It turns out that Magic’s head designer thought that people would rather have foiled cards than playtest cards in Mystery Boosters, so they only handed out playtest cards at conventions.
Magic: The Gathering’s latest expansion, Mystery Box, is a combination reprint and hilarious Un-joke set. But only if you get the boosters at conventions. If you get them at a local store, they’ll just come with regular old cards that you could get anywhere else.
The Mystery Box expansion began to make waves last weekend when a booster draft was held at MagicFest Richmond. Each Mystery Booster pack contained the usual assortment of rares, commons, and uncommons in various colors, but they also contained a single “playtest” card that had never been printed before.
And it wasn’t hard to see why. The playtest cards were quite obviously just pieces of paper pasted to a regular Magic: The Gathering card and given placeholder art and card descriptions. Some of those cards were just for gags, but other cards seemed extremely powerful–so much that each card is marked as not eligible for constructed play.
Even though these playtest cards could only be played in drafts and then never again, Magic players still wanted them. They were unique and interesting, and above all, funny.
Lead Magic designer Mark Rosewater recently published a blog post explaining he’s being bombarded by players asking why they couldn’t get Mystery Booster packs with playtest cards in them at their local stores. He explained that he assumed that most players would want the standard foil card that would at least have a chance for big value.
“I think players are treating the playtest cards far more seriously than we were. They were designed to be fun to read and maybe play once in a Mystery Booster deck. They were light, fluffy pieces of entertainment,” wrote Rosewater. “I’m constantly getting messages from players, here and on other social media, how they want more reprints of cards for their decks, so we thought a foil slot filled with stuff we know people play in decks would be more desirable.”
It looks like Rosewater may have misjudged the community on that call. Mystery Box cards aren’t currently listed on Magic marketplaces yet, but a Convention Edition of Mystery Box is currently listed on eBay with a price of $999.
(Source: Tumblr)
