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https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/magics-voyages-universes-beyond-2021-02-25
I must say that I am less than thrilled to hear this news. The Walking Dead Secret Lair really should have told us to anticipate more of this.
Hopefully this will make commanders out of people's favorite fictional characters.
Honestly, the reason I'm disappointed isn't that held Magic: the Gathering to some high standard for original concepts, but that for the selfish reason that I just don't care about Lord of the Rings or Warhammer, and I don't anticipate being interested in many properties used for Universes Beyond.
These are entirely additional product. Nothing lost.
Reputational damage is still damage.
Wizards have been saying for a long time "We make lots of kinds of cards for lots of kinds of audiences. If some of them aren't for you, that's fine."
I hate the Walking Dead Secret Lair for many reasons. I like the Godzilla-style approach of alternate names/faces for existing MtG cards. I'm a bit disappointed they're doing more of the former than the latter... it all seems a bit like this comic is coming true faster than I expected:
What I like is cards that would be interesting in a puzzle.
Magic trying to do what Lego did in the 2000s-2010s by cashing on franchises is a terrible idea. The Lego stuff did amazing in the short term, but it was awful long term because it never created new Lego fans. And these ventures are even more daft given that LoTR and Warhammer card games already exist!
I don't know, I felt like the lego worlds were pretty fun in their own right.
My problem, which I've complained about before, is that I think it would be more interesting if they designed self-contained sets which were designed to be fun players by themselves, and could also change the colour pie or keyword choices to match the setting. Producing cards that feel like normal magic cards but reskinned with a different flavour just feels cheap to both magic and the flavour.
And if people want them to interoperate with normal magic, they can design a format permitting whatever combinations they think are fun :)
I would really like the ability to mash up some of these different properties in the same game of magic, I think that would be fun. But I think it only works if they actually feel like "lightsabre weilder" is dropped into mediavel fantasy and has to figure out what's the same and what's different, not that everything is just like a magic card with a funny hat :)
I agree completely with Jack
"if they designed self-contained sets which were designed to be fun players by themselves, and could also change the colour pie or keyword choices to match the setting."
Translation: you want then to do more silver-bordered set. Because unless Wizards are ever more moneygrabbing than I already assume they are, they will not contaminate the pool of non-rotating in any shape or form, and that means printing any sets such as what you describe in silver borders only.
WotC: Universes Beyond to be legal in eternal formats
You know, the unfortunate thing about all this is that the usual barometer of whether Wizards is doing things the wrong way is down. Sales could be up, but if people aren't coming out to Friday Night Magic, there's a big indicator that there's a problem. But the pandemic has shut that avenue of attentiveness out.
Yes, that's roughly what I imagined, although Tahazzar points out they're going the opposite way and having them all legal. But I don't think "all silver border" is the right way to think of it -- rather, I imagined prioritising making each tie-in set good in its own right, rather than requiring them be legal in eternal formats. Say, each having their own frame, and have the option of including some sets in eternal formats, or not, or having some in but with a lot of banning, or something. But I guess their financial pressure is more to continue the status quo of valuable secondary market in eternal formats, rather than building a new cool thing.
Although I'm not sure that changing the base design would HAVE to mean they don't fit into eternal formats. There's lots of changes which aren't allowed in regular magic but were allowed in time spiral. If you swapped flying into green, or changed all the creature types so rats and cats were 1/1 and 2/2 and most humans were 3/3 and 4/4, or even to print a set with white, grey, blue, brown color pie instead of the regular five, or created a different set of keywords like in "Space: The Convergence", it wouldn't be normally printable, but it wouldn't necessarily produce anything unbalanced in legacy or commander, or maybe even in modern.
I feel like the flavour of MTG cards with a few completely different cards from LOTR (that work under the rules) is actually better than the flavour of MTG cards but a few of them have names from a different world.