I’m spending a bit of time going through the cards of the upcoming The Brothers’ War set. I was looking at cards using the new Prototype mechanic after my interest was peaked earlier when Phyrexian Fleshgorger was first previewed. As so often happens, that initial search took me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Before I knew it, I was looking at Hurkyl, Master Wizard as a possible include into one of my Commander decks.

There are two versions of the card in the set, the regular one and an extended art version. For whatever reason, the former is a Rare and the latter is Mythic.

While it’s not unusual for cards to change rarity from one set to another, it’s far more unusual for the same card to have different rarities in the same set. But it has happened before. For example, Midnight Hunt Commander (MIC) had two such cards. My understanding is that the Commander decks came with one while the Collector Boosters had the other rarity.

For its part, Wizards confirmed this oddity, adding “As far as we know, this is the only card from The Brothers’ War that has this difference.” That phrasing suggests that this may not have been intentional.

I can’t think of this difference in rarity causing any game play issue so this is more of an interesting little story than anything else (although Wizards may be reviewing its QA processes). One day in the future, players may gather around the table and ask “Remember the time when Wizards printer Hurkyl at different rarities in the same set?”