Attractions in MTG: Rules, History, and Best Cards

Last updated on February 28, 2024

Storybook Ride | Illustration by Dmitry Burmak

Step right up and experience Magic’s newest, wackiest, most jaw-dropping Un-set mechanic: attractions! If taking a peek at Unfinity left you more lost than a Haberthrasher without a hat, I’ve got you covered.

We’re going to get to the nitty-gritty on how to build your attraction deck for different formats, how to visit those attractions, and maybe even how to walk away with a prize or two.

Let’s quit Clowning Around and get down to business!

How Do Attractions Work?

Kiddie Coaster | Illustration by Marco Bucci

Attractions are artifacts that exist in their own special “attraction deck.” They represent the WotC-fied versions of all the rides, gift shops, and mini-games you expect to see at a carnival or fair.

Your attractions enter the battlefield when a card like Goblin Blastronauts instructs you to “open” an attraction. Once you’ve got some attractions in play you roll a d6 during your first main phase to see if you “visit” any of your attractions (more on this later). Successfully visiting an attraction causes its visit ability to trigger.

Some attractions might even reward you with a “prize” if you fulfil the right conditions of your visit, like Trivia Contest.

The History of Attractions in MTG

Attractions were introduced in 2022’s Unfinity and are currently exclusive to that set. The mechanic was met with some skepticism after it was revealed that some Unfinity cards would be legal in eternal formats while others would maintain previous Un-set “silver-border” legality. Only a small handful of these cards are actually playable, but the skeptics may have a point.

While mechanically different, there are noticeable parallels between attractions and the contraptions from 2017’s Unstable. Attractions and contraptions are both artifacts that exist in their own separate deck, have their own graveyard, have once-per-turn effects, and only come into play with other cards’ abilities.

What Is an Attraction Deck?

An attraction deck is the separate deck of cards with all the attractions you have in your card pool. It exists separately from your normal library and has different deckbuilding restrictions depending on what format you’re playing.

Cards that interact with your library by shuffling, scrying, drawing cards, or manipulating cards in any other way only refer to your normal library, never your attraction deck.

What’s the Minimum Number of Cards in an Attraction Deck?

For eternal formats like Legacy and Commander you have to come prepared with at least 10 cards in your attraction deck if you intend to use the mechanic. The deck also needs to be “Singleton,” meaning none of your attractions can share a name with another one in your deck.

I’ll get into those fancy colored lights on the right side of your attractions in a bit, but it’s important to know that some attractions with the same name have different lights on the card. You can’t play two copies of the same named attraction, even if the light patterns are different.

What’s the Maximum Number of Cards in an Attraction Deck?

There isn’t a maximum number of attractions you can put in your attraction deck. 21 of the 35 total attractions do not have the holographic acorn stamp on them, which means the maximum attraction cards in formats that don’t allow the acorn-stamped cards is 21. Otherwise you could use all 35.

What About in Limited/Draft?

Limited has a slightly different ruleset for your attraction deck. You’re allowed to use any of the attractions in your final card pool in booster Draft or Sealed, even ones with the same name.

Unfinity Drafts require that you have at least three attractions in your attraction deck, which must be drafted like any other card in your packs. There’s no maximum to how many you can play, and there’s also no Singleton restriction. In Sealed you have access to as many of the attractions as you want from among the ones you open, but again you need to present at least three to play any at all.

Since each Unfinity pack comes with two seeded attractions, you should open at least 12 attractions in a 6-pack Sealed pool. Possibly more if you open any foil attractions.

Do All Attractions in Your Attraction Deck Have to Be Different?

The Singleton rule for attractions only applies to Constructed formats, which include eternal formats like Legacy, Vintage, and Commander. Each attraction in these formats must have a different name.

This rule exists to force an element of variation into your attraction deck. It might be too easy to guarantee you open the same attractions game-in and game-out if these restrictions weren’t in place, which would add a level of consistency to the mechanic that WotC wasn’t intending for Constructed formats.

For Limited events, there are no restrictions on your attraction deck as long as you have at least three attractions to start with. You can play three of the same exact attraction, or 15 different ones if you drafted that many.

What Is Opening an Attraction? How Do You Do It?

You can only open an attraction when a card tells you to. For example, you open an attraction by taking the top card of your attraction deck and putting it on the battlefield face-up when you resolve Coming Attraction’s ability. This might trigger some abilities, like the +1/+1 counter ability on The Most Dangerous Gamer.

