Nerf or Nothing: When Magic And Nerf Had Crossovers

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Nerf has been a part of Magic: The Gathering a surprising number of times.

Ever since September of 1999 when Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, there has been a lot of intermingling of products. This is largely due to special Magic cards here and there, but a lot of it has been more substantial. Like how Magic and Dungeons and Dragons became quite the pairing.

But there is one part of Hasbro that has seen some of the oddest crossovers with Magic: Nerf.

The first item in the Magic-Nerf cross over was in 2014 when, at that years Comic-Con they made one very limited product: a Nerf Model of Garruk's Axe. And by limited it was very limited. It was only sold during the Comic-Con and a convention in Germany and consisted of one Nerf axe, five planeswalker cards...and that's it.

In 2017, as part of the HASCON promo Nerf had their first, and to date, only crossover card come out - Nerf War. A 5 mana card that is currently not legal in ANY format, Nerf War was an unofficial joke card. It's text even read :Fire a Nerf blaster until empty at target library from at least two meters away. For each card knocked off that library, put it into its owner’s graveyard and Nerf War deals ½ damage to that player. (Foam darts only.)

As fun as it would be to have nerf weapons be tournament legal in some capacity, it was simply just a promotional crossover. And the same could be said for 2023, when Nerf worked with the Magic Secret Lair to actually make a Magic-themed Nerf Gun, complete with two Magic Cards - specially printed Lightning Bolt cards.
 
 
Unlike the other two, they went more with theming. The box was designed to look like a deck box, with the design of the Lightning Bolt gun matching some of the artwork.
 
Magic tends to tie in a Hasbro product or two each year just based on virtue of company synergy, and Nerf tends to get this treatment about every 3-5 years. Still, for as wide a disparity there is between a foam game company and a card game company, there has been a surprising number of crossovers so far. Even 15 years ago, this level of crossover would not have been imaginable. But with more and more IPs working their way into Magic sets and the like, this is probably not the last we have seen of Nerf. 

Evan Symon

Evan Symon is a graduate of The University of Akron and has been a working journalist ever since with works published by Cracked, GeekNifty, the Pasadena Independent, California Globe, and, of course, Magic Untapped.