Sigh... we're back for another Universes Beyond set. This time around, it's Fallout, because everyone loves Bethesda these days. Personally I was a big fan of Morrowind when I was a kid, and played a decent amount of Fallout 3 - my favorite memory was jumping off of Tenpenny tower with the super-nuke-launcher and exploding myself into the stratosphere - but it didn't hook me enough to play any of the other ones. I tried picking it up again recently, but man, trying to get started in a Bethesda game can be a bit of a chore. So I recognize a few characters and the general scenery, but that's about it.
For those just joining us, welcome to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", where we look at every new commander and pass judgment upon them
I mean, obviously nobody is going to play this as their commander, right? You play a sub-wind drake in the command zone, and then after spending the whole game attacking with an escalating number of creatures, you can draw some cards, but only by sacrificing it? The condition of escalating attacks is potentially interesting, but the payoff isn't nearly sufficient. People seem to enjoy colorless a lot more than I do, but I can't see ED-E being a worthwhile payoff. Way too much work, with way too many restrictions, for way too little payoff.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
He does potentially hit pretty hard, and is a decent card advantage engine for a reasonable cost. The setup of having a 3-power creature is pretty minimal, though it needing to lose summoning sickness is annoying - dust off all those 3-power 2 drops. Still not a particularly interesting commander, but 4-power double strike that draws a card when attacking is at least a serious threat, if predictable.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Ward 2 is fine, and the mana ability is okay, although realistically if I'm playing auras and equipment I'm usually wanting to put them onto my commander, so tapping it isn't ideal. Same is true for the other activated ability, which does have a little more play since it could skip a large cost like Colossus Hammer, but especially with the sorcery speed restriction I don't really think there's enough here to put it in the command zone.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Pretty hard to imagine this in the command zone. Even if you're going blink, your selection of targets is fairly restrictive and you give your opponents not-insignificant value in exchange. Possibly has some value in the 99, but not as commander.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Getting overseer to trigger consistently isn't too crazy. Making a couple tokens per turn can easily keep her topped up with quest counters, and that's exactly the sort of thing you want to be doing anyway. The payoff is somewhat limited though - a +1/+1 counter on each creature each turn isn't awful, but it's a bit slow and predictable. You could do worse for a white go-wide deck, but I don't think she's likely to be anyone's favorite.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Eesh, exile? Couldn't even go sacrifice? Rude. Boromir, Warden of the Tower was extremely unpopular as a commander, and significantly less restrictive than Danse. Boromir is reasonably popular in the 99, so perhaps Danse has a chance there in some decks, but the command zone is not for him.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Seems like the plan here is to play some evasive creatures, try to hit each opponent each combat, and possibly play some proliferate and food production, to accelerate the payoff. Unfortunately the payoff seems pretty mediocre. Theoretically it could become threatening once you have, say, 6 quest counters, but that's a tall order and they're reset if she gets removed. So I don't really see it.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Humble Defector as a commander is interesting I guess. I'm not a big fan of defector, but putting it in the command zone gives some serious incentive to combo it with Homeward Path, and with some ingenuity you can find homeward path pretty reliably. You could also just let it drift around the table and eventually get a big army of tokens. It doesn't provide a super obvious direction to go in, outside of the homeward path shenanigans, but despite my dislike of defector I will admit that it provides some interesting possibilities.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Strange design. A 1/3 for 2 that draws a card when it connects is a decent starting point for voltron tbh, and the potential to turn it into something with a few extra points of power could make it pretty strong, though it does have a fairly steep setup cost. A limitation here is that the artifact creatures don't really contribute much to the gameplan except as one-time fodder for Curie, so finding the right balance could be tricky. I don't think there's anything wrong with Curie, and a decent deck could be made for it, but it's also not super exciting and I doubt it will get a lot of traction.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
"Dad" is now a word on a magic card. Weird. The obvious play pattern here is to save up mana, make a bunch of clues with his adventure, and then use him to crack those clues. Paying that much mana to draw an extra card each turn isn't very exciting though. Perhaps there's a little bit of room to focus on his adventure as a way to generate a bunch of artifact tokens, but I think something like Breya, Etherium Sculptor makes him look pretty pathetic in that regard.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
With any kind of anthem Jason can turn zombie tokens into draw power, and in a pinch he provides a way to trigger it himself or get through for some damage. If Jason was in black he'd have more potential, but in mono-blue I'm quite skeptical. There aren't many ways to generate tokens, let alone more than one, and the payoff isn't THAT great. Playable in the 99 elsewhere, but not great in the command zone.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
