Straight from the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout is the latest Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond product. While the Fallout crossover won’t to arrive until March 2024, Wizards of the Coast held a special first look today for fans of both franchises to give a sneak peek of what to expect.
WeeklyMTG host Blake Rasmussen was joined by Pete Hines, head of publishing at Bethesda, and Chris Mooney, Senior Game Designer at Magic, to go over some of the coolest aspects of the set. Tons of little details and fan service throwbacks make their way to the game, like Nuka Cola, Vaults, and the goodest boy to ever grace gaming that fans will love to find, so let’s take a dive into everything revealed on today’s stream.
Four Fallout Commander Decks
There will be four Commander decks in this Fallout Universes Beyond release, similar to the recent Doctor Who product. Each deck has a unique color identity and is designed around mechanics that either fit mechanically into an aspect of the Fallout games or have had brand-new mechanics designed around them.
Scrappy Survivors
The first of these decks is the Scrappy Survivors deck, a red, green, and white deck that goes all in on auras and equipment. The thought process behind the deck is that as you adventure throughout the wasteland, you are continuously finding new and better gear and weapons, and the best way to represent that in Magic is through auras and equipment.
Dogmeat, Ever Loyal is the main Commander of the deck and is a fantastic and flavorful way to adapt Fallout to Magic. Dogmeat mills five cards when he comes into play and then returns an aura or equipment from your graveyard back to your hand. Then, anytime you attack with an equipped or enchanted creature, you make a Junk token, a new mechanic debuting with these Fallout cards.
Junk tokens are kinda similar to Treasure tokens; you have to tap and sacrifice it to use it, but when you do, you get to exile the top card of your library and can play that card for this turn only. You can only do this at sorcery speed, so make sure you’re activating it when you have a healthy amount of mana available.
One of the new auras in Scrappy Survivors is Idolized, based on a skill from the Fallout series. It gives the enchanted creature +X/+X when the enchanted creature attacks, with X equalling the number of nonland permanents you control—turning even your Junk tokens into power.
Science!
Led by Dr. Madison Li as the main Commander, this blue, red, and white deck represents the struggle Dr. Li went through to bring a brighter future to the Fallout universe. The deck itself brings back energy as a mechanic and resource to Commander decks, relying heavily on managing your energy and playing lots of artifacts to help you win the game.
Joining Dr. Li is Rex, Cyber-Hound from Fallout: New Vegas. Rex is another energy-based creature with the very unique creature type of Robot Dog. Rex mills cards and generates energy when he deals combat damage to a player, who can then spend that energy to exile creatures from the graveyard and gain their abilities.
The design for Rex pulls heavily from the quest line from Fallout: New Vegas, where players have to help find brains to replace Rex’s lost one.
Hail, Caesar!
A red, white, and black deck centered around Caesar, Legion’s Emperor and many of the various militant factions found across the Fallout games. This token-heavy deck seems to be both a go-wide aggro deck and a type of Aristocrats deck, gaining benefits from sacrificing your creatures while also producing as many as possible.
Gary Clone is another new card found in the Hail, Caesar! deck that comes with the Commander-exclusive Squad mechanic. Gary is a character found in a lone vault where a man named Gary was the only inhabitant, along with a cloning vat.
Mutant Menace
The Wise Mothman from Fallout 76 is the lead Commander from the final Commander deck, which is a black, green, and blue deck focused on a new mechanic called rads. You track this value with a Radiation emblem that will mill cards at the start of your pre-combat main phase.
Each non-land card that gets milled this way will have you lose both one life and one of your rad counters. You can also place these rad counters on your opponents to slowly whittle their deck and life away turn after turn. After a few turns, your opponents might cure their radiation poisoning, but you can always proliferate them up higher and higher each turn.
Feral Ghouls is the other card featured from the set, representing the dangerous twisted people that wander the wastelands. Feral Ghouls gets +1/+1 counters for each creature you control that dies, and then when it dies, your opponents get rad counters equal to its power.
Other Cards
Intelligence Bobblehead
In the Fallout series, Bobbleheads represent various stats in the game, and collecting them gives you a bonus in its respective stat. The Bobblehead cards have been designed to grant bonuses based around the stat they represent, with the Intelligence Bobblehead drawing you cards, for example.
You can also find serialized versions of these Bobbleheads in Collector Boosters. There are 500 of each serialized Bobblehead, and it’s currently not known if there will be other serialized cards in the set.
V.A.T.S.
The Fallout series was originally a turn-based series, and when it moved to a first-person shooter style, the team at Bethesda wanted to keep that turn-based feel. To capture that feel, the team behind Fallout designed the V.A.T.S. system to slow down time to let players make decisions mid-combat.
V.A.T.S. captures this feel by giving the card split second—not letting your opponents react to it in any way—and lets you pick any number of creatures with the same toughness. V.A.T.S. then destroys all those creatures, sort of like a super-targeted board wipe. It’s also at instant speed, so it can be used against spells that modify your opponents’ creatures stats or to wipe out an army of similar tokens.
Vaults
Vaults in Universes Beyond: Fallout are represented as Sagas, with each saga telling the story of that specific vault. Vault 101: Birthday Party depicts the opening of Fallout 3, where the player starts the game on their first birthday and as they build their character through the early years of their life, which also is represented through the chapters on the Saga.
Each Commander deck comes with Vaults of some kind, with the design team picking some of the most unique and memorable vaults players can encounter.
Several other cards were shown during the stream, with plenty of cool throwbacks and references for players to pick up on.
- Nuka-Cola Vending Machine
- Mr. House, President and CEO
- Radstorm
- Alpha Deathclaw
- Overencumbered
- Command Tower
Basic Full Art Lands
Two different cycles of full art lands are joining the set. The first represents the newer generations of games, with various players encountering vaults hidden in the environments. These lands tell a journey, with the same character encountering different locals and vaults during their game.
The other cycle of lands is inspired by the older isometric games. These games have a fixed perspective, and the artwork of these lands is in this point of view. They’re a great throwback to the classic feel of the older Fallout games.
Collector Boosters
The Pip-Boy frame is inspired by the wrist console that players wear in-game, which gives the player insight into various elements of the game. Looking at the Pip-Boy in-game pulls up a retro-future-styled CRT screen displaying the target of your attack and has all sorts of buttons and knobs surrounding it.
The Pip-Boy frame are a special version of the Universes Beyond cards that are only found in Collector Boosters. They can come as both traditional and surge foil finishes and display various stats and information players would find from the game.
Also in Collector Boosters are various alternate art versions of cards, including Commander staples like Sol Ring, which depicts a Vault Guy before an opening vault door, which creates a ring of sunlight, Arcane Signet, and even a Crucible of Worlds. These cards all have a cartoony style to them, reflecting the Vault Guy style.
Previews for Universes Beyond: Fallout begin in February, while the four Commander decks and Collector Boosters drop in March 2024. Make sure to stay tuned to Hipsters of the Coast for all your Magic: The Gathering and Universes Beyond news, updates, and more!