Making a Magic: The Gathering card is a long process. To go from an idea to an actual piece of paper in a player’s hand takes years, with each one being discussed, tweaked, tested, proofread, illustrated, and so on as it passes between the many different teams at developer Wizards of the Coast. Unless, that is, it’s a card for the Unknown event that has become the star of every MagicCon live show in recent years, in which case the process is… a bit more loosey goosey.“The goose is enormous. It is a goose that you have not seen the likes of, ever.”That’s Matt Tabak, Principal Editor at WOTC and one of the people responsible for the absurd and extremely popular Unknown event. I went to MagicCon in Las Vegas this year to finally see what Unknown was for myself, and I sat down with both Tabak and Gavin Verhey, Principal Game Designer and originator of the concept, to discuss how it got started, why it became such a hit, and how it impacts Magic as a whole. But first, let’s cover the basics: Unknown is a way to play Magic designed specifically for the official conventions, called MagicCons, that are hosted a few times a year. It’s a Sealed event, which means you sit down, crack open some retail booster packs, and then build a deck out of whatever you happen to get. The big twist is that, alongside some special rules, you also get a little plastic bag filled with 10 random playtest cards made just for this event – they don’t have any art, their rules text is often cramped, and their faces are literally just stickers plastered over actual cards. “I find part of the joy of Unknown, why players enjoy it so much, is that it is not fully polished,” Verhey says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, step inside being a Magic playtester for a day.’”Unknown gives you a hands-on peek behind the design curtain to a degree that was previously quite rare, complete with typos, rough edges, and mechanics that don’t necessarily always work within Magic’s rules. They can be a little broken, hard to track, or just more powerful than anything you’d see in a real set – but the one thing they always have to be is amusing."If you ask a Magic designer to make Magic cards in their free time, they’ll make something really weird.” - Gavin Verhey“When you make a Magic card that is intended to go into a booster pack that you hope people will buy, the ultimate goal is joy and entertainment, and there are many roads to get there,” Tabak explains. “On an Unknown card, there’s basically one route to joy, and that’s to make them laugh. Every Unknown card is basically just trying to get somebody to laugh.” That could be with inside jokes, goofy designs, or even silly references to the city your specific event takes place in. For instance, I opened a card called At Least It’s a Dry Heat that deals 1,000,000 damage that can’t be prevented or “compared to damage dealt by sources on the east coast,” which has been in Unknown packs for Las Vegas two years in a row now. (“It’s not any cooler, for some reason. The sun is still shining,” Tabak jokingly complains, before begrudgingly adding, “which we’re thankful for.”) Verhey can basically do whatever he wants with these cards, with fast turnaround times and way less oversight than there is while making regular sets. “I’ll be making unknown cards two-and-a-half weeks before the event happens sometimes,” he tells me, which is a far cry from the years a regular set requires. Verhey says it’s a fun creative outlet compared to the more rigid nature of making real cards, and that other members of WOTC now even randomly send him funny ideas that he’ll often drop straight into the next Unknown card pool. “If you ask a non Magic designer to make Magic cards, they’ll make Magic cards. If you ask a Magic designer to make Magic cards in their free time, they’ll make something really weird.”Even if one ends up clearly out of line, Verhey’s philosophy is that “everything can be fun for three rounds,” which is the most you’ll ever play with a given card in a single event. Tabak similarly emphasizes that “high impact is a priority for these Unknown cards, because [people] have to be immediately wowed and immediately inspired to build decks around them.” That’s due in part to the unique format Verhey has developed for Unknown over the dozen or so times it’s been run since its inception in 2023. It has you building a 60-card Commander deck with no color restrictions that you then play 1v1, which encourages building around a splashy legendary creature and then cramming in as many of the wildest playtest cards as you can reasonably manage.For example, my commander for the first of the two Las Vegas Unknown events I joined was a card called The Sprinkler of Stardust, which has the extremely strange ability to turn instant and sorcery cards into creatures that then cast themselves when they deal combat damage. My gameplan ended up revolving around punching my opponent with big spells like Bad Deal as many times as I could manage, which was equal parts delightful, devastating, and wholly unique in my three decades