You can tie the game with March of the Machines, which is kinda funny (potentially could win the game with the right triggered abilities), but in terms of general value Nick looks quite low. Artifact creature tribal is fairly limiting, and getting clues when they die is a pretty mediocre payoff. Throwing evasion onto him does very little to change the equation. Perhaps there's a real-ish combo build, but I doubt it's anything to write home about.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Being a 2-drop gives Piper some potential in my opinion. Especially if you have a free sac outlet for the clues, she can grow very quickly, doubling in power while providing lots of artifact fodder which can be turned into card advantage in a pinch. I doubt she'll be terribly popular, but I think she clears my bar for being interesting.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Pretty low cost on menace counters, and it's neat that you can put them on enemy creatures. That said, there's really no payoff here.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Hancock looks like he might actually be able to do something powerful, which is more than most of the mono-color legends. Like Nardole, Resourceful Cyborg, it's a little awkward that you kinda want to put +1/+1 counters onto him, but it will undo his undying ability. You can probably stack up a decent number of counters, and zombies are definitely a tribe, but I'm not convinced it's worth the effort, especially in mono-black. You're going to need to run a lot of otherwise-pointless cards just to enable your commander. And nobody really played Denry Klen, Editor in Chief (poor guy got beat by Parnesse, the Subtle Brush), despite him creating one of his own counters, having multiple colors, no tribal restrictions, and a more interesting payoff than simply a stat boost. Granted, Denry needs to enter first and doesn't work for tokens, but at least him getting removed mid-combat isn't such a blowout. Anyway, I think Hancock is probably a decent tribal commander, but he seems kinda fragile and I'm skeptical that people will actually want to play him.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Junk tokens are pretty strong compared to clues, but taking on an extra mana to create the junk brings them a lot closer together. As far as the setup, it's not horrendous - unless you're doing artifact synergies, you should be able to get enough quest counters to keep yourself fueled up relatively easily with evasive or wide creatures. I think that ends up being an okay aggro commander, but nothing to write home about. Alternatively, you can care about the artifact tokens purely as artifacts, but I think there are more efficient ways to do that as well. Somewhere in the middle I think there's a decent deck, but I don't think it's great.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Life is a resource, but Ian might be a little, well, reckless with it. For the setup of modifying him, getting his power sufficient to kill things, and ensuring he survives combat, killing a creature doesn't seem worth it, and face damage isn't as useful for voltron. Giving him lifelink is a good way to offset his reckless tendencies. But I just don't think the payoff is really there.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I waffled for a bit on where to grade this. Adding treasures onto card draw is pretty strong. But ultimately I think the setup is just too high for the payoff. Attacking all three players for multiple turns is hard to keep up - once, sure, suicide some tokens, but you probably aren't really coming out ahead by much if you're just throwing them away, and red isn't great at evasive dorks. That could still be salvaged if there were more ways to generate junk, but there's not nearly enough. I do think you could make a decent deck here, but by the time you can pull off the setup reliably, I think you're pushing for the endgame, not digging for a few extra cards and mana.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I appreciate the attempt at soft nonbasic hate, but this card sucks. You only get energy from a single opponent's nonbasics, and then trade 4:1 to blow them up, once per turn. The evasion is fine I guess, but this package is way too slow to be of any interest.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Inti, Seneschal of the Sun hasn't made much waves as a commander, so I doubt Veronica will do any better. Getting junk tokens is better than an immediate impulse-draw, but she costs more than Inti, only triggers once per turn, and only triggers on nonlands. That's a lot of negatives compared to a legend that few people cared about to begin with. Her looting ability helps a bit, though attacking with a 3/3 menace isn't always that safe. I think Inti was a bit underrated and she probably will be too, but just because they can be made into an okay deck doesn't make them properly interesting.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Another weird one. You want H&B to die ASAP, and then you get a sort of ramp spell that gives you rad counters. On its own this seems pretty middling, but I think there are two interesting angles to attack it from. The first is untappers - green has a decent number, and with a land that taps for 3, you can ramp quite a bit. The second is the rad counters. On the surface they look like a downside, or at least hard to exploit, but you can make them much more interesting by running a high land count. The more lands you run, the more cards you mill, and the longer the rad counters will stick around, letting you mill even more. This could set up some big value off cards like Aftermath Analyst - potentially returned off Genesis? And untapping would accelerate this process significantly. I doubt they'll be super strong, but I do think they're interesting, so they get the thumbs up from me.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Lily wins the award for the card that plays the worst relative to how well it reads. It reads awesome - doubling every turn? Gain 32 life? But this thing is way too slow, predictable, and flimsy. You can just get a 8-power commander for 4 with no downsides now, so it's not until this hits 16/16 that it's anything exciting, which is three turns after you play it, and still not enough to 1-shot. Which is unfortunate because if you buff Lily with anything, it's going to reset a turn earlier and you'll never get to 32/32. But even if the stars align and you manage to keep this thing alive until it's 32/32 and you get to attack and you can give it evasion, you get one good shot and then it's back to total irrelevance for multiple turns. And it's so predictable that everyone will be prepared with answers for the 1-2 turns that it's "on".
