So here's a question with surprisingly non-obvious answers:

What makes Unstable non-canon? What disqualifies it from being in the same setting as Magic's other stories? I've been turning over these questions and one by one I've realized that I don't have great answers. It's actually been quite hard to come up with an objection to the idea that Unstable should be considered at least eligible for canonization in the same way any other Magic set is.

Let's walk through the objections, shall we?

Surely Unstable is too silly for canon?

Canon has always been super silly. People getting turned into sheep or rabbits, egregious puns in card names and flavor text, rabbits with huge muscles and fangs, and goofy story beats abound, if you're willing to look for them.

A ton of the silliness of Unstable actually comes directly from canon, simply putting a more consciously funny spin on what's already often pretty absurd. Take, for example, the jokes across Unhinged and Unstable about Urza's disembodied head. What's up with those?

Well, Urza literally was just a head Gerrard carried around, at least for a little while. At the climax of the Phyrexian Invasion, Urza and his creation, Gerrard, are basically conned by Yawgmoth into fighting to the death for his favor. By the end of that fight, through the power of The Lord of the Waste's substantialBblack mana powers, Gerrard manages to behead Urza. Realizing that he's been duped and Yawgmoth's promise to bring his lover Hannah back from the dead is one he can't possibly fulfill, Gerrard grabs Urza's head and flees Phyrexia.

Then it turns out Urza's head is still alive, if I remember correctly because [handwaves about the Might and Weakstones furiously]. For the climax of Apocalypse, then, Gerrard and the Weatherlight crew are running around coming up with plans with the help of the bodiless head of Urza Planeswalker.

Now that is silly.

An Urza Head Planeswalker card is totally in line with canon. So is an Urza card that demands you go to a website to get a random result when you use his abilities. That's barely even a joke, that's just the only way you can represent working with someone as unreliable, unfathomable, and extremely dangerous as Urza. This is a guy who directly contributed to, by my count, at least six different apocalyptic events played out across multiple planes of reality. This is a guy who literally added a mad Planeswalker-killer to his elite team so that the Planeswalker-killer would kill a Planeswalker so Urza could be justified in converting his soul into a bunch of bombs! That's not even silly that's just disturbing.

All this should give all of us longing for an Urza card pause. Urza's help isn't something anyone should seek out lightly and the results are bound to be unexpected, perhaps apocalyptically so! Urza's card being so inscrutable that you have to actually go to a separate website in order to get an uncertain result is the most fitting mechanic imaginable. Unstable might put a silly spin on it, but this is all very canonical.

Equally canonical are many of the creatures within the set. The goblins of Unstable have fallen a bit flat for me compared to some of the other cards, since goblins already tend to be Magic's comic relief creature. And squirrels are only silly if you don't have to live with them fighting inside your walls at 4 in the morning. Like I do. (Squirrel Dealer is still one of my top-funniest picks for all the Un sets combined, though. What a card!)

This canonical silliness isn't a bad thing, necessarily. I just checked Twitter, for example, and I can confirm that life is currently extremely silly (though less ha-ha funny and more Ubu Roi or Waiting For Godot grotesque absurdity) so for all I've emphasized the fantastic naturalism of Magic's settings I think there's plenty of room in that for hoards of murderous squirrels.

The long and short of it is, therefore, that storyline and setting silliness is already a part of Magic, has been for ages, and can't be, on its own, the metric we use to distinguish Canon from Un-Canon.

What about the card mechanics though? They're definitely too silly.

Shadows Over Innistrad introduced regular cards that literally can be flipped over and stuck together to make one big card next question.

Yeah but this is silly in such a meta, self referential way.

But maybe you mean more overt moments where characters or cards break the fourth wall.

Sort of like the Planeswalker Commodore Guff did in Apocalypse when he revealed that he had written the entire history of the Phyrexian Invasion, thus forcing his doomed timeline to come true?

Yeah.

Guff, after revealing his actions to the other remaining Planeswalkers fighting against Phyrexia, is persuaded that the end of Dominaria will also be the end, eventually, of his beloved library. So he spends the last moments of the war frantically erasing his own history, in order to give the Coalition a fighting chance.

With a giant eraser.

