I first started playing between 4e & ice age, and it’s BECAUSE i’ve been playing magic for 28 years (well, off and on like many people), that I’ve been wanting to see optional UB-like special releases that reinterpret other universes as if they were a plane in the magic multiverse for over a decade.

Playgroups can very easily ban UB from their own eternal format playsessions, and I think in formats like legacy and commander where nearly anything goes anyway, it’d be silly to ban them. Perhaps there should be official “UB-friendly modern” and “core lore only modern”? modern is kinda the midway point between serious competitive and casual play anyway.

Plus in those 28 years, magic’s core lore itself has gotten way wackier, especially in the last decade and a half or so. We now have a whole bunch of weird magic planes that would have felt just as out of place in the mid-90s; there are now:

• a mobster plane
• a fairy tale plane
• an egyptian plane
• a plane that covers everywhere from ancient to modern japanese culture
• a vampire/werewolf centric european gothic horror set
• a nordic/viking plane
• a bunch of other wacky planes
• plus eldrazi and the blind eternities are an obvious take on lovecraftian horror

For most of the above, the only reason they’re not considered UB themselves is that the source material they’re copying is old enough to be in the public domain. And almost none of them feel like they fit in the universe magic was in its first decade or so. Even without UB, today’s landscape in mtg is far separated from the original/“pure” lore i grew up with (and even that took plenty of influence from classic public domain fiction).

A whole bunch of top-down sets have been “jarring” to people who have been playing magic for decades.