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Strong is just kinda vanilla. He's kinda big, he maybe gets to grow, he maybe gains you some life. You could use him with fight effects, but he doesn't even have evasion. For a 6-drop, I want something a lot more impactful.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Video game name person looks like a sort of build-your-own Karador, Ghost Chieftain. He's a lot slower than Karador, though, requiring multiple turns to bring much back. It's nice that you can always bring back mishra's bauble, but I'd hope for a lot more value from a 4-drop.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The ward ability is nearly flavor text, and the etb/death trigger is more on par with draft chaff. He's uncommon and he looks like it.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Rex might be a little bit stupid - he seems to think that milling the opponent for 2 is going to be relevant, when you're obviously going to be exiling cards from your own graveyard 99% of the time. Mairsil, the Pretender is the most obvious comparison, but Mairsil doesn't need energy counters to function. Rex can create them himself, but it's a bit awkward to get through in combat with a Gray Ogre. It might be easier to just generate energy counters from elsewhere. Mairsil had a decent number of gnarly combos, so realistically Rex will probably have some as well. So I do expect that Rex will be able to pull some stuff off. I doubt he'll be as strong as she is, but he's probably still interesting enough to clear the hurdle to being a good dog.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
If this wasn't limited to once per turn it could be very strong, but being one-per-turn-cycle makes it seem pretty awful. Can't even play lands if you mill a land. You can get decent selection with a big mill, but again, being limited to one per turn - and then everything that got milled is wasted as far as Raul is concerned - makes it unable to do anything very powerful or even interesting.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
3-power first strike haste is a pretty solid statline for a 3-drop, and making a treasure token on attack isn't bad either, though none of that adds up to enough to be compelling on its own. Sacrificing five treasures is quite a bit, but stealing a creature permanently could be a huge game, and effective at locking down enemy commanders. The biggest risk is that Kellogg could be removed, especially if you're doubling down and stealing multiple creatures. Sac outlets and protective equipment is probably suggested. Red and black have a lot of good treasure generation, which is good since you probably can't rely on Kellogg on his own. Stealing enemy creatures isn't always very reliable since you often lack the desired synergies, and there's some precariousness with losing control of the commander, but considering how brutal stealing enemy commanders can be, I think the dream is potentially there.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Fleshbag Marauder is a fine card, and Lanius letting you keep a solid body that grows makes him a viable option…in the 99. But I can't see wanting to use him as a commander. He gets kinda big if your opponents play into him, but has no evasion or protection? Pass.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Cait has some potential - only costs 2, indestructible, filter cards, grows - that's a decent amount of sauce going on. I don't think it quite gets there, though. He doesn't have evasion, he doesn't provide much value aside from being a beater, his growth isn't all that fast, he wants an expensive deck to reliably trigger, he's only protected on your turn, plus he wants you to discard nonlands. He's also not in great colors to take advantage of the indestructibility - white or black would have had more options to destroy all creatures. Zurgo Helmsmasher seems like the much more explosive, natural fit for this type of build.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
There's a couple Orzhov commanders here that do kinda the same thing - put +1/+1 counters on your board while sacrificing creatures. Of the two, Autumn has the stricter build requirements - gotta play a bunch of legends, plus have enough tokens available to sacrifice. That's not an impossible requirement by any means, but I'm not convinced the payoff is really worth it. You need to go fairly wide, then play multiple legends and sacrifice multiple creatures in order to get an overrun. At that point, I'd rather just play a commander that gives me a global buff on its own, even if it costs a bit more.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The alternative to Autumn, Maxson has lower build requirements but a lower ceiling. Best case scenario, typically, is going to be one counter on all your tokens per turn. Which isn't too bad for a 3-drop commander, but your tokens need to be attacking every turn for this to happen, which means you're probably going to lose a lot along the way, and it's a fairly slow plan even if it succeeds. I do like the simplicity here, so he might work okay as a wincon for a deck that wanted to do tokens anyway, especially one that uses him as a sac outlet. But I don't think the potential is great enough to grade him favorably.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
There's a long going on for a 2-drop, but I don't think it really amounts to enough to be interesting. The second ability is a decent deterrent, but only against fairly specific kinds of aggression, while the first ability is just low-impact. Can't really see an interesting direction to build here. Give away a bunch of 2-power tokens, then use Thran Weaponry to make them trigger MacCready?
