I didn’t mean to imply that they knew he was latently magical. Rather, he had the Potential for Greatness. When he was a surgeon, he was a Great Surgeon. When he became a wizard, he was a Great Wizard. If he had set his sights on pinochle, then he would have been a Great Pinochle Player.
The MCU is the tail wagging the dog of the comic books these days. A billion people worldwide know the movie version of a character - or, I should say, the latest movie version of a character - and maybe 100,000 know what the current comics have to say if they haven’t been retconned to conform with the movie.
Can the word “canon” be meaningfully applied to the comic book version of any character today?