Gavin Verhey, the Principal Designer of Magic: The Gathering at the studio Wizards of the Coast, is no stranger to Australia. Recently, the American game designer visited our shores again for a jaunt promoting MTG‘s Outlaws of Thunder Junction release. At PAX Aus 2025, he returned for a core reason, the people.
Speaking to ScreenHub, Verhey described a continued excitement about getting to know the players of Magic: The Gathering – to learn more about them, their decks and what makes them tick. It’s these conversations that help shape his role in designing the game.
Magic: The Gathering’s Gavin Hervey – quick links
Gavin Verhey on visiting Australia again
‘I travel a lot,’ Verhey told ScreenHub. ‘I’ve been all around the world, so many places. The thing that always captures me, with any location, is the people. The people are the key, to me, of why I want to come back somewhere. I can go see the sites, that’s great. I can eat the food, that’s wonderful. But the people are what keep me coming back – and the people I meet in Australia are some of my favourites.’
Meeting Magic: The Gathering players in Australia, Verhey made friends with ‘people who are both caring and funny’ but also ‘have a good sense of art, and gaming,’ he said. In the days prior to our interview, he ‘learned a lot about bin chickens,’ but also about the differences between Australian Magic players and those in the United States.
‘Living in the States, living in Washington, working at Wizards [of the Coast], I think it’s really easy for a lot of us to get very centred on the world around us,’ he said. ‘You go to Australia. It’s a huge, huge place with tons of Magic: The Gathering players, and they’re really important too. So, I listen to the needs of people out here and make sure they can get what they need. Doing stuff that’s resonant with this audience, I think is really worth doing.’
Verhey teased that he’d love to do an Australian-themed Secret Lair drop at some point, to highlight the community and give back to the Magic: The Gathering players that have made him feel so welcome. While it shouldn’t be taken as a formal tease, it’s certainly a compelling concept.
Learning more about identity through custom MTG decks
To get closer to his fellow players and learn more about those he visits, Verhey described a particular practice he employed at PAX Aus 2025: bringing only two of his own decks with him (including one comprised of cards he personally designed) and mostly borrowing decks from other people.
‘It’s great for a few reasons,’ he explained. ‘One, it’s great for me, because I can see cards I might not normally see people play with. I get to try out new cards, or new strategies that people are using. It also helps to equalise the table … and three, it’s just a really joyful thing for folks [to see their decks played].’
Everything about a Magic: The Gathering deck is personal – from the theme and mechanics to the characters chosen. My current favourite deck stars Sonic the Hedgehog and his pals, all from a recent Secret Lair drop, and speaks to my love for the franchise. It’s mostly equipment and my goal is to put a hammer on Sonic the Hedgehog and then bonk everyone until their life total depletes. I also have a deck inspired by The Mummy (2017) and previously had a themed deck inspired by the movies of Tom Cruise (Phyrexians, Zombies, Samurai and Mercenaries).
You can learn a lot about a person by which decks they choose. With the arrival of a raft of new Universes Beyond releases, there are so many more chances for people to bring their personal favourites into their Magic: The Gathering matches.
Over PAX Aus 2025 weekend in Melbourne, I spent time playing against Aragorn and Tom Bombadil decks, from the Lord of the Rings UB crossover. I also heard whispers about a Kraven the Hunter deck, from the Spider-Man set and saw a few Marvel-themed Secret Lair cards running around.
On the morning of my interview with Gavin Verhey, yet another challenger entered the arena: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As announced, these heroes are coming to Magic: The Gathering in a major Universes Beyond crossover, including a Commander Deck, bundles and more. It’s all part of a new partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Paramount, which will also define new Universes Beyond sets for Avatar: The Last Airbender (this year) and Star Trek (next year).
How the MTG x Universes Beyond crossovers are designed
‘We’re working with Paramount on a number of upcoming things,’ Verhey explained. ‘Avatar and Star Trek – I led the Star Trek set for next year, which I’m very, very excited about.’
While Verhey ‘didn’t personally work on [MTG x TMNT] as much,’ he described an excitement for what’s to come, and that the Magic: The Gathering universe is opening up new possibilities to indulge players and their personal fandoms. Not only is it gratifying for players to be able to build more personal Magic: The Gathering decks, the Universes Beyond sets also provide a wonderful challenge for the game’s designers.
