They call them “Beyond Boosters” because, unlike normal boosters, they’re not made from meat.

October 2023: “Having too many types of booster is hurting sales, so we’re consolidating them.”

July 2024: “Hey check out this new type of booster we came up with.”

I must have watched too many Pre-Prereleases, because I heard this whole article in Nelson Salahub’s voice as I was reading it.

If there’s more fiction to come then I retract some of my complaining. I was assuming this was all there would be.

A fairly sudden ending. Feels like there’s a lot more story to tell, and it just wasn’t in the budget. We’re really not going to see fox Jace? Not going to get any character development for Zoraline? Why didn’t Glarb have the presence of mind to grab the egg before fleeing, making the party have to track him down? What’s the scoop on Gev’s tail? And how come there are only 16 unique cards spoiled so far and we still didn’t see most of those characters or locations?

Yeah, I mean, I play Standard for a variety of reasons, but “avoiding Universes Beyond cards” is definitely one of them.

I wonder how different the answer could be if they’d asked the question in a different way.

I’d like Modern better if it didn’t have UB cards, but banning UB cards alone wouldn’t be enough to get me to start playing Modern. So am I interested in a UB-free Modern? No, but that’s not approval of the current state of affairs.

Really enjoying the writing in this one so far. Good descriptions, good use of language.

We have cards already for Mabel and Hugs. From the story we also know that Finneas is an expert archer, Zoraline is a cleric, and Helga is a minor mage. Not sure about Gev’s class yet but he’s some sort of performer: he “wielded a pair of fire maces, swinging and spinning them in a dizzying display of grace and finesse, their flames leaving trails in the twilight.”

There’s a decent argument that Shuko and anything else that can be activated an unlimited number of times should be banned, because this isn’t the first time a combo like this has come around. But I think this article does a good job making the case that Nadu is broken even apart from that. (That doesn’t mean Wizards won’t hide behind a Shuko ban anyway…)

I’ve been playing Magic long enough to remember when a 3/4 for 3 mana would need a pretty significant drawback to even be printable. So I’m still surprised when they come out with broken nonsense like Nadu, even though I shouldn’t be by now.

This Pro Tour had lopsided numbers and non-interactive games and just wasn’t much fun to watch. Wizards should consider it a disaster, but whether they will probably depends a lot on MH3 sales numbers.

Well, if he’s cheated so much in the past that he can’t get the benefit of the doubt from the judges now, he won’t get a ton of sympathy from me either.

That’s valuable context, thanks.

It’s not like they don’t know they’re on camera, and on top of that, Van Etten was up a game already. Who would intentionally cheat in a situation where you’re pretty much guaranteed to get caught, and you don’t even need the advantage that badly anyway? The only thing I can think of is that Van Etten told the judges “Yeah, I realized it a couple of turns later but didn’t say anything.”

By the way, speaking as someone who’s played my share of paper Magic and made more than my share of judge calls: call the judges when this happens. Their top priority is to fix the game state, not to punish you. Sometimes if the game has progressed too far to fix, they’ll let the mistake stand. I don’t know offhand how enforcement differs at a high-level event like this, but I think there’s a real chance that Van Etten could have salvaged a match win out of this if he’d called the judges on himself in time.

The announcement says turn 3 of game 3, but it means game 2. Their game 2 starts at about 5:30:15 of the official coverage, and the play in question happens at around 5:34:00. Twitch chatters catch the mistake immediately, and the commentators bring it up around 5:35:35.

I could easily see myself doing something like this by mistake. I wonder what the judges heard when they interviewed the players that convinced them it was intentional.

Yeah, but they can go up to four copies of Yotian Frontliner. It’s not as good, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to sink the deck. And that’s assuming that neither color gets an artifact-producing one-drop in the next set. Or lands that make it viable to go into a third color for Spyglass Siren.

Interesting that they considered banning Atraxa or Knight-Errant from Standard. While I wouldn’t shed a tear for either one, I can’t honestly say that the format is unbalanced right now. Those decks are strong but beatable, and their metagame shares are reasonable.

In fact, I’ve been playing Poison Burn for so long that I actually look forward to facing Domain Ramp. And I think losing the triomes, and thus the potential for turn-two Leylines, will slow the deck down by a lot.

On the other hand, I don’t understand the argument that losing Voldaren Epicure will significantly hurt Boros Convoke. I hardly ever see that deck play Knight-Errant on turn 2, and yet I still lose to it plenty. If I could ban one card from the deck, I’d choose Imodane’s Recruiter, or maybe Warden of the Inner Sky.

before we put our children onto the battlefield, not ‘create’ them like some rules committees would have you believe.

A real Magic fundamentalist would put them into play.