If the worst possible scenario for a design of a card is that it sees play, that card should not be designed.

An occasional check-in of "Hey this is the current nonsense going on in standard" might be a fun video to watch IMO.

The Unfinity experiment has finally come to its inevitable conclusion. I love legacy and I love Un-sets. Putting them together pushed me away from both. I am now looking at getting back to legacy and possibly completing my Un-set collection with this ban.

"You can make a card bad but it won't be bad forever" "And I took that personally" ~ All With Nothing, probably

The only un-card that actually functions as a real card that i can see is saw in half. Most of the time i forget its even an uncard

6:50 what makes rosewaters statement funny is that no group i ever played with had issues with silver-bordered cards in EDH. What people DO have issues with is a larger number of black-bordered cards. People will let you play "the cheese stands alone". People will stab you behind the store for casting scrambleverse.

Goodbye, Mind Goblin. You will not be missed

The reason stickers were a bad idea: Marked cards are banned.

And then there's me off to the side, low-key happy that Attractions are ok in Commander because it means my Mr House deck still rolls a lot of dice to roll. Still confuses me that Wizards made a Mardu dice-roller guy and then barely printed cards that roll dice in those colours.

One of my favorite decks to play is my commander legal Mira The Magnificent attractions deck. It’s fun, quirky, and mechanically unique. I highly recommend building it!

I will say, while I'm happy stickers and attractions aren't legal in competitive formats anymore, I do feel like just using the Rule 0 discussion as a way to play silver boarder stuff in commander isn't really ideal. I've got several rule 0 Un-Decks myself, but the thing is, if the commander or a significant portion of the deck WASN'T devoted to being a goofy silver border thing... I wouldn't really bother. There's no reason Krark's Other Thumb can't be legal now given that there are plenty of black border dice rolling cards and similar re-roll effects... but I'm not about to put it in a dice-rolling deck if its the only card thats gonna be in there, on the off chance that someone in the rule 0 conversation has a hard 'no silver border' stance and suddenly I gotta play a different deck. If the decks entire premise isn't dedicated to an Un-Mechanic, I'd rather the whole deck be black border, just to be safe. But theres plenty of silver boarder cards that are frankly not that egregious and may as well be playable. Plus, making the cards black border also helps people who wanna play those goofier decks because it ensures those cards have actual rulings on them. There's no ambiguity with how they function that could cause friction at a commander table. I have a friend who doesn't like playing against my Discord, Lord of Disharmony deck because of the ambiguity with how you should choose a card with him, if stuff like planes/conspiracies are possible to hit, and even ambiguity with when the ability triggers a second time. But she's fine playing against my Magar of the Magic Strings deck, because how his effect works is clearly defined by the rules. I don't think designing un-cards to be playable in commander is inherently bad. I just do agree it can be a problem when it crosses over into competitive formats.

2:12 What WotC didnt want to say is that there were players not playing clone effects or sticker cards rhat would bring sticker decks to pump fake opponents.

turns out, they did mind goblin on those nuts

This is honestly my main issue with some of the Un-set cards; When the card itself either becomes unplayable because there isn't a non-player around (certain joke cards call for it), or when they make the game a logistical goddamn nightmare... it just ends up not fun to play with. Meanwhile the "Half-x" "...half-x" cards are fun, goofy, and completely self-contained, so it's clear that un-sets can have fun and playable cards in them. Wizards just have to figure out a way for the un-sets to have decent value in them. Like, add slots into the boosters that are guaranteed reprints but with special funny art perhaps? I'd love an un-flavored art version of stuff like Smothering Tithe and Anointed Procession.

I've got a friend who was broken hearted when Illusionary Mask had it's text changed so we let him play the Un land that says all cards in play function as written regardless of rule changes so that he can get attacked for lethal and say things like "a mysterious force is keeping me alive" because there's a platinum angle face down.

I think ultimately the problem with Unfinity wasn't that the cards were black-border, it was that that decision was made well after all the cards were designed, seemingly straight up last minute. If it were designed from the beginning as a black-border un-set, side-deck (which both attractions and stickers are) or physical prop mechanics (which, yes, stickers are) would have never made it into the game. It would have been a set full of the fine mechanics that are still legal from Unfinity. Dice rolling, Saw in Half, etc. It also would have avoided the stamp problems from the very beginning, because you wouldn't make the set some ridiculous insane mixture of legal and non-legal cards. It would just all be black-border cards, albeit with a sillier tone and with some weird mechanics.

