Fallout (PIP): MTG Set Guide & Card List

What is Fallout (PIP)?

Released on March 8, 2024, Fallout (set code PIP) is a Magic: The Gathering product in the Universes Beyond series - Wizards of the Coast's line of crossover sets that bring non-Magic intellectual properties to the card frame. This isn't a Standard-legal set you draft at your local game store; it's a Commander-focused product, built from the ground up as a collection of preconstructed decks.

With 1,068 cards in total, PIP is a substantial release. It draws directly from the post-apocalyptic world of Bethesda's Fallout video game franchise - the irradiated wastelands, factions, and darkly comedic tone of those games are all here, translated into Magic's mechanical language.

Format check: As a Universes Beyond Commander product, the cards in Fallout are legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. They are not legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern unless a specific card is reprinted in a main-set release.

Themes and mechanics

Rad counters - the set's signature mechanic

The headline new mechanic in Fallout is the rad counter, and it's a beautifully on-flavour piece of design. Radiation is everywhere in the Fallout universe - it's the force behind the mutations, the ghouls, the giant creatures that now roam the wasteland - and the card mechanic captures that persistent, grinding danger.

When a player has rad counters, they mill that many cards at the beginning of their upkeep, and lose 1 life for each nonland card milled this way. It's an attrition mechanic that puts opponents on a slow clock, eroding their resources and life total simultaneously. The Fallout games treat radiation as something you can mitigate but never fully escape, and that feeling carries through into how the counters work at the table.

Lore aside: The Great War - the global thermonuclear exchange that ended the Sino-American conflict and transformed the world of Fallout - released so much ionizing radiation that it fundamentally reshaped life on Earth. Mutations led to giant insects, super mutants, and ghouls (humans who survived massive radiation exposure and now resemble walking corpses, with dramatically extended lifespans). The rad counter mechanic is quietly telling that whole story one upkeep trigger at a time.

The Commander decks

Fallout is structured as a set of Commander preconstructed decks, each built around a different faction or theme from the games. If you've played the Fallout series, you'll recognise the factions represented - the different power groups vying for control of the wasteland each bring their own mechanical identity to the table.

Notable lore and worldbuilding

One of the joys of a Universes Beyond set is seeing how another fictional world gets translated into Magic's visual and mechanical vocabulary, and the Fallout team clearly had fun with it.

The Vault Dweller basic lands are a small storytelling achievement on their own. Collected as a series, they show the arc of a Fallout character from the moment they step out of the vault - blinking in the harsh light of the wasteland - through to the hardened survivor they eventually become. It's the kind of detail that rewards players who engage with the full set rather than just individual cards.

The flavour text on Nuclear Fallout leans into the games' signature sardonic tone, offering a near-quote of the Fallout 2 opening narration: "The end of the world occurred pretty much as we had predicted." It's a slight misquote of the original, but the spirit is exactly right - that dry, almost bureaucratic acknowledgement of total civilisational collapse is pure Fallout.

And then there's Tragic the Garnering - a card referencing the in-universe parody of Magic: The Gathering that exists within the Fallout world. Players of Tragic the Garnering are described as hopelessly addicted to it. I think that's the most self-aware joke Wizards has ever printed on a card, and I love it. 😄

A note on the digital release

When Fallout was added to Magic Online, one small change was made to the preconstructed deck contents: the Lethal Scheme in the Hail, Caesar deck was swapped out for Pile On. The reason is mundane but worth knowing - a long-standing bug on Magic Online prevents Lethal Scheme's ability to place +1/+1 counters on creatures that convoked it from functioning correctly. Rather than leave a broken card in the deck, Wizards made the substitution for the digital release. The physical decks are unaffected.

Rules note: If you're playing the Hail, Caesar deck on Magic Online, your list differs slightly from the printed product. Worth double-checking if you're using a digital list as a reference for paper play.