Hello all, and welcome to Magic Monday, where Avocados can magically gather and talk about Magic: The Gathering. Each week I’ll highlight a card that either is on my mind or reflects something else that’s on it and offer a prompt for commenting. This week, the conversation turns, as one knows it always eventually must, to the looming spectre of Universes Beyond.
A friend in my regular Commander pod often tries to cajole us into playing oddball niche formats. Some of these, like Treachery, we cotton to and play occasionally. Others get vetoed with a shrug. His most recent attempted sale was Pendragon, which Moxfield recently added as an option for deck builders on their site. Pendragon is a spinoff of Pauper Commander, in which a common creature and a legendary equipment reside in your command zone, and the other 98 cards in your deck are all commons. Usually, I’m not into wacky offshoots; I just want to show up and play some good clean Magic. But this one sounded like a pretty cool idea—or, at least, it did until I looked up legendary equipments on Scryfall and saw that of the 54 that exist as of this writing, 21 are from Universes Beyond sets, a statistic that significantly dampened my enthusiasm.
Universes Beyond is the arm of Magic that brings extant non-Magic IP into the game, and I have complicated feelings about it. For a while I was against it in any context whatsoever. Previously, my headspace has been begrudgingly fine with it as long as the set was adjacent to high fantasy, like Lord of the Rings or Final Fantasy. Magic: The Gathering is the only means through which I’ve ever been able to enjoy or even tolerate fantasy, so I’m a little protective of it in that way. I’m wishy-washy and of two minds about space stuff; I like a lot of the Warhammer cards despite lacking any familiarity whatsoever with that lore, but not the Doctor Who ones despite being more familiar with that property. If the new rule change allowing legendary vehicles to be commanders facilitates a Star Trek UB, then quite frankly, all bets are off and I’m turning into the Fry meme. My hardest line is comic book stuff: I loathed the Transformers cards in The Brothers War, and I won’t be buying any Spider-Man. I won’t even proxy cards from sets I can’t accept into my heart, like Fallout or Assassin’s Creed. I must admit that the mechanically unique legendary creatures in the Sonic the Hedgehog Secret Lair are piquing my interest.
Some feel that Universes Beyond represents the “Fortnitification” of the game, a claim that’s hard to dispute when Hasbro prints an actual Fortnite Secret Lair. Luckily, the most vulgar partnerships tend to be the ones that only get cosmetic-reprint Secret Lairs—for now, at least. I’m not sure I buy claims that it brings in and helps retain new players, but I also don’t work at a game store, so I don’t have data from the trenches. I also feel like the kind of person who becomes attracted to Magic via a video game or comic book tie-in is the kind of person I am going to have irreconcilable pop culture differences with beyond the Commander table, but that’s perhaps overly judgmental. Whatever your entry point is, you’re here and you’ve got a deck; let’s get down to business.
Where Fortnitification most readily manifests in Magic is in the artifacts. Many of the iconic items of various series are objects and MacGuffins rather than characters, which is how you can end up with so many legendary equipments and vehicles originating from Universes Beyond. This is where you get the really wacky brain-rotted crossovers that opponents of UB worry about. Whether you’re having fun or not, I think there’s something at least mildly damning about the fact that “I equip the Buster Sword onto Optimus Prime!” is a sentence that can describe a legal action in a game of Magic: The Gathering in 2025. I’m not about to scoop over it, but I may struggle to hide any eye rolls. Regardless of how I may feel about certain game actions, however, I hold no one but myself to my inscrutable and haphazardly applied ideas about actual Universes Beyond card usage.
Card of the Week: This week, I give Card of the Week to the legendary equipment I would choose if I was building a Pendragon deck, which is very pointedly not a Universes Beyond equipment.1 It’s The Reaver Cleaver, from 2022’s Dominaria United Commander. A creature equipped with it gets +1/+1 and trample, and whenever you deal combat damage to a player or planeswalker, you create an amount of Treasure tokens equal to the amount of damage you dealt.
My first thought was to pair this with an unblockable blue creature to enable Izzet spellslinging shenanigans. The best candidate for that looks to be Elusive Spellfist, which could enable big fireworks if you keep most of the mana curve low to the ground. It’s also tempting to run Blighted Agent, but it’s no fun to become the archenemy before the game even starts. A new format is always overflowing with possibilities, and I tend to get overwhelmed by the simultaneous introduction of all of them (which is why I never got into Oathbreaker).
COTW Value: Each week, the Card of the Week is rated on a scale of one to five dollar signs (see footnote for values).2 Anything that will consistently generate Treasure tokens is going to hold some value, and indeed, most printings of The Reaver Cleaver will run you upwards of a sawbuck. But it resurfaced last year in the Modern Horizons III precons, and that printing will set you back $8.05 as of this writing. It’s receiving a cosmetic reprint in the aforementioned forthcoming Sonic Secret Lair as Knuckles’s Gloves, but I expect that one will stay north of the Hamilton line. $$
Prompt: How do you feel about Universes Beyond? Is there any potential UB set that would be practically guaranteed to make you bend the knee? If so, what?
Bonus Prompt: What’s your favorite niche format?
You must be logged in to post a comment.