No. I can think of at least one closer analogy: Lessons
You pick them from booster packs like attractions. You do not include them in your deck. You play any card that can activate it and you get to choose whichever Lesson you want like a toolbox.
General Spaaaaace: To Unfinity and Beyond!
- Thread starter MilesOfficial
- Start date
You pick them from booster packs like attractions. You do not include them in your deck. You play any card that can activate it and you get to choose whichever Lesson you want like a toolbox.
I can think of a closer analogy than lessons: contraptions. But, er, you already listed them.
The recent un-sets seem very parasitic to me. Contraptions, attractions, augment and watermarks all require a critical mass of enablers and payoffs to be present if they are going to be drafted similar to retail limited. Im not even sure it would be viable to build a cube combining Unstable and Unfinity and have both Attractions and Contraptions in the draft.
The recent un-sets seem very parasitic to me. Contraptions, attractions, augment and watermarks all require a critical mass of enablers and payoffs to be present if they are going to be drafted similar to retail limited. Im not even sure it would be viable to build a cube combining Unstable and Unfinity and have both Attractions and Contraptions in the draft.
Not eternal legal lol
I am temptedso again, you can simply squadron Lessons, Contraptions, and Attractions with any cards you wish to run that make them.
they’re not really parasitic when handled in this way, as they don’t take up “extra slots” in the cube, and they all operate pretty much on their own once you have them deployed. assuming you’re running them as value engines and not some kind of all-in critical mass archetype that requires you to have a bunch of them out at once… which the good ones don’t, at all. Wrench-Rigger is a very powerful card even if he’s the only card in the cube that references Contraptions. Same with Lifetime Pass Holder.
they’re not really parasitic when handled in this way, as they don’t take up “extra slots” in the cube, and they all operate pretty much on their own once you have them deployed. assuming you’re running them as value engines and not some kind of all-in critical mass archetype that requires you to have a bunch of them out at once… which the good ones don’t, at all. Wrench-Rigger is a very powerful card even if he’s the only card in the cube that references Contraptions. Same with Lifetime Pass Holder.
I think lessons and attractions will play very differently in practice. When you learn, you have to actually cast whatever you learn, usually for a pretty significant cost. You also have a very high degree of control over what you get.
When you open an attraction, you just get a random thing for free. There's no additional cost, no toolbox, no decision to be made in-game, just a free artifact out on the field that generates value.
I agree these two mechanics work in similar design space, but I think the play patterns will ultimately be wildly different.
Still closer than tokens in eternal Magic.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
I feel like part of the problem I'm having with Unfinity is that I cannot bring myself to care about Attractions or Stickers. Like, my eyes literally slide off of them. So the fact that a large portion of the set is dedicated to those mechanics means that I'm left... unintrigued. And it doesn't help that, thanks to the new "part of the set is black-bordered" thing, we're getting fewer mechanically funny cards.
I had a similar issue with Unstable — Contraptions and Augments/Hosts didn't grab me, so most of that set was thoroughly unmemorable.
I've yet to see an attraction, only cards that reference them.
Here they are
https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=type:attraction
Rules:
In draft you cannot use your attractions unless you have at least 3. In constructed your attraction deck must be exactly 10 with different names.
You can only put them onto the battlefield if a card tells you to do so.
When you have one or more attractions on the battlefield you (at the same time Sagas trigger) roll a dice every precombat main phase. In the right side of the cards are highlighted numbers. Roll the number, get the ability. This is called visiting the attraction. Some patterns: 1 is always a miss. 6 is always a hit. And most attractions have variations meaning you can have some that activate on a 3 and 6. And the same named attraction also activate on a 4 and 6. If you click on Balloon Stand you will see the different variations of that attraction.
When a attraction is destroyed, it goes to the ‘Junkyard’. It goes to exile like normal.
So I love this effect! Yay for more white reanimation, and reanimation that feels white!
TO BE FAIR, in most cubes, reanimating based on whether a creature is Legendary or not is equally arbitrary as whether or not a character in the art is wearing a hat. This effect seems worthwhile so long as you can get a bit more than two 3-drops out of it. I can't imagine paying 5 for this, even in white, if it maxed out on 3MV as a rule, especially if we're limiting it to creatures.
