The reason that Mind Goblin has all those caveats from exile and graveyard attached is because sticker cards are supposed to retain their stickers when they move between public zones. Thus, when Mind Goblin moves to exile/graveyard, it already has its sticker on it, and can’t get another one if it were to be reanimated or somehow returned. However if it gets returned to hand or shuffled somehow, the sticker falls off because it moves to a private zone, and then you can put another sticker on it as it enters the battlefield. The reason for the control 9 or less is because you would only ever have 9 possible stickers in your active sticker cards. Since you only draw 3 from game start, and each card has 3 on it, it’s 9 total stickers. There are still inconsistencies, as the card isn’t worded that way in paper, but it’s the best way to make a bad system work
Small correction: it can get another sticker, and the new one would be used to calculate how much mana it adds. But that would mean adding a "how many times cards called name-sticker goblin entered the battlefield" counter to the spaghetti mess that is MTGO (since ypu can run out of stickers), and that probably broke too many things to make it work. Also the fact that the MTGO version always adds at least 4 mana, while in paper you would be adding 3 or less often times by the second goblin of the game is a massive buff for it.
Yeah, and this would be a big deal if the goblin deck had a lot of ways to blink or recur the ___ goblin. But the MTGO folks (correctly, probably) decided that since it doesn't have much practical impact, they'd ignore it.
15:05 I present my stickers. My Companion and Dungeons are sitting on the side of the table, but I don’t say anything, because I don’t have a Companion. Also, my Poison counter is next to it. And I have a dice with a paper under it “storm count”, next to it another “energy”. I’m wearing sunglasses. I talk as little as necessary. Every card in my deck is non-English, full art textless if it exists. Every draw I pull to the side, might be a Miracle. Every spell they cast I pause to think about countering it. I play my lands closer to the red zone.
Making this set constructed legal just so they can sell collector boosters for their parody set was the moment I knew I had to change my relationship with this game
Eh, id say its not malicious or greedy intent in this case. I have seen LOADS of people ask Mark on his blog why x or y card from an un set is illegal in commander despite working in the rules perfectly fine, and a lot of people ask if they could make un cards that work in the rules legal in the future, and when the set was nearly completed they decided to give fans what they were asking him for and make cards that work in the rules legal. It feels moreso like seeing people want something and giving it to them rather than "How do we make more money?"
I hadn't considered the implications that failing to present a stack of stickers to your opponent in a Legacy or Vintage game is strictly suboptimal, even if you're using zero sticker cards. I'm horrified by this revelation, and the closely-following revelation that every player ought to be paying a "tax", unrelated to their deck in any way, in order not to lose advantage.
It also wastes everyone's time, revealing stickers you have no intention of using. Add that up and multiply by every player that would do this. This adds insult to injury.
@@WMDistraction More sales. And that's not some cynical take either, they didn't exactly keep it a secret. If you can keep using the cards in sanctioned formats after, you might care more about buying the set.
I mean, they did, though. No sticker cards are used in legacy except one, which basically is only played because it fits a very specific niche in an already top-tier deck. So one card slipped through, out of an entire set,. Which happens all the time - every set has at least one or two broken cards that Wizards never saw coming. But you chose to play Legacy, so this is the kind of shit you signed up for.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 I could see that argument if it were what happens most of the time, where it's a "oh wow turns out that's better than expected." This was one of those rare times where it was painfully obvious how good it would be and they shouldn't have let it make it to print. That's the main issue, if it was reasonably viewable as not strong that'd be a different story. The whole "you signed up for this with Legacy" schtick is also pretty tired and nonsensical. Especially talking about a product line that has explicitly always been not legal in the format until this set.
I get finding it annoying, but I find it absolutely hilarious and quintessential goblin that the deck to play is defined by a Jumpstart exclusive and a Unset card. That's absolutely nonsensical, but it is funny that it is goblins
My friend at my LGS is one the reddit post at 15:48 was talking about. He went to a legacy tournament, showed his opponent his sticker deck each game, then proceeded to just play dredge. One of his opponents (presumably the person that made this post) called a judge to ask if this was a legal thing to do, who went at and discussed it with other judges for a few minutes, who said it was within the rules. Fast forward to the next day and my friend sees this reddit post about himself on reddit, which gets a LOT of attention, and a week later WOTC announces they're investigating what to do with these cards in legacy. Beautiful.
The acorn-shaped stamp was one of the dumbest ways WotC could have thought to differentiate which cards were legal in eternal formats. Stamp errors happen even in regular sets, where cards can show up with the stamp missing or noticeably misshapen. In Unfinity, in addition to those errors, some cards have been found with the wrong shaped stamp. They should have just printed a small acorn in the bottom corner, the same way they print a small planeswalker icon for cards from The List.
Yeah. I assume they decided to move to it because they didn't want to have to print silver and black bordered cards from the same sheets, but I still miss the silver border for just being instantly noticable.
People already complain of the stamp being difficult to notice, making something even smaller and more out of the way wouldn't be a very good solution either. Really, making them black border should have been a non-starter from the beginning. If there's no good way to do something, I take that as a sign that it's just a bad idea in the first place.
It's clear that "make it black-border" was an edict dropped from on high by the bean counters late in the game. They fell into the classic in trying to make a product for everyone, and in doing so made a product that appealed to no one.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 There's no need for speculation, Maro has outright stated that the decision to go black-border was done late in the process, after the set had basically been all but finalised. That's why they couldn't make the "acorn" cards silver-bordered and the normal ones black bordered - it would require different sheets, which need a specific number of cards, which they couldn't do because it wasn't designed as such. Perhaps if they knew from the beginning, they would have known "We have X slots for silver border and X for black" and would have been able to design accordingly. That still doesn't answer the question of whether or not mixing the two was a good idea in the first place, of course.
5:45 there's a second example too with an effective reprint of Super Duper Death ray (an instant with trample that deals 4 damage to a creature) as Flame Spill. The verbiage isn't identical, but it's for all intents and purposes, a functional reprint of the un-set card
And there's a bunch of mechanics that debuted in silver-border that were later printed in black-border even without direct card-for-card analogs. Giant Fan was considered a wacky departure from "real" Magic back in 1998, but today moving arbitrary counters around is uncontroversial. Dice rolling was a theme of Unglued because apparently they thought that wouldn't fly in black-border back then (even though coin flipping was fine). Infernal Spawn of Evil inspired the Forecast mechanic.
@@dryhad9253 the saddest thing about the dice rolling is that most of the really good support cards for the mechanic were in Unstable, which means I can't legally run them in a Mr House commander deck, despite having a lot of legal coin flipping support legal in black border
There is also Neverwinter Hydra, which is a near reprint of Hydradoodle from Unstable. The only difference is that one has ward and the other reach, but otherwise it's the same card, with the same dice-rolling mechanic.
@@anthonydelfino6171 I added most of them to mine and absolutely no one has cared and I haven't had any issues. Who cares about Krark's Other Thumb when Barbarian Class and Wyll exist? Goblin Tutor does nothing if you roll 1 or 2. Mad-Science Fair Project is absolutely terrible compared to Vexing Puzzle Box. Squirrel-Powered Scheme and Strategy, Schmategy are probably the only two truly powerful ones and even then, how powerful are they really?
they shouldn't have ever been legal. seriously, and I fully mean this, the person or people responsible for that not happening should not have their jobs. it's such a wildly horrific decision.
Just yesterday, I was playing a high power game of commander, and my friend played Mind Goblin, then proceeded to combo off, repeatedly playing it about 60 times to win. I immediately HATED the card. I love cards that do cool things. Dockside is a problem, but I don't hate it. This card though, is unreadable. There's no way you can read the card and understand what it does. And the mechanics of stickers are just so strange and specific and yet also vague and alien, that I legitimately don't know if my friend was even playing it correctly or if he just assumed he could do the thing and win because no one would know he couldn't. ________ Goblin is a problem in commander.
@@DalenthasSo you would in theory have to peel off the sticker each time, then put it back on? I thought the whole point of stickers was to work like "perpetually" in Alchemy.
I just contemplated adding "Name Sticker" Goblin to my vintage cube today. That was a crazy 5 minutes before reason returned to the world and I decided against it.
I saw LSV playing it and considered it for a second. But then I decided not to on principle. I still have 2 unstable legendary creature commander decks, but those are a lot more docile compared to the sticker fiasco.
Printing un cards that are legal would have gone over a LOT better, and could have even been one of the coolest parts of Unfinity if they did 2 things. 1: Kept the silver border, to easily differentiate legal and non-legal cards. The acorn stamp looks cool, but the silver border is just so clear. There's a reason they've used it for all sorts of promos and goofy cards outside of un sets. I wish they kept using it with functionally unique universes beyond cards. The silver border telling 2: Kept all the stickers and clown tokens and letter counting stuff silver-border. They could have just black-bordered a select few un cards, such as the dice rolling cards. It doesn't matter if they're good enough to see play if they don't bring anything too wild (like stickers) into sanctioned play. + if universes beyond unique cards were silver-bordered, they could have created a serious demand for silver-border commander where all these un cards could see play
Clown tokens aren't so bad, and Attractions are nice even if half of the arguments for stickers can also apply to them But I like the magic stickers so I'm biased
@fatpad00 I don't remember the exact numbers, but with mine I think it was a playset of each common, 3 of each uncommon, and one or two of each rare, there was a way to math that that made a good cube size
@@the_old_crimge74 how did you handle the variant cards? I'm considering doing 6x each uncommon and 6x each rare to be able to use all the variations, then 3x each mythic to keep the pack rare-slot ratio correct. Only problem is that would make the cube pretty huge, since that is 600 cards alone without commons, contraptions, or basics. On the plus side, getting the cards isn't particularly expensive
The amount of overcomplicated abilities requiring multiple paragraphs of explanation on separate game pieces WotC has put out in the past while (stickers, the ring tempts, the initiative, day/night bound) is kind of staggering. I’d almost rather shuffle up and play a new game whenever any of these come out rather than take the time to have them explained and understood by all the players.
Here's the thing: I liked the first 3 Un-Sets, I actually have 6 Un-Decks, I'm a huge fan of A) poking fun of yourself B) mechanics that wouldn't make sense in normal MTG C) the fact that WITHIN a silver-border constructed multi-player you can still have a fun time despite the cards/decks being silly But the stickers, DESPITE being unique to this set felt wrong from the get-go. To put it in perspective: Contraptions, Augment or Cards caring for artists were all unique, quirky but still fun to play. Stickers felt wrong from start to finish.
I think the biggest problem in MTG nowadays is all the extra baggage and subgames you have to play, as you play the game. Baggage being the Sticker decks and Companions. Subgames being Planeswalkers, Battles, Monarch, Tempting with the One Ring, and Initiative/Dungeons. Just imagine sitting down to play a game of commander or legacy and they bring a deck that has all of those things. It would get incredibly frustrating as you have to keep track of so many things going on just to play the game.
When I saw the video in my feed I thought "28 min. is long for a rant", but hot damn what an absolute clusterfuck. The sad thing is that you can't really explain how this mechanic has resulted in an absolute pile of shit to a casual audience without 28 min of explaining how different esoteric aspects of Magic interact.
