I thought I was just gonna plow through some basics in the UB version’s review. But then I think about more things to point out and here we are.
One important thing to whine about however, the Arena renders of these cards continue to suck and looks grainy and cheapens the artwork and just the overall card in question. Just compare them to the much better looking renders the MTGO exclusive cards of old got and you’ll see where my point is. To be fair, putting the MTGO renders as is would be brutally terrifying with all the Arials and bad propotions, which might make the Arena renders look much greater in comparison. How is that good enough?
The cynical stone is now deemed to be Terminus, more of an adjective than Infinity ever is and a cooler more fantastical one at that. Its kicker tier is now named Origin instead of the infinite symbol, that’s helpful to be an actual word you can read and maybe it ties to the fact that Terminus, as I looked up on the internet, is the end, a limit of things like a river, train trip,...
The other word that get changed is web-slinging to enweb. Magic has its encore, enlist, entwine already, and this is surely a handy addition to the family of cool fantasy keywords starting with en. It’s definitely a choice to stick with the spider’s web instead of a less creature-specific word in case future sets want to take advantage of rescuing tapped creatures in this specific way. Through they can just add a number of a condition and that can be a derivative alright.
Words that didn’t get changed are Harness for that stone, Mayhem for Magic’s less serious worlds an creatures, Symbiote for apparently a thing Thunder Junction has and the Hero/Villain split, which honestly makes me really want Arena give an option for the typeline to scroll in the evil way the textbox can.
This set lacks most of the bling that the UB version has, like all the showcase frames (which is an upgrade for the bonus sheet, through that might make you question their horrible drop rates), all of the basic lands, most of the flavor words and allegedly most of the flavor texts (Maybe they actually exist in the game, but who am I to ask Scryfall to put them all in).
However, the gendered pronouns in the rule texts stuck somehow. How does that affect the gender bending, we’ll explore eventually.
How will this affect the amount of lines of texts and dead space on each card? Should I even bother to measure this since don’t Arena have a big text mode?
This is going to be a giant problem with converting UB cards to in universes down the line.
The way I split the table is as following:
| Rarity | Lgd | Cgd | Eql | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OM1-M | 11 | 3 | 1 | 15 |
| OM1-R | 29 | 19 | 5 | 53 |
| OM1-U | 30 | 16 | 9 | 55 |
| OM1-C | 10 | 30 | 20 | 60 |
| Total | 80 | 68 | 35 | 188 |
Through I do have a feeling that this number could be even lower had Magic not have a lot of those planes that pushed the fantasy boundaries more and more into the real world, which is yet another argument for why these UB sets exist in the first place.
Something you notice with the UB sets is that many characters just have the card name be the real human name of the character, no fancy title after a comma. Magic’s universe obviously don’t like that much, we like our cool fantasy titles with a fair share of “the”, “of”,… You know what, let’s start with that. In the UB version, only 14 cards have “the” and 13 cards have “of”, 5 of each group (overlaps exist) are commanders. In this Arena version, just counting the commanders, it’s 28 and 18 respectively.
A more effective way (not 100%, mind you) of counting titles of commanders is to look for commas in their names. The UB version has 56, the Arena version has 67. There, all the ones without the comma would get their title through “the” or “of” except for two cards, even then those go for a job title or an adjective, not a full name.
| DF | 21 | 16 | 14 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | -1 | -2 | -3 | -4 | -5 | -6 | -7 | -8 | -10 | -11 | -12 | -17 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HM | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 8 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Now onto the most fun part, how the lengths of the two versions’ names differ. It’s now where I finally have to acknowledge that I’ve been counting the five DFCs as separate names all along, except for that chart at the very top. They might show you an important detail.
This whole chart works out to on average a $\overline{x} = 2.02381,\ \sigma = 6.7188$, so through the formula of $u = \frac{\overline{x} - \mu}{\sigma}\sqrt{n} = 2.7607$ compared to $z_{0.005} = 2.576$, this has proven with 0.5% confidence that the Arena version has longer names than the UB version. I said fantasy titles were a reason, but well there’s another reason we’ll get to eventually.
Then again, how often will people have to reference by any of these cards with their full titles? In that case, it’s certainly an upgrade over half of the characters having the same word with a hyphen in the middle.