A normal artist would be all tied up with a North American tour, but the power of Miku means that she can be doing other shit while showing up at a list of concerts. Today, that other shit encompasses heading over to the artists at Magic: The Gathering for a little collaboration project. To my understanding the same company that owns MTG has a subdivision called Secret Lair that handles orchestrating and selling limited run cards with special partnerships and featured artists. Miku is set to join that lineup with six fresh card designs that will go up for sale starting today May 13 and last until June 2. To further bolster the joint effort of this event, a special song and lyric video were created to promote the partnership.

I’ve only played MTG once in my life and I barely understood what the fuck was happening. It seems like a fun game once you learn the rules though, in the same way that learning Yu-Gi-Oh! can feel like studying for a college exam with the ridiculously high amount of mechanics and specific language involved in the game. Speaking of which, seeing this made me surprised that we haven’t seen such ideas come to life with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards before. I mean the Japanese giant of card games sells all kinds of merchandise with a ton of licensing for clothes, accessories, duel disk toys, and more, but not really any big collaborations outside of a few sparse ones here and there like the Power Pros crossover. I suppose one reason may be due to the fact that the designers already produce so many cards that reference established series. For example it’s not a secret that the Vendread card archetype contains a ton of callbacks to Resident Evil even though it’s not an official collab. Konami executives may wonder “why bother with licensing when we can make archetypes that loosely embody other properties”. Whatever the case, it’s cool to see MTG showing anime some love as in my experience the communities can be quite different (LOTR fantasy nerds vs. Weeb nerds) despite both being involved in famous complicated card games. 

All this talk about dueling reminds me it’s time to get my game on and see what new cards have arrived in Master Duel. Have you played Magic: The Gathering? Did you know Miku was getting her own limited set of cards? Are you surprised we don’t see more card collabs like this involving anime coming from Konami? Load up on some protectors, acquire some nice holographics, and never risk using your rare cards in an actual battle in the comments below!