Back in the day I would just gather the Lion's Eye Diamonds people would leave behind on the tables at various LGSs, because no one wanted them. I wonder what happened to those?

what was the point in even making these legal when they just get banned anyway? literally no one asked for legal un-cards. and the "I don't make the rules, ma'am, i just think them up and write them down." justification for why they couldn't make these are legal in commander and nowhere else is just priceless.

Most people dont want silver border card in their commander deck or in decks at the table so that doesnt work. Un sets didnt sell well, so they tried to make un have some appeal outside of un by making a portion of the cards commander legal by the actual rules not by rule 0.

The primary reason to always keep Un-cards not allowed in Commander games is that, 99/100 times, if the person wants to play the card, it's because they're exploiting it somehow. Had a guy once ask if he could play an Un-card in his deck and showed us it was "By Gnome Means". When we told him he could if he also replaced "Magosi, the Waterveil" (a card he didn't show us was in the deck) with an Island, he got up and left the table.

The Barely 1 shockland per box was the real crime of the un set. Like the rest becomes worthless the second the draft is over.

Hearing you say "Marky Mark...no not that one" made me feel old

They should just erratta or alt rule "_____ goblin" to be roll a d20, 1 to 9 is 4 mana; 10-18 is 5 mana; 19 or 20 is 6 mana. The sticker sheet is just a flavor on a chance and stats. Having a mana positive creature that is not as broken as dockside in commander is nice.

I play a Myra the Magnificent EDH deck. It's literally what got me back into the game after the pandemic. I love the deck to bits, and it is loads of fun. I 100% agree though, that this stuff had no business in legacy or other 60 card constructed formats.

Man you got me scared for a second, thought my Most Dangerous Gamer Commander Deck was done for... ^^

🦀🦀🦀 Unfinity is GONE 🦀🦀🦀

In addition to the talk about 0, my LGS recently had an 'event' where people decided on a rule 0 that everyone plays with two commanders regardless of whether they could partner. Honestly quite a fun idea to mess around with.

The problem is some of the silver cards are just so insanely broken. It’s hard to allow someone to play with them. Like when we first got into commander my wife wanted to get this card that was basically everyone’s graveyard is considered your graveyard because she had a deck that returned stuff from the graveyard so she wanted to be able to just return stuff from anyone’s graveyard, but obviously the card is banned and commander Genuinely we don’t wanna play with cards you can’t play with everywhere cause then you build a deck around stuff you can’t do which I get, but that problem is a lot of these cards are just insanely broken then everyone’s graveyard being your graveyard a lot of implication that is just insanely broken on its own. And that’s what a lot of the infinity cards and the silver border cards are old is really broken because they knew they weren’t supposed to really be used so they can be as ridiculously overpowered as they wanted them to be.

There are plenty of silver borders I'm fine with people playing but there's a caveat that if it can't be properly represented within the regular rules or at least well abstracted it's a no go. Also can't force any player to perform some sort of physical action not laid out in the official rules (no making someone do the hokey pokey). Sword of Dungeons & Dragons for example is fine with me from a play perspective with there being 2 options for dealing with the fact that "gold" is a not a actually color in magic: either the dragon token is all colors of your commander, or you have to pick when you cast spell which one of the 5 real colors does the sword generate. Still, they never should have gotten rid of silver borders because hardliners can just say "no thank you" and people can swap decks or find new pods as necessary.

I will always allow anyone to play 1 card from an unset and that's booster tutor (helps the shop I play at or is just funny and doesn't do anything crazy) plus is funny to see what gets pulled!

Love the silver boarder un cards. I even collect them Hated Unfinity because it ruined the point of a silver border set Now theyre throwing "joke" cards like Holy Cow and Loan Shark in main sets

Unsets are fun for people who sign up for that. I'm glad they walked this back and hopefully will keep Unsets JUST as Unsets (on their own little island and not inbreeding with EDH even).

Mark's post is the most wet blanket, "dad make brother play the game i wanna play" thing ive ever seen from wotc

I wish more people talked about pauper

The next Un-set should just be 4 Commander precons

Cards from 'UN' sets should have never been tournament legal, but Hasbro did this to get people to buy UN packs...