Unfortunately, Cube Cobra does not yet have a way to filter by hat-wearing I'm aware of (though it is on Scryfall IIRC), so I had to manually filter it by hand to see how often I could "cheat" and get above the 3MV standard restriction of this card. Based on what I would personally give it to my playgroup if they tried to pull this, here's my generously-determined "hat-wearing" 4MV+ creatures:
So yeah, absolutely, the art, flavor, and flavor-text are all grating to me personally, but thankfully, I just do not have the density of hat-wearing creatures that this card would literally become the red-headed stepchild of my Cube.
Hat density, new design terminology from riptidelab.com.
Fun House, Fun House,
Throw your Tron lands at the wall,
Endless mana for us all,
Ho ho ho ho ho - hey!
Fun House, Fun House,
Head to Ask Urza Dot Com
Spin the wheel and don't stop
Ha ha ha ha ha - hey!
I will admit, I'm at least a little tempted. Mostly because, even if you don't play Standard, nobody's gonna call you on naming Negate, Naturalize (which is actually Return to Nature at the moment but who cares/will remember?), Thrill of Possibility, Cancel (which is also currently not Standard legal! but nobody's gonna remember that), and if you put effort in to remember which X spell is currently legal (it's Light Up The Night) you get some value there.
The versatility is definitely there, the power level is probably not, but it's at least somewhat interesting.
edit: I will say, if it became the card forever I'd be a lot more interested, you could pay 1 up front whenever you had a spare mana and threaten to draw X or Syncopate or whatever for the rest of the game.
Oh. I'm definitely running Standard Procedure and not looking back.
That's the dumb stuff I was hoping for from this set that I hadn't been seeing, the true "Booster Tutor" of our modern age, and similarly overly wordy and complicated for new players.
I can imagine potential feelbad scenarios or people being confused, but I can also imagine an order of magnitude more scenarios where someone excitedly picks this card and spends half of deck-building looking up what cards are actually in Standard. It's a fun puzzle for any cube drafter to solve, and allows for great creativity and even greater stories. The awkwardness of needing a third party thing is less than something like a lesson-board or an attraction deck imo, and one I'm more than willing to take on.
That's the dumb stuff I was hoping for from this set that I hadn't been seeing, the true "Booster Tutor" of our modern age, and similarly overly wordy and complicated for new players.
I can imagine potential feelbad scenarios or people being confused, but I can also imagine an order of magnitude more scenarios where someone excitedly picks this card and spends half of deck-building looking up what cards are actually in Standard. It's a fun puzzle for any cube drafter to solve, and allows for great creativity and even greater stories. The awkwardness of needing a third party thing is less than something like a lesson-board or an attraction deck imo, and one I'm more than willing to take on.
Why'd they wait until the 11th hour to start posting fun cards? This is so dumb, and I love it.
This is the first top down individual card I think is particularly clever, and it's not bad either. I wouldn't run it in a cube smaller than mine, but I've got a lot of space and plenty of drafters who are surprisingly eager for equipment.
Even with the high equip cost, t's not unreasonable to anticipate you're drawing a card every turn this is equipped. Without the toughness boost, you may have to be reequipping this often...but you're drawing enough gas to make that worthwhile. It's solid!
I imagine people doing scryfall searches in the middle of the match, pessimist that I am.
I think I'll be trying Trigger Happy, I haven't seen anything too egregious that it can do, it doesn't seem too unwieldy to make rulings on, and it's a very open-ended interesting card that also pushes some more blink-ish into red. Might have to reconsider The Cruelty of Gix.
I think I'll be trying Trigger Happy, I haven't seen anything too egregious that it can do, it doesn't seem too unwieldy to make rulings on, and it's a very open-ended interesting card that also pushes some more blink-ish into red. Might have to reconsider The Cruelty of Gix.
I love this card. It can be a removal or a counterspell or a draw spell or a save spell (snakeskin veil et similia). I think this could become a Cube all-star, and the fact that its effect changes (slightly) in time it's an upside more than a downside imho.
I would have loved if it existed in RTR era, to make it become a Sphinx's Revelation. But yeah maybe it's better this way
can I interest you in a Cut of the Profits or perhaps you'd rather Even the Score
(really though, having thought more about it, I'm even more tempted than I was before, because it's just so many things)
Full spoiler is out!
From the first post in this thread, my expectations were reasonably high back in November. Let's see how they lined up:
Did we get any of these things? From the discourse (even here!) there seems to be even more eye-rolling going on around un-cards. Aesthetically, I do prefer the acorn holostamp to the silver border, and I think complaints are overblown about how easy it is to differentiate legality - certainly it's more straightforward than showing a player the 10 latest booster packs and asking them to know whether the contents are legal in Standard, Modern, and/or Legacy - but I do not think we saw the interesting, bizarre, or wacky cards at the same volume of previous un-sets that would've made this aesthetic improvement meaningful.
