This article contains spoilers for the 1997 PlayStation 1 game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SotN).
You have been warned.
The game places you in the shoes of Alucard, Dracula’s half human, half vampire son. You are tasked with discovering the secrets of a mysterious castle. Who is in control here?
As you climb the stairs for what seems to be the final battle of the game, dual feelings wage war inside of you. On one hand, you marvel at the smoothness of the gameplay and the amazing music. On the other hand, you wonder if this is really it. It’s not that you’re disappointed; more like you’ve had a great time and you don’t want it to end.
But you check your map, and sure enough, you’ve filled up just about every spot.
You defeat the (not Dracula) boss in what can only be described as an anticlimactic fight. The ending cinematic plays, and you put the controller down.
Unless…
Unless you’ve collected the Holy Glasses and worn them during that faux boss fight. Then you may have seen a green orb flying above the boss's head. And if you defeat the orb?
The Inverted Castle is revealed, a mirror image of what you’ve already traversed, and you realize you’ve truly only played half the game.
The Inverted Castle
I loved this discovery as a kid. A whole new castle to explore? And the real OGs know that pretty early on in this new castle you can get the most overpowered weapon I’ve ever seen in a videogame (the Crissaegrim sword).
But even with all of these new wonders to experience, I’ve come to understand something very important about why that game was so great: It was allowed to end.
That may sound strange since I just tried to impress upon you the wonder of an undiscovered country.
Allow me to explain (and maybe we will even get to how this relates to Magic).
The shape of something is defined by its boundaries. I knew my Castlevania journey was going to continue, but not indefinitely. I could see the edges of the map. There was an eventual end.
If the developers had made a third hidden castle, or (as is now so often the case) released DLC with Exclusive Castle Content, that initial discovery would have been cheapened.
I’m of the opinion that not everything needs to be an ever-continuing saga.
I beat Castlevania’s inverted castle, got as close to 200.6% completion (two castles + quirky developers) as possible, then moved on to something else. I’ve replayed the game countless times since then: numerous times on the PS1, when it came out on Xbox Live, when I had a long flight and it was available on iOS. Hell, I’d buy a remake in a heartbeat (maybe even a 30th anniversary edition in 2027? Even if it wasn’t tournament legal I wouldn’t mind as long as it was affordable!)
But that replayability is something conferred by the completeness of the original experience. I take it off the shelf, enjoy what it has to offer, and put it away again for a while.
And now dear reader, if I have sufficiently proven my nerd bonafides, let me tell you why I think Universes Beyond can offer exactly the same kind of experience for Magic players.
ASIDE
Ok, obviously any discussion of Universes Beyond requires massive caveats. So let’s just get this out of the way.
If you’re reading this, you are a subgroup within a subgroup. If these words are reaching you, the following things are most likely true:
- You know about Magic
- You consider yourself part of its subculture
- You care enough to read an article that is longer than a page
- You care enough to have paid to read it!
Knowing all these things about you, there’s something that is true in your heart, but you may have been afraid to speak aloud.
I don’t know how to say this gently, so I’ll at least try to be quick.
The Magic you fell in love with is dead.
Ready to head back into the main topic? Not quite? Alright, a few more words about that hole in your chest (I’m sorry).
There are (expensive) museums where you can go visit the fossils of what once was. We call them Premodern, or Old School, or perhaps a Cube with specific boundaries. But to hope that these snapshots of the past represent what Magic will be again in the future is grasping for the wind.
The Magic I grew up with is dead too. I was there, Gandalf. I was there when damage stopped using the stack. When Mythic rares were introduced. When Chronicles forced the creation of the Reserved List. When we thought Mirrodin Pure was just as likely as New Phyrexia.
If we’re being completely honest with each other, Magic has “died” numerous times. For what it’s worth, Magic also has many, many lives. Still, this time feels different.
And as silly as it feels to type this, I know that this “death” hurts. It hurts in a way that only something that is not truly important from a “I need this to live” perspective can hurt. Like when they closed the local arcade that you spent countless hours playing Dance Dance Revolution at. Or when the last Toy’s R Us in your state finally gave up the ghost.
Those may seem like cheap examples but I use them because they are personal and true. Perhaps I will try one other way:
Towards the end of the novel “That Hideous Strength” by C.S. Lewis, one of the main characters becomes entangled with a secret (evil) society. At one point, they try to induct him fully by taking him to a room where everything seems a bit “off”. The dimensions don’t quite line up. The art on the wall is skillfully painted but reveals images that are somewhat disturbing upon closer inspection.
That’s kind of how I feel when I see that The One Ring had to be banned in Modern or that The Fantasticar is terrorizing Legacy. Like a picture frame that is slightly askew but no matter how I try to fix it, it’s still just a bit crooked.
It would take at least an entire article or ten to fully unpack this. We don’t have time today (this is just an aside, an appetizer to the main course!). And please do not read into this that I’m trying to suggest that the designers at WotC are an evil society trying to slowly indoctrinate us to their Magic-as-Monopoly world. I think the people that make Magic love Magic, and I’d be willing to bet that most people orbiting the Magic universe would leap at the chance to work on the game.
