The Nonsense Files: The Many Frames of Mystery Booster 2

From the archives of Wizards of the Coast, we present to you: The Nonsense Files. Chronicling the design journey of Mystery Booster 2, this time-twisting, game-changing product has everything Magic superfans adore. With reprints from every year of Magic's history, it's an experience you won't want to miss. You can discover the mystery for yourself at Magic events like MagicCon: Chicago on February 21–23, 2025. Badges go on sale on December 9, 2024, so get ready for the excitement of Mystery Booster 2 and more!

Check out MTGFestivals.com for more details on the event. For now, we present to you the first episode of The Nonsense Files.

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Over two years ago, I was approached by Gavin Verhey to work on a very, very special project. We'd be bringing back one of the most beloved products from recent Magic history, and this wouldn't just be a sequel. We wanted to make it better than ever.

Who am I? My name's Eric, and I'm a senior game designer working on Magic. I joined Wizards of the Coast in 2021 after twelve years as the lead designer of another collectible game.

I started playing Magic in 1993. My classmates brought back Limited Edition (Alpha) cards from Gen Con and let my friends and I borrow them. I then bought my own Unlimited Edition starter deck, a dozen booster packs of Arabian Nights, followed by two boxes of Antiquities, and that was it for me. I was hooked. Now, it was time to put over 30 years of Magic knowledge to the test.

Refining Our Finest Frames

One of the absolute wackiest things we tried was putting Progenitus into the Future Sight frame. We tried different ways to arrange the ten mana pips into the six visible circles. Do we let them continue below the text box? Do we double them up? Nothing looked very good and would have likely required reminder text.

We settled on putting O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami in the Future Sight frame. It uses all six symbol spots and looks great in the frame.

The Future Sight frame on vanilla creatures is probably my favorite treatment we've ever done, so even though space on the sheet was limited, we wanted to find a few vanilla creatures to reprint.

Memnite and Forest Bear were easy. For Kobolds of Kher Keep, we had to go to Aaron Forsythe, vice president of Magic R&D. We knew we shouldn't use existing token artwork on a Magic card, like turning a Bird token into Squadron Hawk or something. But for a token of a specific existing Magic card maybe we could? In this instance, we got the okay, and the artwork that had been for the token of Kobolds of Kher Keep found a home on the actual Magic card.

As an aside, my Kobold deck back in the day featured Rohgahh of Kher Keep, of course, because he was the mastermind of the entire Kobold civilization. On my personal copy, I blacked out part of "All your Kobolds of Kher Keep gain +2/+2" because it seemed very unfair that Crimson Kobolds and Crookshank Kobolds didn't get to share in the Kobold glory. No one ever complained about it, both because things like that were pretty loose in the 1990s and my Kobold deck was terrible and may never have won a game. That partially blacked-out Rohgahh of Kher Keep became the only card I ever lost at a convention, so if you ever find one, let me know!

Most Magic sets aren't able to reprint cards with specific references from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms or Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, our two Dungeons & Dragons sets. They aren't part of Magic's Multiverse, much like Un- sets. But, in the true chaos of Mystery Booster 2, we were freely able to mix them in! Once we confirmed that, we did a pass and added quite a few more specific D&D cards. You might be able to wish your way out of a dilemma or attack with a miniature giant space hamster or kitten combo for the win!

One category of cards we decided we shouldn't use was tournament and other play promos. We had some ideas for reprinting really bizarre-looking cards like the textless Giant Growth or even the textless Cryptic Command, but our product architect, Zakeel Gordon, wisely took those off the table. We shouldn't invalidate the work that players had put in to earn these promos, even if it was two decades ago. We had more than enough wacky things planned, so it wasn't needed.

Getting Digital

Of all the strange things we did, the one that caused the most work for the downstream teams was including the digital-only printings of cards. The data for many digital cards is archived similarly to paper cards, so I asked if we could just print them. It wasn't quite that easy, but the teams went above and beyond to figure out how to make it happen.