I think some unfinity stuff is great fun, like attractions. It's just artifacts with dice rolls. Simple, easy, and straight forward. Stickers had no chance being good. Especially not since every sticker is at best, a one time use thing
I called that this is exactly what would happen before these were even released (a lot of people called this, its not rocket science); all sticker cards should be banned - this is our generation's ante
@@JohnFromAccounting Well, except, they never made the mistake of making Conspiracy legal in other formats; the reason theyre "banned" like ante instead of just never legal like the silver-border is that they were printed in black-border with the same set code as the eterna-legal Conspiracy set (something Maro says WAS a mistake). These days, they'd just have printed a supplement product like that as a seperate set code that was never legal (as in the "Conspiracy cards" would not be the same set code as the set "Conspiracy", this is getting confusing lol)
No it's not. Ante was a real legal risk and a growth impediment - my mom almost forbade me from playign Magic because she still thought you could lose your cards if you lost a game (even though ante had been gone for a few years). Stickers just add a bit of complexity and annoyance to a game already full of that. There is just no comparison between stickers and ante.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 The comparison would be they are both once-legal-to-play-in-regular-magic mechanics that suck so much and cause enough trouble that they should be banned out out of all formats, I wasn't really trying to make a comparison much deeper than that
Unfinity is a set of disappointment. Like in disappointed that they didnt use it to make old unset cards like Krak's other thumbs legal in some formats. I'm disappointed in just the average quality of the legal cards. I could go on and on it's just a set of dissapointment and wasted potential.
Absolutely agree with you Vince. The novelty of stickers was 1000% not worth making them legal in black border. It causes way too many problems. Even in Commander, I find myself avoiding these things because I don't want to deal with them, which is... a bad look. I put Mind Goblin in my Syr Carah deck but only after asking my playgroup if they'd be alright if I just played it as though it's the MTGO version-- because I'm not going to carry around 10 sticker sheets alongside my Commander deck for the sake of one Seething Song variant. Similarly, I replaced Outland Liberator with Masked Vandal in another deck, which from a power level perspective is pretty much a strict downgrade, but I did it because I don't want to have to track day/night just for one Naturalize on a stick. A friend of mine was playing a dice-rolling deck (Farideh, Devil's Chosen) and had included Monitor Monitor, and then when they went to cast it realized, "Oh shoot, I don't have an Attractions deck", so now they bring Attractions for their dice-rolling deck, which gives me indigestion if I dwell on it too long. For me, this extends to Initiative cards to an extent as well. I'm a big believer in trying to keep all the tokens a deck needs with the deck. If a deck has a Memorial to Glory in it, I make sure to include at least one 1/1 white Soldier creature token; if it's running Beast Within, I make sure to have a 3/3 green Beast token to give my opponent. But including just a single initiative card in a Commander deck can open up the possibility of needing SO many tokens. The Initiative card itself, the Undercity card (and yes, they're usually printed as one card, with the dungeon on one face and the initiative on the other, but when you're using one you're also using the other, so you really need two), a treasure token, and a 4/1 black Skeleton with menace- and that's only if none of your opponents steal the initiative! If that happens, we need multiple copies of the Undercity (or you could use multiple differently colored dice on the one dungeon card, but it's a pain when someone else wants to know what the rooms are), multiple treasure tokens, and multiple Skeletons! So when faced with the choice of including a powerful Initiative card to an otherwise Initiative-less Commander deck- say, White Plume Adventurer in a Kelsien, the Plague deck, I'll sometimes decline to do so-- it can be too logistically taxing. Which is a shame! And in a broader sense, I worry about the complexity of the game. R&D keeps designing these mechanics that require separate pieces to track -- The Ring Tempts You being the most recent, I think -- and they're definitely neat in their own Limited environments, but I worry that Wizards isn't considering all the consequences of introducing so many complicated mechanics to the game. I mean, I remember back in 2009 -- the renewal of the Core Sets with M10, the removal of extemporaneous rules like mana burn and combat damage using the stack, and the introduction of the "New World Order" limited design philosophy not long before that -- all in an effort to prevent the barrier of entry to the game from getting any higher. Has all that gone out the window? How many years can we expect new Magic players to spend learning all the mechanics they may encounter in any given game of Commander? Or returning players?
I really really enjoyed Unstable. Playing that at release was one of the most fun times I've had playing Magic. Unfinity had a lot of baggage with stickers and attractions, but then making it Legacy legal? I put my money where my mouth is and refused to touch it. MaRo said Unstable sold really well, and Unfinity sold poorly, despite them making it EDH legal to sell packs. Can't say I'm surprised.
Stickers are just ikoria counters with skullbriar rules. They suck if you use actual stickers but people just overthink them. I 100% blame the __ goblin implementation on the mtgo crew doing precisely that. The card works just as well in paper as initiative does. It boils my blood whenever people complain it's black border legal because no it sucks just as much in silver border too, that isn't the problem with stickers. It's like pioneer players complaining Sheoldred wasn't in modern horizons instead. Don't pawn it off on us, we're also dealing with it. Every rant about stickers doesn't make me think stickers are worse, it makes me think boomers in Magic are more annoying.
Thing is, I like the UN-sets and what they do for magic. Unfinity *specifically* felt like an abuse of the good feelings Unstable had brought about, with a lot of stuff being done because 'why not' as opposed to 'why should we' if that makes sense.
I think that the legality of UN-finity in normal formats represents greater issues with mtg as a whole. Wordy cards, needless complexity, extra pieces that take up board space and game time, and most notably-that they need to sell packs above all else. I know the goal is that they need to make money at the end of the day, and the way they managed with the old UN sets with those special basic lands was actually a decent idea. But like you said, you can't get away from full-art lands anymore, so why bother with that? Also not to mention- but I remember seeing a post somewhere that showed someone who had damaged a foil card by putting a sticker on it without a sleeve or anything. To me there is nothing redeemable or fun about that mechanic- its embarrassing and just plain stupid.
"on a college campus last month" was such a great moment in SUAP. Patricks genuine distaste made me laugh so hard especially when he asked Cedric if he had a counterspell and said if he didn't cast it he would never forgive him.
Fun fact: Stickers can allow you to get out 1029 of a single enchantment. Step 1.) get out doubling season/parallel lives/primal vigor/anointed process (any of these work) Step 2.) put a name sticker on it. (reminder: stickers aren't a copiable property) Step 3.) Use Yenna to copy the enchanment. You end up making 2 copies instead. However the copies don't have the name sticker. Step 4.) Next turn copy it again, you make 8 copies now. Step 5.) Play a new enchantment Step 6.) Copy that new enchantment, you make 1028 copies.
The other thing about making your own stickers is how do I know if they are legal? I would 100% call a judge if someone sat down and presented me with a homemade set of sheets and stickers.
Yeah, having to search them up in the pool of, what is it, 100 legal sheets then making sure all 10 of them match up exactly sounds horrid. For the opponent, and for the judge(s) that will inevitably be called over. Honestly, as a judge I'd prolly end up printing them myself then asking players to use the ones I printed instead if their opponent objects!
I'm sure there are sticker sheets used in every legacy event at the big Hareruya Tournament Center in Takadanobaba as well. I've seen them there at least once or twice when walking past to go play some EDH.
Saying as an alchemy player, I don't think the stickers themselves are the issue as much as a symptom of a larger issue. The real issue is that wotc doesn't give a damn about content quality anymore. They just vomit all those crap cards without rhyme or reason, zero balancing, and absolutely no playtesting whatsoever, to get that short-term cash. Just look at past sets, sheoldred the apocalypse, orcish bowmaster, ring, cards that anyone with a working brain could see are broken to absolute shit, that came and absolutely annihilated the meta. The rebalancings, that were supposed to fix wotc's zero-effort balancing, happen once a year on a good year. The story might as well be a meme at this point, with mainline sets being such a clownshow that they look more like unsets than the actual unsets. "Lets give everyone detective hats, the set", "lets give everyone cowboy hats, the set". Can't wait for Strixhaven, when they'll give everyone a graduate cap and call it a day.
There is no risk to putting them in Eternal Formats. No testing necessary. Reason being, they don’t care. And I say that as someone that does care. But it’s obvious, Wizards doesn’t care.
I can understand how they would think some cards/mechanics from an Un-set can be good for constructed formats. I will NEVER understand how they decided that the sticker mechanic was one of them.
I think all the worst mechanics in magic have all been invented in recent years. Remember when Storm or Dredge were the worst thing in magic, not anymore, at least they are easy to grasp. Now we have Companion, Mutate, Stickers, Attractions and 2 different types of Dungeon mechanics that do but also don't interact with each other. I remember joking about Command Zone tribal when they made Experience counters and then again when they made Energy. Now I want to do it. Pregame, present my sticker and attraction deck, declare my companion, pull out my energy and experience counter cards and then reveal my commander. Wait what order is that meant to be done?
Thank you for saying that about Mutate. Mutate in Paper is a Cluster. I said it. Even straight forward it’s a lot to track. But when things start happening in the game around it, it becomes very confusing about if the right thing is happening.
I can totally understand the dislike for Companions while I like the idea personally. The idea of a reward being available for some constrained deckbuilding is neat. Shame the execution has all the good ones banned in formats they'd be good in, and some of the others have totally unrealistic restrictions. Nobody's going to companion Umori & give away that their deck literally can't have instants or sorceries in it. They were pretty cool to see in March of the Machines Limited.
I'd like to offer my perspective as an enfranchised player who always loved un-sets. I loved the goofy cards, the wild, game breaking mechanics, the ability for WotC to really push the boundaries of the game. I hate stickers, and unfinity is the the worst un-set they've done. Coming from the other side, I hate that they got rid of the silver border for my own selfish reasons. I had an "all silver border" deck, where every nonland card was silver. It was designed to be fun to play with and against, it avoided a lot of the less fun silver mechanics. I tried to build the deck to be an ambassador for silver-bordered, a way to show players like Kenobi "built right, these cards can be a load of fun for everyone". Not only did unfinity ruin it by making me choose between having non-silver-bordered cards in my deck, or skipping an un-set, which the deck was built around, but the mechanics themselves weren't fun to play with! I don't think I've ever met a player, whether they are a fan of un-sets or not, that likes stickers, attractions, or tickets. What a monumental disappointment unfinity was for one of the un-set's biggest fans....
I think the weirdest thing about Unfinity is that yes, it was made playable in commander to sell packs, but the power level is INCREDIBLY low, there are a handful cards in the whole set that are actually worth playing in EDH and maybe a dozen that are decent as a joke so the set didn't sell anyway, because 99% of it was trash. There are 3 cards in the ENTIRE SET (excluding fetchlands) that are worth more than 1 dollar. They caused all of these problems for it to bomb anyway.
Out of all the mechanics that could have been put into "real" magic cards, why stickers? Why is one of the best cards in the set a "grammar matters" card, a design space Wizards previously stated would never be black bordered. Not to even mention that the mechanic cannot be translated. I know the set is only in english, but thats problematic in itself.
13:17 EDIT: I typed all of that out with such confidence, thinking I was right, and when I got to the end, I wasn't sure because stickers are just that absurd. Being akin to perpetual is correct though. Stickers do stay with the object as it changes zones. But I genuinely have no clue if you can put an additional sticker onto its name or not. the reason for the not from exile or graveyard is because stickers in Paper are akin to perpetual from Arena; they stay no matter which zone it changes to. And because there's only one blank spot on the Goblin, you can only put one sticker on it. So if you played a Goblin, put a sticker on it, got the mana, had it die, then reanimated it you would not put a sticker on it because it already has one.