Standard has been pretty fun during Lost Caverns and now OTJ. I say give it a shot to see if you like a 14-set Standard!

The great evil has been defeated. Now we just need to fix day/night

Regarding the line st 5:28, they were referring to how they cant release black bordered cards for one supported format without them also being legal in Vintage and Legacy due to how those formsts work. This isnt the first time they have run into this type of issue, as Wizards has expressed previously the pains that come from trying to make a fun Modern themed set without it overly impacting the eternal formats.

Trying to make something not powerful is the standard of not only mtg but games in general. It is already shown in systems like card rarity, a common is generally less powerful then a mythic. Otherwise things like demonic tutor would be in every set. Verying power levels help you appreciate the powerful cards, it sets a standard that shows how actually powerful a card is. Magic is a complicated game and not everything is found in testing but finding a way to make a "bad" card to have a powerful effect is also fun, it promotes deck diversity and keeps things from going stale.

Kind of a bummer that Unfinity has flopped as hard as it has. I got a chance to talk to Mark Rosewater at a con about how much I loved Unstable, and he IMMEDIATELY asked if I'd played Unfinity. It's clear he loves the set quite a bit. Gotta feel a little bad about that.

Attractions are not as bad as dungeons & initiative

What's worse is that my issues with silver border is the same as I've recently have with all these mechanics that make me keep track of a bunch of nonsense (like day and night). All in all silver border is just a jumble of random things that are taxing to keep track of not knowing if they have either no impact or are super important in the game. Haha funny the first time but quickly becomes exhausting after that.

Me, a professional commander hater watching this video: Fuck sake goddamn commander amirite Pat Sullivan's reaction to Mind Goblin on Shuffle Up and Play on TCC told me everything I needed to know about those cards lmaooo. I had never seen them before either and he was translating my thoughts in real time upon seeing the card played. I have never laughed so hard seeing someone read a Magic card lol

Recently attended a larger legacy event, and yeah, the pregame sticker deck phase was silly to say the least.

Man... I don't even know if my unfinity cards made it through my house fire.

mfw we try to solve the "problem" of having a two sentence exchange before a commander game because someone wants to play Pair o' Dice Lost and end up having to ban over 50 cards in eternal formats and kill the chance of having another Un- set in the future

Unset cards belong in unsets unless they’ve been printed in another set that’s legal in certain format

Standard "Temur Elementalist" or as I call the deck "Worldsoul's Combo"

I'm an avid un set supporter and even I hate stickers. I'm also against un sets having black boarders.

I think MaRo is showing a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of Rule 0. Rule 0 is not about making a good ban list or creating a healthy format. Rule 0 is about being open for communication and both sitting down at a game you will both have fun at. Or at least that is the goal. And if someone sees your silver bordered card or your sticker pile or whatever and their answer is "No that isn't something I want to play with." that is still completely valid communication. That isn't a failure of rule 0 to do what it is supposed to do but a case of it working as intended. Trying to skirt around it by making the cards legal in general doesn't prevent those negative interactions it just puts them into the same situation as playing hated cards in a pod that hates them. Like yeah the rules won't stop you from bringing a CEDH deck to a table full of precons or stop you from playing a MLD/Wrath theme deck but it's not going to make those decks any more liked by the players.

I play Crow Storm in one of my more casual decks.

Why did people call it "mind goblin" instead of something like "sticker goblin"?

I was literally about to build goblins for Amsterdam too! I'm just going to play to my strengths and play Eldrazi Stompy, or bite the bullet and play Patchwork Stompy (still need my set of blue synthesizers)

For a development team who can't forsee the drastic impact of the free forces, obliterating cards like orcish bowmasters, and oko, i guess it's understandable that they couldnt see these problems, lol.

Even the new un cards that they made that are legal are usually not allowed in most commander playgroups

So glad Commander is untouched - I personally LOVE all of the Un-Sets and having legally playable mechanics in commander was such a blessing for me

They banned 94 cards by banning all cards that care about stickers & attractions, the effectively banned the sticker & attraction cards as well.

Another great example of a card that didn't see play for years and suddenly became a staple in Vintage of all places is of course Bazaar of Baghdad. Through a majority of Magic's history people would've never said that Bazaar was a good card. A quirky card, but not a good one. Now it's one of the driving forces of a top tier Vintage deck. You can never plan for these things.

