One of my favourite cards in Magic: the Gathering is Ursine Champion. This is a really unassuming draft common—except it’s not even a draft common; it was a Planeswalker deck exclusive from 2019. It’s, somehow, lesser to a draft common. And we’ve gotten tons of equivalents and functional reprints of it across the game’s history, from Stonewood Invoker, to Kraul Warrior, to Iridescent Blademaster. What makes Ursine Champion better?

It’s because of one clause in that text: “...becomes a Bear Berserker until end of turn.” This is game changing text. It turns this card from a mechanical piece to a story. For all those other cards, explaining what the ability is and how it works is abstract and distant. Iridescent Blademaster relies on an assumption that the ability comes from Halo; similarly, Stonewood Invoker says the effect is the Mirari. Both of them have to spend their flavour text trying to explain that connection, and I think they both end up as weak explanations. Kraul Warrior is a strictly mechanical design: there is no explanation at all for how it gets strong.

Ursine Champion tells you in its rules text directly that it gets powerful because it transforms into a bear. It’s so much cooler than all the others. It requires no flavour text explanation. It just works. It’s clean, evocative, simple, and takes this card from nothing to unique and exciting.

This is a style of flavour canon M:tG doesn’t do a ton of, especially in 2024, where we have tons of new and more intensive tools to express flavour concepts—such as the panoply of double-faced cards in Magic today. Anecdotal flavour like Ursine Champion’s is most common in the old core sets, where hitting resonant top-down flavour beats without much mechanical baggage was a big goal, and in those sets you see it a lot with creature types—such as little one-off buildarounds like Griffin Rider. Rise From the Grave turning things into black Zombies is a famous example; it feels much more like the player is actually doing necromancy with the type change, even compared to more explicitly-named flavouring, like Zombify. It’s a small attachment that has an oversized impact in practice. It also allows WotC to sell more particular and strange flavour, like Turn to Frog, and sometimes they use it with counters, too, such as Xathrid Gorgon’s transforming its victims into colourless artifacts with its flavourful but mechanically meaningless “petrification counters”.

There’s a lot of strength in this old-school, simplistic flavouring. I find it particularly really interesting with commons, who most often have the text space to allow a little bit of flexing like this, and it’s a good tool for any designer to have in their toolbox. Would your set’s Pacifism equivalent be more interesting or more unique if it also affected the creature’s name, or stats, or creature type? What if your creature with firebreathing actually turned into a Dragon if you used it enough? Do you have room for creature combinations like Advocate of the Beast and Marauding Maulhorn for your set’s important connections?