Infinity (opens in new tab) is Magic: The Gathering’s next un-set—a collection of unusual and nonlinear cards intended for non-competitive play. It’s themed around Myra the Magnificent’s Interplanetary Astrotorium of Fun, a traveling amusement park made of interconnected spaceships, a retro sci-fi take on carnivals and circuses.
Un-sets generally contain cards that diverge from it or outright contravene the normal rules of Magic and fair treatment or break the fourth wall to interact with the other players. Unglued, the first un-set, closed a card called Prismatic Wardrobe, which could decimate any other card as long as it didn’t share a color with the clothes worn by its console. Unstitched also gave us I’m Elastomer, You’re Glue, which permitted you to retarget a spell or capacity at the cost of talking in the poem for the remainder of the game.
Opening Ceremony, the card disclosed by Infinity PC Gamer, isn’t quite as peculiar or expected to get you slapped on the face.
The ceremony, six-mana red wizardry, gives you one mana of each color, such as color, then means allowing you to open a thruster pack of new Amazing cards, which you can cast once at all up to the end of the current turn. Infinity is designed for drafts (though it is the first un-set to be accessible in Collector boosters, which will encompass 100% foil cards), so it’s safe to assume you’ll be going to play it with an unopened booster pack nearby. I hope you create an excellent drawing!
These sorts of meta-level shenanigans seem to be my personal fave. There are several existing cards that allow you to use a card you already own from outside the game, such as the various Wish spellcasters, but I particularly like Last-Minute Chopping (opens in a new tab). This Christmas-themed holiday promo card allows you to ask an opponent for a present, to which they can either say “yes” and put a card they own but aren’t using that in this game into your hand, or say “no” and let you control one of their permanents. The king of this nonsense isn’t a Magic card, but rather the Violation Of copyright card on the Edge. Already a silly phenomenon about conspiracy theories competing for the control of reality,
Killer Cosplay, one of Infinity’s other oddball cards revealed so far(opens in new tab), means allowing you to morph a monster into a copy of some other creature that costs the same amount of auras that’s a creature with the same cost, so I hope you have a good memory or your opponent is fine with you googling stats mid-game.
There are apparently numerous cards in Infinity that involve die-rolling (which Adventures in the Forgotten Realms make heavy use of), as another revealed card, The Space Family Robinson, a 1/1 creature card portraying ogres on holiday, gets a +1/+1 anytime you roll a die and gains trample on any turn where you roll three dice or more.
As the amusement park is staffed by robotic clowns, the collection also introduces a new critter type for robots. The Assembled Ensemble card manages to combine with them to start giving you power equivalent to the number of robots you control, and it enables you to conjure a 1/1 white Clown Robot anytime you cast a spell with an artifact creature in its artwork.
So, yes, it is a complicated set. The comedy writers Sean ‘Seanbaby(opens in new tab)’ Reiley and Katherine De Vere, Corbyn Lauder, and Graham Stark of LoadingReadyRun, who are responsible for the Wizards internet sitcom Friday Nights, were part of the Infinity creative team (opens in new tab).
