Exclusive Magic: The Gathering Unfinity card reveal: Opening Ceremony

Unfinity is the next un-set—a collection of unusual and unbalanced cards designed for non-competitive play—coming to Magic: The Gathering. It’s themed around a retro sci-fi take on carnivals and circuses called Myra the Magnificent’s Intergalactic Astrotorium of Fun, a traveling amusement park made of interconnected spaceships.

Traditionally un-sets contain cards that bend or outright break the normal rules of Magic and fair play, or break the fourth wall to interact with players. The first un-set, 1998’s Unglued, included a card called Prismatic Wardrobe that could destroy any other card as long as it didn’t share a color with the clothes being worn by its controller. Unglued also gave us I’m Rubber, You’re Glue, which let you retarget a spell or ability at the cost of having to speak in rhyme from then on.

The card from Unfinity PC Gamer is revealing, Opening Ceremony, isn’t quite so bizarre or likely to get you slapped in the face. 

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

A six-mana red sorcery, Opening Ceremony gives you one mana of every color, including colorless, then lets you open a booster pack of new Magic cards, which you can cast any of until the end of the current turn. Unfinity is designed with drafts in mind (though it’s the first un-set to also be available in Collector boosters, which will contain 100% foil cards), so it’s fair to assume you’ll have an unopened booster pack nearby when you play it. Hope you draw something good!

I love these kind of meta-level shenanigans. There are several existing cards that let you choose a card you already own from outside the game to play, like the various Wish spells, but I particularly like Last-Minute Chopping. This Christmas-themed holiday promo card lets you ask an opponent for a present, which they can either respond to by saying “yes” and putting a card they own but aren’t using in this game into your hand, or saying “no” and letting you take control of one of their permanents. The king of this nonsense isn’t a Magic card, but rather the Copyright Violation card for On the Edge. Already a deeply weird game about conspiracy theories battling for control of reality, Copyright Violation made On the Edge even weirder by letting you play a card from a completely different game, counting the first three numbers that appeared on it as the cost, attack, and defense.

One of Unfinity’s other oddball cards revealed so far is Killer Cosplay, which lets you turn a creature into a copy of another creature that costs the same amount of mana—that’s any creature with the same cost, so I hope you’ve got a good memory or your opponent is happy with you googling stats mid-game. 

There are apparently plenty of cards in Unfinity that involve die-rolling (which Adventures in the Forgotten Realms made great use of), as another revealed card, a 1/1 creature card depicting goblins on holiday called The Space Family Goblinson, gets a +1/+1 whenever you roll a die and gains trample on any turn where you roll three dice or more. 

The set also introduces a new creature type for robots, as the amusement park is staffed by robotic clowns. The Assembled Ensemble card combos with them to gain power equal to the number of robots you control, and lets you create a 1/1 white Clown Robot any time you cast a spell that has an artifact creature somewhere in its artwork.

So yes, it is a silly set. The creative team for Unfinity included comedy writers Sean ‘Seanbaby‘ Reiley, and Kathleen De Vere, Cameron Lauder, and Graham Stark of LoadingReadyRun, who are responsible for the Magic-themed internet sitcom Friday Nights. Unfinity was originally scheduled for release on April Fool’s Day, but had to be delayed thanks to Covid. It’ll now be released on the less-humorous date of October 7.

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