The Monopoly man (aka Mr Monopoly) is on a Magic: The Gathering card now, but before you groan and grimace, this is not the latest jump-the-shark Secret Lair or Universes Beyond crossover product. Instead, it's a Heroes of the Realm card, one of the unique prizes awarded to Wizards employees for particularly stellar work.
In this case, the card 'Mr Monopoly, On The Go' was shared by its recipient, Dave Moccia, on Linkedin on Monday, May 5. The Senior Creative Director received the award for work on WotC's parent company Hasbro's Monopoly Go! mobile app. Makes sense!
As for what the card actually does, it's a red MTG planeswalker card with four different abilities. Two of these are references to unique Monopoly Go actions. Shut down destroys an artifact, while Heist lets you play cards off the top of an opponent's library.
More intriguingly, there's a zero cost ability that simply lets you roll a d6 and add that many loyalty counters to Mr Monopoly. That provides fuel for what is perhaps the most ridiculous ultimate ability on a planeswalker. This -40 'Pass Go' ability creates 200 treasures!
As the card's designer Jeremy Geist explained on Linkedin, the ability costs 40 because that's how many squares make up a complete lap of a Monopoly board. It does make this busted ability very hard to pull off, though. On average you'll have to activate Mr Monopoly's first ability, which does nothing except roll dice, ten times before you get the chance to make a treasure horde. Perhaps you could speed up the process with some proliferate effects, but it would require a lot of work.
On the whole, then, while the ability is ridiculous, the card doesn't actually seem badly balanced. If anything it's a little undertuned. That's not particularly important, since Heroes of the Realm cards are not tournament legal, though personally I hope those that win them play their prize card in as many casual games and decks as possible.
In the past we've seen Heroes of the Realm cards ranging from a Universes Beyond 'universewalker' to a friendly unicorn that can tutor tutors. Let us know what your favorite HotR card is over on the Wargamer Discord.