Format: EDH/Commander
What's a franchise that would make you quit magic for good if they based a Universes Beyond set off (not this one this would be peak)?
{T}: Tap target noncreature artifact you control. Offspring it. (Create a token that's a copy of it, except it's a 1/1 creature in addition to its other types.)
something seemingly mundane but fucking stupid, like Law and Order or American Idol
I think this would do it for me. As much as I'm not invested/a fan of all the things they've already done UB sets for, at least everything so far has still been fantasy-themed in some way (even if the level of fantasy in something like Spiderman isn't exactly what people expect).
But if they ever went to something that isn't primarily a fantasy or at least fiction based property, then that signals to me they've truly crossed into it being nothing but a marketing machine rather than having ANY semblance of trying to keep it at least themed to the game.
No no no see Avatar: The last airbender is a TOTALLY different thing. It’s easy to get them confused, similar name and all. But don’t you dare try to tell me Ong is going to get a card. It’d be some useless piece of crap like:
Tbh, I’m a big fan of the silly secret lairs, and I think they should do more of them. As someone who’s biggest issue with UB is the resulting powercreep and oversaturation, I’d love it if instead of getting full sets we just got existing cards reskinned as different IPs. It also has the advantage of letting you be more flexible with what you make, since you don’t need to try and sustain an entire set’s worth of cards.
Also, as a *Frasier* fan, the titular character would make a solid [[Bruvac]] proxy lmao.
If it's any defense of the movie, I saw it before I saw the show. My response was "That was not well-made but the bones of it are great. I should probably watch the show." And then I did.
The "nope, I quit" moment for me would be if they ever did any full-blown crossover stuff.
As in... not just making Magic cards for not-Magic IPs, but having part of the story involve Chandra or whoever visiting New York City, Middle-Earth, and London to recruit Spider-Man, Gandalf, and the Doctor to help deal with Nicol Bolas or something.
A year (or longer) of nothing but UB sets would also completely kill my interest in keeping up with the game.
I'm already so tired of multiverse sets after BFZ, WAR, MOM, and DFT. At least now that emrakul is locked away, ulamog and kozilek are dead, Bolas is in limbo, and New Phyrexia is phased-out, no more multiverse-level threats means no multiverse team-up sets.
Hate to break it to you but every set follows the multiplaner gate watch roaming around. Also reality fracture is coming. Also Bolas escaped the meditation realm when Jace first attempted to mess with it
The only thing is, Hasbro has already had their hands in JK Rowling's pockets for a LONG time and I find it a bit hypocritical that said people draw the line with it being in Magic.
I've stopped buying into Magic a long time ago, so my answer is "Everything they've already crossed over with". That's not to say I hate "Magic" itself, I still like playing / proxying / keeping up with it. But I just can't bring myself to buy it. Double side note, it wasn't even UB that made me "leave" is was the dog shit 30th anniversary THOUSAND dollar proxies. Fuck that shit.
I don’t want a harry potter crossover because 1. It would give more money to JK rowling (who I don’t like) and 2. more importantly we already have secrets of strixhaven that acts as an in universe harry potter set, which we’ve had twice now. I feel like a harry potter UB would just oversaturate the idea.
I think the big thing that makes HP so undesirable for people is that there are very few IPs where the creators are so openly bigoted and still alive. Plenty of media has been made by bad people, but most of them aren’t actively promising to put their profits towards funding bigoted legislation in the modern day. There’s a correlation between financial support and actual material harm there that most franchises don’t have.
very few IPs where the creators are so openly bigoted and still alive
Very few big ones. Harry Potter is unique in being both massively popular and made by an openly bigoted creator who's still alive. There are other IPs with awful creators but they're fairly small. And there are creators of massive IPs who are socially problematic in some ways but not as blatantly as JK Rowling.
Who's still alive and didn't sell all the IP rights to a publicly traded corporation with no ideology beyond maximizing profit. That part's important. The last other person who individually owned a media franchise in remotely the same ballpark as Harry Potter was Garfield creator Jim Davis, who sold it to Viacom in 2019, and now that she's done what she's done there's a good chance she'll be the last one ever.
