#silver border

Art by Ringtail

Card transcription

Spiders Georg 3GU Legendary Creature- Human [rare] When Spiders Georg enters and at the beginning of your upkeep, create a 1/2 green Spider creature token with reach. 2, Sacrifice X Spiders :Add or subtract X from a number or number word on target spell or permanent until end of turn. This effect can’t reduce a number below 1 or a number word below one. 2/4 Watermark: Quandrix Border: Silver

Well, I have to admit the limits of my knowledge when it comes to silver-border magic. How much of a hassle is it to transform a Transformers toy?

My first thought thinking about the card was to first strike.

Well. Not quite. My first thought upon reading the card was to Dinosaurs, Vehicles and Transformers, but my second thought was to First Strike. Due to how damage steps work, you can hit someone with the Ferocious King, and then in the middle of combat, suddenly (as suddenly as you can convert a Transformers toy) turn it into Dinobot Leader before the regular damage, when your Dinosaurs, Vehicles and Transformers can benefit from the buff to hit there and then. For that to work, you need Grimlock to have first (or double) strike and your other creatures not to.

Is it great? Not really, no but it's certainly a nice trick to be able to do with this commander! Neglected Heirloom is also not that easy to find a home for, and thanks to being from a promo set and numbered 1, Grimlock can this way make great use of First Come, First Served.

With several sets of support, there are plenty of good Dinosaurs to pull from, and as you mentioned, a set of Transformers (I have probably read those a time or ten but they all have so much text I give up remembering what they do). Most of them are cheap though. The pickings are slimmer for Vehicles.

Vaultborn Tyrant here can take plenty of advantage of Grimlock's buff to your other creatures as soon as they enter, while also being a Dinosaur that turns into a robot dinosaur when it dies. Seems full of flavor while being good for the deck!

Belligerent Yearling interacts well with the buff too, since it'll take the buff into account to set its base power, while itself still being buffed. Double dipping leads to a 2 drop that can easily attack for 8 damage, though notably it won't trigger from Grimlock entering the battlefield.

One of the things that got me into Magic, truly got me into Magic, was Unglued. When a friend of mine was campaigning to get me to play MtG back in 2002, he had an uphill battle. I'd just stopped playing and collecting Pokémon and didn't want a new TCG hobby. Sure, I'd been interested in Magic since it came out (I can point out a few notable moments), but I'd never had anyone to actually play with and had lost that interest by then.

So. Said friend played Magic, and wanted me to be playing it too. He showed me the art which I loved, taught me the gameplay which confused me, and introduced me to the lunchroom MtG group who were all pretty chill folks. None of these swayed me. Finally, he told me about a joke set which had come out a few years prior. It was a set full of self-referential gags which poked fun at characters, storylines, mechanics, and everything else about the game. This was it. There was space in this complicated, epic card game for lore, for humor, for SQUIRRELS. I was hooked, and that friend built me a (black-bordered) squirrel deck.

I later learned that the silver-bordered joke cards weren't legal to play in the formats that existed, and that my friends who played followed the formats. I bought a few of the joke cards because I thought they were funny or liked the art or both, but never got to play with them.

Fast forward to 2011, when Commander became A Thing in the larger Magic community. It was the ultimate casual format, which meant that I finally felt it was time to suggest using silver-bordered cards among friends (two of the three were in my original MtG group). I think the first card I used in a deck, the one that would prove that at least some of them were fine for regular gameplay, was Land Aid '04.

This card does exactly what a green land ramp card would do at a cost that was normal at that time. They were fine with it. I tried a few more cards in a few other decks, most of which didn't break our games and weren't too far out of the realm of what could be done in normal Magic. Sometimes there was a cute twist, but most of the time the effects cared about a normally irrelevant aspect of the card, like Super Secret Tech in the Riku of Two Reflections deck I was in the process of blinging out.

That was over ten years ago. To this day, I still put a silver-bordered card or two in my Commander decks - Jodah Superfriends runs Alexander Clamilton, Yuriko Ninjas runs B.O.B. (Bevy of Beebles), Saskia used to run Pointy Finger of Doom (flavor home run, but not fast enough for my aggro deck). Chatterfang Squirrels has a mere four: Acornelia, Fashionable Filcher, Earl of Squirrel, Form of the Squirrel, and Land Aid '04; the most egregious card in that deck is a Gaea's Cradle, which I personally feel should be banned in Commander (and my friends may very well ban it themselves if that deck ever gets better than a solid seven).

My friends - people I've been playing with for twenty years and have known for even longer than that - trust me to only pick silver-bordered cards that will enhance the game, rather than break it. They themselves don't play with them, though. I won't deny that it feels a little awkward knowing I've given myself access to a slightly larger card pool than they have, even if they're just denying themselves.

Either way, I can only play these decks with specific friends. Amongst ourselves, we politely ask each other to remove egregious cards (Aura Shards in a Karador, Ghost Chieftain turbo-reanimator deck, for example), and have gotten along about it for over a decade. However, if I brought my Chatterfang deck to a Commander Night or FNM, I'd have to remove four of the least offensive and most on-theme cards in the deck before even leaving the house, just because they care about artwork, make me sing a little song, or were printed in sets that defaulted to silver borders. I would not have to remove Gaea's Cradle.

