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MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Yesterday, WotC announced a change for some UB sets, exclusive to the Marvel ones for now: they'll be making a whole copy of the set for digital play with in-universe art and names that will act similarly to the "Universes Within" experiment.

So I guess this is probably the thing that pushes me over the edge into proxying, because I 100% do not want any Spiderman cards in my Cube but I'm sure I'll love some of the designs, and now we'll have official in-universe cards that simply won't get paper printings.

I don't really love this. I wish the two games could actually be the same, and having all these fake cards like Alchemy with every expansion already adds unnecessarily complication and complexity to the most complex game that exists. There are "arena versions" of cards that are purposely nerfed or buffed that show up if I'm not careful on Scryfall. And now there's going to be two versions of every card? And the best way to play Magic is exclusively going to have the ugly one?

Look, I'm probably one of the most accepting of UB of everyone here. But they finally decided "we'll spend ~$1M on new art slash empty our slush art coffers" in a way that makes me just even more sad that UB is 50% of Magic now. It all makes sense -- everything here is logical -- but now I'm just going to be annoyed that the thing so many of us want alongside UB sets is now the only way you can play digitally, and I imagine is unlikely to get fully printed in paper. Maybe I can hope for an occasional secret lair, since I love spending $40 ($30 plus shipping) on four cards.
 
Schafkurai

Schafkurai

MilesOfficial said:
Yesterday, WotC announced a change for some UB sets, exclusive to the Marvel ones for now: they'll be making a whole copy of the set for digital play with in-universe art and names that will act similarly to the "Universes Within" experiment.

So I guess this is probably the thing that pushes me over the edge into proxying, because I 100% do not want any Spiderman cards in my Cube but I'm sure I'll love some of the designs, and now we'll have official in-universe cards that simply won't get paper printings.

I don't really love this. I wish the two games could actually be the same, and having all these fake cards like Alchemy with every expansion already adds unnecessarily complication and complexity to the most complex game that exists. There are "arena versions" of cards that are purposely nerfed or buffed that show up if I'm not careful on Scryfall. And now there's going to be two versions of every card? And the best way to play Magic is exclusively going to have the ugly one?

Look, I'm probably one of the most accepting of UB of everyone here. But they finally decided "we'll spend ~$1M on new art slash empty our slush art coffers" in a way that makes me just even more sad that UB is 50% of Magic now. It all makes sense -- everything here is logical -- but now I'm just going to be annoyed that the thing so many of us want alongside UB sets is now the only way you can play digitally, and I imagine is unlikely to get fully printed in paper. Maybe I can hope for an occasional secret lair, since I love spending $40 ($30 plus shipping) on four cards.
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I also saw the news and immediately thought of Alchemy cards as an analogy.

My fear is (in addition to the points you made) that WotC will cut costs on the art budget. There are some good looking alchemy cards here and there, but somehow most of cards art does not appeal to me personally.
 
ravnic

ravnic

If we proxy them anyway (because we literally have to) we can also choose new artworks over the shitty ones we get.

I wonder if the Spiderman set will be the first UB product that ends up not fulfilling expectations. I hear and read everywhere that people are low on it, and it's such an obviously jarring fit for mtg.

I seriously don't know what I would do if they would print a new green madness card or a white Monastery Swiftspear in such a set.
 
Seeker

Seeker

this site does not have bluesky integration as far as I can tell so here's a fantastic troll post that I took a few seconds to crosspost to imgur:

8KfKDVf.png

z4Xw9jt.jpeg
 
Seeker

Seeker

As a friend of mine also pointed out when he saw it, it's definitely horseshoe theory in action, the higher-power you go in the 5 bracket the more you wrap right back around to 1. Black Lotus is absolutely clown shoes.
 
Nanonox

Nanonox

Found a post on reddit (from Cheese853) where you can sort your cards by word count by pasting this at the end of your ube Cobra url:

?s4=Word+Count&s3=Unsorted&s2=Unsorted

It uses the Oracle text and it looks like it counts reminder text.

My wordiest card for each color are



What are yours?
 
gaytransmulldrifter

gaytransmulldrifter

In Old Border Kitchen Table:

(this beat out morphling lol)
(think this is because the oracle is including regenerate reminder text? this beat out necropotence lol)
(probably gonna cut this eventually it's so much squeeze for so little juice haha)
(lol)
(now we're talking)



Overall most wordy: Tetravus, as it should be!

In Fair Nuff:
(very worth the squeeze imo)
(really doesn't belong in this cube on complexity honestly but I fucking love this card)
(worth the squeeze!!)
(lol sure I guess, but like really it's Rionya Fire Dancer)
(?????????)

(I think about cutting this sometimes bc it is impossible to remember what it does lol)


Overall most wordy: Vohar

Pretty interesting exercise, I think this confirmed a couple things for me:
1. Wordiness and complexity are correlated, but not one-and-the-same. A lot of stuff that I consider pretty simple to understand ranked pretty high just because it takes a good amount of words to explain the effect.
2. Reminder text and keywording have a huuuge effect on how I perceive the wordiness and complexity of a gamepiece. Once you're familiar with it your brain just glides right over it. Good to keep in mind in terms of both making sure I'm not overcomplicating things for new players by not factoring in reminder text when I consider wordiness, but also that repeating keywords with reminder text really is as good and useful for familiarity as they say and I should know when to take advantage of that.
 
ravnic

ravnic

That's a fun exercise!

For the Casual Champions Cube:



All of these seem easy to grasp. The only one I'd like to replace is Cleric Class, as it's my only class at this point. Most of my wordy cards are those having reminder text, but often for recurring abilities like Madness or Ninjutsu, so they are actually quite fitting for my goal to keep that cube groakable.
At the other end of the spectrum I have: Savannah Lions, Cunterspell, Last Gasp, Bloodrage Brawler, Llanowar Tribe, Bonesplitter, Maw of the Obzedat and Shattering Blow.


For the Ravnica Cube:



I don't have much room to change this cube, but it is also so far away from being too wordy and complex, I am not concerned.
 
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