched look. If you’re going to copy someone’s homework, you may as well copy the pupil who got top marks. Ajani Goldmane, the lion-faced warrior, also gets a look in. The video even has a self-aware nod to how long all this has taken, which is either charming or the marketing equivalent of whistling past the graveyard.
And it has taken a while. The series was first announced in 2019, with the Russo brothers, fresh from Avengers: Endgame, as executive producers and a teaser image of Chandra to prove it. Brandon Routh was later cast as the voice of Gideon Jura. Then the Russos left over creative differences, everything went quiet, and in 2024 Routh said he believed the show was no longer happening. Netflix rebooted the project under Matalas later that year, and nobody has yet said whether Routh’s Gideon survived the reshuffle. Meanwhile, Legendary is also making a live-action Magic film with Maya Hawke. Wizards of the Coast are clearly playing more than one card this turn.
“Each one of these cards is a window into this incredible world,” says Matalas. With more than thirty years of cards in print, that’s a lot of windows, and a glazier’s fortune in source material. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll reserve judgement until there’s more than previs to look at. Still, this project has been mulliganed more times than most, so simply turning up with a title and a release year counts as a decent opening hand.
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