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Another 2-drop, but I like this one a lot more. Firstly, having a guaranteed mana dork on turn 2 is really nice. Second, I like the pairing of goading with giving away resources - won't always be ideal to give both to the same person, but it might help to lessen their annoyance. He's not going to be something you build the whole deck focused around, but for a blue-red deck without a strong commander choice, I think he fits really nicely as a curve-filler and a way to subtly manipulate the board.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Interesting design here. Cloning a creature every turn is a pretty strong upside, but the limitation of it needing to attack (once the original is dead, you can't clone it anymore), needing to be legendary, and getting removed if Shaun is removed brings the power level down a fair bit. That last clause is probably good incentive to focus on ETBs rather than building a long-term clone army - though it can be circumvented by changing creature types with Unnatural Selection or similar. Overall this is a design a like - cool, strong upside, but with enough limitations that I don't see it being a huge annoyance to see across the table.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Proliferating twice is definitely a solid upside, but costing seven nukes a lot of my interest in this. Poison decks are too aggressive to want him in the command zone I think, and for other applications I don't think the payoff is worth his high cost. For the mana, his stats are pretty middling too, even with indestructible. He's not awful, but for a 7-drop I think you can expect a lot more.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I did my research for this one. There are ten auras that go infinite with Cass plus a sac outlet, by producing a token when ETBing or LTBing. You'll need an extra creature to the targeting, but then you get infinite sac outlet fodder. Beyond that, Cass doesn't do anything interesting enough with equipment imo to even really think about, but other ETB auras can do some pretty powerful things. I doubt she'll see much fair play, though, I think most builds are going to focus pretty heavily on the combo elements. And you know how I feel about those sorts of commanders.
Final Judgment: Ugly
Final Judgment: Ugly
Lifelink helps a little, but this is another uncommon with the power of an uncommon. A slowly-growing threat that isn't that threatening, and gives the opponents too many choices. Nah.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Escape sounds exciting with how busted Underworld Breach is, but when it's limited to once per turn, with type/cost restrictions, plus you need to swing with a vanilla 3/4? Awful. Karador would be ashamed.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
At first I was ready to write Moira off, but then I realized that the guide isn't legendary. So you can blink her a bunch of times, make a bunch of survival guides, and then all your creatures will buff each other up as they attack, armed with their guides to surviving in the wasteland. Is this an effective strategy? Ehhh… maybe not. But is it funny? Definitely. So Moira gets a pass from me.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
The ceiling is maybe there for Elizabeth, but the requirements are steep - you need two other creatures to attack, ideally you want to be able to attack with all of them safely, and then you also are limited by mana value? And she's only a 3/2 base? Hard to see this working out. Too much setup for too little payoff, simple as.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The most obvious point of comparison for Sarah is Alibou, Ancient Witness. They have the same cost, they both do something with haste, they both deal damage based on your artifacts. Alibou has some decent advantages - she doesn't need to attack personally, she scrys, and she can target permanents instead of players. But Sarah has a pretty solid anthem effect and doesn't need to tap the artifacts. I think Sarah ends up in a pretty reasonable spot, but comparing the design of the two, I think Alibou is far more interesting. Needing to find a way to tap the artifacts is a much more interesting puzzle, and the payoff is greater for it, whereas Sarah feels comparatively vanilla and uninteresting to build around.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Man, I haven't touched a Fallout game in over a decade but I still remember what this annoying dude sounded like. In a set with a lot of pretty uninspired designs, Three Dog beats the odds and actually has a cool design with a compelling build-around, which also manages to tell a story. It does require a fair bit of setup - you want to go wide, and then have some strong auras, likely ETB-focused ones, attached to Three Dog. The payoff is solid, though I doubt it's super strong considering the setup - mostly a lot of ways to draw cards, or maybe deck yourself with Sage's Reverie, but there are plenty of directions to go with it. Anyway, it's a design that offers something original and interesting, and that puts him easily into the good camp.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