Your attractions don’t really do anything on their own. You need to visit them to trigger their effects, which I’ll explain in a moment. Until that happens they just exist as artifacts on the battlefield and can be interacted with by anything that messes with artifacts.

Also note that attractions with prizes replace themselves once you win the prize. Every prize ability instructs you to sacrifice the attraction and open a new one in its place.

What Are the Lights/Colored Circles on the Right of an Attraction?

Once you have one or more attractions in play you roll a d6 at the beginning of your first main phase. The lights on the right side of your attractions determine what number needs to be rolled during your main phase to visit those attractions.

If you roll a 3, any attractions with a lit up 3 triggers and their visit abilities go on the stack. You decide which order to put those abilities on the stack if you visit multiple attractions at once.

This special die roll is the only roll that triggers your attractions. Rolling for a card like Attempted Murder does not cause you to visit any attractions.

I’m not entirely sure what the reasoning is, but every attraction has a lit up 6 while 1 is never lit up. Maybe this has something to do with cards like Scooch and Night Shift of the Living Dead messing with rolls of 1 or 6, or maybe it’s meant to mimic Dungeons & Dragons critical hits and failures.

Either way, 6 is a jackpot roll and 1s fail to visit any of your attractions.

How Do You Visit Attractions?

The main way to visit your attractions is to have a die roll that corresponds to the lit-up numbers on the right side of the attraction. This only applies to the special die roll at the beginning of your main phase, not any other effect that causes you to roll dice.

The only other way to visit an attraction is to resolve a spell or ability that instructs you to visit it. Command Performance and Line Cutter are two fairly simple cards that give you another opportunity to visit your attractions.

It might be wise to diversify your cards based on which lights they have lit up when you’re drafting attractions or building a Constructed attraction deck. You’re more likely to visit at least one per turn when you roll your d6 if you can get attractions on board with a wider variety of lit-up numbers.

Do You Need Tickets to Visit Attractions?

Tickets are a resource that players can get from Unfinity cards, but you don’t need them to visit your attractions. Tickets are really only needed to “purchase” certain stickers from the Unfinity sticker sheets.

If you’re using attractions in Constructed you don’t really need to worry about tickets. But some attractions can reward the player tickets, like Scavenger Hunt, so it might be useful to come equipped with a few sticker sheets and an understanding of how they work.

Are All Attractions Artifacts?

Every attraction printed so far is an artifact. That means anything that interacts with artifacts can interact with an attraction, and they count as artifacts for the purposes of abilities like improvise and affinity.

A card like Mistakes Were Made can destroy attractions. Fingers crossed there aren’t many fire extinguishers nearby when that happens.

What Is the Mana Value of an Attraction?

Attractions have no mana cost and therefore have a mana value of 0. If they ever somehow become a competitive force in Constructed formats it’d be pretty easy to counter them with cards like Ratchet Bomb or Engineered Explosives.

Can You Control More Than One Attraction at Once?

You can control as many attractions as you can viably open. If you have a starting attraction deck of 20 cards, it’s theoretically possible for all 20 of them to be on the battlefield at the same time. Think of it like building up your own state fair, but with more clown robots running around.

It usually benefits you to have as many attractions on the board as possible. This increases your odds of matching your extra die roll each turn to at least one of your attractions.

I’m no expert on the Unfinity Limited format, but I’m guessing one of the best strategies will be opening as many attractions as possible and riding the value train to victory.

What Happens When an Attraction is Destroyed?

When an attraction is destroyed it’s sent to the “junkyard,” which is basically a graveyard tied to your attraction deck.

Maybe your Ferris Wheel broke down, or the Concession Stand ran out of food. Whatever the reason, destroyed attractions end up in the junkyard.

The same is true of attractions leaving the battlefield for other reasons. Moving to any other zone other than exile results in an attraction going to the junkyard. Bouncing, shuffling, or sacrificing an attraction still puts it in the junkyard.

Is the Junkyard the Same as the Graveyard? The Same as Exile?

The junkyard works very similarly to the graveyard, but they’re two separate zones. Cards that interact with the graveyard can’t grab cards from the junkyard. There’s currently nothing that can remove cards from the junkyard, so once an attraction shuts down it’s gone for the rest of the game.