of playing Magic. That commander is itself a reference to both a powerful card called Winota, Joiner of Forces and the Commander Format Panel member known for championing it, Lua Stardust. There have been dozens of nods to Magic community members across the history of Unknown, including a whole series of “Runners” as a shoutout to the group LoadingReadyRun and a round of “Knights” as a wink to The Command Zone, both popular channels that regularly work with WOTC on collaborations. “MagicCon, in so many ways, is about the people that come." - Gavin Verhey“MagicCon, in so many ways, is about the people that come,” Verhey says, “and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to give back to the community?’” He sees these personal references as both a way to thank the creators who helped advocate for Unknown back when it was still a wild experiment, as well as a fun “quest” for fans as they then go hunting the show floor for signatures or custom doodles on the otherwise blank cards they opened. “Like everything else I did, I pitched it to one person, they’re like, ‘Sounds great,’ and I said, ‘Sold!’”In fact, when Verhey first pitched the idea for Unknown as a whole, he was confident it would be shot down. It all started when WOTC Senior Operations Manager Scott Larabee asked him to run an event at MagicCon Philadelphia in 2023, but didn’t have any guidance as to what that should look like beyond being a “spectacle event” to excite people. Events with oddball rules were nothing new, but the idea for these playtest cards came from Verhey’s desire to do something that could only come from WOTC’s game design team. His thought before pitching it? “It is going to get killed for sure.”“I was worried about it because it’s essentially making new Magic cards that are never playtested and put out into the world, which is a thing we often don’t like to do. We like to show our high polish and our high gloss and everything. And, historically, there’s been a lot of rigor around these kind of things. Even the playtest cards for Mystery Booster, there was a lot of time and scrutiny put on those cards.”But he pitched it all the same and, to his surprise, he got the blessing of both Vice President of Design Aaron Forsythe and Communications Director Blake Rasmussen, which was all he needed to be off to the races. Verhey describes the first Unknown event as his “weird little side project” (“It was just me doing it in my free time”), printing all the cards out himself and spending all day stickering them by hand in Philadelphia right before the show with the help of a few members of the event staff (“We had no idea how long it was going to take”). When they realized they still needed to make the booster packs, they dumped the “thousands upon thousands of cards” they had just assembled into Verhey’s suitcase and shook it around to randomize them.“I was so nervous. I was terrified,” Verhey recalls – but the stakes at the time were actually fairly low in the grand scheme of things. Not many people even knew the event was happening, and both he and Tabak agree that it wouldn’t really have been a big deal if it hadn’t gone well, because that would have just meant they don’t do it again. But it did go well, quickly becoming the talk of the show and immediately being put on the schedule for the next MagicCon, and then growing into one of their marquee draws ever since. They’ve even added a charity drive to part of the event each time, which Verhey admits always gets him a little teary-eyed as the amount they raise continues to go up. “Every show we add more seats, every show we do more.”Tabak says that WOTC does encourage individuals to take on “aspirational” projects from time to time but, even in that context, he describes the things Unknown is doing and its impressive popularity as an anomaly. “You’d be surprised [by] the number of things that were just a two-person idea or one-person idea that grew into something special – very, very few, perhaps none, are on the level of Unknown, though.”“Every show we add more seats, every show we do more.” - Gavin VerheyUnknown still operates outside of WOTC’s usual card making process, but Verhey says the quality did vastly improve when Tabak offered his assistance, as it’s the editing team’s job to make sure cards are as close to perfect as possible. “When we first learned about these cards that Gavin had just put out into the world by himself – as a team, professionally, we were horrified,” Tabak explains as Verhey smiles alongside him. “Now, personally, I was delighted, and I knew I had to get on board with this, so I immediately hounded Gavin and said, ‘Why don’t you let me look at those cards this time before we send them out into the world?’But even with a bit more oversight, Tabak tells me they still get to break the rules with these cards when it comes to things like typesetting. “On real typeset cards, we have standards to maintain some measure of readability, we can only put so much text on a card,” he says. “On the playtest cards, we can be a little more forgiving.” Tabak describes