I didn't realize that Fallout already had a crossover with Shrek. The most obvious comparison to Marcus is Edric, Spymaster of Trest, who is also a patron of random evasive dorks. And unlike Marcus, Edric works immediately instead of demanding a 1-turn waiting period to get a counter first. Granted, Edric is sort of symmetrical, but that does have benefits as well. Marcus seems basically fine, but not particularly interesting.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Finally we get to some face commanders, and I get to break some hearts. There's been a couple attempts to make this "have a bunch of individual equipped creatures" theme work - notably Nahiri, Forged in Fury - and I'm not a fan of it. It's a ton of setup cost for something that really isn't very effective at finishing a game, so the payoff for doing all this nonsense ought to be really cool to compensate. And what we get instead is card draw, so we can keep doing this same bad strategy but harder. Bleh. With a cool payoff this build could be compelling, but Dogmeat ain't it.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Build-a-Bear Umbra workshop. Honestly this guy is so awful. He's got an attack trigger despite having trash stats, his auras are glacially slow and do basically nothing on their own…you could enchant other things I guess, but seriously, this is a format where Seedborn Muse exists, what the hell are we doing here? Building a whole deck in order to get one extra untap step? Yeah, yeah, it goes infinite with Aggravated Assault, but so does my cat, and I don't even have a cat.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This would be so much cooler if it was actually Julius Caesar. This guy does pack a pretty decent punch, though - getting to choose two modes every attack is a lot of value. Getting two tokens replaces the sacrifice - and you can sacrifice a summoning-sick creature to get two attackers if you're on the offensive. Card draw is always valuable. And the damage trigger seems like it could speed up games a decent amount, especially in tandem with the first option. I think early-game you'll be focusing on the first two modes, and then later-game you'll become more interested in the latter mode. Build seems pretty straightforward - get a lot of tokens and buff them up. Not the most engaging build, but the actual card provides some interesting options in-game at least.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
I guess Mr. House is a big fan of D&D because he's only ever going to be rolling D20s. Honestly I loathe this design. The conditions are clearly set up to make sense with a D6 roll, but because of how they've worded him, instead of being a 50/50 to get a robot and a longshot to get a treasure, you'll get both of them the majority of the time, making the condition mostly meaningless. I doubt you'll even want to activate his ability, because a D6 is just so much worse than all the D20 cards you'll put into the deck. All that said, a bunch of random AFR cards don't actually make a super strong deck, even if you tack onto them getting a 3/3 and a treasure token most of the time. So he's a double whammy of being underwhelming and stupidly designed.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The thing about those abilities is that even if they didn't cost energy, I still wouldn't be that interested. Maybe the last one, but that's also pretty expensive, and requires a fair bit of setup to make it properly good - and now you're complicating it by requiring playing a bunch of random garbage artifacts to get energy first. There's probably some more mileage you can get out of Madison if you're using her energy for other cards, and using energy from other cards for her, but at that point you're basically just locked into playing the precon forever.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Liberty Prime is marginally stronger than Madison, since at least the payoff is a bit more immediate, but it's so boring. Unless you're pre-gaming the energy, it's not even all that fast either. It's nice that you can turn artifacts into clues, but not nearly interesting enough to make Liberty playable unless you're planning to beat face.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
As if we didn't already have enough cards named "the master". This guy buries the lead a bit - the two rad counters are pretty inconsequential, and being able to target an opponent is pretty pointless too, since you'll almost certainly want to target yourself most of the time with his reanimation. Being a free ability makes him a pretty effective payoff for self-mill, and he's in the perfect colors for it, and strong colors in general. Solid card.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
The last entry honestly seems like it could fit into any of the three categories. First, to break it down a bit - the etb/attack trigger will always eventually mill 1 nonland per player, which means 4 total +1/+1 counters for every trigger. The funky way his trigger is worded is probably to avoid dumping 30 counters onto him off a Traumatize, but as far as the rad counters go, you'll probably usually only have 1 at a time, maybe sometimes 2, so the requirement to divide them won't really matter unless you're trying to use other forms of mill. Of course you can distribute the counters onto other creatures, but I think you'll probably end up wanting to put them onto the mothman himself, especially since he has to attack to get more rad counters. So ultimately you probably end up with a 3/3 flyer for 4 that gets +3/+3 every turn cycle, on average. That's kinda strong, but also kinda boring, and also kinda overly complicated and annoying. So, as I said earlier, it could really go any direction. And when I've got a hard decision to make, I like to go with my gut. And my gut says that I don't care for this set.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
We've probably seen sets with a worth ratio of bad:good commanders, but considering this is a commander-designed precon 4:1 is pretty rough.