As a Person who actually plays this in paper, its not as bad as I initially thought. I printed out my sticker sheets, made a sticker deck, and marked the number of unique vowels. I show my opponent i have 10 unique sticker card at the beginning of each game and let them randomly choose 3. Every time I use the largest sticker on a card I flip it over. If I ever use more than 3 _____ goblins, I just say it makes 3 mana bc if constructed correctly, you are guaranteed to have 5+ total stickers with 3 or more mana. You never see more than 3 a game so its usually a moot point. I personally dont find it that bad to play with, it just sounds insanely complicated and isn’t very intuitive. My opponents usually get the gist after the first game. That being said, please WOTC ban all of these un set cards. Stickers are ridiculous and are functionally replaced by dice on the only playable card. This didn’t need to be a mechanic. It also sucks to see how demoralized people get when I sit down to play in paper. I pull out my sticker deck, and can see my opponent die a little inside as they prepare to play against this nonsense. I hadn’t considered that now optimal play is everyone has a sticker deck, and that absolutely sucks. If everyone uses one that adds a few mins to every round. You have to take the time to shuffle and reveal for each player
The Cheese Stands Alone is technically better, because it triggers at any time, not just the upkeep. There's also the Giant Fan/Nesting Grounds cross-print, but they're a little more different.
I said I hated stickers and people said I was an old head who hated fun. Just please let me enjoy my strategy game without this nonsense. Fully agreed, stickers are the worst design mistake has ever made. I'd rather 10,000 okos than stickers.
I just watched this video in its entirety and in this moment I have no idea how stickers work and no ambition to learn. If someone plays a sticker card against me I would just take their word for it. My most recently played game of paper magic was a commander game, after a year of not playing paper due to long-covid, and two of the players were playing universes beyond decks, as an enfranchised player from the mid 90s I have to say it was the least fun I ever had playing the game. Not just because of the IPs destroying the immersion, which it does, but because I had no idea what any of the cards being played against me did and the entire game I could not be bothered to even attempt to figure out the current board state because every cards was a book. I just simply focused on playing a linear strategy with my deck and ignoring my opponents. "What is your biggest creature currently" was the question I had to ask everyone at the table when the my combat step came up. The entire game I was just ready for it to be over, hoping someone would target me so that I could be released from the social contract of playing the game I started. Since then I have sold the majority of my commander staples. I don't currently have a commander deck constructed so that I never have to enter into that contract again. A year between playing opened up enough of a gap in my knowledge of the format that I don't feel like I will ever get around to catching back up to it, so no reason to keep the cards. I'll just stick to whatever sets that put on arena because my LGS can't even get standard draft sets to fire now because of the increased price. Other than arena now Magic is dead to me but not because of my choice, I have just been left behind.
I feel the same way. So few sets even appeal to me anymore. Last set I was excited for was Strixhaven. And later this year BloomBurrow. But I don’t like Universes Beyond. And cards have gotten more and more complex, it’s crazy. They just power creep now, it’s sad.
Same bro. I used to play a lot of MtG back in highschool and early college days. Recently tried out commander with some old friends who never stopped playing from back in the day. The card design is just bonkers insane. Day/night cycles, dungeons, transforming cards, monarch, tempted by the ring etc. Plus each card is a solid paragraph of rules and triggers. The game state becomes unreadable without slowing things to a tortuous crawl.
I get the need to rant, but... Complaining that it's bad in a chaos draft? That's a crappy reason. Also, Unfinity in-person draft was actually quite fun, probably more fun than the entirety of the Commander format. It's really a great experience in the store, but not something to do regularly.
I think WOTC should have made the Unfinity set all silver border, and the cards that were deemed legal, they do a black border, but now its all much more confusing
"I seriously feel like I'm blacking out now" is an appropriate response to being introduced to stickers. I feel all Wizards needed to do to get people to but Unfinity is have the space-themed Shocks in them; no card needed to be legal outside Unfinity and people still would have been buying cases/boxes/packs to get them. There's a few Unfinity cards that are reasonable, and none of those involve Attractions, Tickets, or Stickers (case in point: Saw in Half; goofy premise, but it makes sense and we're already used to complicated tokens). I'm still confused as to why they didn't use silver borders.
Un sets are the price Wizards pays to keep MaRo happy. These are sets where he can feel like he's a game designer, not just an MtG designer and that's something he said so himself. For better or for worse, when he retires, all this silliness will slowly go away.
I just printed my stickers out, glued them to a basic land, and cut the shapes out. I have a bag I can pull them out of and put them back in. When needed I slide it under the cardsleeve, easy.
16:22 It does work that way at comp REL. Goblins is a very playable deck in 7point Highlander, so I've had to deal with this at comp REL. Game 1 opponent presents stickers, game 2 they forget (oh by the way did you know you have to re-randomise your stickers EVERY GAME, not every match) and so the judge has to go to this website and generate 3 random sticker sheets. Magic the Gathering in 2024
Agree with most things, except that I don't think the initiative improves the gameplay of multiplayer magic. It's just something else to keep track of that is incredibly easy to forget, it requires tracking multiple copies of the Undercity for different players, and overall is just a pain to deal with for very minor rewards.
Dungeons feel like they aimed really, really low so they'd never be asked to make more of them lol. I don't know how many people have ever picked the gauntlet of pain for such a mid payoff that is Tomb of Annihilation. The Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a nice payoff at the end but takes 7 Ventures to get there - yikes. Lost Mine is basically the only one I think people actually use, and it's like 3 little trinkety effects and then draw a card. By making the mechanic unappealing, they don't have to keep talking to the D&D team and thinking up six more cards for dungeons lol.
Ironically I'm one of those weirdos who actually liked the original two unsets in a theoretical sense, and was like kind of okay with Unstable, but hated Unfinity for just kind of awkwardly existing between the two worlds. I mean, to be fair, I don't actually think playing Unhinged / Unglued was all that fun, I just thought some of the joke cards were interesting. But yeah the thing is Stickers felt like they were just trying to play on Unstable's combination creatures and ended up ruining anything fun about the idea. I get the Unsets are MaRo's baby or whatever but I think it would probably have been fine if they didn't keep trying to shoehorn them into everywhere... if they have to exist as a product that's trying to get sold and thus gets pushed so they can force it into every other format I think it might as well not exist.
I'm still a defender of an Un-Masters set that makes select Un-cards playable in eternal formats. Unstable had more "legal" cards and mechanics than stickers or attractions. There is no way that "Krak's Other Thumb" is illegal and "Wyl, Blade of the Frontier" is not. I also have a "Host/Augmentation" deck with "Surgeon Commander General" as the commander that is suprisingly normal magic deck and no one that I played against rises issue with it. But then again, they would probably fuck up a set like that, so its better no one gives them that ideia...
So, I know that there are Canadian Highlander players who bring an Attraction Deck to games IN CASE someone else has Attraction makers. Never seen it for Sticker Sheets but honestly, none of them actually remain in CanLander as far as I am aware.
I'm an active pauper player and we are being plagued by Name-Sticker Goblin. At the last Rags to Riches (big pauper tournament) at MOX Seattle there was at least 3 sticker players as well as one person just playing Dimir Faeries and still revealing a sticker sheet. A friend of mine went against him and said it definitely affected their mulligan decision and cost them game 1. Beyond being a very powerful card, just a nightmare logistically. Can't wait to see someone DQ'd at comp REL because 4 cards in their deck had a sticky residue on them...
Un sets, when I was playing them, were fun but they were only fun if everyone around was in on it and the person playing the deck wasn't overly aggressive with it. As soon as anyone else was not having fun, that's when you put it away. Downside to this though was there was (and probably still is, been a hot minute since I played) people who took their fun way too seriously and just got annoyed whenever someone else didn't, even if you weren't intrusive. There was a lot of those people who took Magic (and themselves) *way* too seriously. Big part of why they didn't sell well back in the day is that people were building for 'official' events, and the Un sets were not allowed in those events, so no one was going to spend money to buy something that they couldn't use for most of their play time. Didn't help that the Un boosters cost as much as a black border booster. Honestly if they were half as costly and had an 'official' format that allowed them to be played in (and was worth playing), then it would've moved a lot more. I wasn't aware of the sticker mechanic until I started to do some research after a friend gifted me 2 commander decks this last month. The Tolarian Community College April Fool's video this year showed me just how much the game has changed since I left. Despite being a fan of Unhinged and Unglued when I played, I'm not a fan of the sticker mechanic and I'm doubly not a fan of taking these wacky and purposefully unbalanced sets and tossing them into the standard formats that are significantly more focused on balance (and are severely hurt by unbalanced cards).
I think the biggest victim of Hasbro's bullshittery with magic in recent years has been Mark Rosewater. He's one of the design pillars of one of the most popular and complex games in human history, at they make him put out PR statements like "everybody secretly wanted to play with stickers" and "I kept accidentally opening the wrong booster packs". They've made him out to be an absolute fucking buffoon.
Admittedly I haven't played in a large event with stickers yet, for FNM level events absolutely nobody has had an issue with my sticker solution: I have a small piece of paper with numbers 1-10 on them, each with the relevant sticker(s) on the sheet they are referencing written down, and we can reference the actual sticker cards on a phone (ours or a judge's) if it is important. I roll a d10 or a d20 a few times to randomize the 3 sheets I'm using this game, write them on my life pad and use a die set to the appropriate number representing the sticker used as a "counter" representing the "sticker." It works, it takes about 3 seconds for opponents to realize what I am doing with the paper and dice... and it transcends language barriers, as 90% of my legacy opponents locally don't speak much or any English (my native language). Does that justify this mechanic's existence at all? Absolutely not, it is putrid and should have never existed, especially on black-bordered cards. But hey Goblins is really fun and really powerful so I'm gonna play with the card, and I hope my "solution" to the problem of having to carry around sticker sheets is useful to someone lol.
Also I hate how _____ Goblin is just a functionally different card online; it isn't even better or worse, just completely different. "Name Sticker" Goblin can't add mana when reanimated (which is worse), as mentioned in the video, but it also (a) doesn't force you to reveal stickers at the start of the game, thus telegraphing your deck (better), (b) is random how much mana you get, so you don't know how much you can make before casting the card since you can't look at your available stickers (worse), (c) has better odds of hitting 6 mana than in paper (better), (d) cannot make 3 mana, which can happen in paper if you are unlucky with your sheets (better), (e) can make 6 mana multiple times, which cannot happen in paper since only one sheet has 6 vowels on it (better), is worse for opponents if they clone it and didn't bring a sticker sheet (better), and so on. Like geez, I get that it was a close-ish approximation to the card to make goblins testable online but boy is it just not the same card.
I know I'm about to be pedantic here, but @5:40: The Cheese Stands Alone is not an upkeep trigger, and does not have an intervening "if" clause, making it strictly better than Barren Glory, although there is no denying the unset to "real" set inspiration.
I think WotC does most of their testing with paper testing. However I have to assume Day/Night was digitally tested. Its fine when you dont have to track it but shit awful in paper lol. Maybe they could comment some day…
I'm fine with day/night persisting for the rest of the game, but it really shouldn't CHANGE if nothing in a public zine cares. Include an icon in a corner somewhere if it would, ignore the change otherwise.
Ultimately the fundamental problem with un sets is that they are an "opt-in" experience for a game that you need at least two people to play. If one player is playing with un cards, it inherently opts the other player into that experience, which is distinct from a normal magic experience. Obviously if everyone involved is on board, there are no issues. But making some un cards strictly legal now means that you can opt in without necessarily getting your opponent on board with the separate type of game experience. From a balance perspective, this can be fine as long as the legal cards arent unbalanced...but from an experience standpoint, it leads to a lot of potentially bad feelings. And it's not about the silliness or the fact that there are jokes. Un cards purposefully undercut elements of the game, and this is the part that's a problem to no longer have as an "opt-in" experience. I think it's easy to get hung up on the goofiness when that's really not the core issue. Goofinees as flavor can hit or miss with a player, but just bc an opponent is playing a goofy card doesnt fundamentally change your experience (since you can just engage with the card as game piece instead of flavor).