Still, I stand by my previous statement: whatever Magic was is no longer what it is.
But just because our old Magic is dead, doesn’t mean we can’t endeavor to enjoy what it has become. That’s my goal for the non-aside parts of this article.
Feel better? Take a moment if you need it.
Ok, back to upside down castles, and the shapes of things, and what it looks like to start again.
END ASIDE
The initial Universes Beyond offerings didn’t grab hold of me.
The Walking Dead? I liked the show for a while but it was a pass.
Street Fighter? The cards were cool but what was I going to do with a handful of legends that still felt aesthetically incompatible with the other 30,000 Magic cards that already existed?
I don’t know the Warhammer or Fallout universes very well, so I didn’t engage with those sets either.
But Final Fantasy? Oh boy can we have a conversation about Final Fantasy. I grew up watching my brother play part one on the NES. Part seven was the first game I purchased with my actual money, and the optional bosses (Ruby and Emerald Weapon) saw me almost break down crying when I finally defeated them.
So naturally I preordered all four of the Commander decks (but not the special editions; those are… bent). As well as a play booster box. And a decent amount of singles. And matching deck boxes for the four decks. And a binder.
Ok that was kind of expensive to type out and I forgot to mention the sick long box I got from UltraPro to house the Commander deck boxes…
Anyway, after my initial shopping spree I was pretty close to having a complete set (of at least the “normal frame” cards). A few months after release, I was finished with the base set; it is a joy for me to flip through the binder and remember specific moments of the games I love.
Somewhere along that process it hit me: I could actually complete this collection and then walk away. That is a very rare thing in the world of Collectible Trading Card Games. For the foreseeable future there will be at least 3 In Universe Magic sets released per year. That is roughly 1,000 new cards each year that are supposed to live in the same canonical world, and which could pretty easily make me feel like I’m behind if I skip one or two (from a collector’s perspective).
The Final Fantasy release, on the other hand, is pretty singular.
I’ve since upgraded (aka “blinged out”) the Commander decks as well (using only Final Fantasy cards), and the Holiday Release served as my own personal Inverted Castle moment for the set.
And now? Barring a few optional surge foils or a serialized chocobo, my adventure is complete. The decks are finished and playable. They even have their own power limitations since they are essentially precons with middle of the road mana bases. I’m not tempted to upgrade the decks with each new release because their shapes are defined by their aesthetics: if there is ever another Final Fantasy set it will be at least 4 years from now.
And if there’s never another one? I take them off the shelf, enjoy what they have to offer, and put them away again for a while.
People often complain about the pace of releases in modern Magic. How we are in an endless spoiler season. One common rebuttal is to only pay attention to the releases that excite you and ignore the rest. But my brain doesn’t work that way. Magic excites me. I want to know what’s coming next; it’s how I’m wired. I find myself checking the price of hot singles in my area on release weekend that I have no intention of buying, just in case. If I was in charge, of course I would only release 3 sets a year. But that is not the world we live in, so instead I’m forced to fight against a deluge of product.
There’s always going to be the next cool angel, or vampire, or border treatment. And I’m susceptible to buying them. I’ve taken more cards than I care to admit out of Commander decks that I played zero times because something that “fit” better came out. So if I can put a boundary around a subset of cards, I want to pursue that.
If I have a +1/+1 counter deck with Atraxa at the helm, almost every set is going to have something worth looking at. As I write this in July of 2026, there have been 207 226 (Star Trek + The Hobbit + Reality Fracture cards have been spoiled since I started writing this article) unique cards printed this year alone in Atraxa’s colors that contain the words “+1/+1” and “counter”. If you don’t believe me here’s the exact Scryfall syntax I used:
year:2026 o:"+1/+1" o:"counter" -c:r game:paper is:unique
226. In half a year.
No, that way lies madness. You can’t complete a journey that wasn’t meant to end.
If you append “border:borderless” to your Scryfall search, the number drops to around 60. Remove any Universes Beyond sets and you’re closer to 10. That number will continue to grow over the years until the final Magic card is printed, but at least you have watchers at the gates now. This is my own personal method for updating non UB decks. Not perfect but closer to a stream than a flood.
But imagine (perhaps you first need to equip your own set of Holy Glasses): you build a Marvel deck (or whatever IP finally wears you down) with Thanos as the Commander and only Marvel villains. And then you learn that there will be six infinity stones to collect over the course of several years? Well now, sounds like you’ve just been sent on a righteous quest. It’s still a large amount of cards but it’s probably only 1 set per year. This is manageable.
Or allow yourself to assemble a Nazgul deck with up to 9 of them (the thematic resonance there makes my body hum). Or recreate the Fellowship of the Ring with Aragorn at the helm. Maybe add to those decks from the Hobbit if you want. If you see a Hobbit/LOTR only Commander deck on Moxfield led by Smaug and called “Other Dreams of Greed and Violence”, you’ll know that I’m following my own advice. Do this, and then call them done. Be at peace, son of Gondor.
I can see the shape of those journeys, and more importantly, I can see the end of them.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with an old friend.