Wizards had never done anything like this before, but we now have the technology to do it again (if for some strange reason we ever want to). It turns out cards from Vintage Masters and Tempest Remastered are easy to print directly to paper. More individual work was required for each card from the other sets, like the Master's Edition sets and the Magic Online Deck Series, Treasure Chests, and Duel Decks: Mirrodin Pure vs. New Phyrexia. This last one was special, being the first set Gavin ever worked on even before joining Wizards! All of these sets have their own unique set symbols, so we really wanted to try to get them in, and the downstream teams were thankfully able to embrace the spirit of nonsense.

While the Future Sight frame was busy providing the first foils for a handful of cards, the rare and mythic rare sheet was busy going the other way! There are about 20 cards on it that were previously available only in traditional foil, but now non-foil versions exist (outside of Secret Lair). Most notable might be the Buy-a-Box promo card Nexus of Fate, but there are face cards from Duel Decks and Commander decks, some From the Vault cards, Game Night cards, Premium Deck Series cards, and even a Planeswalker deck planeswalker!

Here's a conversation I had with Jefferson, Magic's unrivaled archivist of card files.

"Hey, do we have the foil sheets for Seventh Edition, Eighth Edition, and Ninth Edition?"
"Yeah, for sure."
"Those have black borders, and the foil is on a separate layer, right?"
"Basically, yes."
"Could we just print those without the foil part, making them non-foil black-border cards?"
"Um … *long pause* … maybe?"
One to two weeks later.
"Yeah, I think we can do that"

Again, it wasn't quite that easy, but it wasn't remaking the cards from scratch, so we did it! We picked cards with artworks that weren't previously available on black-border cards. We ended up with about eight of them.

The Very Few Limits of Mystery Booster 2

Are there cards that were too powerful or annoying to include in Mystery Booster 2, even if they're only opened once every five drafts? Turns out, the answer is yes. There's a few we had on the initial list where we decided the play patterns in Limited were just that bad.

The most obvious are the buyback triplets. If you've never played against Capsize, Constant Mists, or Sprout Swarm, I envy you. Sprout Swarm mirrors in triple Future Sight Draft on Magic Online still give me nightmares. Some nights, my brain isn't convinced those games actually ended, and I may wake up and find myself clicking 70 times as fast as possible every end step.

Pack Rat is another classic "just do this until the game ends" card that's hard to interact with. To its credit, it usually does end the game, just not in a particularly fun or interactive way.

Waterfront Bouncer doesn't look too problematic, but the correct play is often to discard whatever card you drew and bounce your opponent's creatures until you draw a massive threat. It ends up making an unfun situation for both players.

Kabuto Moth seems harmless and might have been fine. But if you played Champions of Kamigawa Limited as much as we did, you'd want to err on the side of caution as well. Blocking becomes near impossible when it's active.

Don't worry, there are still plenty of unfair cards in Mystery Booster 2, like Mind Twist and Equilibrium, but we wanted to make sure you didn't run into anything from that group too often, and these were some of the worst offenders and easiest to cut.

Demystifying the Mystery Booster 2 Limited Experience

"Gavin, how about some draft-affecting cards from Conspiracy? Maybe an actual conspiracy or two? Is that something we could do?"
"Not only can we, we must! The true essence of the chaos draft demands it."

Mystery Booster 2 has a handful of cards like Clockwork Librarian and Agent of Acquisitions that affect the draft, alongside some conspiracies on the colorless sheet and the playtest sheet. We couldn't include Planechase planes or Archenemy schemes for many reasons, but just in case, we asked about shrinking them down to the standard card size. That was a no go.

There's a handful of cards in the set that care about creature types. Typal strategies are fun, and if you get a typal effect to work in Mystery Booster 2 Limited, you feel like you're getting away with something. There's not a huge volume, but we didn't want to exclude fun cards because they played into typal strategies. Here are some of the different black typal cards:

This mattered because we had many, many old cards that were not printed with the creature types that they now have. For every creature type the set cared about, we wanted to check that we weren't printing a card that had that particular type "hidden." We didn't want players to have to look up creature types for every new creature card that was passed to them during a draft. That sounds boring and very much not Mystery Booster 2!