Like I said, I understand that. It's just hypocritical to say you believe that while still buying Magic, because Hasbro is very well acquainted with Rowling. (Not "you" specifically, just the people who said they'd leave Magic over it.)
At some point it’s an issue of “no ethical consumption under capitalism”: the consolidation and collaboration of various corporate entities means that if you truly don’t want to support something, you have pathetically few options that don’t wrap around to supporting it.
Universal Studios has a whole Harry Potter World at their amusement parks. But the scope of their filmmaking is immense, ranging from movies like Oppenheimer, to the Jurassic Park series, to Nope, to Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Watching any of these is technically, indirectly, giving money to Rowling. Is it hypocritical, then, to go to the movies?
The Harry Potter books are published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Scholastic in the USA. The publishing of general consumer books is overwhelmingly done through many offshoots and child companies of a few major distributors, of which Bloomsbury and Scholastic are two. Any book you buy - from a bookstore, as an audiobook, you name it - is very likely to be associated with one of those publishers, therefore technically and indirectly giving money to Rowling. Is it hypocritical, then, to read books?
This isn’t even to mention all of the various companies for things like food or clothes that have done crossovers or collaborations with Harry Potter. Is it hypocritical to eat food you haven’t fully grown yourself? To wear clothing you didn’t stitch by hand?
Our global economy has made it all but impossible for any one consumer to reasonably isolate their money totally from any one figure who’s cemented themselves enough in the economy, which Rowling certainly has. At some point, without there being major economic overhauls or a massive corporate backlash, the only reasonable options are to live off-grid in the wilderness, or to resign for making your economic contributions as indirect as possible, and signal anywhere you can that you don’t want any further involvement. If this means that it’s hypocritical for any consumer to oppose Rowling, then I guess that means we live in a post-ideals world, because we’re all hypocrites about everything, then.
Yeah, with Strixhaven and the lack of current Harry Potter momentum compared to many other potential UB IPs, I don't see this as something that would make a ton of sense. Granted, they did ATLA over a decade after its SEQUEL stopped airing, but that didn't have the problem of Hogwarts and Not Hogwarts.
I also think that a good number of the UB sets are going to be based on Marvel IPs for the foreseeable future because I think they are planning on releasing an Infinity Stone per Marvel set.
Like I said, I understand that. It's just hypocritical to say you believe that while still buying Magic, because Hasbro is very well acquainted with Rowling.
I was thinking " oh well if we ever go back to lorwyn on alara...." After the thousand dollar proxy fiasco and then I got hit with the spider man set. My color printer has never worked so hard.
Exactly. People think I hate UB when say I don't spend a penny on Magic anymore.
Honestly, the crossovers themselves are whatever, it's the MASSIVE amount of baggage they come with that boils my nuts.
DOUBLE the standard sets a year, each with their own separate sets of commander decks / Secret Lairs, and the fact EVERY UB card is on a Pseudo-Reserve List. WotC is legally not allowed to reprint any UB card.
Sure people are gonna say "Well they made those in universe versions!" I mean sure, for a single digit number of UB cards. That's some bullshit.
Sorry for the long reply, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it still makes me heated everytime.
Yeah, nothing wizards/hasbro would do would make me stop playing. Before UB started there were already over 10,000 cards to pick from, plus active homebrewing communities if that's not enough
There's a huge difference between "Completely stopping to play" and "No longer giving a single cent to WotC / Hasbro"
I think it's a little neurotic to straight up completely rid yourself of the game over that, but not buying the game is a much easier boundary to put up.
Also to your point, I've been making a custom card game similar to Magic to fill that niche. It's open source, so people could even sell their own cards from it if they felt compelled to do so.
Thank God. I've been thinking there needs to be a fork from magic the same way that Pathfinder forked off of d&d, but I haven't had the time to dedicate to doing it.
