Avengers: Doomsday runes: what do the 17 symbols mean?

The Avengers: Doomsday teasers all ended with a countdown clock set inside the film's official A logo, backed by an intricate green stained glass frame. The circle holding that frame is lined with a series of mysterious symbols, or runes, and I think I have a pretty good explanation of what they are and what this whole clock structure is.

What do these symbols mean? Have we seen them in the MCU before? Are they connected to the runes of any other sorcerer who may be appearing in Avengers: Doomsday?

Is the Avengers: Doomsday countdown Doctor Doom's clock to the end of the multiverse?

When we first saw this logo at the end of the teasers, our eyes locked onto the green stained glass background behind the numerical countdown. That raises the question of whether the entire thing is a type of clock device. Is it Doctor Doom's literal countdown clock to the end of the multiverse, the clock he has to beat by capturing all of the anchor beings of every universe? Maybe it is.

The stained glass window opens a few possibilities. It could be the window of Doom's Citadel, maybe even the same castle that once belonged to He Who Remains, the Kang variant, which Doctor Doom might have taken over. But the fact that the glass is contained within a circular portal reminds me of Doctor Strange's observation window in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

Here's a good place to remember that in the opening shot of Loki season 1 episode 5, as the shot glided through the Void, there was a pruned Sanctum Sanctorum on the left side of the screen. When we revisited the Void in Deadpool & Wolverine, Cassandra Nova mentioned having taken a sling ring from a Doctor Strange somewhere in the Void. Now that it seems Doom is going to turn this dumping ground into Battleworld, that pruned Sanctum, and whatever happened to the Doctor Strange there, could be a very important connection.

The Doomsday logo shows 43 markers but only 17 distinct runes

You can see exactly 43 markers around the circle, but in reality there are only 17 distinct ones. Starting at the lower left part of the circle, there's a rune shaped like a wheel. That same symbol repeats as a coda at the upper right, on the other side of the tip of the A. Then the same 17 symbols repeat until we arrive back at the wheel symbol, and they repeat again for another nine to give a total of 43.

None of these 17 symbols has appeared looking quite like this in the MCU before. I'm kind of the expert on this, and I checked. No, they are not the runes Wanda and Agatha used in their witch battle at the end of WandaVision. And no, the small symbol at the bottom right that looks like a cauldron probably isn't meant to be a witch's cauldron.

There could be some similarity with the runes conjured by Zelma Stanton in Ironheart. But knowing how these designs are constructed, there is a difference between squiggles that a VFX artist makes for a Disney+ series and squiggles that the marketing team puts on a bumper card in a poster or a trailer. I know this because I've interviewed many of the people who do these jobs.

Could the 17 runes stand for 17 anchor beings from 17 universes?

I'm sure plenty of Marvel fans will hear the number 17 and get very excited, since it's a recurring random prime number that has appeared in several titles in the MCU. We're getting close to 17 appearances of 17 so far. So maybe we're seeing the 17th 17 right here.

Maybe each of the 17 symbols refers to the 17 anchor beings that Doom is hunting from the 17 universes he's most focused on. I expect Avengers: Doomsday to center only on the last three universes in existence: 616, 828 and 10005. But maybe Avengers: Secret Wars will show Battleworld as a patchwork of something like 17 total Marvel universes.

That could include Universe 96283, where Tobey Maguire is Spider-Man, the Raimi-verse. It could include Universe 120703, where Andrew Garfield is Spider-Man, or Universe 121698, which would be the universe of the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies, a continuity that exists in the MCU now since Chris Evans showed up as Johnny Storm.

Add the Blade universe, which was confirmed as MCU canon when Wesley Snipes showed up in Deadpool & Wolverine, and the Ben Affleck Daredevil universe, confirmed as canon by Jennifer Garner appearing in that movie. Then there's the 838 universe from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, whatever universe holds the Hulk village we're probably going to see in Secret Wars based on the concept art, and whatever new universe the concept art version of a new T'Challa comes from. You can see how we can get up to 17 pretty quickly.

Why 43 could point to the Battleworld map from Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars

While we're obsessing over the numbers, maybe the real number to focus on is the 43 total markers, which may only repeat because an artist didn't want to design 43 distinct symbols. In the map of Battleworld from Jonathan Hickman's 2015 Secret Wars crossover comics, there are exactly 43 divisions of Battleworld. I'm not kidding.

There are 41 on the main list, but one of those is the wall made up of Ben Grimm that separates the other divisions, and Manhattan is subdivided into four distinct parts. From that, you do get 43 regions of Battleworld coming from 43 different universes. Maybe the total number of visible runes in the Doomsday trailer could refer to that.

Doctor Doom's runes suggest a kind of magic Doctor Strange has never seen

The important detail is that we're seeing Doctor Doom using runes at all. Since they're runes we've never seen before, it's safe to say that Doom will be using a kind of magic that sorcerers like Doctor Strange, Wong and Loki have never seen before. It's a completely different kind of magic, and that is a reason to fear him.

In the third Avengers: Doomsday teaser, featuring the X-Men, I speculated that the reason Cyclops gets so roughed up by the Sentinels attacking the X-Mansion is that those Sentinels are being powered by the magical runes of Doctor Doom.

We know runes will be part of this movie. At the Disney marketing expo in Shanghai in September 2025, there was a holo projector display showing Doctor Doom and some of the moves he's going to do in Doomsday. There are definitely some moments in it where Doctor Doom conjures a green sorcery in the shape of runes, and I feel like that is part of the same codex we're seeing in the logo.

The ring of runes echoes Doctor Strange's spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home

The fact that these runes are organized in a circle is also important. It reminds me of the ring of runes that Doctor Strange conjured for his memory wipe spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home, specifically the giant ring we see around the Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie to heal the multiversal rifts. We could be getting somewhere here, because many of those squiggly lines do look like some of the squiggles in the runes of the Doomsday clock.

If there is a connection there, it would be very important. Remember what Wong said about that spell: "That spell travels the dark borders between known and unknown reality. It's too dangerous." I think the idea of that warning was that this spell uses a ring of runes to cause and fix breaches in the fabric of reality, an incursion based spell.

It's easy to see how that might be useful for Doctor Doom in Doomsday. Maybe this ring is his portal for moving through different universes, taking advantage of incursions that have already cracked those borders.

Did the TVA's ban on magic in Loki exist to keep Doctor Doom out?

The idea of Doctor Doom using magic also reminds me of an interesting detail about the TVA in the Loki series. A key rule that kept Loki in check in season 1 was that magic does not work in the TVA. When he tries to use his powers, Loki is told, "Magic powers, they're no good in the TVA, Mr. Laufeyson."

Why was that rule in place to begin with? Was it to keep magic practitioners like Doctor Doom from breaking into the TVA and seizing what Kang had built? The Loki series ended with Loki becoming the god of stories, tapping into some of his actual sorcery outside the walls of the TVA in the Temporal Loom zone. So are those protocols against magic no longer in effect for the whole TVA? I think we may have figured out how Doctor Doom sacks the TVA and gets his new Citadel.

We also never found out what the fourth broken statue was in the Citadel lobby when Loki and Sylvie first arrived in Loki season 1 episode 6. My guess is that it was going to establish some past conflict in the Citadel among the Kang variants. But Marvel could now use the opportunity to establish a backstory in which Doctor Doom once tried to take over the Citadel and failed, and has now come back for vengeance.