As a person with some age on yourself, are you any excited for an amusement park anymore? The place with clowns, ferris wheels, merry go rounds, etc. Also are you excited for space? Obviously not serious space like some Edge of Eternities in the future, the silly space the theme park can let you try.
If you answered no to all of those questions, congratulations, you now understand why this set flopped and is among Unhinged to be the reasons Un-sets died again! Or at least, one of the reasons, and obviously there’s a few more you should remember by now.
Don’t it feels like a cycle to first go from Unglued which set the idea of the silver border set in motion to Unhinged which was so miserable that it put Un sets on ice. Like Unstable being delayed thrice, but still actually succeed and now we get to Unfinity, where do I even begin.
This set was supposed to be released in April’s Fools in 2022, in the middle of Neon Dynasty and New Capenna, for context. It has to be this year and not other years because those years’ April Fools don’t land in Fridays, and you need these set releases to be in Fridays. And at some point, allegedly the sticker factory went out of business and they need to scramble to find another one, so set got delayed. Guess to when? On the same day as the first UB precon set I kid you not. One also about science fiction, but more importantly, one that executed science fiction much better (by virtue of the source material frankly). And that October is already crowded in the middle of Dominaria and Brothers’ War, this was the half of the year that were trying the one set every two month pace we would be moving into for the future.
Point is overall, Unfinity suffers from the oversaturation of Magic that was really creeping in by this point, and turned out the eventual solution is that all the “innovative” sets like it needed to be killed to save space.
That UB precon set turned out to also play another role. It made the Magic designers realized: Back in the day, if you want to play your Unstable commander deck or change your commander to a Shear Trek alter, you needed to talk with your playgroup. Much like how you should talk with your playgroup that you wish this commander pod didn’t have so much tutoring that have the nuance of just being used for combos and nothing else.
Unfortunately, turns out Magic players aren’t that great at talking, so actions speak louder than words, like pubstomping. So now let’s use an action, let’s make external IPs and any silver border cards that can work in the rules black bordered. Even the ones that don’t work, let’s give them the black border and acorn stamp too, allegedly to have an easier time mixing both on a print sheet, but who am I to say it isn’t about making sure everyone have to accept their existence?
The first two Un-sets didn’t have a specified location in the so called “Un-iverse” for their cards to be flavored on. They’re just whatever Magic themed jokes the designers wanted to have. Unstable decided to finally give that place its first proper plane, Bablovia, with this steampunk feel (which conflicted with Avishkar, hence one of the delays, allegedly). Sure, it does have a few Hearthstone artists literally getting in and making arts for, but for the most part you do recognize the Magic feels on the cards. The sharpness is here, the palattes still hit right, and some names you still recognize from the main sets are here too. I guess that’s one thing to thank the Gatewatch era art sanitization for, when the experiment set can’t go far enough to its determent.
And now look at Unfinity, what is a “retro sci-fi space carnival theme park”? A lot of magenta, this color now associated with corporate safe mid 2010s graphics to come off as “colorful” and “cute” and a lot of things Magic allegedly can’t offer in its main serious form. I was thinking about seeing how many artists from normal sets got in here, then I look at their arts and I just feel that magenta, don’t quite feel the same art style. Saddest part is, a lot of the recent great unique artists Magic found aren’t here either. Normal sets greatly enjoy their presence for just that share of splash of uniquness in what otherwise is still a collection of unified art direction, and this one just don’t get that splash.
A different way to elaborate is that a theme park is the most blatant form of capitalism. Have you ever heard the legend of the nightmarish system of FastPasses? I mean technically any setting used in a franchise like this is bound to that argument, who am I to say showing high fantasy don’t make tired workers yearn for the good old days, who am I to say showing cyberpunk don’t make them keep working hard to get to that “utopia”? But well, on a theme park it’s a whole other level. Here, we literally make tickets into something you get and spend, we call everything you would otherwise call a game or a ride an “Attraction”, like calling an employee a “KPI”.
Do I sound like a bloody communist or did I really got my point across that the Rakdos guild of Ravnica would make a much better theme park, obviously for the players of the game of Magic and not any innocent person getting into that place?
Allegedly, Magic as Richard Garfield intended wouldn’t have that strict of a rule book, and instead people look at the card and infer what they should really do as they go. Which is some great ground for Un-sets, as great as Chaos Orbs could be tore into pieces. So these Un-sets are quite important to Magic when viewed that way.
Unfortunately, we certainly aren’t living in Richard’s world right. People don’t settle for a starter deck plus a few boosters, they netdeck the entire meta deck list and acquire it at any cost. They want to win, and in a way their efforts will be recognized (so we need formats). And unfortunately, this has spread to the casual players, with the centralized way Commander has became with its three or five color full text box value engines, in spoiler seasons people look at cards pretty much the same way.
Long way to say most people just don’t make their own fun anymore, and that’s kinda required to make the most of these Un-set cards. Like do you ever look at your borderless card and think I love it for the artwork that plays well with the frame design and flavor text of the card, or you just blindly chase for it because it’s fancier than the normal version.
I feel like that’s probably the root reason for why a lot of draft innovation sets like this died in at first, Modern Horizons, and now crossover sets, because we can’t just settle at something weirder than a normal set, we now need something that is bigger than a normal set.