Exiling an attraction doesn’t cause it to go to the junkyard, it’s just exiled like any other card. I believe this rule was made to allow attractions to working favorably with flicker effects so they can return to the battlefield the way you want them to.

What Is a Prize on an Attraction?

A prize is a reward you get for fulfilling certain conditions when you visit an attraction.

Some attractions, like Guess Your Fate, ask you to play a mini-game when you trigger their visit ability. If you “win” the game, you trigger the “prize” ability, which grants some sort of reward, sacrifices the attraction, and opens a new one in its place.

Most of the mini-games have silly Un-style effects, with Pick-a-Beeble being the only non-acorn stamped attraction that offers a prize. That’s bad news for anyone trying to play The Most Dangerous Gamer at their next big Legacy tournament.

Do You Draft Attractions Like Normal Cards?

Each pack of Unfinity has two card slots dedicated to attractions, and they have to be drafted like any other card in the booster Draft. Remember that you need at least three attractions to create an attraction deck in Limited, so you want to be sure to draft a few along the way.

Are Attractions Legal for Tournament Play?

Whether we like it or not, some cards from Unfinity are viable for tournament play. The new “acorn” stamp differentiates cards that can be played in tournaments from those that aren’t legal for competitive play. If you don’t see an acorn stamp on the bottom of the card, it’s fair game.

While some players have bemoaned the idea of playing Un-style cards in tournament settings, the cards that are legal in these events work within the rules of normal Magic. Cards that ask for outside assistance, refer to the art on the cards, ask you to wear a goofy hat, or anything else of that nature, are acorn-stamped and aren’t tournament legal.

My sincerest apologies to anyone who bought a multicolor tie-dye shirt to make The Big Top work in their Legacy deck.

Are Attractions Legal in EDH?

Whether or not attractions are legal in EDH is a tricky question to answer. The short answer is that the legality of these cards is the same as any other eternal format (i.e., acorn cards aren’t legal, non-acorn cards are).

But this is a good time to talk about Rule 0 in Commander, which is the concept that players can play whatever they want in a non-sanctioned game as long as all players agree to it.

If I bring my Commander deck to a table with my attraction deck at the ready, I need to let the other players know if I intend to use acorn-stamped cards or not. If at least one player in the pod is uncomfortable with me playing weird acorn-stamped effects in that game, I need to accept that and play without those cards.

If your playgroup is generally lax on things like custom, banned, or silver-bordered cards then feel free to throw your cards around with Dart Throw to your heart’s content. Just have that conversation with the other players beforehand.

Are Attractions Good?

Attractions shouldn’t make much of a dent outside Limited. This is an Un-set we’re talking about here. The cards are meant to be memes and jokes more than competitive staples, and I don’t see attractions breaking out into the competitive scene.

There are a lot of things holding the mechanic back in Constructed environments. You have to play the cards that allow you to open attractions, and none of them are designed to be competitive. As much as I hate to say it, I don’t think Monitor Monitor is going to hold its own against Legacy Death & Taxes or Vintage Paradoxical Outcome decks.

The second thing holding them back is the fact that you have to bring a 10-card Singleton attraction deck to Constructed events. It’s hard to form a game plan around your attractions when there’s so much variation in which ones you’re even going to get into play.

And once you’re still at the mercy of a die-roll to see whether your attractions even have an effect on the game you’ve put in the work to open a few. You might open two or three attractions and roll a few 1s to completely whiff on visiting any of them, which isn’t a recipe for success in Constructed tournaments.

You’ll have a better time using these in casual EDH than in any competitive setting. It’s much easier to form a game plan around the opening and visiting attractions in EDH since legends like Myra the Magnificent and The Most Dangerous Gamer can go in the command zone.

When all is said and done, the real home for attractions is Limited. Unfinity was designed to be drafted, so I say have your fun in Draft but don’t get your hopes up winning with these cards in other formats.

Gallery and List of Attraction Cards

Unfinity introduced 35 total attractions with different names into Magic, some of which have multiple versions with different light pattern variations. If you include every version of every attraction there are a total of 135 that can be opened.

