You witness the tearing, shedding of a glossy epidermis to sift through the internal vitals and refuse. Slack-jawed, no light exists in the eyes as the hands delve deeper and deeper. A monotone chant of the required calls and incantations, the same intoned many times before. You are not there to participate; you have no hand in this practice. Instead, all you can do it watch.

This is not a sacrifice; we call it a pack opening video.

Trading card games have spawned a veritable cottage industry of ways to engage with your favourite hobby. We have deck techs and guides, lore explainers, blustering financial rants and EDH games galore. If you are lucky and patient, there’s even the chance of a rare critical appraisal or essay on Magic: The Gathering. But if you’re looking to fill the hours, no form is more reliable than the limitless supply of booster box openings and pack cracking videos.

I’m not above watching another player gamble on a card stock Skinner box, but I set strict limits on the time I spend, lest I waste a free Saturday morning, vacant eyes fixed on my phone. Whether it’s early previews from the latest set or steadily rising packs from an earlier age of Magic, you can always find another waiting to satiate your gambler’s twitch or Schadenfreude by watching a shaky pair of hands shuffle through cards.

If you’ve seen one opening, you are versed in the form. Find you favourite conversationalists and watch them ramble through their thoughts on the cards and game, interspersed with the necessary calls to action for viewers and sponsors. They’ve become Magic’s answer to the anecdote-laden recipes of an earlier era of the internet, before AI algorithm infected the system and we relied on the gameable whims of SEO services. To maximise their time, this throat clearing is accomplished over the early cards; the worthless, the forgotten. No one cares to watch the commons; they’ll be opening plenty of their own in due time.

Save for exclusive extended art treatments, Magic has remained surprisingly democratic with its approach to art. Recognizing that aesthetic and artistic appreciation are subjective, there is no standing rule that a mythic rare is required to have more impressive art than the draft chaff many players toss.

Inspired by autumn’s arrival in Ontario, that bewitching blend of fallen leaves and rain, Innistrad has been on my mind.

The vampiric dynasty and terrors of the plane have made it beloved and oft revisited, though the iconography of the cursed world seeps into all rarities. A piece that has lingered, reprinted in later sets and often cited as a touch point for terror is printed at common. I doubt anyone forgets Claustrophobia.

It’s not the text box that makes me stop short when sorting through my collection. I’m comfortable in confined spaces, but the despair, the hopeless scream echoes off the pine box as the hands dig fruitless furrows in the word. As the commons that serve as the spine of a prerelease deck, so will the captive be forgotten. If hunger or a dwindling supply of oxygen doesn’t kill him, the despair must weigh heavy enough to stop his heart.

Much like Claustrophobia, the eyes in Death’s Caress are windows into the terror of Innistrad. Cloves were meant to stem the smell of decay and as an integral part of burial rites, but for those who once thought their homes as a safe refuge from the darkness outside, they serve as a warning. The remaining tendons, not yet fully decayed on the garish red hand, obscure the woman’s mouth; you can only imagine her fear and her scream.

Avacyn Restored served as a welcome reprieve from the darkness of the plane to allow for a little sun to shine through, a break in the clouds. Of all the aesthetic decisions accompanying Innistrad, to have the third block act as the coming dawn after a terrifying night is a triumph. The black of Avacyn’s robe draws the player’s attention, before they notice her echo amongst the clouds. Given its place in the colour pie, it follows that white would allow for the promise of a new age in Innistrad to shine through. In the previous two chapters, white was often the colour of resistance against the encroaching gloom, an attempt to find hope in the darkness. It’s refreshing to see the balance shift as the shadows fall away.

In a set like Shadows over Innistrad, the ubiquity of commons, teeming in boxes, aids the narrative of a plane infected with the eldritch horror of an unconceivable entity. Opening a booster pack, you’d be forgiven for ignoring a copy of Rancid Rats, an unremarkable card to fill out the lower rarities and sewers of the set. It is nothing special, this pustuled vermin. Onto the next pack, and a few cards in you spot another. By the end of your opening, there is a veritable horde crawling around the sickening roots of the world. Emrakul is out of reach, but you feel their influence in the twisted vermin and haunted acolytes heralding the Eldrazi’s arrival.

The reach of Emrakul cannot be contained to the presumed ‘evil’ colours of Magic. In recent years, though with some notable exceptions, the shorthand of colour design has classified Grixis as the shard of villains. The Eldrazi titans, consistently portrayed as colourless creatures, extend their influence across the entire spectrum — no facet of existence on Innistrad is safe. Grapple with the Past echoes the desires of a young girl from the original Innistrad, casting a coin in hopes that some benevolent party will answer. Yet in the reign of Emrakul, the angels are deaf and wishes are better left unanswered. Howard Lyon is the artist of both illustrations and conveys the reach of the Eldrazi with a simple gift. None are safe from their corruption influence, neither the innocent or young.

