The amount of flack that MaRo is receiving for this product and the lands on Twitter is really surprising.
I think some of it is understandable though, it feels like the ratio of full art lands to other cards is off because Un- sets have 1 per booster pack and I know I'm not alone in that part of the reason I buy Un- sets is for the weird stuff like chickens and squirrels, but a big part is also the lands.
They could have doubled the amount of full art lands in each deck (one foil, one regular), without significantly affecting their cost, but making the overall perceived value of the set much better.
The price I'm seeing now is $50 and that's quite a bit for Un- cards. If it had been $30 or even $40, I would have gladly bought two sets (one to keep, one to kitbash) but at $50 it's going to be one and done.
For a normal set sure but who thought they wouldn't do full art lands for this? Unsets are where the idea first came from.
The only legal cards (in sanctioned formats) are the lands (and one of the whys casuals bought it in the first place). As a casual it is the seccond product with fullart lands he is getting this year. (assuming he is a casual)
Un sets are fun and all, but it's a pet project for Wizards that gets people to buy in with fancy lands. When you have a just released set with fancy lands and now this back to back, it's too much.
Just like everything else Wizards did in the last year and continues to do... People thought the lottery cards were bad. That was mild compared to all of this other stuff.
invention/expedition/whatever-those-were-called lottery was not inherently bad. if you treated those as a nice bonus to what you get in pack it was actually good. they were problematic when you take into account that people can have gambling problems. the fact that this is preconstructed product that contains limited number of those lands speaks a lot of how confident wotc is with the product. by which i mean not at all and feel the need to boost sales by making parts of it artificially scarce.
full art lands are always welcome but they lost all novelty for me. including this we have four products with full art lands in 12 months span. it's just not interesting anymore.
/edit
i have just noticed holostamp on those. why do they have it?
Which 12 month span had 4 full art land releases?
We have only had so many full art lands:
February 2020 - Unsanctioned
January 2020 - Theros Beyond Death
June 2019 - Modern Horizons (although technically these are Snow-covered full arts)
December 2017 - Unstable
July 2017 - Hour of Devastation
April 2017 - Amonkhet
Jan 2016 - Oath of the Gatewatch
Also, I am not really sure full art lands are boring. Each one of the above sets had wildly different art, composition and theme. It is not like we were given a bunch of generic looking islands.
The Amonket full art lands showed the plane at Bolas' height of power, while the Hours ones featured the same scene but at sunset with the destroyed/crumbling architecture.
The unstable lands had no borders.
Theros Nyx lands do not feature terrain at all.
Unsanctioned lands have a unique frame.
Modern Horizons has snow-covered lands.
If anything, the only "generic" ones are the Battle for Zendikar ones (and even they still have Hedrons and floating rocks and junk).
Secret Lairs also had full art lands. That should make it four.
What I'm trying to say is not that they are boring but that as they become more and more common they are losing what they were intended to be - the feel of uniqueness. Instead of genuine rarity (they were released every few years) we get artificial scarcity (why are not all lands in this product full art at that price point? it would even be cheaper to use only one design for lands in unsanctioned but they decided to use multiple.)
The amount of flack that MaRo is receiving for this product and the lands on Twitter is really surprising.
To be fair, the subsection of Magic players who enjoy the wackiness of Un-sets is small. Combine that with the fact that these Un-sets provide nothing legitimate or usable to the actual game of Magic, and I can fully understand why people are upset that development time was spent on it. These cards are amusing jokes and unsubtle nods to other aspects of the game, but they provide nothing of real value.
The amount of flack that MaRo is receiving for this product and the lands on Twitter is really surprising.
To be fair, the subsection of Magic players who enjoy the wackiness of Un-sets is small. Combine that with the fact that these Un-sets provide nothing legitimate or usable to the actual game of Magic, and I can fully understand why people are upset that development time was spent on it. These cards are amusing jokes and unsubtle nods to other aspects of the game, but they provide nothing of real value.
I won't deny your attitude exists or isn't common but it's always sort of funny to me that there's a line for how silly a paper game where we're pretending to be wizards summoning creatures or whatever can be. It's cool and totally serious if I summon the Dark Lord Griselbrand to destroy my enemy, but if you name him Gooslebrand and put a picture of a goose on that's just too much, man.
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I think some of it is understandable though, it feels like the ratio of full art lands to other cards is off because Un- sets have 1 per booster pack and I know I'm not alone in that part of the reason I buy Un- sets is for the weird stuff like chickens and squirrels, but a big part is also the lands.
They could have doubled the amount of full art lands in each deck (one foil, one regular), without significantly affecting their cost, but making the overall perceived value of the set much better.
The price I'm seeing now is $50 and that's quite a bit for Un- cards. If it had been $30 or even $40, I would have gladly bought two sets (one to keep, one to kitbash) but at $50 it's going to be one and done.
What I'm trying to say is not that they are boring but that as they become more and more common they are losing what they were intended to be - the feel of uniqueness. Instead of genuine rarity (they were released every few years) we get artificial scarcity (why are not all lands in this product full art at that price point? it would even be cheaper to use only one design for lands in unsanctioned but they decided to use multiple.)
To be fair, the subsection of Magic players who enjoy the wackiness of Un-sets is small. Combine that with the fact that these Un-sets provide nothing legitimate or usable to the actual game of Magic, and I can fully understand why people are upset that development time was spent on it. These cards are amusing jokes and unsubtle nods to other aspects of the game, but they provide nothing of real value.
I won't deny your attitude exists or isn't common but it's always sort of funny to me that there's a line for how silly a paper game where we're pretending to be wizards summoning creatures or whatever can be. It's cool and totally serious if I summon the Dark Lord Griselbrand to destroy my enemy, but if you name him Gooslebrand and put a picture of a goose on that's just too much, man.