Listen I know how this sounds but it's in the book. It's in there right alongside Urza's head being part of the Legacy Weapon. I don't know what to tell you.

Though, I will say that I don't think this is quite as stupid as it sounds. I have a soft spot for Guff and his oversized pink eraser, for the same reason that I'm still a sucker for Grant Morrison or Stephen King sticking themselves (or their avatars) into their own stories, or Alf showing up on Mr Robot. (Really. Don't ask.) That kind of metatextuality can be really entertainingly mindbending. I acknowledge this may be because I have bad taste. I don't care.

Whatever you think of it, though, it's there, in the story, in all its astounding silliness. Thus, the fourth wall breaks of Un sets can't, on their own, be canon disqualifiers.

Ok but going back to mechanics, surely the rules-

Licids. Phasing. Anyway this is all Melvin stuff and this is a Vorthos column. Next objection.

Yeah but surely the rules of canon are pretty hard to square with Unstable!

It probably seems like I'm picking a lot on J Robert King and Matthew Stover in this article, and I really don't mean to, it's just that they provide so many useful examples, and the other really obvious example is Robert Wintermute's Quest for Karn and listen:

I don't wanna talk about Quest for Karn.

So, King and Stover it is, and Stover provides another useful example. Tezzeret and Bolas can apparently jump between alternate timelines till they find one where things are more convenient for them. It's called clockworking and it doesn't make a lick of sense. Oh and it's pretty transparently overpowered as an ability and confusing from a narrative standpoint. What has Unstable got to offer? Some goblins with weird kludged together artifacts? That's just normal goblins! Urza's head still being around? Well, King already brought both Serra and Yawgmoth back from the dead once, and Urza's head is already a weird anomaly, so Urza's head showing up as the head of Tolaria West would be terrible but it wouldn't exactly be breaking with Magic's storytelling traditions.

On a more general creative design note, I'm not totally convinced that Unstable, if played a little more straight, wouldn't be totally in line flavorfully with the rest of Magic. Are the contraptions that distant from things we've seen on Kaladesh, Ravnica, or Mirrodin? "Quick-Stick Lick Trick" is distinguishable from the nonsense the Simic get up to only by how weird I'll feel saying "I crank my Quick-Stick Lick Trick" out loud. Unstable is silly, to be sure, but it's not exactly what I'd call overpowered or rule-breaking, flavorfully speaking. And if "flavortext matters" doesn't make a ton of sense in-world, well, that just puts it in the same category as mechanics like cycling which don't translate neatly or at all into story terms.

Yeah but a ton of the stuff you're pointing to as canon-breaking has since been tossed out.

True! Karona's Bogus Journey, in which she meets Serra and Yawgmoth, still alive and considered gods of mana, has been tossed out, Doc Jest seems to be gone, Clockworking is out, and we've moved on from a lot of the punnier elements of design.

The strongest objection therefore is that Unstable isn't canon simply because the Creative Team has decreed it so! That's, at the end of the day, the defining factor for canonicity. As much as I think canonicity provides powerful narrative tools, I can't deny that canon has been pretty weird and inconsistent at times. (Oh hey look there's J Robert King again. Maybe canon is just "whatever's been published that King, Stover, and Wintermute haven't gone too off the rails on"?)

Except . . .  this opens up the possibility that someone might change their mind. If canon is simply what the Creative Team, or the Fandom, collectively decides to permit as not too goofy, well, those tastes may change and we could find ourselves reading about Urza's Head relaxing in his Master Head's--er, Headmaster's Hot Tub. If canonicity is that subject to external decree, a new decree could change Unstable's status. And if we consider the other qualities, it's hard to argue that anything makes that decree obviously incorrect, or inconsistent with Magic's tone and history.

Perhaps this article will be seen as my great betrayal. I can hear the chattering objections now! Maybe you think me a bit squirrelly for raising all these problems. I have to admit, I feel like I've really gone out on a limb for some of these ideas. But I think I'm ready to face the dawning truth all bright eyed and bushy tailed. I think I've persuaded myself, fur good reasons I hope, that Unstable might at least be canon-eligible.

And I know that playing Devil's Advocate inevitably means taking payment from the devil himself.

But the devil is offering me the return of canon squirrel cards.

If I turned that down, well . . . 

I'd be nuts.