5:11 one with nothing has entered the chat

I didn't even hear about this until this video! Thanks for keeping us updated Vince! But totally agree with you rant on putting these game mechanics out like they do. Love ya as always!

It surprised me when I learned Unfinity cards were legal. Also, I miss old Edh, where we could use our junk rares in our decks and 🤙 me up with weird combos. Now the cards are designed to work with commander which makes it inherently less fun. Pauper, whether it's Edh or not, is where it's at for me. It still has the feeling of using cards not for their intended purpose.

Whew! Thought I'd have to shut down my WUBRG dice roll deck.

Damn. My idea of trolling on tournaments playing sticker deck just got wrecked. 😂 But really good move.

I for one see a rising call to reprint a curated, revised black bordered unset

Un-sets are basically dead now. The half-legal thing fell to pieces and they've shown they can do ultra-goofy in regular sets with Thunction and Murders

I do think it is slightly more complicated than making cards less powerful so they could be in black border(/non-acorn). I believe MaRo talked about how the decision to make some cards tournament legal was done fairly late in the process. IIRC, the process he described was a committee involving (among others) play design (for power level consideration), the rules manager (for ability to work in the comprehensive rules), and templating (for being able to word the card reasonably within the rules) going over the card file to determine which cards could be printed without the acorn. He also said that they tried to err on the side of leaving cards with acorns, though obviously they missed on one card. I'm not sure if they adjusted the power level of any cards so they could be made non-acorn, but i certainly didn't get the impression that they did that extensively. And they certainly didnt design cards wholesale at lower power levels for that purpose. I do know they have designed cards for previous unsets that would've potentially be too powerful for black border at the rate they were printed. I was recently listening to MaRo's card-by-card podcast for unstable, and he was talking about Crow Storm as an example of this. The card works perfectly well within the rules, but would have to be much more expensive to be tournament legal. That suggests to me that they are comfortable making cards at an appropriate power level for the set, and making acorn decisions separately (though I can imagine tweaking cards *slightly* to be able to drop the acorn).

I think you might enjoy the chicanery that is Temur Archivist in standard

They did the black border to sell packs, but honestly, if they had just put 3-4 shocklands per box instead of 0-1, they would have sold even better!

Stickers, yes I agree even in Commander - That doesn't work at all Attraction for me is on another topic because, is similar to have a sideboard on the commander but in the other formats, there is already a sideboard that can be use has a side deck. The difference is that with Lessons and Wishes, you can get the card that you need while the attractions deck is a random card that can trigger after you role a dice (2/6 or 3/6 change to get the necessary trigger). If the issue in legacy or vintage (I don't play much so I don't really know what is the main problem with attractions) is the randomness of the triggers, then shouldn't all the cards that have dices roll or coin flip to be also removed? Again, for me, this is a complicated situation regard attractions and I wish I could understand better this specific.. but I agree, BLANK Goblin being ban is very good.

Fuck's sake, Goddamn Commander amiright!?

I love Un-sets, I love the craziness they bring to games, I have multiple decks with silverbordered cards in them, i hope some day we get another (silverbordered) Un-set. But they never should have been legal in competitive Magic, end of story.

I'd watch a standard video. I get that with the family stuff it's hard to do all the long form gameplay videos, but if you put up stream recordings, I'd watch those too

Truly a sad day for magic. The end of the best mechanic in standard

As a heretical Silver Bordered enjoyer... I like a good Silver Bordered commander - my Grimlock "Dinos in vehicles" EDH deck is a load of fun and isn't breaking any implicit social rules. If someone really disagrees, I can just swap to any random Gruul commander. No skin off my back. But Unfinity was *heinous* The fact that it mandated sticker play in formats that have no business being sticker formats is one thing, but the fact it outright doesn't even interface with the other Un-Sets silver bordered mechanics is just stupid. There are cards in the old Un sets that care about border color for their mechanics to work, and having unfinity all be black bordered means there's no interaction with stuff like Ineffable Blessing or Border Guardian.

Good thing we still have commander.

