We always love it when two massive fanbases can find something new to share. Toho Studios, the company behind Japanese monster (or kaiju) movies, is partnering with Magic: The Gathering for the card game’s 84th set, Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. In a cross-brand promotion, the Ikoria set will include collectible variants of some of the most powerful new cards as classic monsters like Godzilla and Mothra.
With the setting of a world packed with giant beasts (as the name “behemoth” would imply), it’s easy to see why Magic: The Gathering would find shared brand synergy with Toho. “The world-building of Ikoria was already having things like Godzilla in mind, this classic movie monster vibe was part of the inspiration that went into this set,” Magic: The Gathering principal creative designer Doug Beyer said during the livestreamed announcement. But as it turns out, Magic: The Gathering’s connections to kaiju stretch much farther back, deep into the game’s history.
Magic: The Gathering is the original collectible card game, first released in 1993. In the simplest terms, players represent duelling wizards who cast spells (represented by a deck of cards) to summon zombies, knights, goblins, elves, or dozens of other creatures and artefacts to attack their opponent on the battlefield.
Those spells are cast by paying “mana” in a combination of five colours: white, blue, black, red, and green. Each colour represents particular characteristics — red is for fire and impulsivity, for example, while black is for death and amorality. The colours of mana are produced by lands: plains for white, islands for blue, swamps for black, mountains for red, and forests for green. Effectively, players harness the power of nature to destroy their enemies.
Tapping into nature’s raw power is not so different from how Godzilla, the first Toho monster movie, presents the 400-foot-tall beast as a force of nature seeking revenge against humanity. Godzilla hit Japanese theatres in 1954, just nine years after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a few months after a Japanese fishing boat was irradiated by nuclear weapons testing at the Bikini Atoll. Godzilla himself is described as an ancient, prehistoric creature that was mutated by radiation. Before it even appears on screen, Godzilla’s destruction manifests first as nature’s wrath in the form of huge waves that capsize ships, lightning, and hurricane-force winds ravaging Pacific islands.
While many creatures in Magic: The Gathering are generic and numerous, most of these named “legendary” creatures feature as part of the game’s long-running epic story that has played out in novels, short stories, and on the cards themselves. Magic: The Gathering is set in a multiverse, with each plane its own fantasy setting. The stars of the story are planeswalkers, powerful sorcerers who can conveniently move between planes and take part in every iteration of the story. Eldraine, for example, is a world of knights and familiar fairy tale creatures, Innistrad, is a world of Gothic horror with vampires and werewolves, while Amonkhet resembles ancient Egypt. Some worlds in Magic: The Gathering have been visited several times over the past 27 years, but Ikoria was created fresh for the new set.
As a plane filled with colossal creatures, Ikoria could easily make a comfortable stomping ground for kaiju. Ikoria is a world where the monsters rule and humans huddle together in fortified compounds to stay safe from the beasts that roam the land. It’s a place that sounds like Toho monsters would fit in comfortably among Ikoria’s other demon krakens, nightmare squirrels, and dinosaur hippos (really).
Toho monsters are also often combinations of mythical and real animals grown to gargantuan proportions, or the product of science run amok with nature. The name “Godzilla” is an Anglicized version of the Japanese Gojira, which is a combination of gorira, or “gorilla,” and kojira, or “whale.” So Gojira means “gorilla-whale.” The original design for Godzilla combined elements of a tyrannosaurus rex, a stegosaurus, and an iguanodon. King Caesar is based on the legendary Okinawan shisa, which resemble a cross between lions and dogs. And the MUTO from the 2014 American Godzilla film was created to resemble both insects and the angular streamlining of stealth bombers.
We wanted to create a situation where if people are excited about Godzilla and his friends, they could opt-in by collecting these versions of the same creatures,” Beyer said.
The worlds of Magic: The Gathering have always featured some enormous creatures, like Zacama, Primal Calamity, a city-crushing three-headed tyrannosaurus, or Progenitus, an enormous hydra that in Magic: The Gathering lore both created its plane of existence and shattered the planet into pieces. Even farther back, cards like Krosan Cloudscraper (from 2007), Denizen of the Deep (1998), and many, many, others have let players summon heavy hitters to quickly take down their opponent. Aside from their size, these creatures often also have powerful abilities like resurrecting other creatures from the dead or making them grow in power. It’s not so different from how Toho monsters also possess other deadly abilities like Godzilla’s atomic breath or Gigan’s buzzsaw.
For their partnership with Toho, Magic: the Gathering’s variant cards allow Ikoria’s Illuna, Apex of Wishes to become Ghidorah, King of the Cosmos and Zilortha, Strength Incarnate becomes Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Since Godzilla and Ghidorah keep the same statistics and abilities as their Magic: The Gathering counterparts, they’re playable cards that allow you to include classic Toho monsters in a tournament-legal deck. The same is true for other Toho kaiju variants, including Mothra, King Caesar, Spacegodzilla, Destroyah, Rodan, Gigan, and even the Dorats from 1991’s Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. “We wanted to create a situation where if people are excited about Godzilla and his friends, they could opt-in by collecting these versions of the same creatures,” Beyer said.
On Earth in the Toho movies, humans try to make a brave stand against the monsters, while the monsters smash into each other with the rest of us caught in the middle. Magic: The Gathering’s storylines have also frequently involved worlds that are suddenly threatened by apocalyptic threats, like massive dragons, towering gods, or otherworldly invaders that devour everything in their path. Can Mothra stand up against Magic: The Gathering’s other titanic beasts, or could Mechagodzilla be enlisted by a malevolent planeswalker to become unstoppable? You might just find out.