I like the Unfinity set, genuinely fun. I've got a few non-legal cards in my decks like The Big Top. My whole group has no idea why this isn't legal. Wearing a rainbow shirt just means you're gonna have the mana colour you need anyway. Also blank goblin pads out my goblin deck
I was having a shit day, and I'm not gonna lie, "british man mad at cardboard" might have to be looked into because holy hell did this video make my day better from minute 1. thanks man
My big problem with this is how arbitrary and seemingly random the decisions of what cards are legal and which are not. Jermane, Pride of the Circus isn't legal anywhere, yet half a dozen sticker based cards are, like Tusk and Whiskers. I would love to build a commander deck around Jermane since his abilities can actually be applicable, but can't without rule zero approval.
Note: I strongly support a chaos orb-style pseudoban to the goblin using the mtgo version rather than stickers. I also would like to point out that the exile or graveyard clause on the rework DOES NOT stop "name sticker" goblin from triggering when you plot it, since it goes through the stack.
Step 1: Invent a new language Step 2: Spend decades convincing the people of the world to teach it to their children as their native language Step 3: WotC responds to the new market and starts releasing MTG cards in the language Step 4: Reveal that the word for "mind" contains 21 unique vowels Step 5: Fireball
I love the unsets. When I heard some unset cards would be black-bordered, I was ecstatic. But Unfinity was a huge let-down. The Acorn stamp is stupid and we need should have hard black border and silver border to keep the unplayable cards separate, because separating them is a pain. Then the damn playable cards were almost exclusively with attractions and stickers and they are fucking annoying to keep track of. I expected cards for Commander like the reverse order of phases card "Topsy Turvy" or more dice rolling for my Vrondiss deck or dumb new counters or more Beebles or just other things that make the game sillier. We got "Space Beleren" which was basically a legal version of Problematic Volcano. That's what I wanted. We got "Saw In Half" which is decent utility. It's dumb but it's something that makes sense and you don't have to bring a million extra sheets of cardboard with you. This set was a major let-down. We deserved better and instead we got a massive fucking mess.
Also, the glue from the stickers worked just fine, and the sticker ARE fun, and a pretty great mechanic. All the salt comes from the Legacy legality lol.
I love it when the Ambassador Blorpityblorpboop cast a time a Finishing move under a Hivemind so that the whole table now has to figure out what they want to do with their tickets and stickers.
24:28 as a avid ambassador blorpityblorpboop player I appreciate the mention. My deck has ONE goal, to play as much stupid mechanics wotc printed out. This includes, but not limited to: Mutate Enter the dungeon/initiative Stickers Attractions Will of the council Suspend The ring tempts you Cleave Day/night bound Lieutenant Fortell Landfall Temple of the false god Blitz Kicker Sticker-kicker Surveil Goad Cloak And many many more
To be fair, people should have grasped the fact that magic was driving away from it's path when we got card with cascade written four times on the same card or with effect that could have been printed on un-set (such as the wurm that can be casted from deck).
I'm 36 and goblin is my first deck from highschool, i've kept upgrading it and did many legacy tournament with greats results. Today it's more than hard to find a legacy tournament but I would have to play more than sub-optimal because I can't play this junk and goblin is my favorite archetype and my only legacy deck. even if I want to play it, stickers are not availible anyway
I think there are some fantastic inclusion in old un-sets. Drafter booster is one of the best cube cards there is, and the timmy, jhonny, spike cycle is fantastic. but these card really only belongs in cube, chaos draft and rule 0 commander or other super casual formats. Even there stickers still fails, but a lot of other cards are just really fun.
On the one hand, I find it kind of hilarious that the optimal way to play legacy is to always include a sticker deck and an attraction deck regardless of whether your deck actually uses them. On the other hand, I haven't played paper legacy in like 4 or 5 years so I haven't had to deal with this nonsense myself... I'd probably get very tired of it very quickly if I was still playing in paper regularly.
just looking back, they really released the mechanic putting funny hats on creatures that everyone hated and decided to do that to the entire story and setting of magic
there were soo many ways they could have handled the set and they picked quite literally the worst version, rule zero already facilitates the use of silver bordered commander cards so making them legacy playable literally isnt a fucking factor in whether people want them or not for commander. making them legacy playable and all the issues that caused were simply not worth the 5 or 6 commander players DYING for "legal" wacky commander cards
For what it's worth, silver-border cards actually *weren't* intended to be banned from all other formats initially - they were only intended to be banned from *official events* for those formats. Mark Rosewater even explicitly said it was frustrating to see people think they couldn't use silver-border cards in casual commander games at all, because that kind of casual kitchen-table game is where he'd seen them ending up! Stickers are utterly goddamn stupid, though, not gonna try and argue with that.
One of the major problems with banning the Un sets from official events is that's where a lot of people played their games, in official events. No one wanted to buy a booster that cost about as much as a regular booster, but that they wouldn't be able to play with since the only time they could play MtG was in official events like local tourneys or FNM.
Its wild that a large portion of UNstable is mechanically viable in black border now. Now that theres dice in AFR, most of the die rolling cards are feasible. With attractions, contraptions should be legal. With mutate, host/augment should be reasonable. Id guess less that 20% of the set couldnt be printed inbblack-border today
After learning programming in school and just how hard maintaining legacy code is. I have so much respect for the MtGO team. The fact that they can put any sets at all onto what i assmue is an absolute dumpster fire of software is frankly a miracle. And i am genuinely sorry for every disparaging thing ive ever said about them.
I've always been a big Goblin enjoyer and I am getting into Legacy now. Goblins would be an obvious first choice for me, were it not for Sticker Goblin. I might still make a Goblin Deck without him as I don't mind it being weaker, but it sucks knowing that one of the best Goblins ever printed has this level of baggage attached to it.
The other issue with switching from silver border to acorn is (especially now that UB exists) what to call them. Silver border and black border formats was clean and (mostly, except for the few white border printings) accurate. Now we have what? Acorn and Oval foil formats? Or Acorn and Oval (or nothing, or triangle) formats? ugh.
The only good thing that came from Unfinity having black-bordered cards was that you can play attractions in Commander (and a couple of other neat designs aswell). Attractions seem complicated if you try to figure them out on your own, but are actually easy to understand if some else decides to play them, comes prepared with their attraction deck and the rules knowledge and quickly explains how they work. I'm currently playing them in my Wyll/Sword Coast Sailor deck to roll more dice and people absolute love them. I get asked to play the deck again simply because people want to see which attractions I'll get, if I'll get lucky when visiting them and if they'll end up doing powerful stuff or not. They're a genuinely great mechanic and I hope we'll see more of them in the future - especially more with actual prizes that are black-bordered (we only got 1 so far, which is sad).
Kinda annoyed that so many of them aren’t legal, though. Like, for The Most Dangerous Gamer, there’s one (1) Attraction that has “Claim a prize.” Considering they’re likely never getting more support, _ever_… well.
@@davidhower7095 Yep, I 100% agree, I even said so towards the end of my post. The Most Dangerous Gamer could be a really fun commander - if we had 10+ attractions with prizes instead of only one.
I initially hated the idea of stickers. Then I actually played with them, and felt that actually they're pretty fun and a decent mechanic within the limited space of Unfinity draft. The physical limitations of the actual stickers, however, make it really suck. They stick okay to the carss three or four times, but they don't stick back on the sticker sheet, so there's no realistic way to shuffle your stack of 10 sheets to present to your opponent for a constructed game. Worse, the stickers are all fiddly little bastards, which can present a serious accessibility issue.
In my singular Unfinity draft I focused on stickers, really excited to try them. By the end of the third round I never wanted to use them ever again. A cute idea that is absolutely miserable in execution.
The way I represent stickers is I sleeve some sticker sheets and then with dry or wet erase markers on my sleeves write the name and cross off the sticker then wipe it off after. It makes it a lot less fiddly and I don't know if it works with all sleeves but so far it does. Maybe it's because I play thoughtseize decks and Goblin Guides and write down what's revealed but it doesn't add a tremendous amount of complexity to my games. I still hate it though
@@zztzgza Absolutely, it still sucks and should not be a thing. Just saying if someone wants to play Goblins I recommend this method. It sounds worse than it is as if they have the markers for infinity tokens anyway it reduces the bloat to an extra shuffle.
I bring up these conversations about "bluffing a sticker sheet" in a competitive format and people call me an idiot... Some people just dont see what we see when it comes to issues with these things.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
The reason that Mind Goblin has all those caveats from exile and graveyard attached is because sticker cards are supposed to retain their stickers when they move between public zones. Thus, when Mind Goblin moves to exile/graveyard, it already has its sticker on it, and can’t get another one if it were to be reanimated or somehow returned. However if it gets returned to hand or shuffled somehow, the sticker falls off because it moves to a private zone, and then you can put another sticker on it as it enters the battlefield.
The reason for the control 9 or less is because you would only ever have 9 possible stickers in your active sticker cards. Since you only draw 3 from game start, and each card has 3 on it, it’s 9 total stickers.
There are still inconsistencies, as the card isn’t worded that way in paper, but it’s the best way to make a bad system work
Small correction: it can get another sticker, and the new one would be used to calculate how much mana it adds. But that would mean adding a "how many times cards called name-sticker goblin entered the battlefield" counter to the spaghetti mess that is MTGO (since ypu can run out of stickers), and that probably broke too many things to make it work.
Also the fact that the MTGO version always adds at least 4 mana, while in paper you would be adding 3 or less often times by the second goblin of the game is a massive buff for it.
@@yes_tinkoYeah, that was what I was referring to with the inconsistencies part. I just didn’t want to add more caveats to the caveats lmao.
Yeah, and this would be a big deal if the goblin deck had a lot of ways to blink or recur the ___ goblin. But the MTGO folks (correctly, probably) decided that since it doesn't have much practical impact, they'd ignore it.
@@doktarrUnfortunately, an entirely new deck was built around flicker stickering in pauper, which is why they had to do the adjustment.
@@Dracomandriuthus oof. Stickers really are the gift that keeps on giving, aren't they?
15:05 I present my stickers. My Companion and Dungeons are sitting on the side of the table, but I don’t say anything, because I don’t have a Companion. Also, my Poison counter is next to it. And I have a dice with a paper under it “storm count”, next to it another “energy”. I’m wearing sunglasses. I talk as little as necessary. Every card in my deck is non-English, full art textless if it exists. Every draw I pull to the side, might be a Miracle. Every spell they cast I pause to think about countering it. I play my lands closer to the red zone.
New greentext just dropped.
Just as Richard Garfield intended
Never let 'em know your next move!
You forgot the snow lands without using snow magics
@@17blaziken Oh snap. You right! Definitely all basics are Snow Basics. Non English snow basics.
Making this set constructed legal just so they can sell collector boosters for their parody set was the moment I knew I had to change my relationship with this game
Thanks Rosewater
How has your relationship changed?
Eh, id say its not malicious or greedy intent in this case. I have seen LOADS of people ask Mark on his blog why x or y card from an un set is illegal in commander despite working in the rules perfectly fine, and a lot of people ask if they could make un cards that work in the rules legal in the future, and when the set was nearly completed they decided to give fans what they were asking him for and make cards that work in the rules legal. It feels moreso like seeing people want something and giving it to them rather than "How do we make more money?"
I hadn't considered the implications that failing to present a stack of stickers to your opponent in a Legacy or Vintage game is strictly suboptimal, even if you're using zero sticker cards. I'm horrified by this revelation, and the closely-following revelation that every player ought to be paying a "tax", unrelated to their deck in any way, in order not to lose advantage.