Looking over these, though, my main feeling is one of apathy. So many designs feel uninspired, or rehashes of things we've already seen multiple times before. Even the commanders that are cool designs I doubt I'll actually build.
Partly I think this is because, and apologies to fans of the franchise, but Fallout is ugly. It's an aesthetic dominated by grey and brown, with mostly uninteresting character designs. It's also, I think, limited by being a video game. It's harder to create a striking visual in a game, where the creator has so much less control over how the player experiences the media. Obviously there are other big advantages to this, but most of the time spent playing Fallout is not aesthetically compelling. And the cards are limited to the visuals of the game, rather than doing something bold. You'd never see something abstract like Sublime Epiphany on a UB card.
Another thing that occurred to me while mulling through these is the issue of adaptation. So much media these days is an adaptation of some existing property - comics into movies, movies into games, games into shows, books into everything. And I think it's important for there to be a reason behind the adaptation, something that the new medium can add beyond just "look, it's that thing you like, but now it's live action instead of animated!" I saw Dune part 2 yesterday after having read the book, and I think the change of medium added quite a lot.
But what is adapting Fallout into Magic adding? Sure, it's fun to imagine how something from a different property would be translated into a Magic card, but after so much UB, I think the weight of existing flavor is a burden more than anything. I'm sure most of the designs here do a great job of communicating something about the character, but why should I care if the design isn't fun to play? What am I going to get from James, Wandering Dad beyond "huh, yeah I guess that is what he did in the game, kinda" and then shrugging? When designing their own characters, WotC can work from any angle to create a compelling card, but when working with another franchise they're obligated to make a design that fits the established character in order to satisfy fans, and the result is that the designs mostly aren't interesting in their own right.
I've wondered how I'd feel if a franchise I was invested in was adapted to UB, how much those cards would appeal to me compared to franchises I wasn't familiar with. I think what I've learned at this point is that it wouldn't make that much of a difference. If they adapted my favorite characters, most likely I'd just look at the design, and if it wasn't an interesting design, I wouldn't be interested regardless of whose face was on the card. I like the things I like because of what they are in their own medium - a medium where they can express their character in ways beyond the limited mechanics of a card game. If it's going to capture my interest in another medium, it's starting from square one - so the card design has to stand on its own merits, not coast by on nostalgia.
Overall the impression I walk away with is that this is a product of obligation. It doesn't feel like it has any passion behind it. Of course I could be wrong - maybe every member of the team was thrilled to be adapting Fallout - but it feels like it's ticking the boxes and rarely more than that.
Apologies for the rant. At least the next set is cowboy themed, that will fit nicely with my aesthetic. Yee haw?
Until next time, cowpokes.
That being said, I faced a guy two weeks ago who brewed a deck around Three Dog and I have to say it worked pretty well.
Flavor-wise, they missed out by not having a Stealth Boy equipment card for her to use. Mechanics-wise, I want her to work, but she doesn’t have good evasion or self-protection which limits her as a Voltron base.
Imagine if each face commander was the player character (the Vault Dweller, Chosen One, Lone Wanderer, etc) and each precon was themed around the game and they had their own unique win conditions; or alternatively stick with the faction themes, like why does Caesar's deck have Mr House and NRC characters.
Looking at the cards through this lens of 'does it make a good commander', it feels like UB precons are prone to having too many Legends while their design is really only good for the 99. I suppose that is the paradox of the format where the characters fit the bill of being Legendary (by the nature of being named individual characters in their franchise) but not all of them can meet the standard of regular MtG legendary creatures.
As for my feelings on UB in general, I'd say this has been happening in MtG from a long time ago, basically anytime something new is added. I am sure back when Planeswalkers were introduced people were saying those are not Magic cards, etc. I was not keen on UB when it was introduced, but started to change my mind after playing against 40k precons. I always loved themed decks and there is something very satisfying about every card in a deck fitting a theme.
My first UB was LotR Hobbits and after playing it few times I went back to get a 40k and a Doctor Who precon, and I enjoy playing them. I enjoy referencing the cards to their original media, even if I don't know it much (never watched Dr Who for example).
BUT I think to experience that the UB precons need to stay as UB decks. Once you start mixing UB and regular MtG is can feel wierd; but then again, New Capenna and Neon Dynasty might as well be their own UB universes when compared to the high fantasy of MtG.
My plan for the Fallout precons is to keep them as they are and play them against each other for some casual precon games. That I think is the way to get the most fun out of playing them.