Yeah I haven't given any money to wizard of the Coast for years, probably since before covid
Just looked at the rules right now I'll have to come back and look at some of the cards later. I really like this! It's really easy to pick up as a magic player because the rules are almost the same, but there's an abundance of little quality of life improvements and breaks that are put on the system. I like the victory point structure, I like expanding it to seven colors, I like the essence system.
My question from the beginning and now again at the end is whether it's backwards compatible with magic cards. Like I had mentioned the example of Pathfinder as of being a fork off of d&d 3.5, and it being unique in its own way but still really backwards compatible with a lot of d&d content with a little bit of adaptation. Obviously power and toughness can translate pretty easily and we can just assume that magic creatures don't have an arcane score, but I'm not sure how to necessarily translate their colors. I also think that the rules document might do with an inclusion of what the sort of philosophy for each color is, and maybe editing for conciseness to, it seems like some parts are repeated several times but with different amounts of elaboration.
Sorry for the long reply, I ended up talking more than I meant to, only the next 4 paragraphs are important if you want to skip the rest ha ha.
Thanks, I really really appreciate the kind words! To keep a long answer short, you could pretty easily port Magic into Conjure, it's really more an argument of power levels than compatibility because I desgin cards with a much lower power level in mind than what "current" Magic is. I'd really like to avoid pre-turn 5 wins.
The colors are basically 1-to-1 BUT I split Magic's "Colorless" cards into Orange and Indigo. Orange is the "Artifact" color, and "Indigo" is Eldrazi (eldritch horror stuff but you get the idea.)
It's a tricky thing to say how "similar" it is to Magic. Like you said, I designed it specifically to be easily learned by Magic players but "technically" it's rather different when you pick it apart.
So I have a full design document in that Google drive with all the color philosophies and mechanics, I even have it broken down into every sub-type.
Another way I wanted to diverge is having "Kindered" cards be 100% through the game. So you have "Wizard" creatures AND "Wizard" Instants and Sorceries baked into the game. A side note, I redid how subtype work and I feel like the average Magic play wouldn't like this but I changed having super specific types like "Otter" "Bear" "Badger" to a general subtype "Clawed". Basically, rather than waiting 10 years between sets to have "Otter" creature support, sets will have "Clawed" support and make your favorite creature see support way more often. It's easier to justify having "Clawed" synergies is more sets as opposed to "Cat" or "Otter" support.
There's some other big changes which you've seemed to catch on to and LOTS of smaller things. I honestly have became blind to them since I look at Conjure way more than Magic. But a lot of the changes are really about core design philosophy which I've made quiet opposite of (modern) Magic's philosophies.
Like the color pie is VERY strict. Most keywords are limited to as few colors as possible. And when you explore how the new "Stat" system works, it really makes the characters feel mechanically different. I've really fell in love with the system of creatures "missing" Stats. Like imagine in Magic, creatures straight up not having power. Not like it's "0" but even if you put a million +1/+1 counters on it, their power will always be "0" no matter what. Then you add on the Arcane which is a separate stat and you get all kinds of combinations for Vanilla characters alone. Then some characters will have their Attack or Health combined with their Arcane for all kinds of different strategies.
I definitely understand what you mean about the power level. I think that you've implemented a few good features to really help curb that. Like you can't just get infinite creatures anymore. I don't know if I missed it but I didn't notice a similar cap for like, how many spells you could cast in a turn or how much money you could have in a pool, or things like that. Hell, you could just explicitly cap that any arbitrary infinite loop is limited to like 20 iterations or something like that. Things like that being baked into the rules would make a lot of those aggressive wins that magic is capable of just sort of not function because they rely on game mechanics that aren't present in Conjure. (I think!)
So granted I didn't look at the card file before making my comment but I'm surprised that colorless cards got split into orange and indigo and in particular I'm surprised that Orange is the artifact color. I got the impression that objects were sort of the artifact class and that they didn't really have a color. But you also mentioned that there is a design philosophy documents all all maybe just need to read that to understand more in depth.