• Balloon Stand a-d
• Bounce Chamber a-d
• Bumper Cars a-f
• Centrifuge a-b
• Clown Extruder a-d
• Concession Stand a-d
• Costume Shop a-f
• Cover the Spot a-d
• Dart Throw a-d
• Drop Tower a-f
• Ferris Wheel
• Foam Weapons Kiosk a-d
• Fortune Teller a-f
• Gallery of Legends a-b
• Gift Shop a-b
• Guess Your Fate a-d
• Hall of Mirrors a-b
• Haunted House a-b
• Information Booth a-d
• Kiddie Coaster a-f
• Log Flume a-b
• Memory Test a-b
• Merry-Go-Round a-b
• Pick-a-Beeble a-f
• Push Your Luck a-b
• Roller Coaster a-d
• Scavenger Hunt a-f
• Spinny Ride a-f
• Squirrel Stack a-f
• Storybook Ride a-b
• Swinging Ship a-b
• The Superlatorium a-f
• Trash Bin a-d
• Trivia Contest a-f
• Tunnel of Love a-b

Best Attraction Cards

I’ll only be looking at non-acorn cards when considering the best attractions. Some of the acorn-stamped cards might have better outcomes when all is said and done, but memory games and dexterity tests and the like add another layer of functionality that isn’t in line with the tournament-legal bunch.

Keep in mind that there are different variations of the same attractions with the only difference being which numbered lights trigger their visit ability. Each variation might have a different assortment of numbers, but they have the same total lit up so there’s no huge strategic advantage to picking one over the other.

Take Bumper Cars as an example. There are six different versions of this card, but all six versions each have three lights lit up on the right hand side. You might mix and match to spread out lights across your entire attraction deck, but one copy of it isn’t better or worse than any other version.

With that being said, here are the best attractions to look out for.

Trash Bin + Information Booth

For general card advantage, you want a copy of Trash Bin and Information Booth in your attraction deck. These provide incidental card draw throughout the game, with the extra mill from the Trash being useful in EDH.

Storybook Ride

Storybook Ride is the best card-advantage attraction of the group, allowing you to “impulse” draw extra cards if you manage to visit a bunch of attractions in one turn. It always counts at least itself and benefits from flooding the board with attractions.

Balloon Stand + Clown Extruder

Balloon Stand and Clown Extruder can produce a few extra 1/1 bodies on board. Many attraction-themed EDH decks will have an artifact sub-theme, which makes the tokens from the Clown extra helpful.

Bounce Chamber + Tunnel of Love

Bounce Chamber and Tunnel of Love can remove creatures from the board, but they probably only deal with smaller threats.

Pick-a-Beeble

Pick-a-Beeble can help ramp with a few extra Treasure tokens and is currently the only non-acorn “prize” attraction.

Swinging Ship + Hall of Mirrors + Haunted House

Swinging Ship, Hall of Mirrors, and Haunted House strike me as the best attractions to include.

The Ship can grant you an extra combat step while the Hall does a great Mirrorweave impression. The House has my pick for the best legal attraction, reanimating a creature free of charge for a turn. That creature will be exiled, but reanimation with no extra mana investment is very powerful and puts the House in a league of its own.

Decklist: Gamer Attractions in Commander

The Most Dangerous Gamer | Illustration by Aaron J. Riley

If you’re looking to open your theme park at Commander tables I’d start with a shell similar to this built around The Most Dangerous Gamer. You can’t claim a lot of prizes unless you’re playing with acorn-stamped attractions, but the commander is designed to get as many attractions into play as possible.

This deck is built to embrace the spirit of Unfinity and includes silver-border effects like Squirrel-Powered Scheme and As Luck Would Have It to take advantage of all the die-rolling. Don’t worry, there aren’t any offensive rule-breaking cards in the list.

This Ride Is Out of Order

Swinging Ship | Illustration by Mike Burns

Hopefully by now, I’ve helped clear up everything you need to know about attractions in Magic. Unfinity has proven to be a divisive set among Magic players mainly because of the decision to include legal, tournament-playable cards in an Un-style setting.

A lot of the bickering seems to be aimed at the sticker mechanic, with attractions catching some heat for being unnecessarily complicated. Whether you like these sorts of mechanics in everyday Magic events or you side with those who’d rather keep “silver-border” shenanigans out of mainstream Magic, attractions will appeal to someone, and there’s a good chance you’ll encounter them in casual EDH.

To each, their own on the controversy surrounding this set and its change of pace from previous Un-sets. And hey, if some deep-seated fear of carnival clowns or roller coasters has you really in a tizzy about attractions, feel free to pick up some extra copies of Vandalblast next time you’re buying cards. That’ll shut the park down for good.

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