MTG Universes Beyond: Which Sets Are Standard-Legal

The Hobbit gave Smaug four cards, and they are the whole article in miniature. Three of them — Smaug, the Great Calamity; Smaug the Magnificent; Smaug, Wicked Worm — are legal in Standard. The fourth, Smaug the Impenetrable, released on the same day under the same holofoil stamp and is not legal in Standard, Pioneer or Modern at all. The only difference that decides it is that three sit in a set coded HOB and one sits in a set coded HOC.

That is Universes Beyond legality right now: one rule that is genuinely simple, wrapped in two exceptions that appear nowhere on the packaging. Here is the whole map, read off Scryfall's legality data and Wizards' own announcements on 20 August 2026.

What Universes Beyond is, in Scryfall's numbers

Universes Beyond is Magic's licensed-crossover line — Magic gameplay wearing somebody else's characters. Hasbro's Chris Cocks announced it at the company's February 2021 investor event, and per the MTG Wiki the cards carry a triangular holofoil stamp rather than the usual oval, because they are formally non-canon. The Magic story is not told through them.

It stopped being a side experiment a while ago. Scryfall's is:ub filter returns 4,640 distinct cards across 10,527 printings, against a total pool of 33,598 cards — about one Magic card in seven. 3,404 of those 4,640 debuted in a Universes Beyond set rather than arriving as reprints, so the line has contributed more than three thousand genuinely new designs to the game.

The hard part was never identifying a Universes Beyond card. It is knowing where you are allowed to play one, because that answer changed once, sharply, and was never applied backwards.

The rule change that flipped Standard

At launch, Universes Beyond was walled off from Standard on purpose. Wizards' February 2021 announcement and Mark Rosewater's follow-ups said the sets would never be Standard-legal and would live in the Eternal formats instead. That held for three and a half years.

Then on 25 October 2024, Aaron Forsythe published "Aligning the Universes: Making All Our Sets Legal in All Our Formats," and the policy inverted. New Universes Beyond booster sets would be legal in all Constructed formats, beginning with Final Fantasy in June 2025.

Two clauses of that announcement are doing most of the work, and both are where the confusion survives:

• It is not retroactive. The announcement is blunt about it: the change "is purely forward facing and pertains to sets releasing in 2025 and later," and the legality of existing sets, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth and Assassin's Creed included, "is not changing." Those sets did not become Standard-legal and have not since.
• Supplemental product is carved out. Commander decks and Jumpstart content "will be Eternal legal (i.e., legal only in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage)." That single parenthesis is the seed of the Eternal sets further down this page.

The 2025 release calendar that announcement opens with carried three Universes Beyond sets alongside three in-world Magic sets. In 2026 the line is running ahead of that pace: of the seven premier sets Scryfall lists for the year — Lorwyn Eclipsed, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Secrets of Strixhaven, Marvel Super Heroes, The Hobbit, Reality Fracture and Star Trek — four are Universes Beyond.

The set list, and where each one is legal

Every number below is a count of distinct cards from a Scryfall set search, not a verdict on the product. Legality attaches to the card, not to the printing, so a Commander-only release still shows a handful of Standard-legal cards — those are reprints of cards that are also in current Standard sets.

Three eras fall straight out of that table.

The supplemental era, 2022 to 2024. Warhammer 40,000, Doctor Who and Fallout arrived as Commander decks; Tales of Middle-earth and Assassin's Creed arrived as draftable sets pointed straight at Modern. None of them touched Standard, and the October 2024 change explicitly did not move them. Two quirks worth knowing: the 40 Doctor Who cards that are not Commander-legal are 36 Planes and 4 Phenomena, its Planechase content, and Tales of Middle-earth has exactly three cards outside Modern — The One Ring, which is banned, plus two Arena-rebalanced A- versions that only exist on Arena's digital ladders.

The aligned era, from June 2025. Final Fantasy, Marvel's Spider-Man, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marvel Super Heroes and The Hobbit are ordinary premier sets that happen to wear a license. Across those six, 1,430 of 1,434 distinct cards are Standard-legal — the four exceptions are three banned cards and one Arena rebalance, not a legality carve-out.

Secret Lair, which follows its own clock. 554 of the 1,722 distinct cards printed in Secret Lair drops are Universes Beyond, and each one is legal wherever that card is legal — a licensed skin on a Standard card is Standard-legal, while a mechanically new drop card is Commander, Legacy and Vintage only. Our Secret Lair explainer walks that precedent through in detail.

Star Trek is the row to read carefully: it is dated 13 November 2026 and has not released, so nothing new in it is legal anywhere yet. The 15 cards showing as Standard-legal are reprints that are already legal from other printings.

The Eternal set: the half that skips Standard

Here is the piece that gets skipped, and it is why the Smaug at the top of this article is not a misprint. That "Eternal legal" carve-out in the announcement still needs somewhere to live, because a license like Middle-earth or Marvel attracts exactly the kind of high-power Commander design Standard cannot absorb. Two vehicles carry it. One is the familiar Commander set — Final Fantasy Commander and Marvel Super Heroes Commander are Commander, Legacy and Vintage only despite sitting beside Standard-legal main sets. The other is a separate Eternal set, which is literally Scryfall's set type for it, eternal — a type Scryfall also hangs on the older Transformers and Jurassic World Collection insert cards.