At the moment, the final foray into Innistrad reflects the high concept approach favoured when revisiting planes. The spooky autumnal hues of a waiting forest have never been far from Innistrad, it is a world of reaching branches and dying leaves, but Midnight Hunt allows for this corner of the world to come into full focus. Moreso than any set before, the pagan influences on Innistrad as captured in the twisting nature and darkness of Midnight Hunt, where the forest is both sanctuary and a snare for those who wander in the dark.

Counter to the rough-hewn nature of werewolves and woodsmen in Midnight Hunt is the bloody audacious splendor of Crimson Vow. Both of these sets have mixed receptions in the community, as the illustrations of the Vampiric wedding do away with the gloom of earlier entries. Let’s not forget, however, that we have been invited to a vampiric wedding, the binding of two great dynasties into an everlasting empire.

Illustrations like Blood Petal Celebrant capture a reveler on the day of the reception, bringing to mind the ornate gothic appeal of Castlevania rather than the murky paranoid gloom of folk horror. The power of the set was certainly wanting, but the aesthetics of the double set is one of the better cases for how a well-remembered plane can be pushed in new directions without breaking its visual trappings entirely. We have already seen countless corners of Innistrad and both Crimson Vow and Midnight Hunt add more dimensions to our understanding through the details presented in their collection of commons.

In a set’s lower rarity cards, we see the shape of the plane. It is in their sheer number that allows for various element to cohere together into a nuance image of the world. Innistrad is not only the terror of the villagers or the encroaching eldritch horrors, it can also be a descent into autumnal folk horror and high-gothic vampiric weddings as well.

We’ve seen what happens when commons are disregarded in set design. I imagine I’m more fond of March of the Machine Aftermath than most, based on the several decks I built from the set and Mark Rosewater’s autopsy of the release and its design decisions. Cutting commons was not the worst approach for collectors, but it wing-clipped worldbuilding. The exclusion of commons made the set feel thin, wanting of a hardier stock like a too watery broth.

When I first dive into a new set, I pore over the flavour text, immersing myself in the plane through the scant lines of text afforded under the card’s mechanics. As the game grows more complex, despite a streamlining of language, cards grow wordy. Rares and Mythics understandably need to be exciting, though their need for game altering effects leave little room for flavour. The worldbuilding falls away from the card, relegated to appearance in explainer articles and possibly a chapter in the ongoing story. Commons are the brushstrokes filling in the picture of the plane. With a grand canvas laid out in planeswalker guides, what a shame it would be to get no more than a sketch of the world contained in the framing of the cards. I doubt the wickedness of Innistrad could be contained in the Voldaren brood alone.

Not all players care about commons after sorting through their prerelease decks for the usable cards then discard the rest. In the course of writing about the common illustrations of Innistrad, Wizards announced they were both play and collector booster packs, mercifully changing the name of the former and mod the contents of each. Commons could no longer occupy the foil slot in the renamed booster packs and fewer would be found in collector packs. Several fronts have opened on the matter, and online champions love nothing more than to lend their voice to a cause, but the further whittling of packs is disheartening even if you toss most of the cards in a box after a quick skim. We are far from the robust draft boosters of a few short years ago.

One aspect I’m tentatively positive on, and want to come back to in the future, is the curtailing of foils. We are well within the era of a proliferation of card treatments, and no signs of the practice slowing down, but I like when foiling is a welcome surprise in a pack, especially when it’s tastefully applied to the art rather than as a uniform glittering sheen. Admittedly, I’m not a Pauper player, so the bling of the commons matters less to me, but I was thrilled when Thraben Inspector carried a glossy finish in my pack of Innistrad Remastered.

We’ve been told that the Remastered series is on hiatus, with no clear idea of whether it will ever return. The reasons given revolve around diminishing returns and sales in the series, Innistrad unfortunately being the last bite at the apple for the time being. What isn’t lost on players is the dwindling number of planes that could carry a remastered set yet to receive one— often Zendikar, Ixalan and Tarkir crop up as the few options with enough depth to see the project through. With WOTC’s current hopscotching approach across planes, it’s unsurprising that we haven’t amassed the same number of revisits needed to fill out the card file — and I doubt “Hat-set Remastered” would cause boxes to fly off the shelves.

We are in an era of frequent crossovers and Commander supremacy, yet this is counterbalanced by a growing interest in Pauper and possibly some of the best Limited formats in the game’s history. Ungirding this is a reliable and flavourful base of commons, creative impactful uncommons along with the rares and mythics that stoke the excitement for an upcoming set. We wouldn’t remember Innistrad nearly as well if it arrived in slight boosters and a barebones lore to carry the setting through. The atmosphere and horror of the set run deeps and, thanks to the commons, it is all around you.