Magic: The Gathering cards have had many different border colors for years, but not for Universes Beyond. Why?
When it comes to borders for Magic, generally there have been 4 that have been used to a large extent. There's black, which is the most prevalent and which most sets have used. There's white, which was used mainly for reprint core sets between 1993 and 2005, albeit with a few being used here and there afterwards. There's silver which the un-sets use. And then the gold-bordered ones for commemorative sets.
There have been exceptions. Borderless, for example, just gets rid of them. A few recent cards for the Burning Revelations Secret Lair Drop and Aetherdrift have even tried out yellow and red. Back in the day, Revised cards were also supposed to have gray borders until Wizards of the Coast decided to go with white.
But, considering the huge differences between borders, there is a major exception: Universes Beyond. Started in 2020, Universes Beyond uses existing I.P.s, then makes cards based around that, or straight up reskins some. The Lord of the Rings, Fallout, Jurassic Park, Spongebob Squarepants, and others. And because some are so different, players wanted different borders for years, right up until 2024 when Universes Beyond were made Standard legal.
So...why didn't WotC do that, as most players wanted that to differentiate them. Like, say, make them Grey or Blue or another bordered color? Well, R&D thought that players wouldn't think they were real MTG cards.
No, really.
According to Mark Rosewater, "We talked about having another border color. The ultimate problem was the audience reaction to the silver border. It most often doesn’t get treated as “this is a different subset of Magic”, but rather “this isn’t a real Magic card”. I have letter upon letter of people who want to play un-cards in casual play, things in which there aren’t even playing an established format, and their friends don’t let them because they say they aren’t “real”.
"Our original goal of having different color borders was to make them easy to identify, so people can tell what group the card belong to. In the end, it often became a mark of banishment, a reason to dismiss the card as being something “ less than”.
"If that’s how the majority of the players react, colored borders stopped being an effective tool, so it was off the table as an option for Universes Beyond."
And since they are now becoming legal, it kind of now makes sense why they made the borders that way.
Now, in truth, are they actually "real" MTG cards?
