I’ve been out of the Magic loop for the past couple of weeks. As a result, It’s no wonder that I’ve missed a revelation of players who attended the Mystery Booster World Premiere this Thursday (2019-11-07) at MagicFest Richmond.
Image source: Wizards of the Coast
Mystery Booster is a set designed for limited play, Chaos Draft and Sealed in particular. Mystery and going in blind are part of its appeal. According to Mark Rosewater, packs of Mystery Booster will also be for sale in local game stores at a later point. If you would rather experience it yourself first, I suggest you close this page now, as this post does spoil some minor aspects of the set.
Otherwise, scroll down to see what I’m on about.
Hi there. Sorry for the wait, this is where it gets interesting.
As you may be aware, each pack of Convention Edition Mystery Booster contains one ‘test card’, a card presented in the style of the test cards Magic’s R&D use for playtesting card prototypes while they are designing sets. The ‘test cards’ included in Mystery Booster packs are experimental designs exploring design space outside that of normal Magic, with a humorous and referential theme. These cards seem to embody the R&D fever dream aspect of the Un-sets. The set’s designer, Gavin Verhey, describes Mystery Booster as “Chaos Draft meets Future Sight”.
A taste of what these ‘test cards’ have to offer. This one mixes it up with Landfall from Zendikar and Kinship from Morningtide.
Image source: Scryfall
These cards appear to be paper sheets glued on other cards, but this is just their visual presentation. Their faces are fully printed onto the card.
Scyfall have compiled a list of the ‘test cards’ from Mystery Booster. You can see them in all their glory here.
Another aspect these ‘test cards’ share with silver-bordered cards is that they are not allowed in normal Magic play. Each “test card” comes with the unambiguous reminder “TEST CARD – Not for constructed play“. However, it didn’t stop us before with silver-bordered cards, so I can assure you that these cards will find their way into UnCommander (although not all of them will be legal). There’s no way we’re missing out on this janky goodness. We are currently deciding how to handle them and writing up their UnCommander card entries. When we’re done, I’ll make another post on this blog to let you know that the cards have been added.
To my knowledge, there are currently no in-depth articles on the main Magic website about Mystery Booster, presumably to avoid spoiling players. You can read more about the set on its MTG Wiki article or Gavin Verhey’s Twitter.
Take care everyone, and always expect the Un-expected!
-Hamster
