Battle stations! Spoilers for upcoming Magic: The Gathering unset Unfinity are incoming. On Tuesday, set design lead Mark Rosewater gave some insight into Unfinity’s cards and mechanics, in both an Unfinity First Look video on the MTG YouTube channel and an article, Making Space, on the Magic website.
Best of all, in our humble view, is a planeswalker shaped like a four-footed friend. Other highlights include a new type of artifact, Attractions, that get drawn from an entirely separate deck. And of course, we got to see more of the strange sticker mechanic in both video and article.
Starting our analysis with Comet, Stellar Pup, you can immediately see that this space dog is the ‘planeswalker that doesn’t do what you say’ which Rosewater teased on Monday. Instead of picking Comet’s loyalty abilities, you must roll a dice to determine whether the planeswalker pooch creates squirrel tokens, digs up a low mana cost card from the graveyard, or bites a creature or player. On a six you get to roll twice more, so if you’re very lucky, things could get pretty explosive with Comet.
In the Unfinity First Look Rosewater tells Blake Rasmussen that Comet fulfils a request players have asked him for time and time again. “We see humanoid planeswalkers all the time. Could we have a non-humanoid planeswalker? But not something that’s kind of like a human, something that’s clearly not a human,” he says.
The interesting part is that, while Rosewater says this is “the very first planeswalker of its kind”, as MTG creator Spice8Rack pointed out in his unset video essay, unsets often serve as a testbed, to try out ideas that later crop up on regular Magic cards. It’s not clear if that’ll still be the case with Unfinity, since the loss of silver border means cards like Comet, Stellar Pup are already Commander legal, but perhaps it’s a sign that there’ll be more non-humanoid planeswalkers to come in future sets.
Attractions are the other big reveal from Tuesday. Like Unstable’s Contraptions, these are artifacts which are drawn from a separate deck. You play these when a card tells you to ‘open an Attraction’, and like with sagas, they activate at the beginning of your first main phase. You then roll a dice, which determines which of your Attractions you get to Visit. Each Attraction has numbers from one to six in the bottom right corner, and you can Visit each attraction with a lit-up number that you rolled, activating its abilities.
Interestingly, there are multiple versions of each Attraction, with different combinations of lit-up numbers, and different flavour text. Wizards of the Coast hired comedy writers to create flavour text for Unfinity, including Graham, Kathleen, and Cameron from entertainment group Loading Ready Run.
We’re truly in an endless spoiler season right now, with MTG Unfinity previews marching in the moment all the MTG Warhammer 40k decks are shown. After this though, MTG fans can have a bit of a break – but don’t forget to set your alarm clocks in time for The Brother’s War in November!