It also wastes everyone's time, revealing stickers you have no intention of using. Add that up and multiply by every player that would do this. This adds insult to injury.
It's like playing snow-covered basics even if your deck doesn't care about snow, just to mind-game your opponent.
Technically if you run basic lands you should always have some snow covered basics by a similar principle.
@@Tomwithnonumbersat least in that case Reidane exists.
I brought my Attraction deck to a Secret Commander game just to make people guess the wrong commander. It did work.
Never forget
"Note that we purposefully costed stickers to be well below the power level of Legacy"
Why they didn’t just make them illegal I have no fucking clue
@@WMDistraction because more people would buy them if they're legal
@@WMDistraction More sales. And that's not some cynical take either, they didn't exactly keep it a secret. If you can keep using the cards in sanctioned formats after, you might care more about buying the set.
I mean, they did, though. No sticker cards are used in legacy except one, which basically is only played because it fits a very specific niche in an already top-tier deck. So one card slipped through, out of an entire set,. Which happens all the time - every set has at least one or two broken cards that Wizards never saw coming. But you chose to play Legacy, so this is the kind of shit you signed up for.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 I could see that argument if it were what happens most of the time, where it's a "oh wow turns out that's better than expected." This was one of those rare times where it was painfully obvious how good it would be and they shouldn't have let it make it to print. That's the main issue, if it was reasonably viewable as not strong that'd be a different story.
The whole "you signed up for this with Legacy" schtick is also pretty tired and nonsensical. Especially talking about a product line that has explicitly always been not legal in the format until this set.
I get finding it annoying, but I find it absolutely hilarious and quintessential goblin that the deck to play is defined by a Jumpstart exclusive and a Unset card. That's absolutely nonsensical, but it is funny that it is goblins
Which one is the Jumpstart card?
@@DankAudioStash24 Muxus. He is originally from the first Jumpstart and he so far was only in Jumpstart (OG and 2022) and one secret lair.
My friend at my LGS is one the reddit post at 15:48 was talking about. He went to a legacy tournament, showed his opponent his sticker deck each game, then proceeded to just play dredge. One of his opponents (presumably the person that made this post) called a judge to ask if this was a legal thing to do, who went at and discussed it with other judges for a few minutes, who said it was within the rules. Fast forward to the next day and my friend sees this reddit post about himself on reddit, which gets a LOT of attention, and a week later WOTC announces they're investigating what to do with these cards in legacy. Beautiful.
TBH they could just change the rules so that it functions like MTGO, that would make the card a LOT better to deal with
The acorn-shaped stamp was one of the dumbest ways WotC could have thought to differentiate which cards were legal in eternal formats. Stamp errors happen even in regular sets, where cards can show up with the stamp missing or noticeably misshapen. In Unfinity, in addition to those errors, some cards have been found with the wrong shaped stamp. They should have just printed a small acorn in the bottom corner, the same way they print a small planeswalker icon for cards from The List.
Yeah. I assume they decided to move to it because they didn't want to have to print silver and black bordered cards from the same sheets, but I still miss the silver border for just being instantly noticable.
People already complain of the stamp being difficult to notice, making something even smaller and more out of the way wouldn't be a very good solution either. Really, making them black border should have been a non-starter from the beginning. If there's no good way to do something, I take that as a sign that it's just a bad idea in the first place.
It's clear that "make it black-border" was an edict dropped from on high by the bean counters late in the game. They fell into the classic in trying to make a product for everyone, and in doing so made a product that appealed to no one.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 There's no need for speculation, Maro has outright stated that the decision to go black-border was done late in the process, after the set had basically been all but finalised. That's why they couldn't make the "acorn" cards silver-bordered and the normal ones black bordered - it would require different sheets, which need a specific number of cards, which they couldn't do because it wasn't designed as such. Perhaps if they knew from the beginning, they would have known "We have X slots for silver border and X for black" and would have been able to design accordingly.
That still doesn't answer the question of whether or not mixing the two was a good idea in the first place, of course.
They should have just sucked on the added cost of making the cards silver bordered.
18:30 Remember when they stated that tribal from Lorwyn "wasn't worth the complexity it brought" and that they learned their lesson from that?
Then look at Ikoria, Kaldheim, Dungeons, Stickers, MDFC with both sides full text boxes. 🤣
I just really REALLY despise how we were lied to about the stickers. They told us they would be reusable.
Yeah I knew that shit would be a lie lolol
Anyone with kids knows that the reusable stickers are not, in fact, reusable.
@@jangelaclough5457 also anyone who was a kid and had stickers themselves at any time in their life lol
They also told us they went out of their way to make sure stickers were "well below the power level of Legacy" then printed Mind Goblin.
They are reusable. Twice.
5:45 there's a second example too with an effective reprint of Super Duper Death ray (an instant with trample that deals 4 damage to a creature) as Flame Spill. The verbiage isn't identical, but it's for all intents and purposes, a functional reprint of the un-set card
And there's a bunch of mechanics that debuted in silver-border that were later printed in black-border even without direct card-for-card analogs. Giant Fan was considered a wacky departure from "real" Magic back in 1998, but today moving arbitrary counters around is uncontroversial. Dice rolling was a theme of Unglued because apparently they thought that wouldn't fly in black-border back then (even though coin flipping was fine). Infernal Spawn of Evil inspired the Forecast mechanic.
@@dryhad9253 the saddest thing about the dice rolling is that most of the really good support cards for the mechanic were in Unstable, which means I can't legally run them in a Mr House commander deck, despite having a lot of legal coin flipping support legal in black border
There is also Neverwinter Hydra, which is a near reprint of Hydradoodle from Unstable. The only difference is that one has ward and the other reach, but otherwise it's the same card, with the same dice-rolling mechanic.
@@anthonydelfino6171 I added most of them to mine and absolutely no one has cared and I haven't had any issues. Who cares about Krark's Other Thumb when Barbarian Class and Wyll exist? Goblin Tutor does nothing if you roll 1 or 2. Mad-Science Fair Project is absolutely terrible compared to Vexing Puzzle Box. Squirrel-Powered Scheme and Strategy, Schmategy are probably the only two truly powerful ones and even then, how powerful are they really?
There is really no way around it other than to ban all the sticker cards from constructed play.
they shouldn't have ever been legal. seriously, and I fully mean this, the person or people responsible for that not happening should not have their jobs. it's such a wildly horrific decision.
Hear hear. I couldn’t agree with you more!!
Just yesterday, I was playing a high power game of commander, and my friend played Mind Goblin, then proceeded to combo off, repeatedly playing it about 60 times to win. I immediately HATED the card. I love cards that do cool things. Dockside is a problem, but I don't hate it. This card though, is unreadable. There's no way you can read the card and understand what it does. And the mechanics of stickers are just so strange and specific and yet also vague and alien, that I legitimately don't know if my friend was even playing it correctly or if he just assumed he could do the thing and win because no one would know he couldn't.
________ Goblin is a problem in commander.
You can't play it more than the number of stickers you have. 60 is too many... I think?
@@PleasantKenobiif it goes to your hand the sticker is returned to the sticker sheet.
@@DalenthasSo you would in theory have to peel off the sticker each time, then put it back on? I thought the whole point of stickers was to work like "perpetually" in Alchemy.
Wow. Your right this is confusing. Commenters don’t know what is going on either.
I just contemplated adding "Name Sticker" Goblin to my vintage cube today. That was a crazy 5 minutes before reason returned to the world and I decided against it.
Add it but make it so it's only mind.
I saw LSV playing it and considered it for a second. But then I decided not to on principle.
I still have 2 unstable legendary creature commander decks, but those are a lot more docile compared to the sticker fiasco.
You can proxy the modo version if you’re feeling insane
Unironically, Print a proxy of the MTGO version and use that one. Or white out a _____ Goblin and write "etb seething song" on it
I added a slightly erratad version of the mtgo version and I've liked it in paper so far.
Printing un cards that are legal would have gone over a LOT better, and could have even been one of the coolest parts of Unfinity if they did 2 things.
1: Kept the silver border, to easily differentiate legal and non-legal cards. The acorn stamp looks cool, but the silver border is just so clear. There's a reason they've used it for all sorts of promos and goofy cards outside of un sets. I wish they kept using it with functionally unique universes beyond cards. The silver border telling
2: Kept all the stickers and clown tokens and letter counting stuff silver-border. They could have just black-bordered a select few un cards, such as the dice rolling cards. It doesn't matter if they're good enough to see play if they don't bring anything too wild (like stickers) into sanctioned play.
+ if universes beyond unique cards were silver-bordered, they could have created a serious demand for silver-border commander where all these un cards could see play
Clown tokens aren't so bad, and Attractions are nice even if half of the arguments for stickers can also apply to them
But I like the magic stickers so I'm biased
I wonder if sticker sheets will eventually become really expensive as we have less and less useable stickers. No way they reprint them right?
Why would anyone buy them?
@@zztzgza for legacy and commander if you play goblins
@@zztzgzapaper legacy and/or commander play
Fortunately, you can go online & they have a tool that you can use to generate sticker sheets.
Why would they reprint them? Lol. Just gonna have to bring your own that you make.
you don't need them to play, you're legally allowed to proxy the sheets and use infinitokens/scratch paper to track them
I hate that I live in a timeline where I loved Unstable enough to build an Unstable cube, but hate Unfinity with a burning passion.
Unstable is one of the best draft experiences ever made.
I've been considering building an UN-cube. Do you have a list?
@fatpad00 I don't remember the exact numbers, but with mine I think it was a playset of each common, 3 of each uncommon, and one or two of each rare, there was a way to math that that made a good cube size
@@the_old_crimge74 how did you handle the variant cards?
I'm considering doing 6x each uncommon and 6x each rare to be able to use all the variations, then 3x each mythic to keep the pack rare-slot ratio correct.
Only problem is that would make the cube pretty huge, since that is 600 cards alone without commons, contraptions, or basics.
On the plus side, getting the cards isn't particularly expensive
@@fatpad00 I think the variants helped make it a cube number, and I'm sure I threw in a few extra of the rares I found fun too
The amount of overcomplicated abilities requiring multiple paragraphs of explanation on separate game pieces WotC has put out in the past while (stickers, the ring tempts, the initiative, day/night bound) is kind of staggering. I’d almost rather shuffle up and play a new game whenever any of these come out rather than take the time to have them explained and understood by all the players.
Here's the thing: I liked the first 3 Un-Sets, I actually have 6 Un-Decks, I'm a huge fan of
A) poking fun of yourself
B) mechanics that wouldn't make sense in normal MTG
C) the fact that WITHIN a silver-border constructed multi-player you can still have a fun time despite the cards/decks being silly
But the stickers, DESPITE being unique to this set felt wrong from the get-go.
To put it in perspective: Contraptions, Augment or Cards caring for artists were all unique, quirky but still fun to play.
Stickers felt wrong from start to finish.
I will never get over the fact that stickers are legacy legal but riggers are stuck in silver border land forever.
I think the biggest problem in MTG nowadays is all the extra baggage and subgames you have to play, as you play the game.
Baggage being the Sticker decks and Companions. Subgames being Planeswalkers, Battles, Monarch, Tempting with the One Ring, and Initiative/Dungeons.
Just imagine sitting down to play a game of commander or legacy and they bring a deck that has all of those things. It would get incredibly frustrating as you have to keep track of so many things going on just to play the game.
When I saw the video in my feed I thought "28 min. is long for a rant", but hot damn what an absolute clusterfuck. The sad thing is that you can't really explain how this mechanic has resulted in an absolute pile of shit to a casual audience without 28 min of explaining how different esoteric aspects of Magic interact.
