Magic: The Gathering announces a fourth booster pack type releasing with Assassin’s Creed crossover
Four-barreled booster fun.
Magic: The Gathering will receive a fourth booster pack type designed for the previously announced Assassin’s Creed Universes Beyond set. Beyond Boosters will allow the popular trading card game publisher to design unique experiences to fit the crossover media property.
Universes Beyond products have become increasingly audacious since Wizards launched the initiative back in 2021. Introducing worlds outside of Magic’s core Multiverse was originally the purview of Secret Lair and its premium, print-to-demand reprints. Since that point, it has expanded to include the wildly successful Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks and most recently Tales of Middle-earth, which dropped as a full premiere set with all the accompanying bells and whistles.
Wizards of the Coast president Cynthia Williams previously teased Assassin’s Creed’s coming to Universes Beyond during a 2022 Hasbro Investor Day presentation (Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast). According to a Gen Con 2023 panel today, the Ubisoft-developed video game series will help launch yet another type of booster pack.
The publisher said during the panel that these booster packs would be designed to provide a particular player experience and help tell a story set in the world of the crossover property. Assassin’s Creed has chronicled the centuries-spanning history of a secretive group of hidden agents, applying pressure to world events across the world. Its modern incarnation has focused on ancient Egypt, Greece and most recently Viking-era Scandinavia.
We don’t really know much more about how these Beyond Boosters will function, and there’s a lot of questions regarding what’s inside. Will they be randomised or semi-randomised, or function closer to Jumpstart booster packs, which draw from a limited pool of random themes? Will they be premium-priced products such as collector boosters? Will they be designed for draft or just collectability?
Dicebreaker has reached out for more information. Wizards of the Coast’s emphasis on Universes Beyond and collectability over gameplay has ruffled more than a few player feathers. Many feel as though price creep and a release calendar crammed to the gills threatens to burn out their core audience.
It hasn’t been more than a couple years since collector boosters hit the retail market - a fourth so soon certainly doesn’t bode well for a more thoughtful, considered approach to Magic: The Gathering’s tempo.