We have dubbed these "acorn" cards. If a card has an oval security stamp or no security stamp at lower rarities , it's legal in eternal formats which includes Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. We have dubbed these "eternal" cards. This security stamp technology would allow us to let the two different types of cards commingle in the same set. I should stress that all the cards in this set were designed before this distinction existed, so cards weren't made to be one or the other.

We just made cool cards for the set and later divided them into categories. We tweaked a small number of cards that were close to being non-acorn, but mostly things stayed as originally designed. Let me give some examples using some preview cards. Assembled Ensemble is an acorn card because it mechanically references art which is something the black border rules don't allow.

Also, yes, Robots are a new creature type in the set, and there are enough of them to care about tribally. One of the design choices we made in building the world is that all the Clowns are Robots, but not all the Robots are Clowns.

It helped us avoid the creepy clown issue. The Robots of Unfinity tend to have one function, which varies from Robot to Robot, that they commit to strongly.

Killer Cosplay is a card that's a little more subtly an acorn card. Like Richard Garfield, PhD, the card that inspired it, it's broad in scope, messing with mechanical space that's difficult to balance for competitive formats. It's also a card that's hard to track for the opponent because few players have memorized all the mana costs in Magic. If we didn't make it an acorn card, it would have to be costed in a way that few would ever play with it. Because acorn cards can't be played in tournaments, we have more latitude to make the card that the casual player can enjoy.

And yes, that is a Lhurgoyf costume. Saw in Half is an eternal card because nothing the card does can't be done in black border.

It's in this set because it's a top-down circus design. It's also a quirky card that we hope eternal players can have fun exploring. The Space Family Goblinson is an eternal card because die-rolling is now something that eternal cards can do. It's in this set because it's synergistic with the rest of the design and allows us to tap into another fun top-down trope. And yes, Guest is also a new creature type. The Space Family Goblinson is also a legendary creature, which leads me to a different aspect of the set.

There are 30 legendary creatures in the set, the majority of which are two-color and over a third of which are eternal, allowing the Commander players a whole bunch of quirky commanders.

Each of these 30 legendary creatures has a Booster Fun card treatment done in a retro-pop style. We have dubbed these cards the showcase cards of tomorrow. As an example, click below to see the showcase cards of tomorrow card treatment of The Space Family Goblinson.

In each case, the traditional card was done by an artist. That illustration was then given to a second artist who reinterpreted it in a retro-pop style. The resulting cards are quite cute. While I don't have pictures today, Unfinity also has two planeswalker cards that each have a borderless alternate art card treatment using the retro-pop art style in addition to their normal planeswalker versions.

But wait, the Booster Fun goodies don't stop there. One of the hallmark qualities of any Un- set is full-art basic lands. Unfinity does not disappoint. The set has a cycle of what we're calling the planetary space-ic lands, with each basic land type illustrated as a landscape of an alien world. The cards are full art, bleeding the art all the way to the edge. They show up in roughly seven out of every ten Draft Boosters Note I said Draft Boosters. That's because for the first time ever in an Un- set, there's a second type of booster available—a Collector Booster.

Collector Boosters have become a staple for Magic sets, and we didn't want to leave our latest Un- set out of the fun. I can't get into all the cool things appearing in the Unfinity Collector Booster today, but I can say we worked real hard to make it something that die-hard Un- collectors would want to purchase.

To explain how the basic lands show up in Collector Boosters, I must first explain two things. Two, besides having the traditional foils that every Magic set has, they're going to have a new unique foil treatment called galaxy foil the foil looks like stars in space; we aren't showing it off today but will show it off as we get closer to Unfinity 's release.

We wanted something to capture the feeling of space, feel at home at a carnival, and get everyone's attention. The galaxy foil treatment is quite eye-popping; the perfect companion for our first-ever expansion set in space. Twelve out of fifteen of the cards in every Collector Booster will be traditional foil, and three out of fifteen will have galaxy foil. You will have two shots at the planetary space-ic lands, once in traditional foil and once in galaxy foil.