I think one of the things about silver border that I get is that even if the cards are actually worse than the alternatives, people still get kind of a stick up their ass about wanting to make sure you play by the exact, sanctioned rules. To give an example I discussed with my playgroup about wanting to build a deck for Mr House, but using all the d20 cards from the DnD sets felt like cheating to me and I asked if they'd be okay if I instead ran cards from Unstable which had me rolling a d6 instead. These cards would be explicitly worse in his deck which rewards you for rolling a 4 or higher, but my playgroup, for the most part, said no to silver bordered cards. So there is a point at which I do think that cards that should be okay from a game play perspective shouldn't be silver border even if they're in an un-set... but Wizards doesn't seem to know where that line is.

id definitely love to see a standard video from you PK!

I can confirm for you, silver-border hate is real. At our local store, many players will REFUSE to play commander with you because "they're not legal magic cards." They also won't let people use proxies because "they're not real cards." I got so sick of it, I don't even play paper magic anymore.

So I can’t play my Myra extra turn attraction deck in commander anymore? :(

I'd watch you play pioneer for sure

This was so stupid from the beginning, 'if we don't make the cards strong we won't have to worry about them showing up in tournaments'. People rarely enjoy weak cards even in commander which was their target to begin with.

Vince yucking Mark's yums. Absolutely agree on stickers though, and I haven't even interacted with them but I hate the implementation. It's an interesting design space that legacy games use and I love it there. Sadly WotC missed the mark testing them on an Un-set.

I think a black border unset with a silver border bonus sheet is the happy medium they need

The core issue that unfinity's setup was trying to solve is cards that were perfectly doable in black border, but were just slightly silly, and people saying no to *those* simply because they're silver bordered and people are often too tryhard.

"Tournament Logistics" is why Yorion was banned. The integrity of an 80+ card deck and shuffling took too long, or some bs they said lol

Make them all Silver-Bordered... And then give some of them a tiny accorn (in addition to being Silver-Bordered)... There. All Silver-Bordered are NOT VALID in Legacy. But all Accorns are VALID in Commander. Wouldn't it be nice like that?

Also the lack of logistics is currently making 40k cards (Sicarian Infiltrator) skyrocket in value to $15 each. We need reprints badly or bans in eternal formats for all tie in sets. Which, I would LOVE Bowmasters and One Ring to eat a ban.

3:50 - I mean, esoteric knowledge about how the rules interact, sure, but I hardly ever see turns as complicated as a single modern YGO turn.

I just play my Dee Kay, finder of the lost commander in my zombie grave deck for shits and giggles. People always do a double take on it cause it’s such a random deck to bring out at my LGS

I liked Unfinity! They should just get rid of the acorn and make it silver or black border cards. I think the acorn was sacrificing clarity for the sake of production. The cards actually being banned in Modern is justifiable and also funny AF.

I play commander at a WPN store. It is a sanctioned gameplay experience and we do not get to play with silver border. Until Wizards creates a commander competitive level that allows for silver border those sweet sweet broken cards are locked away for my normal play group lol. But for realizes they should have made Unfintiy silver border and either made a list of official commander legal silver border cards, an Unfinity commander subset, or as I described above, create a silver boarder tier level for official commander events. Also the most common push back I get from kitchen table commander and silver border is that they aren't legal cards so there's no point in using them. Nothing about how crazy they are or anything else. Just "Silver border cards aren't real cards so why bother." Which is funny because those same groups proxy like a mofo on cards over like $10 for their home games.

I love your caveat at the end that you'd rather they experiment than always play it safe. Fully agree that this one missed the mark, but I appreciate them trying something.

Only silver border card that's fun/in the spirit of commander is the super secret tech

Why Attractions! They were not a problem at all.

WotC: We can't make cards illegal to play in- Me: AH AH AH YOU SAID YOU CAN'T MAKE CARDS ILLEGAL. **4 COPIES OF SCHEHERAZADE** (thats how it's supposed to be spelled))

I have a disability, tourrettes syndrome. I remember my LGS years ago ran a "60 card every card you own, even un cards are legal" and having someone play the card "stop that". I flick my cards, and do other things with my hands because it helps me manage my disability. After discard 4 cards I packed up my things, and left without saying anything to anyone. Un sets do not make magic more fun.

All they had to do was release the cards as silver borders and release a statement saying "these cards are legal in commander", its really not that difficult

I would watch a video about Standard.

I hate bans. Cause no matter how necessary they are, it feels bad to be told the card you bought can't be played anymore. Some cards you just dont know how theyll synergize, but cards like these, with annoying and broken mechanics, should never have been legal to begin with and thus been priced significantly less than standard mtg packs.