General Spaaaaace: To Unfinity and Beyond!

Today, Mark Rosewater announced the first real details and teaser cards for the upcoming (un) set, Unfinity, due out April 1st. Unlike the previous (un) sets, this one will not be silver-bordered, and presents some interesting opportunities for us Cube curators and theorizers. But before that, the spaaaaace part is more than worth sharing:

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They're gorgeous. I personally wish they had frames and looked more like Magic cards (not sure where the love of the extended art comes from), but that's a personal gripe that's not new to this expansion. It's certainly not enough to stop me from considering swapping out a couple of my current shocks with these, but it'll be tough to do some and not others from an aesthetics standpoint...a standpoint I've already failed at with other cycles.

The big news here is that, in addition to being 100% black-bordered (a huge aesthetic win in general) over half of the cards will are playable in eternal formats. The ones that aren't, that go too un-set-y, will have an acorn foil symbol in the bottom, expressing their "silver-border" in a way that's much less visually off-putting than even the best attempts of WotC in the past. Sure, it'll be easy to mix them up at a glance, but for nearly all practical uses, (un) cards are totally fine. (This will also make these cards easier to play in EDH without people being weird about it, a welcome change considering the casual roots of the format and the great culture fit of (un) cards in that environment).

So now, we'll see new designs like this, which feel like Battlebond+ or Conspiracy+, an exciting and unexplored middle-ground of design space:

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We've previously had great discussions about Silver Bordered cards and Playtest cards, both which offer unique and compelling Magic cards that flesh out the Cube experience for a great many of us on these boards. I feel like with this decision from WotC, we'll get more cube-worthy cards from Unfinity than ever before, and I couldn't be more excited.

THE GOOD:
{c} More interesting, bizarre, and wacky cards and effects will be formatted in a more sensible, rules vetted way, a previous issue with attempting to implement silver-bordered design into black-bordered Magic.
{c} SPACE (in a way that makes sense for Magic)
{c} Aesthetic improvement for un-cards. Urza, Academy Headmaster is my last silver-bordered card, largely for this reason.
{c} There will be less eye-rolling at including the sillier cards in cube, as their signifier will be much more subtle than a gross border.

THE BAD:
{c} I worry this will draw out the worst excesses in modern design, especially in the commander-motivated space.
{c} I am personally uninterested in the retro space setting as well as the idea of a space theme park / carnival / circus. Space is cool though.
 
I'm personally not a big fan of a black-bordered un-set, since I feel like that defeats the entire purpose (which is to let the design team get all of their wacky ideas on paper to test them/get them out of their system, in a set that's obviously "not canon").

I'm also surprised that you're running Urza, given how lolrandom the card is. Do you use the website, or do you print out the cheatsheet and use a d20?
 
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This card is ccccrazy! I'm certainly cubing this. There's so many busted things you can do with this.
 
Nailed the art direction on the lands. They are great.

Saw in Half is one of those cards that reads really weirdly the first time because it inverts the normal application of the abilities being used (destroy). Great card tho.
 
I like that this Un-Set is black-border now. I wasn't going to be going out of my way to get any of the cards from this because I don't have a need for land upgrades beyond my Theros basics that I currently use and I already have a full set of shocks. But, now that there are some cards that will work under the normal Magic rules that I can use, my interest has been piqued. Hopefully the cards here are good. Even if they're not, I like Space Breeding Pool more than the Ravnica Allegiance Breeding Pool I have right now.

I personally want a SPACE CANTRIP.
 
I'm also surprised that you're running Urza, given how lolrandom the card is. Do you use the website, or do you print out the cheatsheet and use a d20?

We use the website, as the card requests. It's more fun to have no idea what you could even hit imo.

It's a five-color card that you have to know what you're getting yourself into with it. If the cube wasn't 720 cards, I wouldn't want it, but since it's only even drafted every other time on average (we haven't hit the 14-15 player pods we used to in 3 years or so), we haven't had much issue with it very occasionally popping up. It's a fun card, and rarely oppressive -- usually a downside for the owner. It's actively lost me as many games as it's won for sure.

I don't think most cards in a cube should be a silly and relevant in maybe only 10% of drafts, but I'm happy to dedicate one spot for this one.
 
Okay, so now that set might actually have an acorn-less (as if regular holo foil stamps weren't ugly enough) card or two I am interested in. At least i's not a zero percent chance anymore.
 
Reading the article I get the logic in moving the borders from silver to black. It was never intended to be non-playable in all formats. It was meant to be unplayable in Vintage, Legacy and Standard competitive tournaments. But allowed everywhere else.
 
