Assassin's Creed (ACR): MTG Set Guide

Some crossovers feel like a stretch. Assassin's Creed doesn't. Parkour, hidden blades, ancient conspiracies, morally complex operatives working in the shadows - this franchise has been playing Magic's game thematically for twenty years. When Wizards of the Coast brought it into the fold as part of the Universes Beyond series on July 5, 2024, it felt less like a surprise and more like an inevitability.

What is Assassin's Creed?

Assassin's Creed (set code: ACR) is a 309-card Magic: The Gathering product released under the Universes Beyond banner. Universes Beyond is the umbrella for sets that step outside of Magic's native Multiverse to feature licensed intellectual properties - previous releases in this line include The Walking Dead, Warhammer 40,000, and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth.

ACR was released on July 5, 2024, and is a standalone product rather than part of a Standard-legal set rotation. Like other Universes Beyond releases, it sits at the intersection of collector interest and gameplay, with cards distributed through a product structure that includes both play boosters and the Beyond Booster format - more on that below.

Format check: As a Universes Beyond product, cards in Assassin's Creed are legal in the formats in which their rules text and card types would otherwise qualify - but always check the specific legality of individual cards on Scryfall or the official format pages, as legality can vary.

Themes and mechanics

The Assassin's Creed set leans hard into what makes the video game franchise tick: stealth, information asymmetry, mobility across rooftops and history, and the gathering of ancient artefacts. Mechanically, you'd expect that to translate into sneaky, efficient gameplay - and from what the card list reflects, that expectation holds.

The set features characters spanning the full breadth of the Assassin's Creed timeline, from Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and Bayek of Siwa in the ancient and medieval worlds, through to Ezio Auditore da Firenze in Renaissance Italy, Edward Kenway on the high seas, Adéwalé, Kassandra, the Frye twins, and the modern-era Desmond Miles. That's a remarkable sweep of settings and tones to pack into a single card set.

The Hidden Blade and Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine both appear as named cards, which gives you a sense of the range - intimate assassin tools sitting alongside world-altering mythological machinery. Spells like Restart Sequence and Rooftop Bypass feel purpose-built for this world, evoking the franchise's signature gameplay loops.

Cards like The Spear of Leonidas and Adrestia (the ship from Assassin's Creed Odyssey) round out the artefact and vehicle space, suggesting a set that rewards fans of the games with delightful recognition moments alongside meaningful gameplay choices.

Limited and Draft

ACR's Limited environment is built around the franchise's distinct eras and character archetypes. With assassins, pirates, warriors, and modern operatives all rubbing shoulders in the card pool, I'd expect draft to reward tight deck construction around a specific faction or time period - though without full public draft data at time of writing, take that as an informed guess rather than a firm archetype breakdown.

The presence of cards like Rooftop Bypass hints at evasion and mobility being meaningful axes in the format. If the set rewards getting through defences rather than over-powering them, games of Limited ACR probably reward patience and reads over raw aggression.

Notable cards and the Art Series

The Art Series for Assassin's Creed includes twenty cards featuring illustrated portraits and scenes from across the franchise's history. The full list spans iconic characters - Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Eivor, Wolf-Kissed, Eivor, Battle-Ready, Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Kassandra, Eagle Bearer, Bayek of Siwa, Edward Kenway, Adéwalé, Breaker of Chains - alongside notable weapons, locations, and ships like the Adrestia and Hidden Blade.

The Starter Kit product accompanies the main set, presumably offering a lower entry point for players new to both Magic and the crossover.

Collector note: The Art Series cards are a separate product track from the main set boosters. They're aimed squarely at fans who want the art as a collectible rather than functional gameplay pieces.

Reception

Honestly, the reception story here is a split one. The set itself landed well - the popularity of the Assassin's Creed franchise gave it a strong built-in audience, and the card designs seem to have satisfied fans of both the games and Magic.

The rougher story is around Beyond Boosters, the booster format Wizards introduced (and restructured following the difficult reception of March of the Machine: The Aftermath). Even with that restructuring, Beyond Boosters were not well received by consumers. It's a reminder that how a product is packaged and sold matters almost as much as what's inside it - a lesson Wizards has had to keep relearning in recent years.

The set itself, separate from the product packaging debates, is generally remembered fondly as one of the more thematically coherent Universes Beyond releases.

Lore and setting

Rather than inventing a new Magic plane or grafting the Assassin's Creed story onto existing Multiverse lore, ACR functions as a faithful adaptation of the video game franchise's world - spanning Ancient Greece and Egypt, medieval Syria, Renaissance Italy, the golden age of Caribbean piracy, Viking-era England, and the modern day. Each of these settings has its own iconic characters, and the set appears to cover them all.

The tension at the heart of Assassin's Creed - the Assassins versus the Templars, freedom versus control, ancient artefacts of enormous power - translates naturally into Magic's vocabulary of factions, artefacts, and world-altering spells. Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine is a particularly evocative card name for long-time fans of the series, touching on the mythological thread woven through Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

Set legacy

It's still early days for ACR's long-term legacy - the set released in mid-2024, and the dust on its competitive and collector impact hasn't fully settled. What I can say is that it represents one of the more ambitious Universes Beyond projects in terms of narrative scope: twenty-plus years of video game history, dozens of iconic characters, and multiple distinct visual aesthetics all folded into one cohesive Magic product.

For Universes Beyond as a line, Assassin's Creed feels like a proof of concept that licensed sets can be both fan-service and thoughtfully designed. Whether the Beyond Booster controversy leaves a lasting shadow on how the set is remembered is a separate question - but the cards themselves seem to have earned genuine affection. ✨