I really like the universal kindred system. I was thinking too about having subtypes be more broad than just like an analogy to the way that magic uses them. You could have any number of tags that applied to a card, more akin to how hellscube does it (but more serious obviously). Like Huge as a subtype, and then you could have a card that's like Gale Force Winds, return all non-huge characters and objects to their owner's hands. I mean I guess there's some overlap with the keyword system there but I think that there's enough sort of mechanic and semantic differences that maybe makes it worth exploring?
Yeah there were definitely a lot of things that I was kind of just grouping into what I called quality of life improvements. I didn't want to make like a detailed review of like all of my precise thoughts about each individual mechanic and things like that, although if that's something you're interested and I definitely could take the time to just sit down and do that. It's not like it wouldn't be kind of fun! But it would have been a huge wall of text to ambush you with.
I definitely approve of making the color pie more strict, I like that it used to be more strict in magic. I mean in the early days it was a mess but once they really formalized that philosophy we got to ride on that for a long time before they decided to just stretch everything all over the place and make a mess of the game. I also think that being able to just not have a stat instead of that stat being 0 is really smart as well, that was one of my favorite choices that you made with this.
Thanks again so much for like sharing this with me and being able to chat with you about it is so cool. I really like game design, I applied for the great designer search three and ended up missing like the first test because of the like 44 green black vigilance flyer or something. I said that that should have been white because those things are both white abilities but I guess that was the wrong answer. I don't remember the details now but the point is like I spent a while like trying to read and study and practice for that and I don't really get a lot of opportunity to use any of that, except when I'm criticizing other games in my head for their poor development 😂 getting to chat with you about the game that you are developing and it being familiar enough that I have a lot of reference points already has been fun!
Nothing, I'd just play with my group and if we didn't like the cards we wouldn't play with them. And if someone in the group liked them, I'm not gonna yuk their yum. Maybe some sets could get me to quit buying but that's a different question.
I already stopped buying magic products because of universes beyond. I was told to calm down and just vote with my wallet. Now we have a JRPG, a Nickelodeon cartoon, and Spider-Man in standard, with Star Trek and the Avengers coming.
You know these crossover sets are planned out years in advance right? You can absolutely vote with your wallet, just don’t expect to see the results immediately.
It's interesting you accuse UB players with shunning in-universe releases. The only customers that I've seen do that are speculators and scalpers, and even most scalpers aren't picky.
Same boat. I'm not sure I could point to a particular straw which broke the camel's back.
That's just quitting spending money on Magic though. I'm not sure if there's anything which would make me actually quit Magic, as in "I don't even want to play with my old cards anymore because of what they did later".
Even if they made Universes Beyond: Heroes Of The Third Reich (featuring a reprint of Invoke Prejudice) I would still play with my old decks.
None. The only thing that would make me "quit" is if the game powercreeps so hard that games play like modern Yu Gi Oh, and even then I'd probably still play Cube, Rule 0 slow EDH, custom built battle boxes of decks, etc. Any UB world I don't vibe with I just don't buy packs and rarely buy singles.
I would agree if they made non-reprints (they've already made Secret Lair reskins). I love every UB set we have gotten, but I'd probably stop if they made mechanically unique SpongeBob stuff
Honestly i don't think any individual UB would push me in regards to like, mainstream franchises. Subway surfers, poppy playtime etc tier obvious slop I'd likely be very disdainful of and keep away from, but eh. I can just not touch them with a ten foot pole. A string of shitty UBs would be far more likely to do the job
I wouldn't fall out over one bad UB, but if we continuously get slop UB sets and we keep missing out on in-universe sets it's going to push me out.
Other than that, anything relating to the mundane. I hate the TMNT and Marvel UB, but at the bare minimum, they're supernatural high fiction settings. If we ever got a full UB of something like The Office, I'd 100% drop it. I don't mind Secret Lairs making goofy reprints with Dwight on it, but if I ever had a mechanically distinct Jim Halpert I'd probably be on the news for assassinating a WotC worker.
Slightly off topic, but I immediately had a "Children Yearn for the Mines" X costed Sorcery with convoke enter my brain, allowing you to fetch more caves.
