Magic's Fallout crossover was a major turning point for Universes Beyond

The set’s lead designer Annie Sardelis talks game-making for the apocalypse

Barely more than a month before Fallout season 1 dropped on Amazon last year, Wizards of the Coast released four Magic: The Gathering Commander decks celebrating Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic game series. The timing was a little uncanny, coming during a moment when Universes Beyond was expanding fast and testing out a variety of crossovers, including one-off Secret Lair drops, full sets, and Commander deck bundles.

By that point, Universes Beyond already had a breakout hit: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth arrived in June 2023 and broke sales records in a matter of months. Wizards had also previously put out pre-constructed Commander decks for Warhammer 40,000 (October 2022) and Doctor Who (October 2023).

The Fallout decks didn’t reshape Commander’s competitive ecosystem when they arrived in March 2024, and they were never really trying to. But as an exercise in cohesive flavor, they remain one of the sharpest Universes Beyond adaptations Wizards has ever printed. These decks understand Fallout less as lore to be catalogued and more as a nostalgic vibe that players can bask in. And they were eventually praised by Wizards parent company Hasbro as "probably the best performing Commander set ever."

Just in time for the launch of Fallout season 2, Polygon spoke with Annie Sardelis, the lead designer on the four Fallout Commander decks, over email about how the team’s approach helped redefine Magic’s approach to crossovers.

“The hardest part was divvying up the themes of the decks,” Sardelis told Polygon. “I wanted there to be representation from a variety of games in each deck so that you didn’t feel left out if you only played certain games, although it would’ve been easy to say, ‘This is the Fallout 4 deck.’ That made us investigate themes that could feature cards and concepts from any given game, roughly defined as technology, mutants, armies/raiders, and survival.”

The team also arrived at this approach because focusing on specific games led to difficulties representing various factions that exist across all the series. There’s also the obvious design choices from the games where nameless heroes like The Chosen One, The Courier, The Lone Wanderer are totally customizable, lacking the distinguishing features you could represent in a trading card game. Instead, the various Commanders and other legendary creatures represent various NPCs, both allies and villains. While the overall designs had to echo the games, Sardelis said her team had a lot of freedom to accurately translate various mechanics into Magic.

The Hail, Caesar Commander deck is a red-white-black precon that focuses on go-wide token generation. The deck rewards players for amassing disposable creatures, converting them into resources, and sending wave after wave into combat, which itself is a mechanical reflection of how power operates in Fallout: New Vegas. Caesar himself is the default Commander who leads Caesar’s Legion in the lore of the games, a sort of imperial squad that also appears in Fallout season 2. Mr. House, his ideological rival, is a pre-war industrialist who controls New Vegas from a life-support chamber, and his company RobCo Industries is responsible for most of the robots we see throughout the franchise. (“I’m looking forward to seeing how Mr. House is characterized in the new season!” Sardelis said.) Despite their opposition to one another, Mr. House appears in Caesar’s deck as an alternative Commander option leveraging similar Magic strategies.

“For Mr. House’s card, we wanted to show him as he existed in the New Vegas game: physically incapacitated but able to wield a Securitron army,” Sardelis said. “The means to do this felt only natural to be rolling dice and spending money (Treasure tokens). Although he is in opposition to Caesar, his card is in that preconstructed deck because both of them use a similar method of vying power, and therefore similar designs. Both create an army to do their dirty work, but have different ways of generating that army.”

Sardelis explained that the Hail, Caesar deck emphasizes New Vegas more than the other games, with some of her favorite examples being Wild Wasteland, The Nipton Lottery, and Yes Man. In New Vegas, Wild Wasteland is an optional trait that, according to its official description, “unleashes the most bizarre and silly elements of post-apocalyptic America” in the form of pop-culture references and silly encounters. In Magic, it’s an enchantment that skips your draw step to instead exile the top two cards of your deck, giving you the option to play both on the current turn, channeling a similar sense of chaos into the play experience — with huge potential upsides.

The Nipton Lottery references an early-game New Vegas quest where Caesar’s Legion massacres a town and forces the survivors into a lottery to decide who lives, who dies, and who’s enslaved. The card is a four-cost sorcery that sees the player gain control of a random creature and untap it with haste, then all other creatures are destroyed at the end of the round.

Yes Man is a cheerful robot that agrees with absolutely anything the player says. Like so many Fallout robots, he’s funny, albeit unsettling in an uncanny way. As a Magic card, his owner taps him to allow an opponent to gain control of him. They draw two cards and he gets a quest counter. Because this can only be activated during “your turn,” when an opponent controls Yes Man, they can’t do anything with him other than pass him to another player. When he leaves the battlefield, its owner creates a tapped 1/1 white Soldier token for each quest counter. And he’s far from the only card that focuses on generating huge numbers of weak tokens like this.

Sardelis said the team also focused on tracking what players still quote, meme, and remember years later. “Secure the Wastes is a reprint we decided early on, just to make sure we had room for that iconic line about patrolling the Mojave,” she said. A straightforward instant, the card creates X 1/1 Warrior creature tokens for a cost of X colorless and one white mana. Its flavor text reads, “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.” Yikes.

In a February 2024 blog post about designing the decks, Sardelis previously pointed out the importance of maintaining the game series’ humor in this way. “Despite the war-torn history of the Fallout universe, the games are very fun to play, and even funny at times,” she wrote. “There's so much charm and strangeness to the world that you can't help but fall in love with it, rads and all.”

So among the many cards designed for Fallout, what’s her favorite?

“Overencumbered is my favorite,” she said, referring to a condition from the games where if your inventory is too full, the player character moves slower. The card appears as an aura enchantment that targets a player, causing them to create a Clue, Food, and Junk token. Then, if they don't pay one mana for each artifact they control, creatures can't attack. In theory, it can be used to nerf an opponent or cast on yourself if you need some of those tokens for other reasons.

"I spend WAY too much time combating being overencumbered in Fallout because I can’t stop stealing things," Sardelis said. "Hauling a pile of junk and contaminated food so heavy that you can barely walk is quintessential Fallout to me."