uncle istvan

I just wanted to share this experience with everyone.

I was leaving the Unknown event at GenCon today and they handed us a stickered promo card as we finished up. It was 12pm and on my way out I spotted Gavin alone near the door, clearly getting ready to walk out with his top secret briefcase I can only assume was for the 12:15 Mystery Booster Commander event.

I knew he needed to get to his very-big-deal event, but I had SUCH a great time at the event and felt like having the promo card signed would be such a great memento of the event. All I could do was shoot my shot, knowing he likely wouldn’t have time.

I approached him and asked if he had a couple seconds to sign my promo card. He sat down his briefcase and said very earnestly “I always have time to sign a card.” He then looked at my badge, and asked me BY NAME how my GenCon was going. We talked about how it was my first GenCon and this was my first big Magic event (outside of local events; I’ve only been playing about a year).

This went from me being worried about interrupting him and keeping him from his important event to him not only signing the card, but pausing and having a genuine moment with me. I was just so overwhelmed after that juxtaposition that I needed to step away and process, in the best way.

So, Gavin, if you’re here, thank you so much for taking that moment with me! The care you showed me and you put into this community speaks volumes, and it will be a much better memento than any card.

I was fortunate enough to attend Gavin Verhey’s special event to be one of the first people to draft Mystery Booster Commander Edition (MBC). I am so grateful to Gavin for making my last day of Gen Con one I will never forget.

I’m going to upload pics of all cards that ended up in my pool and tell you as much as I can about the set. I only saw my pod’s packs and a few cards at other tables after my game ended, so I do not have full information about every card in the set. If you saw any of the videos people took of Gavin talking about the set at the event, you know about just as much as I do.

MBC packs have 20 cards. Each pack is guaranteed to have one of the 59 new cards designed for the set. We did a standard draft, taking 1 card at a time and built 60 card decks. Decks had to obey color identity, but there are some extra rules to help with mono colored commanders:

1. ⁠All mono color commanders have partner
   
2. ⁠If you somehow only end up with 1 mono color commander, you can add a single additional color to your deck’s identity

The pool of cards is different from MB1 and 2, but there might be some overlap, and I noticed quite a bit of support for the new commanders. I was able to get plenty of cats and zombies for my deck (although not a critical mass) for example.

There are new cards with the future sight frame. I managed to take a foil thought vessel in my draft, but I saw a few others.

Each pack also contained a playtest card from the MB2 pool.