Last updated on December 6, 2024
Unfortunate Accident | Illustration by Josiah ‘Jo' Cameron
Once again pointing at what he previously called the dagger in his heart, Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater admitted that Unfinity‘s stickers were a mistake.
“Stickers weren’t supposed to be anywhere near Legacy,” he wrote on his blog last Wednesday. “We goofed on the cost of one card.”
He doesn't regret mixing black-border and acorn cards in the same Magic set, though.
“My 20/20 hindsight on Unfinity is I wish we could have made the acorn cards silver-bordered and the eternal-legal cards black-bordered,” he wrote in a later post. “I have no regrets letting people play cards in eternal formats that would normally be black border in any other set.”
The Great Goblin Goof
The one card Mark was referring to is _____ Goblin, which he had already pointed out as a mistake in his Lessons Learned, Part 7 article in December last year where he noted that one of Unfinity's big mistakes was putting stickers in Eternal formats.
“We had tried hard to cost stickers so they wouldn't show up in competitive Eternal events. We missed on one.”
Five months later, _____ Goblin was enough of a pain in Legacy that WotC outright banned them from Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper in the May 13, 2024, B&R Announcement .
But here's the kicker: All cards that bring a sticker or an Attraction into the game were banned, thus making Unfinity the set with the most Magic cards banned in the single day.
Which in turn somewhat makes you wonder: Goofed on just one card? Why ban the whole mechanic, then? And why in Vintage, if (apparently) it was a problem in Legacy?
“This is one of the only mechanics in Magic history that gets the axe for just being a flat-out bad idea,” notes Tim Zaccagnino when ranking Stickers as the #3 worst Magic mechanic of all time.
_____ Goblin was bad enough that, on MTGO, they even had to turn it into a dice-rolling card, to avoid having to code the sticker mechanic!
Unfinity Sales
It has to be said, though, that by un-set standards, Unfinity did great in the one metric that Hasbro, like any corporation, cares about.
“It’s the best-selling Un-set by a decent margin,” wrote Mark in another post a few days ago, confirming what he had mentioned in January last year when he revealed that Unfinity had outperformed Unstable and was the best-seller “by a pretty big margin.”
It's a defense he has wielded several times, and looking at card prices it does seem to suggest that mixing black-border cards was a very good idea…
… as long as those black-border cards happen to be very sought-after, powerful reprints. Like, say, shock lands… in space!
This Booster Fun trick has indeed allowed Unfinity Collector Boosters keep a steady price, which in turn allowed it to be, as Mark says, be the best-selling un-set of all time.
But if a set mixes black-border and silver-border cards, why go to such length to make a radically new, never-yet-tested-in-the-wilds mechanic like stickers legal in Eternal formats?
Above all considering they never, ever wanted it in Legacy?
Sticking it to Nadu
“The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander,” noted Andrew Brown in the same Banned and Restricted Announcement that struck down stickers. “But there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy.”
If that sounds somewhat familiar…
… that's because it's the exact same reason why Nadu, Winged Wisdom was made into a pushed card in Modern Horizons 3.
“Ultimately, my intention was to create a build-around aimed at Commander play, which resulted in the final text,” said Senior Game Designer Michael Majors when explaining the mistake. “We didn't playtest with Nadu's final iteration, as we were too far along in the process, and it shipped as-is.”
And Mark himself admits that much.
“If there was a way to make them legal in Commander, but not Legacy, I would have done it,” he wrote last May, commenting on the stickers' ban announcement.
The New Normal
For better or worse, though, it's unlikely that something like stickers, or possibly even un-sets in general will show up any time soon.
“The uphill climb for Un-sets is not anything Unfinity did,” Mark wrote, “but the new normal for the expectations of a supplemental set.”
He's referring to Magic's packed release schedule for 2025, which will have six Standard sets – and very little room for supplemental sets, let alone goofy, unsettling sets.
It still seems that it's a bit of a understatement for how bad stickers were.
“When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks,” Andrew Brown wrote in the Ban Announcement for stickers. “Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.“
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