Each slot will have the same percentages as the one slot in a Draft Booster, so roughly seven out of ten for the planetary space-ic Lands. We didn't stop there. There's a second cycle of space-ic lands, called the orbital space-ic lands, this time from the vantage point of space.

But wait, there's even more. We took the ten shock lands from the Ravnica blocks and made space card treatments out of them. Like the space-ic lands, the shock lands are also borderless. The borderless shock lands show up one out of every 24 booster packs in Draft Boosters and one out of 24 in each of the two slots, traditional foil and galaxy foil, in the Collector Boosters.

Plus, each Draft Booster and Collector Booster display comes with a Box Topper booster that includes a traditional foil borderless shock land. Finally, before I wrap up for today, I wanted to show you one last preview.

Yeah the problem is API compatibility. If we add a new field to the API format it could break thousands of integrations. What kind of integrations would need to get changed? I would think that mutating or deleting existing columns would for sure break things. But adding a new column shouldn't break existing integrations, right? This seems like an issue that's going to grow as Galarian and Gigantamax form pokedex descriptions get added as well I'd love to help out with it. What direction or next steps would need to be taken next?

I'm not familiar enough with the CSV files and ins and outs to jump right in. Third party integrations that use this service, we can't guarantee all those projects handle the API responses in the same way, so I'm always wary about adding new fields.

New columns means new API fields. I think so, but in some cases, like if the field is added in the middle and not in the end, it could cause problems. But thankfully we had tests that were failing because of this and were able to fix it fast. But if new fields are added without touching the old ones, I don't think that would be a breaking change.

This is a pretty severe issue. It basically invalidates the flavor text of any Pokemon with multiple forms. If any of those existing projects use the PokeDex descriptions they have to parse them manually which defeats the purpose of the API in the first place , and this is also an issue for all new projects that try to use the text as well.

It's not my place to say one way or the other obviously, but if I had the choice between breaking some old projects who can update, likely with little effort or having an entire section of the API be indefinitely dysfunctional over a year and counting! Hello C-Garza , I approach this issue for the first time.

So, apparently, Veekun modified the file we are speaking about removing this inconsistency. I opened a PR: Can somebody test if the new version works well? Is the intent to move the regional flavor text into the variant files? Or maybe the species object had that before and I'm just forgetting. Yeah that should fix the identically tagged entries.

This is a build to get you through your dailies in a reasonable amount of time without dying. I mostly pull one mob after another assembly-line style and save my panic buttons for when I accidentally aggro too many. There are several encounters where heavy damage can be avoided by a smart group, meaning you can essentially run the dungeon with 3. This build nerfs your healing, but ideally, you should be able to get by on nerfed healing at that level. Anyway, I welcome feedback on it from anyone else who tries it out—let me know what you find, and I hope you found this post helpful!

Salt to taste, see what works. And well, that happened. What do you say when you write a post like this? Responding to the attention with self-deprecation or rattling off self-praise is equally abrasive.

Millions of us are a handful of survivors that vanquish foes and triumph on daredevil missions. And as I kept lurking on EJ, I appreciated when several generations of rogue theorycrafters showed up in items.

To me, the players with named items had taken their enjoyment of WoW and turned it into a unique hobby that transcended progression patches or dangling carrots designed to hook the player base. So last week I was working on archaeology and legendary weapons posts when Esoth, writing up a MoP hunter gear list, linked me the ring and asked if I knew about it.

I went back to screencap all the replies on my phone, since it was so heartwarming: the outpouring reminded me of dinging the Realm First Rogue announcement, except less temporal. I tend not to squee about things or actively reach out for support, so to see my feed crit with well-wishes surpassed my expectations. It was different and overwhelming to be in a position where all I could do was accept thanks. Having a named item is in a completely different league from other unique character perks—it transcends the petty elitism tied to many aspects of the game that temporarily make players feel special.

But in adjusting to a new schedule and responsibilities, I was unable to interact in my familiar way with WoW. As a side note, I have felt a bit more adjusted recently—my current guild, Something Wicked, has been a great fit. The guild is full of people who are passionate about WoW: Anafielle runs a paladin blog, Derevka writes about priests and finds excuses not to visit me, Omega maintains Deadly Boss Mods, to name a few. Last week I made a vague comment about trying for a Real ID heroic Firelands clear, and the next day there were three pages of forum responses.

This really meant a lot to me because I had to step down from raiding in Firelands and I felt very ambivalent if I deserved to be carried along to Rag or not. I remember how much his Theorycrafting Think Tank entry on rogues in TBC helped me, and how it was nice to chat with him a few minutes at Blizzcon about ways Killing Spree and void zones can be problematic. I absolutely believe my pre-Wowhead experiences shape the quality and nature of my work.

I draw upon my variety of experiences—progression raider, vanity collector, lazy alt player, achievement hunter—to come up with articles and features that resonate with the wide-ranging player base.

The missing piece of the puzzle that turns this trajectory around is that I also started work as the Content Manager for Wowhead. I was stumped at the time of the prompt summarizing how I greatly enjoyed my current job, which I started during a period of many other changes, but ironically it prevented me from playing the game the way I was used to for six years.

I gave up though, and went back to covering beta. I thought again of writing this entry a month ago, when my guild suggested bringing officers-gone-casual, including myself, to heroic DS for chances at the mount.

My officer team, valuing loyal raiders both past and present, always brought guildmates along for achievement or vanity things for free, knowing it built community and helped reputation. I think we can all agree cutting back was for the right reasons, but it still feels strange, from a personal perspective. So, onto the screenshots. My vanilla screenshots are mostly lost, but I saved the six earliest ones from my old computer:.

From this, we can learn a few things. Even though I was on a terrible laptop, I cared about atmosphere, taking care to find places with dramatic lighting or snapping a picture mid-emote.

My sense of exploration is present as well, as some of the pictures are taken in pre-BC Caverns of Time and pre-Naxx Eastern Plaguelands, yet I focused on nooks and interesting walls instead of sweeping vistas. But they do show a fair amount of wonder at the world.

It was taken when my Burning Crusade guild quit raiding in Sunwell and I was waiting to hear back from new guilds. I had always wanted to join that guild in vanilla, and had a happy few tiers with them in BC until the core team was crit by outside scheduling issues.

So in the twilight of BC, I flew around Azeroth after filling out several apps, taking pictures in my favorite zones like Feralas and Darkshore. After Wrath hit, I also liked this picture for capturing the old look of Cursed Vision with glowing eyes. I had started to become interested in the lore in BC and demon hunters were the perfect hook to get me learning more—eventually leading to a burst of creativity where I wrote some stories about night elves.

If you had asked me to analyze the picture when it was taken though, I would have talked about gear worries. I always remembered that anxiety and how it ultimately proved useless. I did find a raid that cleared Sunwell pre-nerf, I did not see a full set of glaives or Felmyst pants drop for the rest of the tier, and I loved the guild. That taught me a valuable lesson about applicants, gear, and attitude when I did become an officer a year later.

How Sunwell tier and Felmyst pants were easy choices, but the 4th piece of Tier 6 and off-set items were contested. Thinking back to that moment, when I hopped servers in that outfit, all I wanted out of the game was a progression guild I felt comfortable in, and some gear to reflect the content I was working on.

I did get much more than that. People that left us over Immortal reported our recruitment thread out of spite when we started doing better, and yet I continued to handle recruitment in spite of my complaints to Blizzard not going anywhere. A previous BC guild changed their minds about accepting me mid-xfer due to my gender, and so I always worked to ensure the guild was a place where women would feel comfortable. We organized server-wide achievement runs to clear out all raid achievements in the game—I remember The Traitor Kin g bugged for a large part of the raid, so we repeated it several times on 25s.

We teamed up with another guild and finally got Immortal for all achievement-hunters. We did vanity things like running AQ for the rare enchants and Black Temple to finish three glaive sets and had a party in Dalaran when we were done. Our officer core was a really strange mashup of Robert Baratheon, Stannis, and Tyrion if they peacefully ruled together on a council in an alternate universe, and it worked.

A vanilla raider that filled in for Ulduar 10 hardmodes helped me get a discount on some awesome clothing this spring. A group of us all aiming for Feats of Strength got on vent and dealt with my panicked quest questions for over 12 hours straight. Somehow I managed to not get lost, smash Escape in Uldum a lot, and pulled ahead of everyone else. To me, it represents how we blended competition and friendship well. I had sensed my attitude was shifting in Tier 12 though: the week I handed my graduate thesis in was the week I asked to sit for the first time.

The end of undergraduate was rocky and I had many demons to expel in grad school : spending my free time working hard to raid and get achievements helped me relax. Raiding as relaxation was entwined with an academic environment, and once freed from one, the other felt a bit untethered. Soon after I graduated, I got my current job, which was vastly different from my previous one as a humanities and museum research assistant.

And I realized my schedule had to be addressed as I covered Tier 13 previews during Heroic Rag attempts: it would only get worse when beta hit. I love sharing new things with people, and now I get to do that every day on the news blog for work! If I think something is cool in game, I can tie it into one of our features, like Transmog sets. Tier 13 was a strange time to stop hardcore raiding and attempt to still consume content in my overly-picky style.

Some friends put together alt runs and invited me along, but I never could commit with my schedule so unstable. Many of my friends also cut back on WoW due to increasing job commitments, so I ended up talking more to them during the day than in-game. Which is valuable—it showed the friendship went more beyond the game and pixels—but it made logging on pretty strange. I got to travel for work instead of being cooped up in a library, covering Blizzcon and the Mists press event.

Many of my early blog posts were about guides to various quirky things in WoW, and now we have a section for user-submitted guides. I like coming up with screenshots for holiday guides and newsposts using the large collection of disguises I collected over the years. And it has been a good opportunity to branch out into other things. Transmog lets people freeze their characters in a timeless moment instead of the present, how the player wants them to be remembered. An armory link, especially in my case, would lead to a misleading and more depressing conclusion without context.

When I moved servers last week to relax in a healthier guild atmosphere, I put on my Sunwell set for Midsummer farming, since I felt uncomfortable in my reforging mess of LFR gear that was abandoned when beta hit. A lot of the memories of my previous transfer came back to me. This was the raiding set I always wanted to have because I thought it symbolized someone that had demonstrated skill and reliability.

I forgot about our old friend RNG, but, details. Collecting things at a slower pace now, I do miss how things were, but the past served me well. As Cat has mentioned in the post immediately preceding this one, some time ago the authors of Flavor Text were tagged by Rades and Cynwise to participate in the Sixth Meme making its rounds along the WoW blogosphere.

Because I am far too lazy to organize my screenshots into subfolders, I simply picked the sixth picture currently in my screenshot folder. The above picture was taken shortly after the launch of patch 4.

It features myself, Catulla, and Perculia sporting the new pigtail hairstyles, tier 8 druid helms or the lookalike, Unwavering Stare , and whatever costume we felt put forth our best Sailor Moon impression. Then we found a rooftop in Stormwind, danced, and giggled together over Ventrilo, joking about the game, our characters, our lives, and whatever else came to mind. Sadly missing from the above screenshot is our fourth Flavor Text member, Narci, woefully excluded from Stormwind shenanigans because her main is a tauren.

Oh, my dear, how the false barriers of faction do come between us! Alas, our celebrations were the poorer for your absence. I was surprised to find this picture as the sixth in my folder, and the moment I saw it, the precise memories of what I was doing at the time jumped straight to the forefront of my mind. I could tell you about how my poor connection lagged terribly that day in Stormwind with all the post-patch crowding on the realm and how I got turned around in the north alley of the Trade District trying to find the barber shop I very, very rarely use it.

