Format Philosophy

Below is some commentary on the guiding approach to Universes Contained and how the format came to be. Its two most defining features are its long banlist (and resulting reduced power level and reduced deck costs) and, of course, the namesake contained-universes, both of which are discussed below

Lower Power Level

Aside from how Universes Beyond is handled, the main thing that you’ll notice that distinguishes this format from most is the very long banlist—approximately 2% of the entire possible cardpool! This results in a much lower power level constructed format than any existing officially supported one—even a run-of-the-mill competitive Standard-legal deck would crush most Universes Contained decks! The advantage of this reduced power level is that a great many more cards are playable. You can pick your favorite signpost uncommon from a recent set, and there’s a good chance you could build a competitively viable deck around it under these rules.

Lower Deck Prices

The Universes Contained format tends to cost much less on average to play. This is partially because of the reduced power level (the strongest cards tend to fetch the highest prices, and we’ve banned most of the strongest cards), but also partially because of some of our categorical bans—specifically the lands—as discussed below. A tournament-competitive Universes Contained manabase will generally cost less than $20.

The most expensive widely played lands as of right now are the Pathways (generally between $2.50 and $6.50) and the Fastlands (generally between $1.50 and $3.50). There are some random individual members of other land cycles that are expensive due to their specific reprint history.

To give a concrete example: in the Universes Contained format, the most common competitive manabases for a generic Selesnya deck would be, for a slower deck, 4 “Canopy Vista”, 4 “Sunpetal Grove”, and roughly 15 basics (approximately $7), or for a faster deck, 4 “Branchloft Pathway”, 4 “Razorverge Thicket”, 1 “Sungrass Praerie”, and roughly 12 basics (approximately $16).

Separate Franchises

Part of what inspired Universes Contained was a dissatisfaction with the introduction by Wizards of the Coast of Universes Beyond cards to Standard. We did not welcome the prospect of seeing Spiderman, Jace, and Aang mixed into one deck and legal together in every Magic format. On the other hand, since Universes Beyond is becoming a bigger part of Magic, we recognized rejecting it entirely was a losing battle. And we also observed that, for most players, even if they generally disliked Universes Beyond, there was usually at least one outside franchise they enjoyed.

A few years into Wizards’ Universes Beyond push, we asked around, particularly among the most long-time players we knew, many of whom were opposed to Universes Beyond in some capacity, and saw what kinds of Universe Beyond decks they did build. And a consistent theme immediately became clear—players were much more willing to engage with Universes Beyond if the whole deck was from the same intellectual property. To put it another way, the same player who might hate the idea of a Sephiroth-Sauron-Liliana deck might be totally fine playing a “pure” Lord of the Rings deck. Players built these decks for fun, even though—mechanically speaking—it was a big self-imposed handicap to limit your card pool to just one or two sets for flavor reasons.

And so we said—what if it wasn’t a handicap? What if that was the actual rule?

All cards in a deck must be from the same franchise. Simple.

This had the natural effect of making Universes Beyond decks inherently weaker than “regular” decks to start, because they were limited to a pool of 250 or so cards (depending on the IP) when the broader format already had over 10,000 cards. To help account for this, we allowed the Universes Beyond decks to use the normally-only-Legacy-legal Commander cards, which felt like a huge flavor win, and also settled on a comparatively lower power level for the format at large.

The other major implication of the “contained-universes” rule is that, if you’re monitoring new sets for potential upgrades to your existing decks, only about half of the new sets will be “relevant” for a “regular” deck—which helps offset the product fatigue many players have felt since the number of Standard-legal sets has increased so much in recent years.

Balanced for Best-of-One

You may see references on this site to Universes Contained being “balanced for best-of-one”—but what does that mean?

Simply put, it means for purposes of balancing decisions, we assume sideboards do not exist.

Historically, in Magic, there have often been decks that are incredibly oppressive in game 1 but then can be easily hosed in the sideboard. A classic example is Reanimator, which in Legacy can field a turn 1 “Griselbrand”, but bricks to a boarded in “Tormod’s Crypt” or “Bojuka Bog”.

We recognize that in reality, outside of a literal tournament, it is very common for players to play best-of-one, or to play best-of-three but with no sideboarding between games. In that type of environment, a deck that is unbeatable game 1 is, for all practical purposes, simply just unbeatable. In our view, this leads to bad games.

We therefore took the view that if a card is overpowered if you assume there will be no sideboarding, then the card is overpowered.

The practical upshot of this, for banlist purposes, is that many historically powerful but easily-hosed decks have been hit harsher than you might expect to see—Reanimator being an example! (But fret not, Reanimator fans—it’s still one of the most powerful archetypes in the format….)

Categorical Bans

One thing that may not be obvious to you if you look through the banlist is that certain “groups” or cycles of cards are banned on a categorical basis—that is, every single card of that group is banned. This is a conscious choice as part of the design of the format (though the reason the groups are banned differs group to group). In case it’s helpful to think about them as a group, though, here are some examples of these types of categorical bans:

• All 10 original Alpha duals
• All 10 fetchlands
• All 10 shocklands
• All 10 Triomes
• All 10 Murders at Karlov Manor “surveil-lands”
• All 5 Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty “channel-lands”
• All 10 companions
• Almost every 1-mana “dork” (with the deliberate exception of “Llanowar Elves”)
• Almost every “extra turn” spell
• Almost every otherwise-legal card that’s banned in any of the primary Magic formats

Approach to One-Drops

One of the goals of “Universes Contained” was to lower the power level and slow down games. One of our overriding mantras was “you should be able to play a tapland on turn 1 and that not be a death sentence.” In a competitive constructed format, achieving that turns out to be a surprisingly tall order!

To slow down games, the main thing we had to do was make sure to ban most cards that can yield a very quick win, even if they are disruptable. For example, “Glistener Elf”, “Tainted Strike”, and “Assault Strobe”, with the proper combination of cheap pump spells, can deal 10 infect / double strike damage as early as turn 3. Accordingly, all 3 cards are banned. Similarly, a lot of the most powerful “aggro” one-drops, such as “Heartfire Hero”, “Goblin Guide”, and “Monastery Swiftspear”, got axed.

We also noticed that the ability to quickly ramp up into higher-cost cards, particularly by starting with a turn 1 ramp spell followed by a powerful 3-mana ramp spell on turn 2, led to games ending much more quickly than we liked. So we took a harsh stance on 1 mana “dorks”—essentially the only way to ramp on turn 1 without jumping through some hoops or minusing yourself is to use actual, factual “Llanowar Elves” (who we felt was integral to green’s color identity).

This doesn’t mean we don’t have good one-drops, though! In fact, for each of the five colors, there are a handful of legal and very powerful one-drops that are some of the most commonly played cards in the format! Many of them are classic cards (some dating back to Alpha) that most long-time players will know well:

• Green: “Llanowar Elves”
• Red: “Lightning Bolt” & “Faithless Looting”
• Blue: “Preordain”, “Ponder” & “Spell Pierce”
• Black: “Duress” & “Requiting Hex”
• White: “Oust”, “Surge of Salvation” & “Brave the Elements”