I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
I’ve been a fan since the first one, even if it felt a little repetitive. Then Assassin’s Creed II came out– and the series entered into one of its best eras: likable and interesting characters, fascinating plays on history and historical figures, and great gameplay.
So, when the set was announced for Magic the Gathering, I was VERY excited. I am, to say the least, disappointed.
The Good
What’s terrible about my disappointment is seeing the possibility of a good set. There are some great cards which are well worth building decks around or adding to your already existing deck. The freerunning mechanic (which allows you to cast a spell for cheaper when you do combat damage to a player with a commander or assassin creature).
The starter decks, the only preconstructed products for the set, are a great place to start. Ezio, Blade of Vengeance and Eivor, Battle Ready are both great commander choices. Beyond that great builds can be done off a lot of the main names from the series: Altair, Edward Kenway, Ezio Auditore, Shay Cormac, Aya, Shao Jun, and Arbaaz Mir as great examples. Even if these aren’t your commander, most can be put into the 99 of your commander decks and provide some real value, especially if you build around legendary permanents.
The Bad
There are two things that make this set disappointing.
The first is that it is not given much in the way of support via card creation. While not every set can get the support of the Lord of the Rings set (which got me back into Magic after almost 10 years)– actually, yes. Yes, they could. And they didn’t. There are only about 100 cards in this whole set and some of them (I think about 30) are reprints. Lord of the Rings included no reprints and had several hundred unique cards for the game. (Which made it incredibly addicting to get new packs, commander decks, and even the collector’s boxes once they got cheaper!) It isn’t hard to get reprints of uncommons (especially as “there are no commons” in the set).
The second thing that bothers me is that the pack sizes are smaller and the pack prices are more than normal packs. Being a “Universes Beyond” set, pulling ideas from an intellectual property outside the Magic multiverse, it can make sense that the prices are a little higher– but to then cut the amount of cards in each pack feels like an insult. What’s more, when you open a pack or several, you pretty quickly run through the value and find that you’ve spent more money on a pack that isn’t going to give you a return on investment and likely provide you repeat cards of uncommons.
Fix #1: Treat it Like a Real Set
There are so many characters that don’t have cards– so many legendary land possibilities! There’s– Okay, okay. I got it mostly out of my system earlier and I need to let it go. Fine.
Fix #2: Bigger Packs
One of the odd problems with the set is that even the secondary markets seem to be low on product for these cards. My best guess is that because people aren’t as interested in buying these packs, because of their size if nothing else, and because people aren’t getting as many multiples of cards with at least some value, they aren’t going in to trade or sell. The closest I’ve gotten is that I got two copies of Sword of Light and Shadow– but I’m not giving up on my second one yet! Maybe if it goes up in price.
I’m hoping that Wizards of the Coast learns from this set’s terrible sales and multitude of bad reviews that this was a terrible idea.
Fix #3: Commander Decks
One of the worst parts of this set is that we all already know that Wizards knows what to do with sets like this, a nerd-interest set which they don’t want to give full support to: commander decks.
They’ve done it for Doctor Who, Warhammer, and Fallout; all of those sets did decently well– even with selling some additional “collectors” packs for those who want the cards and want the pretty versions of them.
For this set’s level of support, I would have liked to have seen four decks constructed for commander (all of which I’m building for myself):
- Work in the Dark A blue-black deck with Ezio, Blade of Vengeance as the commander. The goal of this deck is using your assassin creatures for more card draw and activating freerunning. (This is, of course, based on one of the two decks that come with the starter set.)
- Serve the Light A red-white deck with Eivor, Battle-Ready as the commander (though Aya might be a better choice, Eivor would be the face of the deck). The goal of this deck would probably be split between equipment (powering up Eivor), and benefitting from historical permanents (hitting with them for Aya or just entering with Arbaaz).
- History is Our Playground A red-white-black deck with Altair as the commander. This deck would emphasize getting legendary assassins into your graveyard and exiling them with memory counters so that when Altair attacks, they are summoned to attack with him.
- Templar Order A white-black-blue deck with Haytham Kenway as the commander. (This would mean that Haytham would need to change to be add black– but that should have been the case from the beginning!) I’m honestly not sure what the point of this deck might be other than swarming. Ideally, you would want to acquire the Isu artifacts to power it up, perhaps getting a benefit from playing cards your opponents own. Perhaps targeting opponents’ creatures and destroying them. If they didn’t really support the set overall, they REALLY didn’t support the templars. There’s an uncommon Templar Knight that you can have an infinite number of in your deck; there’s Haytham; there’s Shay. That’s it. I only created a deck for Templars because that’s what the other sets always seem to do. There’s always a “bad guy” set. Too bad Wizards didn’t even make Templars compatible with each other.
Thank you for reading!
While I usually prefer to talk about writing, I couldn’t help but talk about one of my hobbies. If you also feel disappointed by this set, let me know what cards you would have created for the set and what pre-con you might have wished for if you could have done so at Wizards!
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