The elephant in the room is to talk about the insanely low drop rate of these things, even by the last bonus sheet’s standards. We’re down to 1 in 8 packs, actually less than a main set mythic now, and certainly a small ratio compared to even that UB bonus sheet’s 1 in 3 packs rate.
The way they managed this is by cutting all the uncommons out of the bonus sheet. So it’s just 15 mythics and 30 rares. But well, should that just reduce the numbers to that old 1 in 3 instead of this low? Maybe it has to do with concerns of cramming into the play booster, something that already isn’t all that spacious anymore. After all, lands isn’t something draft decks need the most of, sure there are the MDFCs which are pretty appreciated, but some random utility lands that produce colorless so actively going against fixing your mana, well, not so much. But let’s say we start with the number of 1 in 8, how about just making the card list smaller so that an individual card’s pull rate stay not insanely low? So that’s where the nefarious intentions lie.
Yay I can bring the plural back for the first time since literally the Mystical Archive, am I even kidding? And this time that second frame don’t even use any cherry picking whatsoever, every card just get it. Well, technically cherry picking already happens at the step of cutting all the uncommons.
To start this review off, let’s say that both frames share an elephant in their respective rooms, or let’s say, their planets. It’s the fact that the card name is moved to be slightly above the text box, not by having two cylinder boxes on top of one another, but by the card name getting the box and the card type just awkwardly crammed down to the text box. And with that, you don’t have room for the set symbol anymore, because you don’t want to put it in the same box as the card name, that would imply that’s the mana cost, while lands aren’t supposed to have that.
That’s the crux of the argument to do this frankly. You don’t want to do this with normal spells because you don’t dare push the mana cost any lower than the top of the card (well the poster Secret Lair cards frankly does in fact do that). But well, you can with the lands. And who am I to say that the Adventure cards haven’t prepared us to this crap? All in the name of unobstructed art, they try literally everything. I guess it isn’t as bad as literally not using any frame, so be grateful I guess.
The typeline is definitely a big crux of my issues with these thing. Remember the Zendikar Expeditions where they put the typebox below the text box, also in the name of giving the art more room? Well that’s a 5 year old experiment right, along with centering the typeline back in original Eldraine or something. I mentioned those because now you look at this set’s way of putting this Beleren word right alongside the normal font of the text box and I’m not sure if it actually serves a heading purpose. The spacing just feels awkward overall. Like the word land is pushed as close to the pinline as possible, while the text box itself either clearly has enough space (they don’t have flavor texts this time) or is pushing brutally hard for space and doesn’t seem to be able to get it (this is the one time they decide to shrink the text box). What’s being created are these incredibly awkward text boxes that really don’t justify their rarity. At this point going all out poster may yield a more cohesive result really.
I give them this, there’s a very high quality design for the two bottom sides of the frame. And the fact that the cylinder sides is more of a literal circle now, so there’s actual designing going on. What is a bizzare decision is the name of these cards need a unique font. It’s certainly very fitting and fun, but well the main text box is still what they are.
The big dumb thing of note to these is that each art features a spaceship that breaks out of the art and tramples over the frame and card text. It could be harmless like reminding you where the set symbol could have been, just slightly trampling over a letter in the frame, leaving a trail that barely covers the text, or well, just have the ship straight up tramples over multiple words in the text box. Don’t know about you, but the ancient Un cards have the respect to bound the text out of these intruding “art pieces”, or well if they do they actually have good reasons to do so. I’m not sure what these few spaceships have to deserve to do this.
If you remember back to Strixhaven, well the second version is quite simplified to let the art speak on its own even better. This time we have the same goal. Through the frame’s execution this time is even more oversimplified.
There’s no more cylinder for any name or text box, it’s now just one rounded rectange with the bottom covered. I think this design is what the generic borderless Tarkir lands already shown us with the glowy outline but now just brutally oversimplified. So maybe it doesn’t deserve that much to be called an unique frame.
And the unique font for the card name is obviously gone, so now the overall box is even more of a misaligned mess. The name has to be close to the typeline just like the typeline having to be really close to the box, now you realize the name’s size is bigger than the typeline but not like the name stands out that much to be clearly readable, and the text box’s weird spacings continue, so what a mess for the eyes are these words.
Here is the funny thing, the vast majority of these lands are colorless lands. Not entirely, as seems to be the new course with bonus sheets now. Which frankly sounds harder to analyze than funnier. But we can try. For this analysis, I will have this diagram showing how I group the cards. Each group has its own number, and the shape surrounding them will denote the rarity, so I’ll call them in text by both their rarity and their number, so M1 vs. R2, since if we just combine the whole list we would run into double digits anyways. Within the rares, you may also realize there are these up or down triangles, which is to represent different pairs within the groups. Frankly without those we would be in way bigger group counts.
Appendix: Why did I put the terrain generator in R1 instead of R5? Not even like this is the most symmetrical layout of things possible.
So, at Mythic, there are 6 groups, three are pairs of cards, which may be really easy to figure out, and the other three are trios, which are harder to figure out: