When Wizards of the Coast's space-themed Unfinity set was on the way, I decided the only fitting way to celebrate was to send Magic cards to the actual edge of space. Then I went and did it.
Where the idea came from
This whole project grew out of one of the most wholesome things that's ever happened to me in the MTG community. Bradley Rose ran a grassroots campaign on Twitter, #MaxUnfinityPreviewCard, to get me my first-ever official preview card, even campaigning outside CommandFest Bellevue with an actual sign. To pay that forward, I ran a giveaway asking people how I should preview a card, and one suggestion from my friend Emma lodged itself in my brain: space. Unfinity is space-themed, so surely I should send the set to actual space? I mean, how hard could it be?
What it actually took
Turns out: quite a lot. This wasn't a green-screen stunt. I built a real high-altitude ballooning payload from scratch, and it needed:
- GPS and a radio transmitter, plus software to beam its position back down
- A small flight computer (a Raspberry Pi), batteries, and a camera
- A box, a parachute, a big balloon, helium, and cord to tie it all together
- And the most important ingredient of all: hope
Many weeks later I had a polystyrene box full of electronics. My target was 35 kilometres up, roughly four times the height of Everest and three times airliner cruising altitude, where the balloon bursts and the payload parachutes home.
The card I sent
While I was building this, Wizards of the Coast reached out and asked if I'd like to officially preview an Unfinity card, as they'd been following the campaign. My preview slot landed three days before my flight date, so in a lovely twist of fate I got hold of a full Unfinity booster and sent that up instead. Inside the payload I also tucked a card printed with the names of all my Patreon supporters, and Bradley's, so their names would reach the edge of space too.
Launch and recovery
Guided by Steve from Random Engineering, one of the UK's high-altitude ballooning experts, I made a game-day call and launched. I tracked telemetry and in-flight photos through a UK-wide network of receivers. At 35,932 metres the balloon burst, sending the payload into a spiral at nearly 100 mph.
Finding it was its own adventure. My friend Tim guided me Anneka Rice Treasure Hunt style toward the predicted landing site near Cromer, just outside Stevenage. The locator buzzer had died, because the camera tore loose on impact (around 9 metres per second) and cut power to the Raspberry Pi, so I had to search a straw field by hand. Fate smiled on me: the prediction was spot on, I found it, and I recovered both the payload and the booster pack intact.
Why I made it
Setting out to send a booster pack of Magic cards to space and back is not a sentence I ever expected to say, and pulling it off was fun and stressful in equal measure. This is the kind of ambitious, hands-on, community-driven MTG project I love making. Huge thanks to Steve, Dave, and the folks at UKHAS, to Bradley for the campaign, and to my patrons who help me pull off these ridiculous ideas. There's a follow-up video with the full onboard camera footage too, if you want to see the view from the edge of space.