Universes Beyond's Worst Mistake has Reached Pauper

At the beginning of the week, right before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) was about to release on Magic Online, I was discussing with some colleagues in a group about Utrom Monitor and the possibility of it becoming an Affinity staple. Personally, I always view any new card with skepticism — I dubbed it a Delver of Secrets for Affinity, which would be enough to consider, since it dodges Krark-Clan Shaman and fuels other artifact-reliant cards while attacking in the air.

There was, however, an important detail regarding availability: Monitor comes with three copies in a specific product from the Magic collaboration with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the Turtle Team-Up. It doesn't exist in Play Boosters, not even as a foil in Collector Boosters. Your only option to acquire it is to buy a box whose only functional card is this one. If you want a full playset, you need two.

The Turtle Team-Up is, ideally, a product for beginners. A box with four decks designed to be a social game among friends, not an item to crack open looking for chase cards. When a format staple ends up in one, its purpose — and market value — are tainted by the commercial realities of competitive Magic, even when the card affects exclusively the commons format.

It's still early to say that Utrom Monitor will be a major game-changer for Affinity, but results have already started showing up in Leagues and Challenges with players including a full playset of them. At the time of writing this article, four copies cost 110 tix on Magic Online. On paper, each copy costs $10.

This isn't the first time an exclusive card from a product has had a major impact on Pauper, but it might be the first time we have a significant long-term problem for the format that is independent of Wizards of the Coast's ability — or willingness — to reprint it in another product.

Bonder's Ornament was the closest example. Exclusive to the Commander 2020 decks, the artifact became a Tron staple and slowly solidified its place in several other decks until it reached a point where archetypes like Faeries needed to run one or two copies in the sideboard to combat the card advantage it generated. It ended up banned in Pauper as one of the first measures to weaken Tron, and it will probably never come back as it polarizes games around itself and forces every deck to have an answer or to run it as an answer.

Let's imagine a future where Bonder's Ornament, for some reason, is unbanned. The card got a reprint in Commander Masters and in some series from The List — a special reprint slot in Play Boosters that no longer exists. If it came back, a reprint in any Commander precon would quickly solve a potential card shortage caused by Pauper. Prices might rise initially, but the opportunity for stabilization would exist.

Let's compare this case with Utrom Monitor. Like Ornament, it is now only available in a preconstructed deck box where securing a playset requires opening more than one product. Although it probably won't have the same level of dominance, the card has enormous potential in one of Pauper's most popular decks and one of the most solid and long-lasting in the Metagame, with a legion of players dedicated exclusively to it. If it finds more variants, the competition for copies will get even fiercer.

In the coming months, Monitor's distribution might even be larger than Ornament's, since each box comes with three copies. The result could be a price reduction as more players, stores, and vendors open Turtle Team-Up and put their contents up for sale. The market stabilizes, those who need it buy it, and all ends well. In a year, as demand increases and there are no more boxes left to open, it's natural for the price to rise, and maybe the card even reaches $15, maybe $20?

When it hits $20, calls for reprints begin. Pauper's main purpose is being "cheap," and players like to keep it that way. Plus, Wizards has a history of occasionally throwing players a bone by reprinting staples like Snuff Out in Commander decks or special slots — Utrom Monitor won't share the same fate.

Utroms are an alien race from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe. They are intellectual property of Nickelodeon/Paramount and don't belong to Magic: The Gathering's lore, and Wizards of the Coast deliberately chose to print cards with the Utrom type instead of using Alien and keeping a generic creature type that would allow for future reprints.

This places these cards in the same contractual black hole existing in partnerships like Warhammer 40,000 and Final Fantasy, where creature types like Moogle or Astartes, Tyranid, and Necron are specific properties of a particular universe not owned by Wizards of the Coast. To reprint them, a new contract will need to be established with those companies, or the partnership contract must grant WotC the right to re-release the cards using the same creature types at some point. And that contract would have to be signed with every company that enters a Universes Beyond partnership to avoid the same problem in the future.

It's curious how the design team seems to have thrown caution regarding intellectual properties out the window. When Warhammer 40,000 was released, the use of creature types with names directly from another IP raised concerns in the community, but The Lord of the Rings was spot-on in using existing card and creature types within Magic's system to represent each card — The One Ring could easily be reprinted as "Urza's Ring" and have the same text, cost, and ability with a line under the name representing it as The One Ring because absolutely nothing besides the name and image ties it to the intellectual property of J. R. R. Tolkien's books.

Now, we have Moogles and Utroms, iconic races from other universes. We have The Soul Stone with the "Infinity Stone" type, which had to be renamed on Magic Arena and MTGO because Magic's contract with Marvel doesn't include digital platforms. In Marvel Super-Heroes, we'll have the first Skrull creature type — another alien race and also Marvel's property. It will have the same problem.

Magic can do functional reprints. Include the same cost, abilities, but with different names and types. For availability purposes, it can work, but it creates redundancy: Affinity could run up to eight copies of Utrom Monitor between the original card and the "Mirrodin Monitor" of the Myr Drone type. That's creating one problem while trying to solve another.

For Pauper, this is the first anomaly caused by a collateral effect that has no solution. The inclusion of the Monarch mechanic could be addressed by including Thorn of the Black Rose and the others in a reprint set or Commander deck. If necessary, Avenging Hunter could return at some point, and the peculiarities of the differences between paper and MTGO formats were addressed in 2019.

Fixing the issue with Utrom Monitor, besides requiring time, also demands a lasting consequence: whether it's allowing to run eight copies of the same card or eventually forcing a ban for reasons that might not involve Metagame balance — a decision that would be perceived as highly damaging to Pauper's credibility.

Universes Beyond is the most ambitious project in Magic's history and has brought its share of benefits to the game. With it also come consequences, and these don't appear to be properly evaluated across all spheres. Utrom Monitor is a side effect of a product design decision, and it's difficult to imagine that choosing it for the box was a deliberate move to affect Pauper's economy — but it has, and it will be very detrimental to the format's financial health if the pattern repeats in new products from the series.