While showing off the first Spiderman Magic: The Gathering cards on Saturday, Wizards of the Coast also announced its decision to remove the unique frame and inverted triangle mark that previously identified cards as part of the Universes Beyond sub-brand.
It’s only a small change, and we couldn’t find it in ourselves to get all het up about it, but I do want to point out that the company’s explanation for this decision – that it’s “part of our continued efforts to reduce complexity” – makes absolutely no sense.
Not that reducing complexity isn’t a good thing for Magic to strive for – whether it’s in UB products like MTG Spiderman or anything else. With increasingly rules-heavy cards squeezing out flavor text and forcing explanatory language to contract, as well as product proliferation that makes finding what you’re looking for difficult, we’re all in favor of some more simplicity in our TCG.
But it’s just not believable that anyone was confused by the very minor matter of a different symbol on the bottom of the card and a very subtly different frame. Perhaps we might be able to buy that this was its intention, if Wizards didn’t constantly stretch the limits of what a Magic: The Gathering card can look like.
But between special art treatments that look like an 80s TV screen and Secret Lair cards that are almost unreasonable, the idea that reducing complexity in the frame is a priority for Magic is absurd.
Instead, the reason why Wizards is ditching the UB border is likely the same reason why it axed the silver border, so we’ll just draw from head designer Mark Rosewater’s explanation for that:
“It most often doesn’t get treated as ‘this is a different subset of Magic’, but rather ‘this isn’t a real Magic card’.
“Our original goal… was to make them easy to identify… In the end, it often became a mark of banishment, a reason to dismiss the card as being something ‘less than’.”
Now doesn’t that seem like a better fit? Not that Universes Beyond cards have been looked down upon as strongly as silver-border cards, but there may have been some tables where they were forbidden, and either way, the triangle stamp did mark the cards out as something ‘other’, less ‘real’ than those without it.
When they were just a small sub-brand of Magic, this made perfect sense, but now that half of all Magic cards released will be Universes Beyond, distinguishing between ‘normal cards’ and UB cards in this way does seem more arbitrary.
Ultimately, the change seems designed to erode the distinction between Universes Beyond and Universes Within cards, making it harder – at a glance – to tell whether it’s an in-universe card you’re looking at or not.
Since Wizards of the Coast announced that UB would be Standard-legal, and make up 50% of future MTG sets, the message has been that those who hate the third-party crossovers are just going to have to lump it. This move is the latest in a series that seem intended to drive that home.
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Source: Wargamer