Beyond 1 of the cycles of basics, the 10 shocks, and Nearby Planet - all but one of which were spoiled before I wrote excitedly about it - we didn't even get any visually cool space cards! Everything was this very kitschy 1950s space, with virtually zero room for the romance of the cosmos. I didn't need much, but I wanted the occasional card to show it off or mechanic to express the physics/science concepts the setting promises.
On the other hand:
Oops. Nailed it.
Attractions and Stickers have several levels of layers to comprehension and don't really get there in being that exciting or clever. They're both parasitic in ways that doesn't interest me, and I haven't seen any effects that I'd be tempted to try out in cube even if I weren't concerned about the high barrier to entry/complexity with these mechanics, which I very much am! Going to try a draft or two of this set to see if I like it in its portended context, but I can't imagine these mechanics ever whispering my cube's Cube Cobra URL while I still breathe.
The hat joke went too far -- it was funny because it was unintended! ADMITTEDLY, I'd be more forgiving of it if my cube had the hat density to justify a Rat in the Hat, but I'd realistically sooner support dragon tribal.
All that said, it looks like we're at 3 cards I'll be testing in my 720 list:
And there were som fun designs, many of which were only released today:
Overall, not as fun or interesting as previous un-sets, and if these had the silver borders, I'd be running a whole 0 of them for aesthetic preference reasons. But hey, we've gotten plenty of good sets already this year. Let's go Secret Lair 40k and Brother's War spoilers
From the first post in this thread, my expectations were reasonably high back in November. Let's see how they lined up:
THE GOOD:
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.
Did we get any of these things? From the discourse (even here!) there seems to be even more eye-rolling going on around un-cards. Aesthetically, I do prefer the acorn holostamp to the silver border, and I think complaints are overblown about how easy it is to differentiate legality - certainly it's more straightforward than showing a player the 10 latest booster packs and asking them to know whether the contents are legal in Standard, Modern, and/or Legacy - but I do not think we saw the interesting, bizarre, or wacky cards at the same volume of previous un-sets that would've made this aesthetic improvement meaningful.
Beyond 1 of the cycles of basics, the 10 shocks, and Nearby Planet - all but one of which were spoiled before I wrote excitedly about it - we didn't even get any visually cool space cards! Everything was this very kitschy 1950s space, with virtually zero room for the romance of the cosmos. I didn't need much, but I wanted the occasional card to show it off or mechanic to express the physics/science concepts the setting promises.
On the other hand:
Oops. Nailed it.
Attractions and Stickers have several levels of layers to comprehension and don't really get there in being that exciting or clever. They're both parasitic in ways that doesn't interest me, and I haven't seen any effects that I'd be tempted to try out in cube even if I weren't concerned about the high barrier to entry/complexity with these mechanics, which I very much am! Going to try a draft or two of this set to see if I like it in its portended context, but I can't imagine these mechanics ever whispering my cube's Cube Cobra URL while I still breathe.
The hat joke went too far -- it was funny because it was unintended! ADMITTEDLY, I'd be more forgiving of it if my cube had the hat density to justify a Rat in the Hat, but I'd realistically sooner support dragon tribal.
All that said, it looks like we're at 3 cards I'll be testing in my 720 list:
And there were som fun designs, many of which were only released today:
Overall, not as fun or interesting as previous un-sets, and if these had the silver borders, I'd be running a whole 0 of them for aesthetic preference reasons. But hey, we've gotten plenty of good sets already this year. Let's go Secret Lair 40k and Brother's War spoilers
this set was an absolute banger IMO.
more includes for me than any set since MH2, i love the goofy aesthetic and subgame (can’t wait to proxy the showcase cards), Attractions make me happy, finally, to try an artifact theme (in SULTAI?!? amazing). even ignoring stickers for the logistical challenge i am walking away from Unfinity with a big bag of goodies to try out. this one was among the all-timers for me among Unsets and just Magic sets in general.
more includes for me than any set since MH2, i love the goofy aesthetic and subgame (can’t wait to proxy the showcase cards), Attractions make me happy, finally, to try an artifact theme (in SULTAI?!? amazing). even ignoring stickers for the logistical challenge i am walking away from Unfinity with a big bag of goodies to try out. this one was among the all-timers for me among Unsets and just Magic sets in general.