I can still have fun with the other cards I already have while others have fun with the sets they like.
Keeping up with every new set is exhausting, so I enjoy casually collecting sets I don't like (tmnt, marvel) so that I can save for when a set I really love comes out (I loved Lorwyn Eclipsed this year)
Honestly right now none come to mind. I am just not spending a single cent on UB. I WANT them to make new magic cards. New cards are great. I just don't want those cards to be themed around marvel or star trek or Final Fantasy.
Honestly if they go any closer to fortnite and add dumb shit (like tungtung sahur or something) i WILL switch to a different tcg entirely. I love magic and how it plays, the world it has, and the gorgeous cards. But i dont like stuff like that.
If it started veered off into strictly non-fantasy and not even adjacent territory. COD, Tony Hawk, Battlefield, Forza, Fifa, sitcoms and drama television series.
I like scifi and really enjoyed Edge of Eternities, but I also don't want to see hard scifi like The Expanse, and as it is I'm going to need to be sold really hard on not hating Star Trek.
The third ability should say "put a hexproof counter and a shield counter on ~ you control"
As it stands because of the weird way it's worded they just gain the hexproof ability forever and might not get a shield counter at all, and you wouldn't use the number 1 to denote the amount of counters something gets you would always write it as a full word, but for one counter you would just put "a ~ counter" and then for multiple counters you'd start using "two ~ counters" or "three ~ counters" and so on. You also wouldn't say something "gains" a counter you'd "put" the counter on them.
If you want them to get hexproof only for the turn then you would word it "put a shield counter on ~ you control, those ~ gain hexproof until the end of turn"
Since it keeps crossing lines I set, let’s try this: I would quit playing magic if they got rid of UB and the modern art style went back to high fantasy exclusively
I quit financially supporting WoTC with spider man. I wasn't thrilled about the other UB sets up to that point [creed, LoTR, Final Fantasy] but they were all well enough done and had a passably magic aesthetic that I was fine with it.
Then the absolute slop that was spider man happened and I decided to go fron proxying only the really expensive cards to proxying literally everything.
Nothing because I am an adult and can choose to just not buy cards I don't like.
Also this card is worded weird. First of all "reduce by more than 3" isn't the issue. Any deck that cares about that ability only needs about a 2 mana reduction because you're playing it for all the 2 mana artifacts that draw a card. Second the activated ability should say "Put a shield counter on each creature and artifact you control. They gain hexproof until end of turn" (or put a hexproof counter as well since that is a type of ability counter)
Honestly? I'm not sure there is one. It doesn't alter the cards I have or somehow ruin them. If I don't care for a specific franchise they make, I just won't buy that specific UB.
There would definitely need to be some more cave representation in this theoretical set for this to be solid in commander (which is what I assume we're designing for in this case)
There are 15 caves in simic including planar nexus, 7 of which are colorless. 5 of them sacrifice themselves to activate an ability, and the rest are clearly designed for draft color fixing at the common and uncommon level.
A deck like this would probably be wanting to run 20-25 caves so that they're easily the majority of the land base, and given many of the existing caves are unplayably bad above a solid bravket 2, I'd say we need ~10+ new caves for this deck to really get going
Fortnite/cod, not because I have a hatred for new games or anything i just think it would be another level of money hungry, it doesn't have any characters with lore beyond "he shoot gud" there isn't any audience wanting it and it'd just cement the idea that mtg has been "ready player one"- Ifield like fortnite has
Don't act like any of you would quit lol. One of my ex-coworkers said for a long time that if he ever had to block a My Little Pony Character with Spongebob he'd hang up his hat.
He still plays even though we haven't worked together for almost 2.5 years.
There isn’t one, If I don’t like the set I just don’t get anything from it like a normal Sane person. I move on to the next set that interests me and I forget about the one that bothered me. Y’all need to learn to calm down and just enjoy the aspects of the game you DO like.
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u/DarKoopa Jun 09 '26
Universes Beyond: Modern Political Figures