Microsets; or Proving The Old Saying About Good Things and Small Packages

Written by kayiu102

If you’ve clicked on this article, you’re probably someone that’s heavily invested in Magic design, and are curious about an exciting new project type! Or maybe you’re just bored on your commute and your data isn’t loading anything else. Whatever the case, before we get into talking about microsets, I want to zoom out a bit. Let’s talk about the concept of a “project” in custom magic spaces, and why it holds a position of revered importance for many people.

The Passion for Projects

Most people get into custom magic design with one-off cards, making cards of characters from their favorite piece of media or game pieces for their favorite deck. Once they’ve been around the block for a while, however, they start to aspire for something bigger—a full, completed set, the white whale for many a custom designer: There are a couple of reasons for this. 

• Firstly, while some cards are just made to be shared and ooed and ahhed at, many designers want people to actually play with their cards! There aren’t many venues for people to jam with individual designs, beyond slotting them into commander decks when playing with close friends. With sets, people can draft them or even engage in constructed play if it ends up in a custom format. 

• The second reason is longevity. Individual cards get lost to time, buried by future posts in ever-moving card design feeds. With a set, there are multiple hosting options one can use to collect their work into a conveniently linkable and shareable format. Some of them, like Egghub and Planesculptors, also allow strangers to stumble on them, giving them unique reach.

• Finally, there’s the question of canonicity. Some people get into custom magic to push boundaries that Wizard of the Coast hasn’t. Others do it to emulate the style and structure of a game they’ve loved! For the latter group, sets represent the ultimate goal in design, a truly professional-grade product. 

A Different Approach

Here’s the funny thing, though: none of these points are exclusive to sets! They just usually end up as the default option, as the most prominently discussed and visible type of custom magic project. However, they aren’t for everyone: they require creating a huge volume of cards, with several different relationships and roles overlaid on top of each other, that often requires multiple cycles of iteration even once “completed” to achieve polish and balance. This exhausting, demanding process isn’t always what someone is looking for when working on a project. They might be better served by working on something with a smaller scope, like a set of Jumpstart packs or a Commander precon, that checks all the boxes that sets usually do while being more manageable. 

Regardless, there are trappings of sets that are attractive beyond just size; the rarity system, even distribution of colors within a single project, getting to develop a suite of mechanics, etc. What if you wanted a project with the scope of a Jumpstart pack, but the structure of a standard set? Enter: Microsets.

First conceptualized by IgnitedxSoul on the Beacon of Creation server, Microsets were originally intended to be played in a duplicate sealed format, similar to Jumpstart. Two designers would privately make 45 card microsets, then simultaneously reveal them to each other. After making collaborative balance changes, they’d combine the microsets and make 40-card decks out of them, then play a match. 

Making Microsets

While this style of play didn’t end up catching on—with constructed-style deck brewing taking center stage instead—the set structure did! The aforementioned 45 cards are first divided by rarity: 6 rares/mythics, 12 uncommons, and 27 commons. To make sure the sets have a proper density of creatures, there’s a hard lower limit of nine creatures at uncommon and twelve at common. For the rares and uncommons, the only restriction on color is that no two cards within a rarity could share a color! For uncommons, given there are five colors and twelve cards, this structure necessitated dipping into multicolored cards, leading most people to drop a full set of ten signpost uncommons. Others went unconventional, dipping into 3c and hybrid cards to fulfill the requirements. The commons have a little more breathing room, with four of each monocolor and three colorless cards. If you also want to spice it up here, there’s room for five wildcard slots, each of which have to have a different color identity from each other— but they can be hybrid or multicolored, if you’re making a tricolor faction microset! 

Either way, this meant that to some degree, designers were forced to think about and explicitly support archetypes in their microset. This meant that each microset often had small buildaround “packages” of 3-4 cards between the commons and uncommons, that could serve as the foundation for a constructed deck. As the project grew, some people designed their sets after being inspired by looking through the existing catalogue. Originally, though, the designers deliberately held off from looking at the completed microsets, to encourage emergence in the interactions between them. The way the resulting buildaround packages stumbled into working together has been my favorite part of the whole process! Two microsets—Schwa’s Star Wars Miniset and Qirn’s Race to the Eternal Lands—even both ended up convergently designing a backup-style mechanic, where creatures could grant their abilities to vehicles they crewed!

One big advantage of Microsets is allowing you to explore concepts that wouldn’t have been possible in other product types. Juliet’s Curtain’s Fall originally started as a “piles matter” set—a narrow and complex mechanical concept that would’ve had trouble developing in a conventional environment. Here, odd mechanics like puppet, where you temporarily gain control of opponents—primarily to control their pile choices, but also for other shenanigans—can thrive without questions of play patterns at density. 

There’s also an aesthetic advantage to microsets. Art hunting is often the bane of a budding custom designer, forcing them to find hundreds or even thousands of pieces for what might be a narrow concept. And while a common refrain in custom communities is that “if you’re willing to search for it and make concessions in concept, there’s art for everything out there,”—with sets spanning gun-toting space cowboys to Jewish mythology proving artable—it’s entirely reasonable to not want to do either of those things, both for reason of time and artistic vision. Microsets act as a playground where you can just use the few pieces that sparked your interest in a given aesthetic, and create the Magic: the Gathering equivalent of a moodboard! The aforementioned Curtain’s Fall is one such example, heavily featuring not just masked performers, but specifically the Innamorati of 16th century commedia dell’arte! Race to the Eternal Lands is another great example. Return sets can often be tricky to art—while canon planes are based on broad genres or tropes, ones whose very inspiration a designer can dip into for their own art file, they also often have their own flourishes that you can only find in fanart of that same set! Race to the Eternal Lands cleanly weaves together traditional swashbuckling pirates with fanart of the vampires, dinosaurs, and other denizens of Ixalan, creating a satisfyingly authentic feel that would’ve been difficult to achieve at scale. 

Others, like Grapple’s Mercadia: Blood and Gold, serve as true proof-of-concepts for future full sets—not just acting as a project in and of themselves, but also functioning as exploratory design.  This, personally, was the usecase I resonated with most. Chikyu: Ruined Future was a set I’d been concepting for a while—even doing some streams for it last year—but had been daunted by the sparsely-filled set skeleton every time I opened the file. Within the context of a microset, I no longer had to commit to sinking my time into what might be a black hole I’d never escape from. The cleanly defined, pared down scope allowed me to overcome my designer’s block and force myself to work through the process card by card. I think that if you’ve ever dealt with anxiety over not knowing where to start a project, microsets are one great way to just get the ball rolling!

The Future

When people had just started making microsets, there were passing comments about it being a legitimate constructed experience in its own right. Others were cautious, noting that it would take thirty-six microsets to match the current size of Standard. Now, with eighteen microsets and counting, each by a unique designer, that goal doesn’t seem like such a pipe dream anymore!

Hopefully, I’ve sold you on Microsets as a form of custom magic creative expression! If you’re interested in checking out the currently completed microsets, you can find them all here. You should also join the Beacon of Creation Discord server to discuss them and maybe even get some help making your own! Otherwise, until next time, this is Kayiu, signing off!