So, we compiled a list of every creature type that cards in the set cared about and every creature card in the set with subtypes that didn't match what was printed. This was not a quick process, but we think we resolved all the problems. We changed a few, but the one I remember was this:

We wanted to print the retro frame version from Urza's Saga, of course, but Cleric was relevant on at least two cards (Edgewalker and Daru Spiritualist). So, we decided instead to print the Duel Decks: Phyrexia vs. The Coalition version so you'd know you can make mana with it and Edgewalker! I can't guarantee we caught everything relevant during our intensive iterative process, but don't feel you need to spend your time looking up creature types. If it matters, it's printed on the card! We hope!

Each of the five colors has a number cards with off-color mana costs in their rules text. We generally like these kinds of effects in Limited. They often wind up with the players in that color pair, but they're also playable with just the card's main color. This set more than most wanted that kind of flexibility. We found two or three cards for each ally-color pair and one for each enemy-color pair. Here's black's list:

Red – Crypt Champion, Nightfire Giant, and Olivia's Bloodsworn
Blue – Puppet Conjurer and Shoreline Salvager
White – Unburial Rites
Green – Urborg Repossession

Along with the positive comes the negative. Magic, especially in older sets, has a rich history of color hosers, and we weren't going to ignore those cards. We balanced the amount of them among all colors, but definitely not the quality. Deepwood Legate and Virtue's Ruin are of slightly different power levels. Here are some of black's color-hosing cards:

White – Stromgald Crusader, Virtue's Ruin, and Massacre
Green – Blightbeetle and Deepwood Legate

Post-Playtest Results

Overall, the initial playtesting went great! The most notable piece of feedback we got was that we were a bit too heavy on retro frame cards that weren't especially playable in Limited and a bit light on combat tricks. In each color, we cut one to three of the former for one to three of the latter. Part of the fun of Mystery Booster 2 is that you never know what's going to happen, in combat or anywhere else, so we made sure we had a truly wide variety of combat tricks to fill every role.

Two of Gavin's playtest cards come from bizarre cards I tried (and failed) to get into the set. I have very fond memories of the 1997 Magic video game commonly known as Shandalar. It featured cards from the "Astral" set with unique random effects that wouldn't work in paper Magic, at least back then. Some of them would actually work fine today (Not you, Faerie Dragon. Go home!), but some issues prevented us from printing cards like Call from the Grave. Similarly, Stone Drake calls back to a series of hypothetical promo cards we did in the early 2010s. I really appreciate Gavin fitting these into the playtest cards!

Another obscure thing we tried to fit into the set was alternate-art Chinese-language cards. Restrictions on depictions of skeletons and piracy in that region meant some older art was altered or recommissioned for the Chinese-language versions. The main issue was that the white-border and Future Sight sheets already had a ton of great candidates. All the other sheets used straight pickups, and we couldn't just do a straight pickup of them, as they weren't in English … or could we? If we reprinted a vanilla creature, it wouldn't matter that you couldn't read the text. There was exactly one vanilla creature that had alternate artwork in its Chinese-language printing: Horned Turtle! The card has some very oddball artwork that very much fits into Mystery Booster 2's milieu.

Once we decided to do that, we figured we should pick a vanilla creature in some other languages. That's how you ended up with several non-English vanilla creatures in Mystery Booster 2. Yes, I did try and find the longest possible name for the German vanilla creature, because why not? I took German in college. I know what it's all about (not brevity).

Not only did we bring some digital artwork and set symbols to tabletop Magic, we were also able to get some cards into tabletop Magic for the first time! Those cards had to be put onto the white-border or Future Sight sheets, so we limited ourselves to three. Two were from the Arena Base Set: Goblin Gang Leader and Mardu Outrider. We did ask about Inspiring Commander, but that's a color-pie break we didn't want to see in paper. The other new-to-Magic card was Velukan Dragon, a card from Magic: The Gathering for Dreamcast. Secret Lair had recently printed Arden Angel, and we weren't about to let Secret Lair one-up Mystery Booster 2 on weird obscure cards, were we? Certainly not! Now the Dragon can join the Angel in filling out players' Dragon and Angel collections.

