Netflix Names Magic Series Planeswalker for 2027

The series has a name, a face and a year. At MagicCon: Atlanta on November 13, 2026, Netflix titled its Magic: The Gathering animated series Planeswalker, released a first-look image and a two-minute development diary, and set the premiere for 2027. The diary shows concept art, 3D character models, action animatics and finished animation tests from DIGIC Pictures, the Budapest studio producing the animation. The series is a partnership between Netflix, Hasbro Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast.

The story centers on one character. Netflix's synopsis reads: "PLANESWALKER chronicles the fierce clash between formidable mages known as Planeswalkers. At the center of this struggle for power and survival burns Chandra, a volatile pyromancer hunted for her gifts and haunted by her past." Chandra Nalaar has been one of the card game's signature characters for nearly two decades, and she's the figure in the first-look image, conjuring flame under a twilight sky.

The credits are the credibility argument. Terry Matalas, who ran the third season of Star Trek: Picard, is showrunner and executive producer. Cindy Appel, his Picard and VisionQuest collaborator, co-showruns. Patrick Osborne, who won an Academy Award for the short film Feast, is supervising director and an executive producer. Netflix placed the series in its Adult Spectacle category at the Annecy Film Festival in June 2025, on the same banner as Blue Eye Samurai.

The history explains the diary's tone, which opens by acknowledging the skepticism. Netflix announced a Magic series in 2019 with Joe and Anthony Russo overseeing it. The Russos left in 2021 and that version was scrapped. A second version under Jeff Kline went quiet. Matalas took over in September 2024, when Netflix confirmed the series was in production, and the project has now survived long enough to show animation tests in public.

Magic: The Gathering has run for 33 years and has never had a television series. The card game's lore spans dozens of fictional planes and hundreds of named characters, which is exactly why the adaptation kept stalling: the raw material is a library, not a story. Planeswalker's answer is to shrink the door. One pyromancer, one struggle, and a 2027 date that the development diary now has to defend.

DIGIC's résumé is part of that defense. The Budapest studio built its name on game cinematics, including work for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and animated segments of Netflix's anthology Secret Level. A studio that already renders game worlds for a living shortens the distance between the cards' art and the screen, and the diary leans on that, cutting between the studio's models and the finished tests instead of asking fans to trust a logo and a press release.

The reveal shared its stage with the card game's own future. MagicCon: Atlanta, which runs November 13 to 15, also used its Preview Panel to show cards from Nauctis: The Sunken Realm, a coming set. That's the strategy in one room: the paper game sells its next expansion while the streamer builds the television version of the same multiverse, each feeding the other's audience. Hasbro's television chief Gabriel Marano and development executive Lauren Chavez-Myers are executive producers alongside Matalas, Appel and Osborne, so the rights holder sits inside the production, not outside it. The 2027 window has no month attached yet. After seven years of false starts, a year is the most specific promise this project has ever made in public.