MTG’s New Sticker Mechanic Explained… Mostly. We Stopped Paying Attention Half-Way Through

PORTLAND, Ore. — You may have heard the news about the upcoming Unfinity set, the latest of the “Un” sets to come out of Wizards of the Coast. With it comes a brand-new sticker mechanic which, as intriguing as it is, comes with a hefty wall of text to explain how they work. Here, we’re going to explain how the new sticker mechanic works… mostly. Our eyes glazed over, and we stopped paying attention half-way through when someone tried to explain it to us.

“Un-sets have traditionally been silver border cards which meant they were not legal in eternal formats,” local MTG enthusiast Tashan Howard explained. “Now however, the un-sets are black bordered, so they are legal in eternal sets like Vintage, Legacy, Pauper, and Commander, but not sets which include only standard-sets like Modern and Pioneer.”

Uh huh.

“So the set contains 48 different sticker cards which exist outside the game like a dungeon.

Now, some cards have tickets, not to be confused with tix on MTGO, even though these will be on MTGO – I think, which should be able to handle all of this even though they still haven’t figured out initiative.

Anyway, you use tickets to buy stickers, but not from your LGS, but from your pile. I think. These stickers you stick to your actual card, but they’re like post it stickers, not the permanent kind which means that you can use them once and they’ll never work again, leaving up to the community to come up with a solution to represent this bloated mechanic which will probably end up being post-it-notes or something a loot uglier than stickers.

Where was I? Oh, right so some cards give you tickets which you use to buy sticker which are like power and toughness or abilities or text. Just a bunch of random shit! But there are hats and squirrels too! Stickers carry between zones so if you ever wanted to play Alchemy in paper…

Uh… yeah. There you have it, folks. I think. Stickers mostly explained. Whatever they are and whatever they do is another … thing to try and represent on the board alongside your keyword counters, power and toughness counters, tokens, dungeons. Need to make sure you keep track of day and night, who has the initiative and who has the monarch. Flip those modal cards and, (wait do the stickers go on both sides?) and be sure to remember all those other triggers, both your own and from all your opponents.

We’re guessing that some stickers will be more rare than others so eventually a Secret Lair Sticker pack can be released for $50. Due to the scarcity of that one sticker, sheet, pack, whatever they are, you’ll be inclined to pay it because it’s in line with the secondary market price. It’s not like they’ve done expensive Lair treatments of secondary game pieces like tokens in the past, right?