It’s a question you might dread at your Commander night: “My deck has some silver-bordered cards in it, is that cool?” The silver-bordered (and now, acorn-badged) cards printed in ‘unsets’ run the gamut from silly but playable cards that work within the rules of Magic the Gathering, to absurd jokes that let your opponent fire nerf darts into your library. The Commander Rules Committee’s new ‘Silver-Bordered Project’ will grade all 800+ uncards to clearly categorise the silly, the strange, and the simply unacceptable.
We’ll note now: none of these cards are leaving the MTG Commander banlist. The Silver-Bordered Project is supposed to provide clearer guidance for the Magic the Gathering community when making judgement calls about whether or not to include cards in casual games.
A Rules Commitee blogpost uploaded by Jim Lapage on Wednesday sets out three categorisations for silver-bordered and acorn-badged cards:
- Cards that function within MTG’s rules framework and could be printed in black-bordered MTG sets.
- Cards that don’t function within MTG’s rules, but “are intuitive, and otherwise non-problematic”.
- Cards that “represent negative play patterns and interactions that you generally shouldn’t spring on unsuspecting opponents”, and which would probably be banned if uncards were made legal.
The RC plans to share the results of its categorisation with the quarterly update for the format on September 30, shortly after Duskmourn hits the MTG release schedule.
Explaining why the RC is producing this list and not adjusting the banned list, LaPage quotes the April 2024 version of the Commander Philosophy document. This states that the RC is responsible to manage the format in such a way as to “encourage positive, communal experiences where people can bond over the shared experience of gaming” and “help players communicate their preferences and arrive at a shared set of expectations”.
The RC has to balance the needs of people who do and don’t want to include silver-bordered cards in the format. LaPage states that those in favor of legalising silver-bordered cards argue they’re in-keeping with Commander’s identity as “the fun, casual format that doesn’t take itself too seriously” and because “many ideas and mechanics that used to be silver-border are now printed in black-bordered sets, sometimes 1-for-1”.
But that doesn’t change the fact that many cards from unsets don’t obey the rules of Magic, and may produce feel-bad moments for players who haven’t signed up to play a party game with whacky rules.
The Silver-Bordered Project aims to give the community a shared language when discussing cards, so that the next time someone says their Commander Deck has silver-bordered cards in it, players have a common understanding of how much those cards might disrupt the normal play experience.
Where do you stand on unsets? Our own Matt Bassil argued in a recent article that the new playtest cards printed in Mystery Booster 2 get MTG nerd humor far better than the silly cards in unsets do.
If you prefer formats in which cards that break the rules of the game aren’t just banned, but are utterly impossible, check out our guide to all the MTG Arena Codes that still work, and get some free boosters for your Brawl and Historic MTG Arena decks.
Source: Wargamer
