General CBS

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.
 
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.
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.
 
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.
 
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:

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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.
 
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