I have a Cube which will never contain UB cards, and I'm now in the process of converting all my existing decks for different formats into a "Modern Pre-Horizons" Battle Box since that was my favorite format ever.
Will probably spend some money in this, but after that I'll never upgrade those decks again, and with more focus on UB there will be even less things I care about to put on the Cube.
This way I can keep good memories from those times, have ways to play the game with friends, and never again bother with WOTC's bullshit.
I think this is a fantastic idea and I agree regarding keeping the good memories. I put together a Portal cube a few years ago and have now started to put a collection of Tribal decks together in each color. These are all only including cards Pre-Horizons as well.
This aside, I stopped playing standard a decade ago. There were no bans for years, then kaladesh and innistrad 2 came along and fucked that all up. I was running pummeler but caught the collateral ban from temur energy. I tinkered to limp it along until I built something else, but then another two decks got smacked down a month or two later. I basically lost all confidence that the decks I was spending money on would be viable for any period of time. (in fairness, pummeler was 30 bucks when I built it, but it's the principle of the thing). Moved to modern. Then MH2 Uhh... Yeah that was kinda bad. Always played edh, but that became the only format I played. And now...
I was an incredibly reliable consumer. I bought a box of almost every new set, and supplemental products that interested me or had cards I wanted. Then with it being eternal spoiler season, I couldn't even keep up with which was which. I haven't spent a dime on mtg in probably over 3 years. And I'm sad about it. I loved it. I loved cracking packs and setting interesting cards aside and doing a pass through my decks to see if anything could be swapped out. But now it feels like too much effort, which is crazy because mtg can be a high effort hobby. I have all my commons and uncommons sorted into 3 20k count boxes because it makes searching easy for building. Now I haven't touched them in ages. Still some unsorted piles but I can't even make myself give a fuck.
I'm still gonna throw money at Johannes Voss on patron and Kickstarter because DUH, but I'm afraid wotc has lost me.
I didn't read the whole thing, mostly because I'm kinda scared to, but if this means UB sets are floating in through Standard and Pioneer than I think I'm done with the game for a little while. Pioneer was the last thing I was interested in and just bought into it in paper simply because it wasn't on Arena and wasn't part of the UB system but this changes that entirely for me. I don't know what the heck they're thinking here.
Crossover sets like Marvel, Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed.
A lot of people dislike those sets, but so far you could ignore them depending on the format you played. From now onwards it'll likely be impossible to stay away from those if you want to play competitively.
Besides the overall dislike of this new "Fortnite the Gathering" world, there's also concerns of pricing, these sets so far have been more expensive than regular sets, and also even more product burnout - we're up to 6 major sets/year from the 4 we used to have not too long ago.
Ugh. I did not think that UB was that big a deal when it was announced because I thought they would be smart enough to keep it optional and wouldn't oversaturate the market. Oh how wrong and foolish I was
I could complain about this, or explain why I don't want it, but what good would it do? The fact that they're making this announcement means it's already too late to stop it.