Unfinity, an upcoming expansion for Magic: The Gathering, is a wildly different direction for the game. For the uninitiated, thinking about Magic likely summons images of wizards engaged in battle, mighty heroes slaying dragons, or perhaps just pieces of cardboard that somebody is willing to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for. Players have different associations - specific cards, favorite characters, Magic's competitive play and various formats, or at-times esoteric lore. What nobody expects is stickers, interplanetary carnivals, or drink cans as game pieces.
These are all elements players can expect to see in Magic's future. Unfinity, which releases on October 7, 2022, is the next of Magic's "Un-sets," expansions created by Wizards of the Coast that are unlike anything else in the game, and perhaps any game. The sets feature elements of self-parody and a humorous tone that doesn't fit with the rest of the game. Magic has existed for almost 30 years, and Unfinity is only the fifth Un-set - they're rare, so players have good reason to be excited.
Previous Un-sets have focused on chickens, squirrels, and half-shark, half-kittens and asked players to tear up cards, high-five as many people as quickly as possible, or play under the table rather than on it. It's all very silly, especially compared to the tone of standard-legal expansions like the upcoming Dominaria United. Unfinity is pushing boundaries further than ever before, and while the far-out tone and gameplay may not be for everyone, Magic will be a better game for it.
What Unfinity Cards Bring To Magic The Gathering
The narrative premise of Unfinity is somehow both surprisingly simple and remarkably wild. The set is themed around a pulp sci-fi interplanetary traveling carnival. That may sound absurd, but many of Magic's worlds can't be summed up so succinctly - a previous Un-set, 2017's Unstable, presented a world with various warring factions, each with their own highly distinct theming, resulting in a setting with no easy parallel. Unfinity, in contrast, is a top-down set, meaning that the flavor and theming came first, and mechanics were designed to match. Many of Magic's most iconic planes were the result of top-down design including fan-favorite Innistrad, effectively a gothic horror world and the former residence of anti-hero-turning-regular-hero Liliana Vess.
As such, Unfinity's cards will draw on tropes around carnivals, circuses, and 1930's-era sci-fi. While the set won't be available for a few months, previews emerged from a panel held at San Diego Comic-Con hosted by Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering. Several cards were shown off to give players a better look at Unfinity's theme and mechanics.
One such mechanic is tickets and stickers; tickets are a new resource players can gain through various effects and are used to pay for stickers that are physically placed upon cards to modify them. (Wizards of the Coast claims that the adhesive used is designed to remove easily and allow re-use, so players don't need to worry about damaged cards.) While some stickers, which come on sheets in Unfinity booster packs, affect a card's art or name - qualities that Un-Magic cares about while the main game doesn't - more powerful ones add abilities or change a creature's stats. Magic's catalog of mechanics include plenty of ways to modify creatures, but stickers last until the end of a game, even if a creature leaves play. Plus, turning in tickets for a prize fits perfectly with the carnival theme.
Unfinity is also changing how Magic handles Un-cards in general. In previous Un-sets, each card had a silver border, marking it as illegal in all sanctioned formats. This is important, as Un-cards cards do weird things to Magic and often don't work within the game's rules even if their effects are intuitive. However, sanctioned events and tournament formats aren't the end-all, be-all of Magic; the vast majority of players simply play with the cards they have, a casual "format" often referred to as Kitchen Table Magic. To bring these two halves closer together, Unfinity includes cards legal in eternal formats like EDH and Legacy, making them just as legal as staples found in sets like Double Masters. Not every Unfinity card is included, though; cards that simply don't work are marked with an acorn-shaped foil seal, which is replacing the silver border for Un-cards moving forward.
Unfinity Is Important For The Future Of MTG
While Unfinity and Un-Magic are delightfully zany, they actually serve a key purpose as something of a testing ground for ideas too far from what "real" MTG can handle - yet. There are plenty of examples to draw upon in previous sets - Unglued's The Cheese Stands Alone was eventually printed as the nearly-identical Barren Glory, and the B.F.M., a single creature made of two combined cards, was a precursor to the Meld mechanic. Magic is a hungry beast, and is constantly pushing into new design space; Un-cards are often a major route to finding it.
This extends beyond mechanics, too. In a time of Magic crossovers with properties like Fortnite and Warhammer 40,000, it can be easy to forget that Magic's past is footed strongly and purely in the fantasy genre. While more recent expansions have taken players to a mech-filled cyberpunk city, a magic school that's more college than Harry Potter, and an art-deco plane built on the bones of angels, the game's first decade was almost entirely set on the world of Dominaria, with only slight variance in the creative direction from set to set.
The early Un-sets were hardly the only factor behind the eventual change, but they undoubtedly gave Wizards of the Coast a place to explore flavor beyond what was expected from Magic. Unfinity is doing the exact same thing, decades later. Un-sets aren't for every player - as is the case with every Magic product - but this seemingly silly bunch of sets is far more important than first impressions reveal.
Magic's narrative is taking a turn for the dark. The game is re-introducing Phyrexia, an existential threat from Magic's past, and killing off characters in the process. As the story develops further, Unfinity will serve as a sort of comic relief, providing a reprieve from the building tension in the main narrative. Players can look to the set for a light-hearted, whacky experience - and, in the process, get a glimpse into the potential future of Magic: The Gathering.