The Mystery Booster 2 reveal last week got us excited for some ridiculous draft fun, so it’s a crying shame that Wizards is keeping this product exclusive to conventions, making it super hard to get hold of, especially for anyone outside the US.
But more than that, as fans share photos of all of these awesome cards I’ll almost certainly never be able to use, I can’t help but be disappointed that the latest joke MTG set, Unfinity, wasn’t a lot more like this.
Mystery Booster 2 is brilliant. Filled with humor, references, and ridiculous (though often interesting) designs, we love every lame gag, each scrap of tongue-in-cheek rules text.
The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest, and perhaps the reason I’m champing at the bit for Mystery Booster 2 while 2022’s Unfinity left me cold is I’ve been told I can’t have it. But – and obviously this is subjective – what I’ve seen of MB2 is just better than Unfinity.
It’s not just that it’s funnier (though it is that). Mystery Booster 2 has a nerdier style of humor, more reliant on in-jokes, references, and memes, which seems like a much better fit for Magic’s audience.
Without falling into the trap of analyzing it too hard, let’s take a quick look at the kind of jokes we’ve got in MB2.
There’s weird versions of existing cards, like Oddric, Lunar Marquis. There’s references to other TCGs and board games. There’s strange versions of mechanics like Flashforward and Annihinfect. There’s jokes about little bits of lore, like The Many Deeds of Belzenlok; or famous moments in the game’s history, like the lovably terrible exposition on Ancient Grudge.
Do you see the pattern here? None of these things would be funny if you weren’t already a fan of Magic: The Gathering. This is what makes Mystery Booster 2 feel like a love letter to the game. Its jokes make you feel like part of a community. They reward your dedication to the hobby by tickling your funny bone.
Unfinity doesn’t really have any of this. It has silly characters, but most don’t have anything to do with Magic. Its humor is likely to connect with more people, but an overreliance on minigames, activities that won’t work outside your LGS, and jokes about art and spelling make that humor weaker overall.
Speaking from the uninformed perspective of someone who’s never opened an Unfinity pack, the set looks like it would be fun the first time you tried it, and then never again (outside of an Attraction Commander deck, which admittedly sounds like a laugh).
What’s interesting is that past unsets struck a better balance. Unstable leaned hard into playing around with Magic: The Gathering’s mechanics, with cards like Animate Library, Graveyard Busybody, and Three-Headed Goblin. It also had a few fun references like Very Cryptic Command.
Unfinity, meanwhile, shows glimmers of brilliance. Form of Approach of the Second Sun is the absolute pinnacle of the set, but cards like it are the exception.
The other problem with Unfinity compared to Mystery Booster 2 is all the hoops Wizards had to jump through to try and make it sell. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the obvious attempt to make the set marketable to Commander players shows a lack of confidence in the quality of the product. Wizards was not willing to let the goofy joke set stand on the merit of its goofy jokes.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with putting shocklands in Unfinity to provide a wee bit of value, but doing away with the silver border and making ridiculous fiddly mechanics like stickers playable in eternal formats was a misstep.
It invited controversy and arguments and distracted from the silly fun players were supposed to be having. It also felt so transparent and ‘salesy’. It may have made Unfinity the best selling unset of all time but maybe in doing so it killed the joke?
Compare that to Mystery Booster 2, a set Wizards is so uninterested in selling to you that it won’t even let you buy it.
But seriously, even though the Future Sight border shenanigans clearly make the cards a bit more desirable, Mystery Booster 2 feels like a ‘purer’ product. It’s a self-contained box of nonsense to draft with your friends, rather than a draftable set that might also give you a valuable land, or let you build a new Commander deck, or break Legacy.
At the end of the day, I’m mostly just sad to see Wizards wasting some great ideas and great jokes on a product that most players can’t purchase. Hopefully the company will get the message and – after the next set of conventions are over – put MB2 up for sale. Hey, perhaps that was always the plan.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our cEDH tier list, and our guide to the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
