As a Magic player/designer, how do you feel about the less-serious expansions Unglued and Unhinged? If there were a huge demand for such a set for Dominion, what kind of direction do you think you'd take it?
The central problem of Un- cards is that you can't play with them. And I don't just mean in tournaments. You build a deck with some Un- cards, you take it to your local game night. People are playing Standard-legal decks, they are not interested in playing against your decks. You can maybe talk someone into playing two of your decks against each other, but uh people tend to play established formats, and those formats don't allow Un- cards. This is at least how things went back when I was playing at local game nights, which was you know in the 90s. I bought a box of Unglued, people were interested in that for maybe a week, then, you know, I have Standard / Type II decks here, those cards are not legal in that format. These days they do make some supplemental products that are not legal in Standard, so they must see a sufficient demand there.
However. For many years the main way I played was cubes. You can put Un- cards in your cube, everyone's playing with cards from that cube, what's not to like there. Wait, we have to look at the specific cards you're talking about. Let's divide up Un- cards into uh ones that care too much about the physical world and everything else. Some cards care about what words you say, what you touch, your clothing, you know. All that stuff. And then others just do game-type things you can't do on normal Magic cards - die-rolling, caring about words in the text box in a way that wouldn't work in a game translated into multiple languages, caring about parts of a card that they don't want you to have to worry about in tournaments (artist, card name, rarity), fractions, stuff like that. Well caring about what I say or my clothing or whatever, those cards are good for a laugh once ever and then man I am sick of them. The other stuff is great; some things like caring about artist may not hold up because man I don't want to have to pay attention to this all the time, but there are cards that stay fun. It's uh not as large a fraction of the sets as I would like but they're there.
So anyway. For Magic, I would do another Un- set, but focus it on the stuff like caring about card text, and stay away from stuff like talking in funny voices. I bet it would go over better.
For Dominion I would never consider stuff like the funny voices; I personally have to like the set and so much for that. Caring about card names/text has the same issue for Dominion that it does for Magic: it doesn't translate. And if I were going to do die-rolling or something, I wouldn't think of it as an Un- set, just a theme that would be less popular. Making a funny set but having normal cards seems pointless. I mean a couple popular game brands are based around selling humor, and I should get in on that, but I dunno, I could just be sending off my screenplays if I wanted to pursue humor over gaming.
So, 1) I think future Magic Un- sets should focus on the cool stuff you can't do in normal sets, rather than wacky real-world stuff, and 2) I do not expect to ever make a Dominion Un- set.