‘It was so interesting for the team to try and bring the world of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to life, trying to figure out which characters to use, how they wanted to use them, what eras they wanted to draw from – because obviously, there’s so much history with that franchise,’ Verhey said.
The team faced similar challenges when building out the Final Fantasy set, picking and choosing which characters to represent and how best to represent them – mechanically, visually and beyond. For Verhey, the task carried an additional challenge. As a personal fan of Final Fantasy, he wanted to represent his childhood-favourite games with real finesse and care.
‘The first game I was ever given was Final Fantasy for the NES,’ Verhey said. ‘I grew up playing Final Fantasy. [The games] crafted my childhood in many ways. I played through them and the stories were so rich, and the characters were so amazing, that man, it really stuck with me.’
Magic: The Gathering was another favourite game growing up, so ‘being able to do them side-by-side was huge’ for Verhey. ‘It was like a dream come true. I got to bring my childhood to life, and capture this franchise with so many amazing characters and stories.’
The biggest challenge, in wielding this fandom for good, was whittling down the games to their core essences to figure out which characters made it in, and how. ‘There are a lot of cool characters that were left on the cutting room floor, and fans were like, oh man, I wish we had that. We tried to cram people in wherever possible.’
Once characters were chosen, it was a matter of breaking them down into the world of Magic: The Gathering to fit canon mechanics and colours. Given the example of Vincent Valentine – hands-down the coolest character in Final Fantasy – Verhey explained that sometimes, what’s best for adapting a character is analysing story, motive and emotion and perhaps ‘bending’ the world of Magic to suit.
‘Final Fantasy – and honestly any Universes Beyond set – is really hard for colours because a well-written character can be any colour, right?’ Verhey said. ‘There are heroes that’ve done things that’ll make them [more akin] to black [mana]. There are villains that’ve done things that are for the good of their people.’
He added, ‘What we did is something called the snapshot moment. We pioneered this for Final Fantasy – you look at a character’s arc and you pick a moment in time from it, and you’re like, this is the moment we’re going to capture on this card. Whatever they were in that moment, is what we’re going to feature.’
You can see this process in the many Sephiroth cards of Magic: The Gathering‘s Final Fantasy set. He’s mostly mono black, but there is a red/white Sephiroth in the set to represent his anger at finding out he’s a clone. There are also two Vincent Valentine cards, with each focused on a different snapshot and a different aspect of his personality.
‘He might be on the hero’s party but he’s certainly very good at killing people. So he’s got his own ambitions. So, black and red is where we put him,’ Verhey said. ‘With Universes Beyond, we have to sometimes bend to what’s right for the character.’
In the case of Vincent Valentine, shapeshifters are typically (but not always) blue. When designing Vincent’s cards, it was about best-serving the character’s vibe, even if it did mean bending the established nature of Magic: The Gathering‘s shapeshifters.
‘When I think of Vincent, yes, he shape shifts into a different form – an aggressive form. But he doesn’t copy. He’s not like a clone. It’s a bit of a different vibe, so we were like, well, we’ll do it a different way.’
Looking to the future of Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond
Speaking ScreenHub, Verhey expressed a great excitement about what’s to come after an incredibly successful few months for Magic: The Gathering. One of the biggest and most exciting releases on the horizon for many fans, including Verhey himself, is the arrival of Magic: The Gathering‘s Star Trek crossover.
‘I’m really biased because, while I appreciate all the sets coming out next year, I was the lead designer of Star Trek and Star Trek is very meaningful to me. I grew up with my family watching [it],’ Verhey said. ‘Me and my mum and dad would watch Star Trek together and talk about the stories, and often the morality behind it, and all kind of stuff that really helped pave the path to where I am today and who I am as a person.’
‘So to get to work on that set was pretty cool.’
As a tease for what’s to come, Verhey confirmed the Star Trek set will cover the ‘whole history’ of the series, all the way from the original series ‘up to the newest stuff today and the movies and all that stuff.’
‘It’s a really cool celebration of the series,’ he said.
From Verhey’s excitement, and everything else revealed, it’s very clear he and his team are gearing up for a blockbuster year to come.
