it's very hard to control your play group when that includes games at a store or CommandFest
Correct, because some of those players will not have the same opinions as you; hell, some of them may actually enjoy UB releases. They also can’t control you ([[mindslaver]] and similar cards notwithstanding 😉).
We have public games, and we have private games with friend playgroups. It’s not a bad thing for public games to be more inclusive, especially in casual formats like commander.
I first started playing between 4e & ice age, and it’s BECAUSE i’ve been playing magic for 28 years (well, off and on like many people), that I’ve been wanting to see optional UB-like special releases that reinterpret other universes as if they were a plane in the magic multiverse for over a decade.
Playgroups can very easily ban UB from their own eternal format playsessions, and I think in formats like legacy and commander where nearly anything goes anyway, it’d be silly to ban them. Perhaps there should be official “UB-friendly modern” and “core lore only modern”? modern is kinda the midway point between serious competitive and casual play anyway.
Plus in those 28 years, magic’s core lore itself has gotten way wackier, especially in the last decade and a half or so. We now have a whole bunch of weird magic planes that would have felt just as out of place in the mid-90s; there are now:
- a mobster plane
- a fairy tale plane
- an egyptian plane
- a plane that covers everywhere from ancient to modern japanese culture
- a vampire/werewolf centric european gothic horror set
- a nordic/viking plane
- a bunch of other wacky planes
- plus eldrazi and the blind eternities are an obvious take on lovecraftian horror
For most of the above, the only reason they’re not considered UB themselves is that the source material they’re copying is old enough to be in the public domain. And almost none of them feel like they fit in the universe magic was in its first decade or so. Even without UB, today’s landscape in mtg is far separated from the original/“pure” lore i grew up with (and even that took plenty of influence from classic public domain fiction).
A whole bunch of top-down sets have been “jarring” to people who have been playing magic for decades.
i hate the design of this. the small section could have been the “a”, instead it’s the T.
if this is the kind of terrible decisions you make when making a meme, i would be terrified to learn what life choices you make.
Yeah, it sucks being a magic fan who likes UB on the internet lately. Apparently the fact that I can enjoy UB ruins magic for people who won’t buy the sets?
The march of the machine commander decks each come with a unique deck of 10 planes (well, 9 planes and 1 phenomenon each) so if you buy those that’s 50 planes.
The doctor who set will also have 10 planes in each of 4 commander decks, and that’s another 40 if your playgroup is cool with universes beyond cards.
The last playgroup I had wasn’t conventional; we didn’t play commander, but we also weren’t heavily 1v1, we all played modern decks but our games were both group ffa games and 1v1 games, and we had to balance our decks for both.
One thing that helped our games stay balanced was that we very often played planechase on top of that — not with the standard rules, though, rather than each player bringing a deck of planes, we just used a full set of planes (we played proxy back then), and had one big plane deck which was “neutral” to any player, and existed to help weaken combos and strengthen general purpose strategies.
Also now that i’m trying to get into commander, commander feels like a fun place for the mechanic, whether under standard rules or the “neutral all planes shared deck” variation i played.
Is this an unpopular opinion?
wotc lately is quite obviously in the mindset of “commander is our most popular format, we need to control and guide it ourselves to ensure we profit from it, because these players are stealing money from us by making up their own format and robbing us of our god-given profits”