I think some unfinity stuff is great fun, like attractions. It's just artifacts with dice rolls. Simple, easy, and straight forward. Stickers had no chance being good. Especially not since every sticker is at best, a one time use thing
I called that this is exactly what would happen before these were even released (a lot of people called this, its not rocket science); all sticker cards should be banned - this is our generation's ante
Closer to the Conspiracy card type.
@@JohnFromAccounting Well, except, they never made the mistake of making Conspiracy legal in other formats; the reason theyre "banned" like ante instead of just never legal like the silver-border is that they were printed in black-border with the same set code as the eterna-legal Conspiracy set (something Maro says WAS a mistake). These days, they'd just have printed a supplement product like that as a seperate set code that was never legal (as in the "Conspiracy cards" would not be the same set code as the set "Conspiracy", this is getting confusing lol)
@@JohnFromAccountingTHE CONSPIRACY CARD TYPE IS NOT LEGACY LEGAL
No it's not. Ante was a real legal risk and a growth impediment - my mom almost forbade me from playign Magic because she still thought you could lose your cards if you lost a game (even though ante had been gone for a few years). Stickers just add a bit of complexity and annoyance to a game already full of that. There is just no comparison between stickers and ante.
@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 The comparison would be they are both once-legal-to-play-in-regular-magic mechanics that suck so much and cause enough trouble that they should be banned out out of all formats, I wasn't really trying to make a comparison much deeper than that
Unfinity is a set of disappointment. Like in disappointed that they didnt use it to make old unset cards like Krak's other thumbs legal in some formats. I'm disappointed in just the average quality of the legal cards. I could go on and on it's just a set of dissapointment and wasted potential.
Absolutely agree with you Vince. The novelty of stickers was 1000% not worth making them legal in black border. It causes way too many problems.
Even in Commander, I find myself avoiding these things because I don't want to deal with them, which is... a bad look. I put Mind Goblin in my Syr Carah deck but only after asking my playgroup if they'd be alright if I just played it as though it's the MTGO version-- because I'm not going to carry around 10 sticker sheets alongside my Commander deck for the sake of one Seething Song variant. Similarly, I replaced Outland Liberator with Masked Vandal in another deck, which from a power level perspective is pretty much a strict downgrade, but I did it because I don't want to have to track day/night just for one Naturalize on a stick. A friend of mine was playing a dice-rolling deck (Farideh, Devil's Chosen) and had included Monitor Monitor, and then when they went to cast it realized, "Oh shoot, I don't have an Attractions deck", so now they bring Attractions for their dice-rolling deck, which gives me indigestion if I dwell on it too long.
For me, this extends to Initiative cards to an extent as well. I'm a big believer in trying to keep all the tokens a deck needs with the deck. If a deck has a Memorial to Glory in it, I make sure to include at least one 1/1 white Soldier creature token; if it's running Beast Within, I make sure to have a 3/3 green Beast token to give my opponent. But including just a single initiative card in a Commander deck can open up the possibility of needing SO many tokens. The Initiative card itself, the Undercity card (and yes, they're usually printed as one card, with the dungeon on one face and the initiative on the other, but when you're using one you're also using the other, so you really need two), a treasure token, and a 4/1 black Skeleton with menace- and that's only if none of your opponents steal the initiative! If that happens, we need multiple copies of the Undercity (or you could use multiple differently colored dice on the one dungeon card, but it's a pain when someone else wants to know what the rooms are), multiple treasure tokens, and multiple Skeletons! So when faced with the choice of including a powerful Initiative card to an otherwise Initiative-less Commander deck- say, White Plume Adventurer in a Kelsien, the Plague deck, I'll sometimes decline to do so-- it can be too logistically taxing. Which is a shame!
And in a broader sense, I worry about the complexity of the game. R&D keeps designing these mechanics that require separate pieces to track -- The Ring Tempts You being the most recent, I think -- and they're definitely neat in their own Limited environments, but I worry that Wizards isn't considering all the consequences of introducing so many complicated mechanics to the game. I mean, I remember back in 2009 -- the renewal of the Core Sets with M10, the removal of extemporaneous rules like mana burn and combat damage using the stack, and the introduction of the "New World Order" limited design philosophy not long before that -- all in an effort to prevent the barrier of entry to the game from getting any higher. Has all that gone out the window? How many years can we expect new Magic players to spend learning all the mechanics they may encounter in any given game of Commander? Or returning players?
I really really enjoyed Unstable. Playing that at release was one of the most fun times I've had playing Magic.
Unfinity had a lot of baggage with stickers and attractions, but then making it Legacy legal? I put my money where my mouth is and refused to touch it. MaRo said Unstable sold really well, and Unfinity sold poorly, despite them making it EDH legal to sell packs. Can't say I'm surprised.
Stickers are just ikoria counters with skullbriar rules. They suck if you use actual stickers but people just overthink them. I 100% blame the __ goblin implementation on the mtgo crew doing precisely that. The card works just as well in paper as initiative does. It boils my blood whenever people complain it's black border legal because no it sucks just as much in silver border too, that isn't the problem with stickers. It's like pioneer players complaining Sheoldred wasn't in modern horizons instead. Don't pawn it off on us, we're also dealing with it. Every rant about stickers doesn't make me think stickers are worse, it makes me think boomers in Magic are more annoying.
Thing is, I like the UN-sets and what they do for magic. Unfinity *specifically* felt like an abuse of the good feelings Unstable had brought about, with a lot of stuff being done because 'why not' as opposed to 'why should we' if that makes sense.
I think that the legality of UN-finity in normal formats represents greater issues with mtg as a whole. Wordy cards, needless complexity, extra pieces that take up board space and game time, and most notably-that they need to sell packs above all else. I know the goal is that they need to make money at the end of the day, and the way they managed with the old UN sets with those special basic lands was actually a decent idea. But like you said, you can't get away from full-art lands anymore, so why bother with that? Also not to mention- but I remember seeing a post somewhere that showed someone who had damaged a foil card by putting a sticker on it without a sleeve or anything. To me there is nothing redeemable or fun about that mechanic- its embarrassing and just plain stupid.
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"on a college campus last month" was such a great moment in SUAP. Patricks genuine distaste made me laugh so hard especially when he asked Cedric if he had a counterspell and said if he didn't cast it he would never forgive him.
Fun fact: Stickers can allow you to get out 1029 of a single enchantment.
Step 1.) get out doubling season/parallel lives/primal vigor/anointed process (any of these work)
Step 2.) put a name sticker on it. (reminder: stickers aren't a copiable property)
Step 3.) Use Yenna to copy the enchanment. You end up making 2 copies instead. However the copies don't have the name sticker.
Step 4.) Next turn copy it again, you make 8 copies now.
Step 5.) Play a new enchantment
Step 6.) Copy that new enchantment, you make 1028 copies.
[untap] [plays farewell]
The other thing about making your own stickers is how do I know if they are legal? I would 100% call a judge if someone sat down and presented me with a homemade set of sheets and stickers.
Yeah, having to search them up in the pool of, what is it, 100 legal sheets then making sure all 10 of them match up exactly sounds horrid. For the opponent, and for the judge(s) that will inevitably be called over. Honestly, as a judge I'd prolly end up printing them myself then asking players to use the ones I printed instead if their opponent objects!
Check out the Japanese cedh scene. They all include a full sticker sheet in their deck brews with their sideboard. So funny
I'm sure there are sticker sheets used in every legacy event at the big Hareruya Tournament Center in Takadanobaba as well. I've seen them there at least once or twice when walking past to go play some EDH.
@@MatthewOstergren lol. I’m new so I was just surprised that a card with all the extra stuff needed would be so popular
Wait did you say sideboard in edh?
Saying as an alchemy player, I don't think the stickers themselves are the issue as much as a symptom of a larger issue. The real issue is that wotc doesn't give a damn about content quality anymore. They just vomit all those crap cards without rhyme or reason, zero balancing, and absolutely no playtesting whatsoever, to get that short-term cash.
Just look at past sets, sheoldred the apocalypse, orcish bowmaster, ring, cards that anyone with a working brain could see are broken to absolute shit, that came and absolutely annihilated the meta. The rebalancings, that were supposed to fix wotc's zero-effort balancing, happen once a year on a good year.
The story might as well be a meme at this point, with mainline sets being such a clownshow that they look more like unsets than the actual unsets. "Lets give everyone detective hats, the set", "lets give everyone cowboy hats, the set". Can't wait for Strixhaven, when they'll give everyone a graduate cap and call it a day.
The worst part is us Fools keep buying it. And yes, if you just buy singles that means you too.
There is no risk to putting them in Eternal Formats. No testing necessary. Reason being, they don’t care. And I say that as someone that does care. But it’s obvious, Wizards doesn’t care.
I can understand how they would think some cards/mechanics from an Un-set can be good for constructed formats. I will NEVER understand how they decided that the sticker mechanic was one of them.
That's exactly how I feel. Like 80%+ of UNstable could be printed at this point.
Stickers is so much worse than say contraptions
I think all the worst mechanics in magic have all been invented in recent years. Remember when Storm or Dredge were the worst thing in magic, not anymore, at least they are easy to grasp.
Now we have Companion, Mutate, Stickers, Attractions and 2 different types of Dungeon mechanics that do but also don't interact with each other.
I remember joking about Command Zone tribal when they made Experience counters and then again when they made Energy. Now I want to do it. Pregame, present my sticker and attraction deck, declare my companion, pull out my energy and experience counter cards and then reveal my commander. Wait what order is that meant to be done?
Judge! Lol
Thank you for saying that about Mutate. Mutate in Paper is a Cluster. I said it. Even straight forward it’s a lot to track. But when things start happening in the game around it, it becomes very confusing about if the right thing is happening.
I can totally understand the dislike for Companions while I like the idea personally. The idea of a reward being available for some constrained deckbuilding is neat. Shame the execution has all the good ones banned in formats they'd be good in, and some of the others have totally unrealistic restrictions. Nobody's going to companion Umori & give away that their deck literally can't have instants or sorceries in it.
They were pretty cool to see in March of the Machines Limited.
I'd like to offer my perspective as an enfranchised player who always loved un-sets. I loved the goofy cards, the wild, game breaking mechanics, the ability for WotC to really push the boundaries of the game.
I hate stickers, and unfinity is the the worst un-set they've done.
Coming from the other side, I hate that they got rid of the silver border for my own selfish reasons. I had an "all silver border" deck, where every nonland card was silver. It was designed to be fun to play with and against, it avoided a lot of the less fun silver mechanics. I tried to build the deck to be an ambassador for silver-bordered, a way to show players like Kenobi "built right, these cards can be a load of fun for everyone". Not only did unfinity ruin it by making me choose between having non-silver-bordered cards in my deck, or skipping an un-set, which the deck was built around, but the mechanics themselves weren't fun to play with! I don't think I've ever met a player, whether they are a fan of un-sets or not, that likes stickers, attractions, or tickets. What a monumental disappointment unfinity was for one of the un-set's biggest fans....
I think the weirdest thing about Unfinity is that yes, it was made playable in commander to sell packs, but the power level is INCREDIBLY low, there are a handful cards in the whole set that are actually worth playing in EDH and maybe a dozen that are decent as a joke
so the set didn't sell anyway, because 99% of it was trash. There are 3 cards in the ENTIRE SET (excluding fetchlands) that are worth more than 1 dollar. They caused all of these problems for it to bomb anyway.
Out of all the mechanics that could have been put into "real" magic cards, why stickers? Why is one of the best cards in the set a "grammar matters" card, a design space Wizards previously stated would never be black bordered.
