So Magic has the physical card game, but also two digital versions, Magic: The Gathering Online and Magic: The Gathering Arena.

The exact differences between the two digital versions are unimportant

As you may know the upcoming set being released in a couple weeks is a Spider-Man set. This is part of a series of crossover sets, they’ve previously done things like Fallout, Warhammer 40K, Doctor Who and Assassin’s Creed.

However, recently there’s been a change in how these sets were approached. Previously, the cards in these crossover sets would not be legal for play in the Standard format, which is the main competitive format.

So you could play them in some more permissive formats like Modern or Commander, but they were sort of outside of the intended main game experience. And importantly, this also meant that they did not need to be included in the digital versions of Magic.

However, starting with the Final Fantasy set from earlier in the year, and continuing into the upcoming Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender sets, the new crossover sets are Standard sets.

Which means that they need to be included in the digital versions of Magic. Which is a whole separate licensing rights negotiation.

For Final Fantasy and Avatar, the license holders were willing to play ball. But for Marvel...well.

So in two weeks’ time, there will not be a Spider-Man set released on Arena and Online. But there will be a new set. It’s called Through The Omenpaths, and it is an exact mechanical duplicate of the Spider-Man set.

New names and art but otherwise identical.

The specter of Marvel Snap looms hard, presumably

this has the odd benefit that people who don't like crossover sets can make proxies of the digital versions

yeah I was gonna say this is entirely a Marvel Snap snafu

lol

There’s also speculation that the Spider-Man set was originally going to be a side-content set and it got reworked after the Assassin’s Creed side-content set bombed

In which case they originally just secured the rights to physical because they wouldn’t need digital, and then were stuck

Through the Omenpaths Card Image Gallery