Just in case you haven't heard Netflix's announcement last June: the popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering is getting an animated series on Netflix from executive producers Joe and Anthony Russo (The directors of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame), and now we have a rough idea when the series will be released on the streaming service thanks to a new placeholder for the show.
If you try to search "Magic: The Gathering" on Netflix, you will see a placeholder revealing the release year: 2021, and the description says, "Executive producers the Russo Brothers team with writers Henry Gilroy and Jose Molina, telling an animated new story of the magic-wielding Planeswalkers."
Here's the placeholder:
Henry Gilroy is known for writing Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Jose Molina is the writer of the 2016 Amazon series, The Tick.
The placeholder didn't reveal anything new. No plot details, number of episodes, and we still don't know the exact release date but at least we know that it's expected to release sometime in 2021. We already know that the series will focus on the planeswalkers but we still don't know if the show will be based in any of the previously-written MTG stories.
Last July, Nic Kelman, head of story and entertainment for Wizards of the Coast, told TheWrap how they are approaching the story in the MTG Netflix series.
"So what we plan to do is, the story and the characters are going to be true to the spirit of the story and the characters that are preexisting," Kelman said. "We're going to be true to that and the world and also true to the core values of those worlds and characters. But we're definitely going to try to carve out our own continuity space in a very similar way to other franchises that have done that with adventures in a new medium from preexisting stories."
We expect the main members of the Gatewatch like Jace, Chandra, Liliana, Nissa, and Gideon will play significant roles in the series, but I hope that they won't adapt Greg Weisman's controversial MTG novel War of the Spark: Forsaken.
Here's a fact that the placeholder didn't say: Yoriaki Mochizuki (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) will serve as co-executive producer and supervising director.
2021 is not too far away. As long as they don't rush it, and make sure that the series will stay true to what fans love about Magic's story, then I'm willing to wait. With the Russos and talented writers and animators on board, fans are confident that this MTG Netflix series will be epic.
Related: Reid Duke Apologizes For "Causing Pain" in the MTG Community
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Magic: the Gathering