There’s a green felt mat on the back room table at my LGS that has, no joke, been there since the Lord of the Rings prerelease. Cup rings, a permanent crease where someone’s spindown rolled off the edge, the corner pulled up just enough to bug you when you lay down a board state. I noticed it again last Saturday when I was poking around and saw the calendar tacked above it. June 12 through 18 was already filled in with Sharpie. AVENGERS ACADEMY 2HG, capital letters, two exclamation points.
I asked the counter guy if they’d registered. He said yes, before May 1, so they’re getting the full promo support. He also said they didn’t know yet how many Welcome Decks they were going to actually get shipped. Welcome to the gap between official Wizards announcements and what shows up at your local store.
So here’s the actual structure, pulled from the official Avengers Academy announcement Wizards put up on May 2. Five Welcome Decks, each themed around a Marvel character paired with a Magic color: Black Panther (white), Iron Man (blue), Black Widow (black), Spider-Man (red), and Hulk (green). I’m guessing on some of those character-to-color mappings since the announcement just listed them in parallel without committing, but the color order matched the character order, so. Probably right. Probably.
Each Welcome Deck contains two 30-card half-decks. You get the character on the package plus one other half-deck of a different color. At the event you and a teammate each play one half-deck against another pair, Two-Headed Giant style. No rounds, no prizes, no rankings, no constructed prep. Casual learn-to-play stuff. After the event you keep the Welcome Deck, and you can combine your two half-decks into a 60-card two-color deck for later. Which is actually how most people are going to play these. Not at the event, at the kitchen table.
The combine math is the interesting part
If you ignore the “first game ever” framing and look at the Welcome Decks as starter precons (which they basically are), the combinations matter. Five colors, two half-decks per Welcome Deck, drawn presumably at semi-random or by store discretion. There are ten possible two-color combinations:
- Black Panther / Iron Man → Azorius (W/U). Likely flicker, control, defensive value
- Black Panther / Black Widow → Orzhov (W/B). Lifegain or removal
- Black Panther / Spider-Man → Boros (W/R). Aggro, equipment, hero-flavored
- Black Panther / Hulk → Selesnya (W/G). Tokens, big creatures, and this is the color pair Wakanda Forever (the actual Black Panther Commander precon) runs
- Iron Man / Black Widow → Dimir (U/B). Sneaky, artifacts-and-sacrifice
- Iron Man / Spider-Man → Izzet (U/R). Spells and artifacts, very on-brand for Iron Man
- Iron Man / Hulk → Simic (U/G). Probably the weirdest pairing flavor-wise
- Black Widow / Spider-Man → Rakdos (B/R). Aggro plus disruption
- Black Widow / Hulk → Golgari (B/G). Big creatures, sacrifice, recursion
- Spider-Man / Hulk → Gruul (R/G). Smash
The Iron Man / Spider-Man pairing is the one I think gets the most kitchen-table mileage. Spells matter plus artifacts matter is just always going to play well in a 60-card casual deck, and any kid who gets a Spider-Man package paired with the Iron Man half-deck has hit the jackpot from a “this is fun to upgrade later” perspective. Black Panther / Hulk has the deepest commander tie-in because Wakanda Forever is Selesnya. If you’re an experienced player thinking about which Welcome Deck to grab as a gateway for a niece or nephew, that’s the combo I’d hunt for.
I should mention I have absolutely no idea what’s inside any of these half-decks. The contents haven’t been revealed. Wizards just said “we’ll reveal the contents of these decks in the future, so stay tuned!” which is corporate for “trust us, it’s fine.” Historically, Welcome Decks have been a mix of bulk commons and a handful of recognizable named characters at uncommon or rare. The Hobbit Welcome Decks that surfaced last month followed that pattern — playable, but mostly bulk by value. I’d expect the same here.
The three-tier promo stack is what changed
The Welcome Deck event itself isn’t unusual. Wizards has been running learn-to-play events at LGSes for years. What’s actually new with Avengers Academy is the promo stacking, and this is where I think the collector angle lives.
There are three layers of giveaways:
- The Welcome Deck itself. Free to participating attendees while supplies last. Standard.
- The drawstring bag and the double-sided Hero // Villain token. Given to attendees who also register for that store’s Marvel Two-Headed Giant Prerelease event the following week. This is the new layer — it’s a hand-off promo, designed to push casual attendees from the learn-to-play event into the actual paid prerelease.
- Wearable Loki horns. Given out at the 2HG prerelease itself, only to people who attended Avengers Academy and registered for the prerelease. So a stacking incentive.
The wearable Loki horns are the thing nobody on MTG Reddit is talking about yet but absolutely will be by July. Wearable cosmetic prerelease promos have a precedent — I have a Theros Beyond Death laurel crown somewhere in a storage tote, still in the plastic. They’re not “secondary market” items in any serious sense, but they do show up on eBay six months out for $20-40 once it’s clear how few were actually distributed. Drawstring bags from past sets do similar numbers. The Hero // Villain token is the wildcard. Double-sided tokens with art tied to a hot Universes Beyond release sometimes catch a real collector wave (look at what Walking Dead die-face tokens did) and sometimes never break out of bulk. Marvel’s brand pull suggests this one might pop.
The registration deadline for stores to qualify for the full promo support was May 1. That’s already gone. If your store didn’t register before May 1, you’ll still get the Welcome Decks and the event, but you won’t get the drawstring bag or the Loki horns. Worth asking your LGS counter before you commit to a schedule.
Honestly, I went back and forth on whether the promo stack is meaningful or just normal marketing. The cynical read is that Wizards is running an unusually layered onboarding funnel for Marvel because they need to convert MCU fans into actual product buyers, and the giveaway escalator is just standard customer-acquisition design. The less cynical read is that it’s also accidentally a collector event. Both are true. The promos are real merchandise that will be tracked and listed and chased, even if they were designed as marketing assets. You can think of them as a planned promo run with an unplanned secondary market.
What to actually do
If you’re a regular at an LGS that registered before May 1, just show up. The Welcome Deck is free, the promos are free, the 2HG is supposed to be fast and chill. If you’re thinking of it as a collector play, you want to hit both events at the same store so you qualify for the Loki horns layer. Same store matters because the promo tracking is per-event-attendance.
If you’re going to flip the promos, sleeve them and store them separately the day you get them. Don’t toss the drawstring bag in the bottom of your prerelease loot bag and then dig it out wrinkled three months later when listings start moving on TCGplayer. That’s how I lost most of the resale value on a Modern Horizons 3 promo pin I tossed in a backpack at GP Boston, which is still sitting in a drawer somewhere with a bent edge.
If you’re a parent dragging a kid to their first MTG event, the Welcome Decks are not a bad way to do it. The packaging is designed for that. Just don’t expect any of the cards inside to be worth tracking — those will be bulk to single-digit uncommons. The collector value here is in the promos, not the deck contents.
For everything else Marvel-shaped that’s coming, I already wrote about what’s in the four main Commander decks and the preorder pricing and the six-week audit I run before a big set release. The Avengers Academy event is the prelude to all of that, the soft warmup before the actual product hits shelves on June 26. It’s also the closest thing 2026 has produced to a Wizards-engineered collector event that doesn’t require you to spend any money to participate. Which, in a year of seven sets and three Superdrops, is honestly kind of refreshing.
Now I just need to remember to bring sleeves.