The "Universes Within Collection" (UWC) is a personal, non-commercial project where I create unofficial Universes Within alternatives (proxies) for Universes Beyond Magic, the Gathering cards.
Check out the card gallery.
You may freely use the card images as proxies by downloading them from the gallery. These cards are NOT FOR SALE; you may not charge for them nor should anyone charge you for their use. For more, see the license.
If you play digitally on Tabletop Simulator, you can use my importer tool to substitute in available UWC cards when playing.
While Magic's Universes Beyond cards have many interesting mechanical designs, I personally don't like the aesthetics of mixing third-party IPs with other Magic cards. Wizards has created the concept of "Universes Within" variants in part to address this issue, but they have also made it clear that there is no plan for Universes Within printings to keep pace with the ever-growing list of new Universes Beyond releases.
The Universes Within Collection is an attempt to cover some of the ground that Wizards won't by building out a set of unofficial Universes Within variants and making them easy to access.
UWC cards are designed with a few goals in mind:
- 100% rules compatibility with the Universes Beyond originals. These are not custom cards in a mechanical sense.
- Clear linkage to the original card to minimize confusion. When renaming cards, the "Nickname" frame is used to clearly-but-unobtrusively reference the original name, and the collector's number is also linked like it is on official Universes Within cards.
- Blend in with traditional Magic cards. References to Earth and/or non-Magic IPs should be removed, except where it violates one of the other goals.
If you're interested in the project and would like to contribute, I'd be happy to have help!
Contributing requires making a free GitHub account. To make any of the contributions below, simply create an issue describing the contribution you'd like to make and attaching any materials.
There are a ton of cards to cover so I have a strong bias towards accepting contributions. However, as the project creator, I do reserve the right to make the final call on subjective matters like quality/appropriateness/etc.
When it comes to creating UWC variants of cards, my goal is to make as few changes as possible. If a card's name fits just fine with in-universe Magic and doesn't contain IP-specific names, I bias towards keeping it to minimize confusion. The same goes for art which sometimes is fine either as-is or with cropping.
In your issue, let me know the name of the card you'd like to add along with any parts of it that should be changed (new name and/or new art). I've found that the most time-consuming aspects of this is linking up Universes Beyond cards with fitting new art and/or names, so this is a huge help. See the artists list for art options.
If you'd like to go the full mile, you can take the extra step of using MTGCardBuilder to assemble the card.
My goal for this project is to use high-quality human art. This can be:
- Public domain art
- Existing Magic art, either heavily cropped or art that was not used on cards (e.g. box art or OTJ bounty tokens)
- Non-magic art with permission from the artist. See the artists list for current options.
You can help by identifying artists on platforms like ArtStation or Cara whose art could be useful to the project, and linking their info in an issue.
If you have other ideas about how or where to acquire art for the project, I'd love to hear about that as well.
Is there a typo in a posted card? Want to spruce up the gallery? Please create an issue with your idea.
It isn't uncommon for Universes Beyond cards to sport IP-specific types or IP-specific keyword mechanics. These generally cannot be removed or renamed without breaking rules compatibility, but when selecting are for a re-concepted card these can be treated as blank/wildcard. Mark Rosewater has said that Wizards can rename mechanics with very UB-focused names, so I'm open to that in a limited capacity so long as the original name gets referenced in reminder text to avoid ambiguity.
Note that cards that reference IP-specific tokens can be addressed by creating a renamed UWC variant of the token and referencing that.
Also note that ability words (which have no rules impact) may be removed.
Personally, some IPs clash with in-universe cards more than others. However, I don't think all players have the same reactions to every IP (certainly it varies among members of my play group). Therefore, any Universes Beyond IP is fair game; players pick and choose which ones they care to use.