Exciting news! The Unwell Kingdom is officially complete, both in art and mechanics!! This should serve as the final patch notes, assuming I never need to go back for an emergency errata. May saw one last playtest draft, and I’m pleased to report that no cards stood out as needing adjustments! We also saw a fun spread of colors across the decks. Proven staples like Naya Equipment and Rakdos Goblins continued to put in work, but the winner was a surprising one: Azorius Tempo Enchantments with a splash of Black! Spiritual Weapon applied snowballing pressure, Archibald, the Astute was unexpectedly disruptive (fun fact: sacrificing an Illusory Palace costs mana while he’s out!), and Fall of the Fell King put nails in coffins.

Of course, this begs the question: if there were no cards that needed adjustments after the last playtest, then what’s in the patch notes? As I did a final proofreading pass on the entire set to get them ready to print, I found lots of minor formatting & templating bits to clean up, and there were even a few cards that needed full rewrites. I also found a single true typo on Splendor: “numbver” instead of “number”. Shameful.

Here’s a summary of the changes:

(REWORK) Full Speed Ahead!

Sacrificing a land is now part of the casting cost

I’ve updated Full Speed Ahead! to be less Roiling Regrowth and more Harrow. Now, you need to sacrifice a land up front. This feels cleaner and more official, though it does mean it can be punished harder by a counterspell. Overall, I don’t expect this to be functionally different in the vast majority of situations, and it should continue to be one of the strongest ramp cards in the set.

(REWORK) Confounded Chimera

“At the beginning of combat” → “Whenever you attack”

While proofreading, I realized that the old version of Fable, Nimble Trickster broke the rules. By triggering at the beginning of combat, she could create a “tapped and attacking” Illusion token before the Declare Attackers step. To create this attacking token at a more appropriate time, she’ll now wait until you attack with at least one creature. The knock-on effect of this is that the Illusion is no longer a completely free attack, since you’ll need at least one other creature to risk itself in combat. The good news is that the attacker creature doesn’t need to be Fable, so with proper setup, you can still get this trigger the turn she enters or keep her back as a blocker while still threatening damage!

Fable was a serious threat in the Equipment deck in the final playtest, and she should continue to be a powerful build-around legendary.

(REWORK) Practice Cactus

Moved triggered effect to equipped creature

I love Practice Cactus’s effect and the play patterns it offers, the wording always felt off. Fortunately, I found a more elegant way to only trigger its effect if it’s attached to a creature: it now triggers on that equipped creature directly. This one feels obvious in retrospect, and while there are subtle differences in how this plays out, it should feel more or less identical.

(BUFF) Fathers’ Parting Gift

Can now grab any land, not just basics

While this change was mostly made to put Fathers’ Parting Gift more in-line with the effects of similar real MtG cards, it’s worth noting that it’s strictly a buff to now have the option to grab any land you find instead of just basics. It’s possible this will make an already-strong card even stronger, but I believe the restriction to only find lands or Equipment is still enough to keep it fair. (If this could grab creatures, the ability to look at seven cards for one mana would be ludicrous.)

I expect that, unless they just need to hit their next land drop, most players will still aim for Equipment when playing this card, but new powerful targets include tri-lands like Cobbleston and discard/sac lands like Memnos, the Giantwood.

(REFORMAT) Various Character Names & Pronouns

Ability text now references full names and pronouns

One of my favorite shifts in official MtG templating since I first started this project is the willingness to refer to named characters more naturally in their effects. In the past, proper syntax would be “When Garp Garp, Lord of Bones dies, it deals damage […]” Now, it’s much nicer to read “When Garp Garp dies, he deals damage […]”

I assume this shift is a combination of real cards getting too wordy and looking for any way to reduce text, and IP crossovers creating new pressure to refer to characters a certain way… I can just imagine feedback from Marvel’s legal team saying something like “Please don’t refer to Spider-Man as an ‘it’.”

Whatever the reason, I was able to improve readability on lots of cards in this set, and as a bonus, some characters may now avoid being misgendered by players! Wap, Eternal Diva and Mutt, Battle Mage are now referred to as “they” directly on the card (along with Harlowe, the Sublime if you count flavor text), but I never did find an organic way to clarify that Spitts, Furnace Keeper is a girl. Alas.

And that’s a wrap! There are still a few more articles I’d like to write for the devlog, but after nearly three years, this set is finally complete! I don’t think it will full set in until I have the physical cards in hand, but I’m immensely proud of what we accomplished for The Unwell Kingdom. I’d put this up against any real set printed into standard over the past few years in terms of draft experience, and I look forward to experimenting more with constructed decks using these cards. Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and art to this beast, to all the folks who helped playtest and gave vital feedback to dial everything in, and to YOU for reading this and following along this dev journey!