When Universes Beyond Is Truly Cynical

When you actively try NOT to say it's a cashgrab and physically can't, it's probably a cash grab.

Product fatigue is so fkin real right now

You're telling me that Ubisoft made something as a cash grab!?! I can't believe it

Ugh the immersion break aside, i hate that they made Ezio have a 5 color identity on top. Im getting so tired of all these 5 color commanders for different themes theyve been pushing. Building 5c used to be a somewhat quirky thing with commander choices like Progenitus or Child of Alara but nowadays I rarely play in a pod without a 5c deck.

the montage of "art featuring a hooded guy posing dramatically" cracked me up

Remember that feeling of climbing a tower and the map suddenly fills with shit you don't care about? That was the flavor they were going for in this set.

When the lead designer says "uhh. i played the first two games in high school" on drive to work, you know little passion was put into this

I was GENUINELY amazed that Assassin’s Creed wasn’t given Commander Precons; One for our Protagonists and Antagonists.

If anything, the only AC character that should be 5 colours is Desmond Miles.

Imagine the alternate universe where we have duel decks, George Washington vs. Karl Marx. But seriously, if they were only going to do 100 cards anyway then it really should have been a commander deck. That would even address the issue of all the characters looking similar since a cohesive aesthetic is often a plus there.

"a Ubisoft original" is not a selling point

I have 2 friends who love Assassin's Creed, it's their favourite video game series, I explained one of them the intricacies of these boosters. It ended up as "Just by all the singles from this secondary market" The other friend I learnt from my mistake "It's your birthday coming up, I'll buy you $50 worth of cards you pick out". I wish they'd stop making buying their product so confusing...

Free running just feels like a missed opportunity to me. As it is, it's just a reworked prowl cost. Which works for rogues because they are about being sneaky. Same thing with ninjas and ninjutsu. Both are mechanics that take your opponent by surprise. If you wanted an assassin specific mechanic that represents a different way of being sneaky, then do that. Have cards that phase out when you play them and only phase in under specific circumstances. Have cards that have a cool effect when they phase in. Have cards with plot, that represent the scheming of the Templars and the plans of assassins on a mission. Use the disguise, and morph mechanics to present game states where you're not sure who's who. Make an elite assassin that has an ability that says that it cannot be named. For those assassins that happen to also be ninjas bring back ninjutsu. Hell you could even make use of the new outlaw batching. So you have assassins that care about fellow outlaws. If you wanted to do a mechanic that represented parkour, make it similar to storm but instead of copying the spell the spells that you cast get more effects for every spell cast prior to it. Or perhaps spells with free running could add an effect to the next spell that you cast. Using momentum and rapid action to overcome obstacles is what parkour is all about. There could have been a mechanic to represent that but instead they went with the laziest possible interpretation of the idea.

I'm glad more people are pointing out that they're full priced, 7-card boosters. I'm excited for some of the characters sure but like.. C'mon guys. WotC (And worse, Hasbro) is going to take this hype and equate it to the market shifting towards 7-card boosters so long as they hit the 'memberberries nostalgia and we should really know better as fans, players and enjoyers of one of the already more expensive hobbies on the planet. This is not how we make this more affordable.

People wanted assains creed games to be shorter but they made the set instead

What you are feeling when you look at Assassins Creed is similar to what I feel whenever I look at Universes Beyond. I just can't stop seeing them as advertisements.

Homelands was 8 card boosters and 140 cards! Its a call back! lol.

The entire direction of Magic these days is so screwed up I barely even recognize it.

I definitely agree with a lot of your points here. I was the biggest UB defender for the longest time because I really liked how the design was a sort of top-down "make this card feel like the moment/character, archetypes be damned" versus in-universe sets that feel like they decided on the draft archetype first and molded everything else around it. Even though I have never seen Doctor Who, the stories of each card were told so well through the mechanics that if I took a guess as to what the card is depicting, then looked up the episode it was from, i was usually right. 40K, LOTR, and WHO all felt so vibrant and interesting, despite me having only watched the LOTR movies and knowing next to nothing about the other two IPs, that I really got frustrated when my peers would dismiss UB wholesale. Comparing the AC set to past Universes Beyond sets, it's completely indefensible. I've looked at so many of the spoilers and still know basically nothing about what Assassin's Creed is about. The mechanics are mostly really boring which both makes it hard to gather anything about the story being told through them and makes me completely uninterested in even finding out anything about it. You can only wade through so many cards of dudes in hoods that say "assassins you control get +1/+1" before you just kind of check out. It's just so lifeless. If this is the new standard for UB then I'm probably going to find myself on the UB hate train very soon.

I was completely fine with the AC having their own set box and all that jazz. But... I didn't know they made just little shitty packs and a very small card pool for this set. Means that actually opening a box is just gonna be duplicate on duplicate on duplicate. Only upside I can see is like... yay more Sword of Feast and Famine in the wild.