Not to even mention that the mechanic cannot be translated. I know the set is only in english, but thats problematic in itself.
13:17
EDIT: I typed all of that out with such confidence, thinking I was right, and when I got to the end, I wasn't sure because stickers are just that absurd. Being akin to perpetual is correct though. Stickers do stay with the object as it changes zones. But I genuinely have no clue if you can put an additional sticker onto its name or not.
the reason for the not from exile or graveyard is because stickers in Paper are akin to perpetual from Arena; they stay no matter which zone it changes to. And because there's only one blank spot on the Goblin, you can only put one sticker on it. So if you played a Goblin, put a sticker on it, got the mana, had it die, then reanimated it you would not put a sticker on it because it already has one.
You can put up to 9 names on one. You never even have to fill the blank
Stickers stay on as it moves to public zones. Once it moved to a hidden zone it’s stickers return to the sheet.
If it goes to your hand or library the sticker falls off
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As a Person who actually plays this in paper, its not as bad as I initially thought. I printed out my sticker sheets, made a sticker deck, and marked the number of unique vowels. I show my opponent i have 10 unique sticker card at the beginning of each game and let them randomly choose 3. Every time I use the largest sticker on a card I flip it over. If I ever use more than 3 _____ goblins, I just say it makes 3 mana bc if constructed correctly, you are guaranteed to have 5+ total stickers with 3 or more mana. You never see more than 3 a game so its usually a moot point.
I personally dont find it that bad to play with, it just sounds insanely complicated and isn’t very intuitive. My opponents usually get the gist after the first game. That being said, please WOTC ban all of these un set cards. Stickers are ridiculous and are functionally replaced by dice on the only playable card. This didn’t need to be a mechanic. It also sucks to see how demoralized people get when I sit down to play in paper. I pull out my sticker deck, and can see my opponent die a little inside as they prepare to play against this nonsense. I hadn’t considered that now optimal play is everyone has a sticker deck, and that absolutely sucks. If everyone uses one that adds a few mins to every round. You have to take the time to shuffle and reveal for each player
Lol
I can relate to that shuffle up and play clip so much. Everytime i see an uncard i just breakdown and start questioning everything, including reality.
Totally agree with you. Stickers are probably in the top5 worst things WOTC ever have done with MTG, along with Companion and Magic 30th.
Honestly I wish they made more of dice rolling cards or the attraction cards legal instead of the forty-six sticker cards.
*48
The Cheese Stands Alone is technically better, because it triggers at any time, not just the upkeep. There's also the Giant Fan/Nesting Grounds cross-print, but they're a little more different.
I said I hated stickers and people said I was an old head who hated fun. Just please let me enjoy my strategy game without this nonsense. Fully agreed, stickers are the worst design mistake has ever made. I'd rather 10,000 okos than stickers.
I just watched this video in its entirety and in this moment I have no idea how stickers work and no ambition to learn. If someone plays a sticker card against me I would just take their word for it.
My most recently played game of paper magic was a commander game, after a year of not playing paper due to long-covid, and two of the players were playing universes beyond decks, as an enfranchised player from the mid 90s I have to say it was the least fun I ever had playing the game. Not just because of the IPs destroying the immersion, which it does, but because I had no idea what any of the cards being played against me did and the entire game I could not be bothered to even attempt to figure out the current board state because every cards was a book. I just simply focused on playing a linear strategy with my deck and ignoring my opponents. "What is your biggest creature currently" was the question I had to ask everyone at the table when the my combat step came up. The entire game I was just ready for it to be over, hoping someone would target me so that I could be released from the social contract of playing the game I started.
Since then I have sold the majority of my commander staples. I don't currently have a commander deck constructed so that I never have to enter into that contract again. A year between playing opened up enough of a gap in my knowledge of the format that I don't feel like I will ever get around to catching back up to it, so no reason to keep the cards.
I'll just stick to whatever sets that put on arena because my LGS can't even get standard draft sets to fire now because of the increased price. Other than arena now Magic is dead to me but not because of my choice, I have just been left behind.
I feel the same way. So few sets even appeal to me anymore. Last set I was excited for was Strixhaven. And later this year BloomBurrow. But I don’t like Universes Beyond. And cards have gotten more and more complex, it’s crazy. They just power creep now, it’s sad.
Same bro. I used to play a lot of MtG back in highschool and early college days. Recently tried out commander with some old friends who never stopped playing from back in the day. The card design is just bonkers insane. Day/night cycles, dungeons, transforming cards, monarch, tempted by the ring etc. Plus each card is a solid paragraph of rules and triggers. The game state becomes unreadable without slowing things to a tortuous crawl.
I get the need to rant, but... Complaining that it's bad in a chaos draft? That's a crappy reason. Also, Unfinity in-person draft was actually quite fun, probably more fun than the entirety of the Commander format. It's really a great experience in the store, but not something to do regularly.
I think WOTC should have made the Unfinity set all silver border, and the cards that were deemed legal, they do a black border, but now its all much more confusing
"I seriously feel like I'm blacking out now" is an appropriate response to being introduced to stickers.
I feel all Wizards needed to do to get people to but Unfinity is have the space-themed Shocks in them; no card needed to be legal outside Unfinity and people still would have been buying cases/boxes/packs to get them. There's a few Unfinity cards that are reasonable, and none of those involve Attractions, Tickets, or Stickers (case in point: Saw in Half; goofy premise, but it makes sense and we're already used to complicated tokens).
I'm still confused as to why they didn't use silver borders.
Un sets are the price Wizards pays to keep MaRo happy. These are sets where he can feel like he's a game designer, not just an MtG designer and that's something he said so himself. For better or for worse, when he retires, all this silliness will slowly go away.
Are you happy that all sticker cards are now banned in legacy, vintage and pauper?
I just printed my stickers out, glued them to a basic land, and cut the shapes out. I have a bag I can pull them out of and put them back in. When needed I slide it under the cardsleeve, easy.
16:22 It does work that way at comp REL. Goblins is a very playable deck in 7point Highlander, so I've had to deal with this at comp REL. Game 1 opponent presents stickers, game 2 they forget (oh by the way did you know you have to re-randomise your stickers EVERY GAME, not every match) and so the judge has to go to this website and generate 3 random sticker sheets. Magic the Gathering in 2024
Agree with most things, except that I don't think the initiative improves the gameplay of multiplayer magic. It's just something else to keep track of that is incredibly easy to forget, it requires tracking multiple copies of the Undercity for different players, and overall is just a pain to deal with for very minor rewards.
You don't put the player markers on a single dungeon?
Dungeons feel like they aimed really, really low so they'd never be asked to make more of them lol.
I don't know how many people have ever picked the gauntlet of pain for such a mid payoff that is Tomb of Annihilation. The Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a nice payoff at the end but takes 7 Ventures to get there - yikes. Lost Mine is basically the only one I think people actually use, and it's like 3 little trinkety effects and then draw a card.
By making the mechanic unappealing, they don't have to keep talking to the D&D team and thinking up six more cards for dungeons lol.
Ironically I'm one of those weirdos who actually liked the original two unsets in a theoretical sense, and was like kind of okay with Unstable, but hated Unfinity for just kind of awkwardly existing between the two worlds. I mean, to be fair, I don't actually think playing Unhinged / Unglued was all that fun, I just thought some of the joke cards were interesting. But yeah the thing is Stickers felt like they were just trying to play on Unstable's combination creatures and ended up ruining anything fun about the idea. I get the Unsets are MaRo's baby or whatever but I think it would probably have been fine if they didn't keep trying to shoehorn them into everywhere... if they have to exist as a product that's trying to get sold and thus gets pushed so they can force it into every other format I think it might as well not exist.
I'm still a defender of an Un-Masters set that makes select Un-cards playable in eternal formats. Unstable had more "legal" cards and mechanics than stickers or attractions. There is no way that "Krak's Other Thumb" is illegal and "Wyl, Blade of the Frontier" is not. I also have a "Host/Augmentation" deck with "Surgeon Commander General" as the commander that is suprisingly normal magic deck and no one that I played against rises issue with it. But then again, they would probably fuck up a set like that, so its better no one gives them that ideia...
So, I know that there are Canadian Highlander players who bring an Attraction Deck to games IN CASE someone else has Attraction makers. Never seen it for Sticker Sheets but honestly, none of them actually remain in CanLander as far as I am aware.
I'm an active pauper player and we are being plagued by Name-Sticker Goblin. At the last Rags to Riches (big pauper tournament) at MOX Seattle there was at least 3 sticker players as well as one person just playing Dimir Faeries and still revealing a sticker sheet. A friend of mine went against him and said it definitely affected their mulligan decision and cost them game 1.
Beyond being a very powerful card, just a nightmare logistically. Can't wait to see someone DQ'd at comp REL because 4 cards in their deck had a sticky residue on them...
Un sets, when I was playing them, were fun but they were only fun if everyone around was in on it and the person playing the deck wasn't overly aggressive with it. As soon as anyone else was not having fun, that's when you put it away. Downside to this though was there was (and probably still is, been a hot minute since I played) people who took their fun way too seriously and just got annoyed whenever someone else didn't, even if you weren't intrusive. There was a lot of those people who took Magic (and themselves) *way* too seriously.
Big part of why they didn't sell well back in the day is that people were building for 'official' events, and the Un sets were not allowed in those events, so no one was going to spend money to buy something that they couldn't use for most of their play time. Didn't help that the Un boosters cost as much as a black border booster. Honestly if they were half as costly and had an 'official' format that allowed them to be played in (and was worth playing), then it would've moved a lot more.
I wasn't aware of the sticker mechanic until I started to do some research after a friend gifted me 2 commander decks this last month. The Tolarian Community College April Fool's video this year showed me just how much the game has changed since I left. Despite being a fan of Unhinged and Unglued when I played, I'm not a fan of the sticker mechanic and I'm doubly not a fan of taking these wacky and purposefully unbalanced sets and tossing them into the standard formats that are significantly more focused on balance (and are severely hurt by unbalanced cards).
I think the biggest victim of Hasbro's bullshittery with magic in recent years has been Mark Rosewater. He's one of the design pillars of one of the most popular and complex games in human history, at they make him put out PR statements like "everybody secretly wanted to play with stickers" and "I kept accidentally opening the wrong booster packs". They've made him out to be an absolute fucking buffoon.
He is one. It’s okay to say he is failing us.
Admittedly I haven't played in a large event with stickers yet, for FNM level events absolutely nobody has had an issue with my sticker solution: I have a small piece of paper with numbers 1-10 on them, each with the relevant sticker(s) on the sheet they are referencing written down, and we can reference the actual sticker cards on a phone (ours or a judge's) if it is important. I roll a d10 or a d20 a few times to randomize the 3 sheets I'm using this game, write them on my life pad and use a die set to the appropriate number representing the sticker used as a "counter" representing the "sticker." It works, it takes about 3 seconds for opponents to realize what I am doing with the paper and dice... and it transcends language barriers, as 90% of my legacy opponents locally don't speak much or any English (my native language).
Does that justify this mechanic's existence at all? Absolutely not, it is putrid and should have never existed, especially on black-bordered cards. But hey Goblins is really fun and really powerful so I'm gonna play with the card, and I hope my "solution" to the problem of having to carry around sticker sheets is useful to someone lol.