I am exceptionally excited for this. The best :p mechanics from Un-sets usually make it in some way to black border anyway (ie: host-augment -> mutate, dice rolling, etc.)

I do wish the silver-yness was a bit more pushed, but at the same time I am excited for the possibility of making a bunch of other silver border cards legal in eternal formats. (Which Mark says is a possibility someday).

I am a bit mixed on the ways that they have decided to handle legal "silver" cards, but the lack of a holo-stamp is probably the best way that they could have decided to handle it without some major costs or readability/aesthetic concerns.

And I can't decide which of the full art basics I like more. I love the art of the orbital designs but I love the mana symbol on the planetary designs... Oh wait the planetary designs are going to be much more common making them much more cheaper. I guess that gives me my choice lol.
 

landofMordor

Administrator
In general I’m pumped for these changes. The planetary basic lands are completely stone-cold sicko awesome, and the move to black border opens up basically the entire set to consideration in my main cube, which wouldn’t have been a possibility during the days of Frankie Peanuts and Eye to Eye. Worst-case, I can just nope out of actually including these new cards, so it’s a no-risk proposition for me. Good stuff.
 
And I can't decide which of the full art basics I like more. I love the art of the orbital designs but I love the mana symbol on the planetary designs... Oh wait the planetary designs are going to be much more common making them much more cheaper. I guess that gives me my choice lol.

The expensive ones then, right?
 
I dislike Un-sets in general aside from the lands so this one is an easy skip for me. Being able to take a break until a real set in February is refreshing.

I don't get it, is there a bigger market than I'm aware of for Un-sets? I've been playing Magic actively for around 8 years now and have never seen any Un-cards played by anyone in person. I've only ever seen the basics when someone uses them for a constructed deck, EDH, or as their draft kit basics. That's it.

I don't really care that much since it's a supplemental set that I just ignore for the most part (well, until now with the change in legalities), but it seems like a waste of manpower to me.
 
Unstable was probably in the top 5 sets I opened the most boosters (held phantom drafts, plus a bunch of regular drafts, total of probably ~2 boxes). I had a lot of fun with it, and wanted the basics too, so Unfinity is partially my fault :) It was pretty popular in my area.

I don't have much of an opinion on Unfinity yet, based on the few cards we've seen.
 
I liked all the references and I actually cube two silver bordered cards, so I am not against them. But I also never saw someone play more than a card or two in their decks anywhere
 
Most players play kitchen table magic, as has been stated by MaRo many times, and Un-Sets are perfectly fit to be popular at the kitchen table scene.
 
One of the biggest reason that you don't see them around is that folks who play at game stores, at least here in the states, are fairly hostile to silver borders. I've seen greater acceptance to Shaharazad both pre and post banning to even an innocent Timmy, Power Gamer in someone's 99 at the commander tables. Lots of bemoaning how unserious they are (yes, correct) and how it's not "real Magic".

I imagine with this set, there will be some grumpy folks, but the discreet signifier will allow even the non-legal cards to play in EDH games so long as they're not entirely busted. This is 100% a huge thing. The silver border was more than an aesthetic faux pas, it's been brightly colored stripes of a poisonous frog in terms of how folks have been treated. Haven't noticed folks who played in (un) drafts being any more toxic than normal players to justify the treatment (if anything, the opposite), so I imagine it's really all about a philosophical difference about the cards.

Folks who play Magic entirely in kitchen table settings play essentially a different game than those of us who frequent tournaments and grind Arena. They're a much larger cohort, and you can see that in some of the subtlety of price movements on otherwise random cards, even if on average they spend significantly less than a PTQ regular. The kitchen table crowd, my playgroup absolutely included, follows things like the "official" EDH ban lists. They wouldn't have considered cards from (un) sets in their decks before because they just weren't allowed, but now, it won't really matter as much. And my group loves (un) cards in cube, so they'll be happy for the visual balance with the rest of cube!
 
There's also the fact that even if all Un cards had black borders, a lot of them would remain absolutely miserable to play with or against. For every Cheatyface there's a passel of Carnivorous Death Parrots or worse Deal Damages. And even Cheatyface can be awful depending on your standards!

I say this as someone who loves Un cards, of course. If you pick the right ones, they can be a ton of fun, but I can't blame anyone for having their first silver card experience being a Phyrexian Librarian and deciding that the whole concept is super dumb. As enfranchised players I feel we tend to remember the highlights, but the bad stuff was really, really bad as well and I think that that gets glossed over in a lot of these types of conversations.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Which is why they're differentiating what you can and can't play in official tournaments.
The only difference is now the cards actually look good.

I'll admit I do think the "legal" cards and the "silver boarder" cards looks REAL similar, and that could certainly be improved, but I do prefer this overall
 
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