For those who don't want to sit across from it, maybe you don't realize it, but people who have severe aversions to certain things (trigger warnings for all of these links if this type of thing bothers you) - spiders, body horror, mutilation, etc. - have had to sit across from people playing cards with that kind of artwork this whole time. Even mechanically, Goblin Game and Raging River are perfectly legal, and if I take a reanimator deck to FNM, I can't politely ask my opponent not to play absolute hosers like Relic of Progenitus.

The stigma around silver borders is old, and and persisted throughout just about all casual formats. That's why Mark Rosewater and his team did what they did with Unfinity. They realized that there were plenty of cards that don't break the game, and made it so that people who like that kind of flavor in their game can play it.

So yes. I'll be unashamedly playing Comet, Stellar Pup in my Superfriends deck once I get one. But I'm not planning on removing Alexander Clamilton any time soon, and I've already gushed endlessly about Vorthos, Steward of Myth as a commander.

(Reposting here my comment on this video)

"Who asked for this!? Who asked for Stickers!?” ...Me? I love Un Sets, doing wacky stuff like this is what I sign up for. I don't get to opt-out of my opponents sitting down to play with a full suite of fetchlands, 12 tutors and multiple 2-card infinite win conditions, I think they can put up with my putting 'Dark' in the name of my Master of the Feast on turn 5.

"Has anyone in the history of Un-Sets ever requested Silver Border Cards just be Black Border and Legal in constructed formats?" The question is phrased in the wrong direction. It wasn't about money, if it was about money they wouldn't make a change like this when Unstable got REPRINTED 4 times and still sold it's final bout of product well. It wasn't fans of Un-Sets that wanted them to be Black Border, it's the people who Despise Silver Border Cards that forced WotC's hand into making this change. If you're the kind of person who when asked before 'are Silver Border Cards real Magic Cards?' said 'no, they are not.' this change was made in direct response to YOU.

It's easy to take the hyper cynical route and assume this was purely for money, purely for greed, but that's ignoring both players like me and ignoring what Mark Rosewater has told us directly. This decision was made because there are lots of players who looked at a card like Dr. Julius Jumblemorph or The Big Idea and thought "I'd love to play EDH with this as my Commander!" only to find that the vast majority of players will REFUSE to play with them because they aren't using 'real magic cards'.

Commander is supposed to be a Casual format, but being the most popular way to play and outlawing outright Each and Every Silver Border Card means the only way you'd get to play with Silver Border Cards you love would be after managing to get a group of people who won't sneer at you for it.

KNOIVES (the silver border indicates this is a joke card)

fun fact: the max amount of damage you can deal to yourself this way in singleton EDH is 98 damage! wow!

Some of the folks over at the Inventor’s Fair discord server and I have been designing a silver bordered Magic set, and it’s getting close to completion! If anyone wants to join in and help out, feel free to join on in and play a few rounds of Sportsball with us!

So aside from designing totally new cards for an un-set on Arena, you could absolutely program in some pre-existing ones. Here are the types of already existing un-cards I most want and think are probably most feasible to add to Arena. I know @markrosewater​ is likely to want to do all new stuff and particularly stuff that can only work in digital, but I think there’s a lot of potential fun to be had by getting any and all silver border cards we can into digital.

Here are the broad strokes groups of cards I hope could be added or inspire new cards for such a set.

1. Dice Rolling Cards

We already do coin flips, and what is a D6 if not a fancy coin? The big investment on this is probably making a dice rolling animation.

2. Watermark Cards

I suspect the way cards are handled in Arena means there’s already a lot of stuff the game can recognize. Even if watermarks aren’t already something it can recognize, chances are it could be programmed, and I think it means it’s likely that the game can be programmed to care about them. I’m thinking stuff like artists matter like Artful Looter, rarity matters like Rare-B-Gone, and premium cards like Super Secret Tech.

3. Host/Augment

I think this one is more feasible than it might seem at first, though it does create a lot of work with the work around I have in mind. So if you can’t easily program these cards to just interact the way that they do IRL, I think you could program every possible combination of host/augment cards and just have it so the original host card object is replaced by an appropriate combined card object when you play an augment on to it. Essentially Common Iguana would be its own card, Half-Squirrel, Half- would be its own card, and then when you played it onto Common Iguana, both of them would disappear as far as the game is concerned and you’d have one new card called Half-Squirrel, Half-Iguana. Seems no matter how you do it this is probably a great deal of work, but it’s worth it if you ask me.

4. Double Cards

I have no idea really if the game can potentially handle these. I know MTGO can’t, so chances probably aren’t great. But if it can, bring them on. These encourage a special sort of grudge between friends that would be so delicious to taste on Arena.

5. Subgames

Ok, this one I’m incredibly doubtful could actually work. It’s probably an insurmountable amount of work to even try to make it happen. But gosh are these a special kind of fun.

6. Booster Opening

My hunch is you could approximate these by providing a way to choose a set and then just randomly generating the appropriate number and rarity of cards to choose from. The cards just disappear after you “open” the booster and don’t go into your collection. They just exist for that game. Also since it’s free and wouldn’t impact your collection if you do it that way, you could do more of these kinds of cards than you normally might.

7. Variant Cards

[Tumblr is being weird and won’t upload my image of six different Sly Spies]

Forgot these in the first pass at this, but I love them and want more of them. 

Broadly speaking, I’d be happy to see any and all of this in a digital un-set.