Also I hate how _____ Goblin is just a functionally different card online; it isn't even better or worse, just completely different. "Name Sticker" Goblin can't add mana when reanimated (which is worse), as mentioned in the video, but it also (a) doesn't force you to reveal stickers at the start of the game, thus telegraphing your deck (better), (b) is random how much mana you get, so you don't know how much you can make before casting the card since you can't look at your available stickers (worse), (c) has better odds of hitting 6 mana than in paper (better), (d) cannot make 3 mana, which can happen in paper if you are unlucky with your sheets (better), (e) can make 6 mana multiple times, which cannot happen in paper since only one sheet has 6 vowels on it (better), is worse for opponents if they clone it and didn't bring a sticker sheet (better), and so on. Like geez, I get that it was a close-ish approximation to the card to make goblins testable online but boy is it just not the same card.
I've never had to mana ramp like that with my Goblin deck, Skirk Prospector and Powerstone ritual do that for me just fine.
You've done it daddy vince, mind goblin is now banned
I know I'm about to be pedantic here, but @5:40: The Cheese Stands Alone is not an upkeep trigger, and does not have an intervening "if" clause, making it strictly better than Barren Glory, although there is no denying the unset to "real" set inspiration.
Yeah, there's very few triggers worded like that (Darksteel Reactor being one).
I think WotC does most of their testing with paper testing. However I have to assume Day/Night was digitally tested. Its fine when you dont have to track it but shit awful in paper lol. Maybe they could comment some day…
I'm fine with day/night persisting for the rest of the game, but it really shouldn't CHANGE if nothing in a public zine cares. Include an icon in a corner somewhere if it would, ignore the change otherwise.
the easiest answer is to fix this is just reprint Name-Sticker Goblin and just errata the entire card into the MTGO version
They might ban all the sticker cards, or remove unfinity from legacy and commander legality.
The easiest is to just ban the damn thing
@@Hakaze banning the card that makes goblins a t1 deck in a format because its clunky af when there is a clear answer on mtgo sounds like a cop out
@@pacdaman15557 A mistake is a mistake
Ultimately the fundamental problem with un sets is that they are an "opt-in" experience for a game that you need at least two people to play. If one player is playing with un cards, it inherently opts the other player into that experience, which is distinct from a normal magic experience. Obviously if everyone involved is on board, there are no issues. But making some un cards strictly legal now means that you can opt in without necessarily getting your opponent on board with the separate type of game experience. From a balance perspective, this can be fine as long as the legal cards arent unbalanced...but from an experience standpoint, it leads to a lot of potentially bad feelings.
And it's not about the silliness or the fact that there are jokes. Un cards purposefully undercut elements of the game, and this is the part that's a problem to no longer have as an "opt-in" experience. I think it's easy to get hung up on the goofiness when that's really not the core issue. Goofinees as flavor can hit or miss with a player, but just bc an opponent is playing a goofy card doesnt fundamentally change your experience (since you can just engage with the card as game piece instead of flavor).
I like the Unfinity set, genuinely fun. I've got a few non-legal cards in my decks like The Big Top. My whole group has no idea why this isn't legal. Wearing a rainbow shirt just means you're gonna have the mana colour you need anyway. Also blank goblin pads out my goblin deck
I was having a shit day, and I'm not gonna lie, "british man mad at cardboard" might have to be looked into because holy hell did this video make my day better from minute 1.
thanks man
Hope your day got better from here.
My big problem with this is how arbitrary and seemingly random the decisions of what cards are legal and which are not. Jermane, Pride of the Circus isn't legal anywhere, yet half a dozen sticker based cards are, like Tusk and Whiskers. I would love to build a commander deck around Jermane since his abilities can actually be applicable, but can't without rule zero approval.
Jermane is an "art matters" card which goes against an important Magic rule that reprints should be interchargable
Note: I strongly support a chaos orb-style pseudoban to the goblin using the mtgo version rather than stickers.
I also would like to point out that the exile or graveyard clause on the rework DOES NOT stop "name sticker" goblin from triggering when you plot it, since it goes through the stack.
Step 1: Invent a new language
Step 2: Spend decades convincing the people of the world to teach it to their children as their native language
Step 3: WotC responds to the new market and starts releasing MTG cards in the language
Step 4: Reveal that the word for "mind" contains 21 unique vowels
Step 5: Fireball
Stickers are a crime because they target PleasantKenobi specifically
I love the unsets. When I heard some unset cards would be black-bordered, I was ecstatic.
But Unfinity was a huge let-down. The Acorn stamp is stupid and we need should have hard black border and silver border to keep the unplayable cards separate, because separating them is a pain.
Then the damn playable cards were almost exclusively with attractions and stickers and they are fucking annoying to keep track of.
I expected cards for Commander like the reverse order of phases card "Topsy Turvy" or more dice rolling for my Vrondiss deck or dumb new counters or more Beebles or just other things that make the game sillier. We got "Space Beleren" which was basically a legal version of Problematic Volcano. That's what I wanted. We got "Saw In Half" which is decent utility. It's dumb but it's something that makes sense and you don't have to bring a million extra sheets of cardboard with you.
This set was a major let-down. We deserved better and instead we got a massive fucking mess.
Also, the glue from the stickers worked just fine, and the sticker ARE fun, and a pretty great mechanic. All the salt comes from the Legacy legality lol.
I love it when the Ambassador Blorpityblorpboop cast a time a Finishing move under a Hivemind so that the whole table now has to figure out what they want to do with their tickets and stickers.
24:28 as a avid ambassador blorpityblorpboop player I appreciate the mention. My deck has ONE goal, to play as much stupid mechanics wotc printed out. This includes, but not limited to:
Mutate
Enter the dungeon/initiative
Stickers
Attractions
Will of the council
Suspend
The ring tempts you
Cleave
Day/night bound
Lieutenant
Fortell
Landfall
Temple of the false god
Blitz
Kicker
Sticker-kicker
Surveil
Goad
Cloak
And many many more
You're a monster! Lol
Idk if you've done this with other videos, but i really appreciate the red bar to indicate how much longer there is left in the ad
To be fair, people should have grasped the fact that magic was driving away from it's path when we got card with cascade written four times on the same card or with effect that could have been printed on un-set (such as the wurm that can be casted from deck).
I'm 36 and goblin is my first deck from highschool, i've kept upgrading it and did many legacy tournament with greats results. Today it's more than hard to find a legacy tournament but I would have to play more than sub-optimal because I can't play this junk and goblin is my favorite archetype and my only legacy deck. even if I want to play it, stickers are not availible anyway
I think there are some fantastic inclusion in old un-sets. Drafter booster is one of the best cube cards there is, and the timmy, jhonny, spike cycle is fantastic. but these card really only belongs in cube, chaos draft and rule 0 commander or other super casual formats. Even there stickers still fails, but a lot of other cards are just really fun.
On the one hand, I find it kind of hilarious that the optimal way to play legacy is to always include a sticker deck and an attraction deck regardless of whether your deck actually uses them.
On the other hand, I haven't played paper legacy in like 4 or 5 years so I haven't had to deal with this nonsense myself... I'd probably get very tired of it very quickly if I was still playing in paper regularly.
just looking back, they really released the mechanic putting funny hats on creatures that everyone hated and decided to do that to the entire story and setting of magic
But….. but I love Day/Night. My werewolf decks are my favourite
People just jump on the day/night hate bandwagon without any thought tbh
there were soo many ways they could have handled the set and they picked quite literally the worst version, rule zero already facilitates the use of silver bordered commander cards so making them legacy playable literally isnt a fucking factor in whether people want them or not for commander. making them legacy playable and all the issues that caused were simply not worth the 5 or 6 commander players DYING for "legal" wacky commander cards
For what it's worth, silver-border cards actually *weren't* intended to be banned from all other formats initially - they were only intended to be banned from *official events* for those formats. Mark Rosewater even explicitly said it was frustrating to see people think they couldn't use silver-border cards in casual commander games at all, because that kind of casual kitchen-table game is where he'd seen them ending up!
Stickers are utterly goddamn stupid, though, not gonna try and argue with that.
One of the major problems with banning the Un sets from official events is that's where a lot of people played their games, in official events. No one wanted to buy a booster that cost about as much as a regular booster, but that they wouldn't be able to play with since the only time they could play MtG was in official events like local tourneys or FNM.
Its wild that a large portion of UNstable is mechanically viable in black border now.
Now that theres dice in AFR, most of the die rolling cards are feasible.
With attractions, contraptions should be legal.
With mutate, host/augment should be reasonable.
Id guess less that 20% of the set couldnt be printed inbblack-border today
After learning programming in school and just how hard maintaining legacy code is. I have so much respect for the MtGO team. The fact that they can put any sets at all onto what i assmue is an absolute dumpster fire of software is frankly a miracle.
And i am genuinely sorry for every disparaging thing ive ever said about them.
I've always been a big Goblin enjoyer and I am getting into Legacy now. Goblins would be an obvious first choice for me, were it not for Sticker Goblin. I might still make a Goblin Deck without him as I don't mind it being weaker, but it sucks knowing that one of the best Goblins ever printed has this level of baggage attached to it.
The other issue with switching from silver border to acorn is (especially now that UB exists) what to call them. Silver border and black border formats was clean and (mostly, except for the few white border printings) accurate.
Now we have what? Acorn and Oval foil formats? Or Acorn and Oval (or nothing, or triangle) formats?
ugh.
The only good thing that came from Unfinity having black-bordered cards was that you can play attractions in Commander (and a couple of other neat designs aswell). Attractions seem complicated if you try to figure them out on your own, but are actually easy to understand if some else decides to play them, comes prepared with their attraction deck and the rules knowledge and quickly explains how they work.
I'm currently playing them in my Wyll/Sword Coast Sailor deck to roll more dice and people absolute love them. I get asked to play the deck again simply because people want to see which attractions I'll get, if I'll get lucky when visiting them and if they'll end up doing powerful stuff or not. They're a genuinely great mechanic and I hope we'll see more of them in the future - especially more with actual prizes that are black-bordered (we only got 1 so far, which is sad).
Kinda annoyed that so many of them aren’t legal, though. Like, for The Most Dangerous Gamer, there’s one (1) Attraction that has “Claim a prize.” Considering they’re likely never getting more support, _ever_… well.
@@davidhower7095 Yep, I 100% agree, I even said so towards the end of my post. The Most Dangerous Gamer could be a really fun commander - if we had 10+ attractions with prizes instead of only one.
I initially hated the idea of stickers. Then I actually played with them, and felt that actually they're pretty fun and a decent mechanic within the limited space of Unfinity draft.
The physical limitations of the actual stickers, however, make it really suck. They stick okay to the carss three or four times, but they don't stick back on the sticker sheet, so there's no realistic way to shuffle your stack of 10 sheets to present to your opponent for a constructed game. Worse, the stickers are all fiddly little bastards, which can present a serious accessibility issue.
In my singular Unfinity draft I focused on stickers, really excited to try them. By the end of the third round I never wanted to use them ever again. A cute idea that is absolutely miserable in execution.
Ban the stickers.
The way I represent stickers is I sleeve some sticker sheets and then with dry or wet erase markers on my sleeves write the name and cross off the sticker then wipe it off after. It makes it a lot less fiddly and I don't know if it works with all sleeves but so far it does.
Maybe it's because I play thoughtseize decks and Goblin Guides and write down what's revealed but it doesn't add a tremendous amount of complexity to my games.
I still hate it though
That's still a lot of ridiculous steps to take to play a card and use a mechanic.
@@zztzgza Absolutely, it still sucks and should not be a thing. Just saying if someone wants to play Goblins I recommend this method. It sounds worse than it is as if they have the markers for infinity tokens anyway it reduces the bloat to an extra shuffle.
I bring up these conversations about "bluffing a sticker sheet" in a competitive format and people call me an idiot... Some people just dont see what we see when it comes to issues with these things.