There were a few early Magic artists whose work we adore. We wanted a lot of old-frame cards anyway, so we made sure to find a bit of room for them to shine. Rebecca Guay's artwork is on over fifteen cards in the set, DiTerlizzi and the Hildebrandts each have more than ten, and Richard Kane Ferguson and the Foglios have five or more, along with many, many other classic Magic artists being represented on a few cards. At this point in Magic's history, many players have never seen these artists' work. We wanted to introduce them to newer players and bring smiles to the faces of long-time fans.

There were a small number of cards we wanted to reprint with printed text that was highly misleading. Even though the first twelve sheets were pickup sheets, their whole point being that we didn't have to lay out all the cards again, the teams downstream let us have a few partial layout reconfigurations. Most of those went to the cards from those Magic Online releases I mentioned earlier, but we wanted to clarify the effects on a small number of cards. The most notable of these was Blood Frenzy. The part that reads "Cast this spell only before the combat damage step" is kind of important to know about. Now, a version exists with the actual rules text!

One of the hardest, most unexpected parts of this process was deciding which Future Sight–frame cards didn't get foil versions. There was a lot of debate to get to the list we ended up with. We loved all of our selections for the Future Sight sheet, and it was very hard to judge which 22 we loved the least—if we didn't love them, we would have put something else on the sheet! The last two cuts were Hunting Cheetah and Tsabo's Web with its all-new artwork, and those were tough cuts. But cuts had to be made, and I promise we considered every single card as an option. The reason we had to do it was because we needed those 22 slots for …

Future Sight–Frame, Traditional Foil–Only Cards and Other Oddities

We knew from the beginning that the Future Sight sheet had a traditional foil version. If we wanted to, we could add some different cards for a super-special surprise. We ended up with two primary wacky ideas.

The first came from me trying to put the old Vanguard cards from the late '90s into Mystery Booster 2. We immediately realized that it wouldn't work. They were just far too unbalanced, even when only one person played even the weakest one. Since we wanted you to be able to play with every card you opened in Limited, they were a non-starter. I was a bit disappointed since the artwork on those cards is so emblematic of early Magic and its story. It was then that I realized that almost all of these characters now had existing Magic cards—something that early Magic didn't really do for its most powerful characters. Maybe we could print this artwork on their now existing cards? Magic cards can't use the artwork of other Magic cards, but these Vanguard cards weren't normal Magic cards. We had to check with Aaron Forsythe and others in the studio, but eventually, we were cleared to use these very obscure pieces on the traditional foil–only Future Sight sheet. We're proud of how they turned out, they look fantastic in person.

The second idea came from a brainstorm about the craziest thing we could include. At one point, we were going to print Gleemox, a promotional card from Magic Online, but that was too out there even for us. Alchemy: Dominaria released about a month after we started this project, and Oracle of the Alpha was an immediate smash. Hmm … that got our wheels turning. We looked at all the digital-only mechanics and decided that conjure and boons were the most practical mechanics for paper Magic. They all needed the acorn symbol, as those mechanics don't work in tournament play, and they ended up as uncommon so we could print that acorn stamp. We couldn't mix the acorn stamp with the foil stamps on the rare and mythic rare sheet.

That's all for today! That's all for today! Join me next time as I explain how the heck I picked the 1,700 cards from across three decades of Magic to reprint!

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We'll return tomorrow with the story of how we designed Mystery Booster 2 for Draft. You can draft all of these exciting cards at upcoming events like MagicCon: Chicago on February 21–23, 2025. Draft Mystery Booster 2 alongside fellow Magic fans, meet your favorite content creators, experience the artwork of Magic, and more! Tickets go on sale December 9, 2024, so get ready for a celebration of Magic in the Windy City!