I could tell you how we searched for the perfect spot to dance and take screenshots. Random gliding doggie is still an in-joke that makes me grin, though I acknowledge its lack of meaning to anyone but myself.

It speaks to the power of imagery that my memory is jogged so well through this one little screenshot. Through World of Warcraft communities I discovered modern thinking on social justice and I met many people from diverse backgrounds who have challenged my perceptions in ways I will forever appreciate.

I do not wish to insinuate that I never could have developed these things without World of Warcraft, because I certainly hope that I would have, however it just so happens that in my life Warcraft was the medium through which these things came to me. Surely that is something special. Right now I am going through one of the more difficult periods of my recent life.

Family and personal issues only marginally within my control have finally reached a breaking point and the fallout from that has been exhausting, demanding, and draining. The effort required of me to confront these events and their causes has taken from me the time I might normally be spending losing myself in my hobbies, including WoW, however, the constant that remains is the people the game has brought into my life.

Those folks have been here for me in the past few weeks, buoying my spirit and renewing my faith in ways I have desperately needed, even if only through a few sympathetic words or a silly kitten picture on Facebook.

Life sometimes takes us through dark places, and often the light we rediscover while there is cradled in the hands of other people. One of my favorite quotes is from the book Contact , by Carl Sagan, and it sums up what I feel rather well:.

You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone. This time two years ago, I got it into my head that I was going to do one of those photo-a-day memes.

This screenshot was the first one I took for the meme. When I began work on this project, I was in a blue period of my own. World of Warcraft was my escape; my safe haven to recharge. I had a job that was physically exhausting and left me feeling very drained—I had no control over the fact that the bills had to get paid, no control over the fact that I was constantly succumbing to illness due to stress for the better part of a year.

I felt trapped; away from the keyboard, I was Vrykul-Cat, hiding my pain beneath an icy iron mask of constructed smiles and hollow laughter. Azeroth was one of the few places I could allow myself to grieve. All of us here, we all share a common interest that runs deep. This game uses a medium that is interactive and participatory; we may not be able to shape Azeroth directly, but we can use it as a conduit to shape one another with our ideas.

In one of many emails to me, Narci described World of Warcraft as a petri dish, a focused, controlled environment that lets you attempt and experiment with ideas you might not otherwise be able to or are afraid to outside of Azeroth.

In addition, World of Warcraft gives us a framework on which to hang our ideas. The vrykul screenshot is a perfect example of this—anyone who has leveled a character in Storm Peaks will be approaching this image with an informed context.

It proved to me that what I wanted say had value, and could benefit others. Before I started creating things again, my views were largely similar to Cyn on his blogging heroes. I had convinced myself that I could never live up to what others were capable of doing:. They looked like they had their shit together and all the little details fell into place for them. I found, after a while, that I was jealous of how easy it all seemed for them.

Not because of anything they did — they were creative people being creative. No, it was me — unhappy with my own creative output, stymied by looking at really great examples and finding myself wanting. The project was a low-risk thing for me to do; it was a gentle way to try and get in touch with a part of myself that I was afraid of but desperately missed.

I might have only followed through with it for a few weeks, but do you know why? Suddenly, after a dry spell that covered the better part of my twenties, I was making things again. It was the whisper that started the avalanche. Taking risks and hazarding rejection is no less terrifying to me now than it was before I started playing World of Warcraft.

My evil inner editor who sometimes takes the form of a hyena still lives in my head, eternally demanding more from me, deeming every thing I make unfinished and lacking.

So, what changed? Sarah Pine is an inspiration to me; without her, I would never have thrown my hat into the ring of the Global Writing Contest in I can remember sitting there, wondering who would ever want to read about two night elves arguing in the Temple of the Moon for words.