Before this set, probably my biggest exposure to this franchise are two YouTube channels, namely one is Scott The Woz who is not an RPG guy, and the more important one is videogamedunkey who actively finds things to clown on these games, usually in the form of nonsensical dialogues. To be fair, that’s the thing with these “Nintendo platformers influenced” people looking at these JRPG right, ain’t no way they would be fond of them. Turns out they would like Persona instead.

So welcome to my first take at an Universes Beyond set, one where ideas like the legendary supertype is supposed to have a special status or a Standard set is supposed to be affordable are all thrown out of the window and instead appealing to people who don’t whine on the internet over meaningless things is the foremost important goal. I’m certainly in the latter camp as shown in all my previous work, and honestly I find it part of the fun of Magic nowadays, just pointing out so much crap the good cards stop mattering at all.

You know what, that’s all I’m going to preface about this set. Otherwise, it will devolve into something horrible and unrelated. I highly suggest you read this article to see something you might want to avoid getting into nowadays.

1 Mechanics rundown

Somethings that will go without saying, there will be an irrational amount of commanders in this set. And this time there’re even DFCs to represent small bad guy turning into the ultimate form of evil. Or other things I guess.

Also this will be the last set to use the oversimplified and therefore highly dreaded UB frame. The next one will return to the normal MTG frame so 1. The cards just look better 2. You can’t be the elitist and separate them at a sight anymore 3. Chances are a new frame is coming for all the cards, M15 has been in use for 11 years and yes that’s because M15 was in 2014 because you have to do that when naming annual things.

1.1 Job select

In New Phyrexia, there was a mechanic called Living Weapon that creates a 0/0 creature for the Equipment to equip to right away. It means that the Equipments have to provide the toughness for the creature to live, but well it has Batterskull (not clamp) going for it.

Then in Phyrexia: One, there was a new version for the opposing side called For Mirrodin! (with the exclamation mark) that changed the token into a 2/2. So now the Equipment doesn’t have to provide toughness (or even can subtract one point), and since they tend not to these things cost more.

And now we got something at right smack the middle, a 1/1 Hero in the same way the Rebel doesn’t specify its race. Not a third faction in said war, not Zhalfir which is what Mirrodin actually is now. You know what, what a dumb name it is. Because for one, you don’t get to actually choose, a synonym for select. I guess you do choose the card to put in your deck. For two, what is so “jobby” about an Equipment? Do you really think the difference between an Archer and a Knight is just simply that one shoots with a bow and the other chop things with a sword? I feel like a class really has as much to do with your personality as what will you fight with, because the former tends to form in you before you have to fight anything.

Let’s do some statistics about all the cards, draft set and the one precon. Counting the different weapons, there are eight different sword type weapons, three wands, two bows, two things for hands, and the last four things are a shield, a sphere, a book, and lastly a “noulith”. Counting the creatures holding them, white has 3/5 being women, blue has just 1/5 and the rest is two cute small creatures and one very gender person with blue hairs, black is the most drowned in hats, red has 2/3 women, and green has that ratio too if it count the colorless too.

And you may notice on these cards, the creature type they grant to the Hero would be different than the job name of themselves. Obviously, there are exceptions like Monk, Bard, Warrior and Samurai where you don’t have to translate at all. And then you got a set of four different colors of mages where the white one is a Cleric, the other three are still Wizards, and green is just missing. On the image, the missing two are Reaper which is an Assassin and Dancer which is a Performer.

Onto the most important part, how are these things distributed? None are mythic, that place would get really crowded just you see. Something you notice, red and green takes the most slacks, red and white like their common Equipments, and there’s just the one colorless job in lieu of multicolored ones.

Let’s quickly go over how the stat boosts are handled. The takeaway is that on average, more cards want to give power than toughness, and these base boosts are never quite big. It’s the abilities that will give the biggest boosts. Which we’ll also do some analysis. To note, the commons have some triggered abilities that to mee feels small enough to fit in the keyword category. One of them even overlaps with the self boost category, the second most popular among these.

The amount of words they get to convey the flavor of these classes are just naturally way lower than the DnD vertical arts. Like the Monks going from clever minds going for surges (or flurries as Jeskai would call them now) to now just 1 additional power. You know, because of the reminder text for both the Hero creature and the equip sometimes. There you can find some flavor wors that range from some cool non-English words to longer and more baffling things, or in fact nothing.

Appendix: Here’s what Arena considers the common cycle. They got rid of the red and white mage, so two of the women.

1.2 Tiered

I mean you probably can represent this flavor already using the DnD’s way of rolling the D20 then follow the die chart. But well, in a video game, you don’t roll a dice, the 95% hit accuracy is just decided. Wait, what tangent I’m on, this is just a kicker variant.