Four Eternal sets have shipped alongside a Universes Beyond premier set so far, and they are not automatic. Of the six Universes Beyond premier sets from Marvel's Spider-Man onward, four have an Eternal set, while two — Marvel Super Heroes and the unreleased Star Trek — carry a Commander set instead. Same legality either way; different packaging.

That is 494 distinct cards, 493 of them Commander-legal and 21 Standard-legal — and those 21 are reprints of cards that were already in Standard from somewhere else. Wizards' own Collecting The Hobbit article states the rule in one line: the HOC set "is legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage, and individual cards are also legal where already available in other formats." Marvel's Spider-Man Eternal is the cleanest example of the shape: 26 cards, all brand new, zero legal in Standard, Pioneer or Modern.

The practical consequence is the trap that opened this article, and it reaches into a Standard-legal set's own packaging. Per that same collecting article, nine non-foil extended-art mythic rares from the HOC set appear in The Hobbit's Collector Boosters — the premium pack our booster types guide covers on the product side. Crack one and the mythic you pull may be a fully legal Commander card that you cannot register in Standard, Pioneer or Modern. It is not a misprint and it is not a gold-bordered novelty; it is a real card aimed at a different table.

So check the three-letter set code at the bottom-left. HOB is Standard, HOC is not, and our Hobbit set guide covers what shipped in the main set.

How much of each format is Universes Beyond now

The share question is the one worth answering with arithmetic rather than vibes. Counts are Scryfall's, for cards with at least one Universes Beyond printing:

Standard is the outlier at 32%, and the reason is arithmetic rather than editorial: Standard is a small, rotating pool, and six of the sets currently in it are Universes Beyond. The eternal formats sit near 14% because they are averaging the crossover era against two decades of Magic-universe printings. If your instinct is that Magic has been taken over by crossovers, Standard is the format where that instinct is closest to being right, and Modern is where it is furthest off.

One caveat on the Standard row: 1,566 counts cards with any Universes Beyond printing, which sweeps in Secret Lair skins of ordinary Magic cards. Restricted to the six Universes Beyond premier sets themselves, the figure is 1,430.

The bans, on both sides of the argument

Standard's banned list currently holds 13 cards. Three of them come from Universes Beyond sets: Vivi Ornitier from Final Fantasy, and Badgermole Cub and Gran-Gran from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Three of thirteen, in a format where six of the legal sets are Universes Beyond, is close to the crossover line pulling its own weight on the banned list rather than dominating it.

Modern is the more interesting scoreboard, because it is where the pre-2025 direct-to-Modern sets landed. Fourteen Modern-banned cards have a printing in a Universes Beyond set, but thirteen of them — Dark Depths, Dig Through Time, Dread Return, Field of the Dead, Fury, Grief, Mental Misstep, Ponder, Rite of Flame, Seething Song, Skullclamp, Underworld Breach and Vault of Whispers — are reprints of Magic-universe cards rather than Universes Beyond originals. Only one card that debuted in a Universes Beyond set is banned in Modern: The One Ring, from Tales of Middle-earth, which is still legal in Legacy, Vintage and Commander.

That is not incidental to the policy. Forsythe's announcement gives reducing Modern's churn and applying the same power-level heuristics to every set as part of its reasoning, and the MTG Wiki's summary is blunter still: the change weighed the impact direct-to-Modern sets like Tales of Middle-earth had already had on the eternal formats.

Checking any card in about ten seconds

• Read the set code, not the art. Bottom-left of the card. HOB, TLA, TMT, MSH, FIN and SPM are Standard-legal sets; HOC, TLE, TMC and SPE are the Eternal companions.
• Search the card on Scryfall and read the legality box. It is per card and per format, and it is the same data every number in this article came from. Wizards' banned-and-restricted list is the other authority.
• Ignore the release date of the franchise. Middle-earth has cards in both eras: Tales of Middle-earth from 2023 is out of Standard, The Hobbit from 2026 is fully in it.
• A triangular holofoil stamp tells you it is Universes Beyond. It tells you nothing about which formats it is legal in.

Quick Action Checklist

• Universes Beyond sets from June 2025 onward are legal in every Constructed format, Standard included, starting with Final Fantasy.
• The change was not retroactive. Warhammer 40,000, Tales of Middle-earth, Doctor Who, Fallout and Assassin's Creed were named as unaffected and are still not Standard-legal.
• Each recent release also carries an Eternal-only half, either an Eternal set or a Commander set. SPE, TLE, TMC and HOC hold 494 cards between them, 493 Commander-legal and none Standard-legal except reprints.
• Collector Boosters of a Standard-legal set can contain Eternal-set cards. The Hobbit's carry nine non-foil extended-art mythic rares from HOC, per Wizards' collecting article.
• 32% of Standard's 4,887 legal cards now carry a Universes Beyond printing, against 12.2% of Modern's 22,450.
• Three of Standard's 13 banned cards are from Universes Beyond sets, and exactly one Universes Beyond original is banned in Modern.
• Verify on Scryfall before you sleeve it, not from a set list — legality is a property of the card, and it changes on ban announcements.