Beyond confusing.
After what feels like forever waiting, at least in the grand scheme of the intense release schedule we have now, Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed and the Beyond Booster is finally here. This tidbit of information may surprise you, with the release quietly coming and going after Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 and right before we jump into Bloomburrow spoiler season, which kicked off proper on Tuesday, by the way.
As usual, this weird release timing is not exactly Wizard of the Coast’s fault, but we’ll get into that soon. But the result is a Magic set that is released with minimal context based on a series of video games that, while still shockingly popular by sales numbers (as in, one of the bestselling franchises there is), has seemed to have passed popular video gaming culture by after the release of its fourth major release in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Holy moly, Black Flag came out in 2013? When did I get so old? But anyway, this Universes Beyond release has just disappointed me.
The Beyond Booster
Market Price: $58.49
Market Price: $94.38
Market Price: $216.79
The first problem — and maybe the biggest problem — with Assassin’s Creed is the distribution model. You can only buy Assassin’s Creed in Beyond Boosters (and smaller Collector Boosters), a horrifying cousin of the ill-fated and already canceled Epilogue Booster that debuted in March of the Machine: The Aftermath.
Beyond Boosters feature a whopping seven cards (three Uncommons, one Land or Scene card, one Rare or Mythic, and a “Booster Fun” card), these boosters are obviously quite small and require you to open quite a few of them to obtain any of the cards you may want. I’m sure that Wizards isn’t happy about having to run these out, after all, they already have done their best to get rid of planned Epilogue releases by awkwardly releasing the planned cards into the sets they were supposed to be attached to (see The Big Score in Outlaws of Thunder Junction).
Market Price: $26.43
Market Price: $182.84
Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed, as a fully standalone set already designed for this distribution model already had to be run out this way, overarching context be damned. The set is, by this design, un-drafted, removing a shocking amount of demand for the set immediately out of the potential pool of buyers. I imagine there will also be a fair amount of players who may be invested in Assassin’s Creed, but not that invested, Magic fans who look to buy packs and are immediately put off by the fact that they’re getting half the cards they’re used to, no matter the actual price point.
Even if there could potentially be space for new innovations in the booster space, that train was missed by Wizards long ago as its customers became entirely used to the 15-card draftable booster or something that promised even more opening fun like the Set booster. Something I haven’t mentioned yet — the Beyond Boosters you can buy do carry a themed experience promise that the Set Boosters used to have — for example, you may find an Assassin, the place in which your assassination takes place, the tool of assassination, the target, and so on. This is also a cool idea that may affect people’s enjoyment of opening them, I hope at least. But from any other perspective, this set has automatically been hampered by having to be distributed in a pack design that already was dead long before its arrival.
A Solution Looking For a Problem
Market Price: $30.89
The weirdest thing about Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed, to me at least, is not the booster distribution or the theme itself being a bit thing — it’s the Modern legality and the promise of “evergreen staples.”
I get it — there’s no way this would be a Standard-legal set. For some glaring reason, this wasn’t just a selection of Commander Precons. The only option then, if you want to sell a single dang pack I guess, is Modern legality. The problem with that is every single card in this set will certainly not sniff in a Modern deck, especially in the Modern Horizons 3 era. Maybe I’m wrong, but that also seems like the domineering opinion. As a result, this set looks like a bunch of Commander Precon Specials™ shoved into a bizarre booster product.
The Commander hype for this set is, rightfully, off the charts. There are cool designs here. There are a lot of cool designs here, even. But none of them are scratching the surface of Modern playable (especially post Modern Horizons 3. You know, the set released two weeks before this one). So, by a necessity, it is a Modern legal set with Commander cards and no appeal to anybody outside of the Assassin’s Creed fandom. A solution to a created problem, that problem being the fact that they had to find some way to make anything out of the Assassin’s Creed deal signed by somebody outside of Studio X. Honestly, I feel bad for them that they were put into such a position, and maybe, all things considered, they did a truly inspired job.
The Wrong Release Window (Again)
Another video game tie-in for a Magic release, another delayed release making Wizards of the Coast look accidentally incapable. Going back to the intro, the release timing for Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed is accidentally horrendous, getting stepped on both by the tail end of Modern Horizons 3 hype and the spoilers for the highly-anticipated Bloomburrow. But, much like the seemingly random release of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate (which saw great additional success when its delayed partner game was eventually released), it has been left orphaned by its accompanying video game release (in this case Assassin’s Creed: Shadows) being delayed into later in the year than originally planned.
However, unlike a video game, Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed has a ton of work that had to be done upfront and specific windows that had to be hit for investor’s sake and otherwise. Pushing a Magic set backward has difficult consequences, crowding them into the release window of other sets, causing them to sit on already produced products for long periods, or having to move production windows with already-overloaded production facilities. The idea of a synced-up release like this is appealing, after all, if Baldur’s Gate 3 and the accompanying Magic set had been able to be released in conjunction with each other, the Magic expansion probably would have been wildly successful rather than a context-less flop. Much in the same way, if there was a new Assassin’s Creed game dominating the nerd news cycle at the same time the set was released, plenty of other flaws could be overlooked. Dang it video games, why can’t you be on time?
I Must Admit, it’s Just Not for Me
Market Price: $32.56
Maybe this is where part of my confusion about this set comes from, and this is where I admit that I could just be wrong. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and the first Assassin’s Creed are the only games in the series that have ever remotely grabbed me. I haven’t played many of the rest and for those that I have I quickly fell off. It’s not often that Magic isn’t for me, but this is one of them, which is why I tried to focus more on the institutional failings of Wizards of the Coast’s decisions. There is a world where this could have been for me if it was a set of sweet Commander Precons or something that actually had Modern power-level cards contained within it. However, that was always going to be a tough ask with Modern Horizons 3 releasing just before Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed. If this set demanded my attention, as so many others have previously, I perhaps could have come to have loved it.
But in Assassin’s Creed, Wizards has created an unfortunately ignorable product. You may engage with it if you have the perfect card for your Commander strategy or have a favorite character from the series. But otherwise, this set will do nothing for you because Wizards gave nobody a reason to care, which is probably the saddest part about all of this.
There is a lot of Magic these days that isn’t for a huge swath of people, but the company has continued to make people care about Magic (for better or worse). Maybe it’s good that there is finally a product that is just for one extremely defined audience, but damn is it a hell of a change of pace to adjust to as an enfranchised Magic fan.