this as an advantage, but his apprehensive tone while doing so betrays the slight discomfort this clearly still causes the editor side of him. Indeed, they both laugh as Verhey teases that “sometimes Matt will be like, ‘Gavin, your card doesn’t fit,’ and I’m like, ‘I can print it out and all the text is on there; I don’t know what to tell you.’”The way they physically make the playtest cards has matured, too, no longer resting on the shoulders of Verhey and a very large suitcase. They are still individually stickered by hand, but that’s now handled at the offices of WOTC’s event partner, Pastimes, over the course of multiple weeks, with Verhey saying the scale of each Unknown event is “ultimately capped, to some degree, by our ability to just sticker these cards.” (He jokes about considering giving players uncut sheets of printed stickers so they can assemble their own cards, to which Tabak replies, “What if we just give all 600 players scissors? What could go wrong?”)The structure of the event itself has evolved as well, with player feedback being used to iterate a bit each time. The very first one was normal 40-card Limited, with all the participants split between two teams that they could win points for in a larger competition. It didn’t take long for Verhey to add a commander to the mix, but even that started with the regular color identity rules before first allowing Partner commanders to open things up more and then finally getting rid of color restrictions altogether. The goal behind that is to make sure people can use these wacky cards more reliably, but the variety between shows is also just part of the appeal for anyone who goes to multiple MagicCons.“I think one of the things about Unknown is, to some degree, it has to keep changing and it can’t be the same thing forever,” Verhey says. “So I’m running this current Commander version right now, but we could do something different at a future one, and that's the beauty of Unknown. People have so much faith in it at this point, they’re like, ‘I’m going to sign up, I’m going to come to see this thing, we’ll see what happens.’ And I might totally change the format at some point, which could be pretty fun.”“It’s on us to evolve a ruleset based on what set is in the spotlight at the time, kind of match that and bring them something that they can’t find [in regular Sealed],” Tabak adds on. The Las Vegas event I attended was primarily tied into Tarkir: Dragonstorm, with special creatures linked to its five clans, but the card pool also had plenty of RPG references as an homage to the Final Fantasy crossover set that had just come out. Tabak is quick to point out that there are always a lot of newcomers, too – some of whom have no idea what they are getting into before they sit down at the table. “There are definitely people that are surprised when we hand them the playtest cards. They’re like, ‘I don’t know what this is, do I just put it in my backpack?’”“The number one goal for me is just let people have fun and make them smile and delight them – and if I learn anything, that’s a nice bonus.” - Gavin VerheyI was curious how much those playtest cards are actually “playtesting” something, and if WOTC uses Unknown as a real testing ground for ideas given how quickly they can go from concept to public feedback, but it turns out this really is mostly just them having fun. “I'd say [Unknown cards are] like 85% nonsense,” Verhey says, “5-10% ‘here’s a thing we actually tried for the set it was associated with that we didn’t end up using,’ [...] and maybe 5% are like, ‘I actually think this could be cool, let’s see what people think about this.’”He wouldn’t give any indication as to which ones fall into that final category, but Verhey says he has used the popularity of some cards in Unknown as “ammo” to convince people internally that something similar could be a good idea for a real set. Besides, even as unofficial, stickered cards, he recognizes that some people have started to take them more seriously, using them in casual Commander decks or even their cubes (a collection of cards that make up a custom Draft set). “The number one goal for me is just let people have fun and make them smile and delight them – and if I learn anything, that’s a nice bonus.”It’s hard not to be at least a little bit amazed by both the almost grassroots rise of the Unknown event and the surprisingly bootstrap way it gets made within the multibillion-dollar corporation that is Wizards of the Coast. Tabak says it’s a testament to the company’s culture that this sort of thing is encouraged, but it has still grown far bigger than anyone expected it to (including its creator), going from shaking typo-filled cards in a suitcase to filling up convention floors and raising money for good causes. When I ask if it feels like they sort of got away with something here, Tabak’s response is unequivocal: “Absolutely. And we’re going to keep getting away with it, too.”Tom Marks is IGN's Executive Reviews Editor. He loves card games, puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and lots more.