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Using Embeddings to Cluster MTG Cards: The Guest List Case Study

In the realm of data science and collectible card games alike, embeddings provide a way to discover hidden structure in a vast sea of cards. By mapping features like mana cost, card type, rarity, flavor, and mechanic into a shared vector space, we can group cards that feel similar even if they live in different sets or colors. The Guest List from Unstable—a colorless artifact with a wink and a wobble—serves as a delightful springboard for this exploration. It’s not just a goofy novelty; it’s a compact hard example of how embedding-driven clustering can reveal connections across style, function, and play experience 🧙‍♂️🔥.

Guest List is an artifact — Contraption in the Unstable set. It carries zero mana cost and a rare rarity tag, a combination that immediately signals edge-case behavior in most traditional MTG models. Its text reads: “Whenever you crank this Contraption, target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn, where X is the number of creature cards in its controller's graveyard.” The lack of color identity and the absence of a mana commitment place it squarely in the artifact category, which is a natural anchor point for embeddings focused on colorless utility cards. The card’s frame, borderless treatment, and full-art presentation by Franz Vohwinkel emphasize the whimsical, puzzle-box vibe that Unstable is famous for—a style that plays nicely with modern anomaly detectors in data science, where oddities become strong signals.

From a gameplay perspective, Guest List embodies several features that embedding models love to notice: a zero-cost activation, a gravity toward graveyard interactions, and a “crank” trigger that multiplies impact as the graveyard grows. In Unstable, crank is a mechanic that often punks the math, turning the number of real-world graveyard cards into a dynamic pressure point on the board. When you crank this Contraption, the creature’s power and toughness swing for the turn based on how many of its controller’s creature cards lie there. That means embeddings should cluster Guest List with other cards that reward graveyard-centric play, as well as with other zero-mana artifacts and Contraptions. It’s a small data point, but it’s a surprisingly telling one 🧭⚙️.

What makes Guest List stand out in an embedding landscape

On the surface, Guest List is a rarity-flagged artifact with a quirky ability. But in the embedding space, we don’t just count mana curves—we examine semantics and interaction density. Guest List is colorless, which means it sits apart from the four-color swirl or mono-color archetypes. Yet its ability references creature cards in a graveyard, connecting it to the evergreen mechanics of creature reclamation and graveyard manipulation. Its “crank” trigger aligns it with other Contraptions and with cards that reward players for stacking information about the battlefield. The set's oddball watermark, leagueofdastardlydoom, and its whimsical art help pair this card with other flavor-driven artifacts that celebrate a mischievous, puzzle-box playstyle. In short: Guest List is a cross-cutting feature extractor—colorless, artifact-based, graveyard-relevant, and crank-dependent—a compact signature that helps an embedding model separate goofy power cards from straight-laced tear-downs.

From a design perspective, the Unstable era—a playful, rule-bending punctuator in MTG history—provides rich ground for pattern discovery. The card’s borderless frame and full-art treatment push it toward a visual cluster with other high-impact, fan-oriented cards. The fact that it’s rare and printed with both foil and nonfoil options also adds a facet for the embeddings to consider: rarity, foil availability, and collector interest often align with the perceived power ceiling and novelty value of a card. All of these cues—artistic style, rarity, and the quirky textual engine—inform a richer clustering than merely “colorless artifact” or “zero-mana card.” It’s the kind of data point that helps a machine learning model separate playful but limited cards from those that usher in multi-turn micro-games.

When we talk about using embeddings to group similar MTG cards, Guest List offers a micro-case study in scope. The card’s effect scales with the size of a graveyard, turning a once-silent board into a tactical arena where players monitor dungeon-like graveyard growth and calculate how much X actually is. It invites a practical play pattern: you may want to encourage or accelerate your own graveyard development, or you may leverage the knowledge that your opponent’s graveyard is swelling to time your crank activations for maximum effect. That dynamic—counting, timing, and gravity—becomes a distinguishing feature in an embedding space, separating this card from cards that might share its colorless identity but not its emphasis on graveyards and crane-based triggers 🧙‍♂️.

Practical notes for collectors and players

From a collector’s viewpoint, Guest List represents a standout Unstable piece: a rarity with collectible appeal, a bold art direction, and a memorable mechanical hook. The card’s artwork by Franz Vohwinkel—alongside its full-art, borderless presentation—adds to its aura as a special-occasion card that often appears in casual decks and meme-worthy stacks. Embedding-informed discussions also point out how guests of the Unstable set tend to cluster around novelty value, price volatility, and the distinctive thrill of “what the crank will do this time?” moments. For players, the card’s zero mana cost and graveyard-reactive power make it a quirky tempo tool in contraption-focused decks, especially in formats that embrace the humorous but still competitive side of MTG.

As embedding models grow more attuned to card design and gameplay texture, Guest List serves as a reminder that the most interesting clusters aren’t always the most obvious. Colorless artifacts with offbeat triggers often anchor communities that celebrate the artistry, the silliness, and the shared “gotcha” moments that MTG fosters. The interplay between a card’s mechanical design, its lore-friendly flavor, and its place in a broader set like Unstable reveals a deeper truth: great grouping comes from listening to how a card feels when it hits the battlefield, and how it nudges players to think differently about what’s possible in a game that loves to surprise you ⚔️🎲.

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