Wizard of the Coast has caught players off-guard recently, banning several pivotal cards to improve the Standard metagame for upcoming tournaments. This regularly scheduled update to the Banned and Restricted list was announced through magic.wizards.com on August 10th. An accompanying interview with the Play Design team was posted to the Magic YouTube channel the next day, expounding on the reasoning …
It feels like this whole spoiler season, excitement for The Hobbit has been slightly chilled by the looming shadow of The One Ring. Tolkien may have dreamt up Bilbo’s adventures as a lighthearted children’s story, but once you understand the epic events it presages it’s impossible to read with the same innocent whimsy. Likewise, if The Hobbit had been Magic’s …
Who’s ready to revisit Middle-earth?! Magic has been there once before with The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, and now we’re going back again. The Hobbit will launch in a little more than a week, bringing tons of powerful new cards that the Magic community has already been eyeing greedily during spoiler season. But why wait that long? …
Before it established its own original fantasy worlds, Magic: The Gathering was one of many fantasy games to borrow heavily from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien-esque elves, dwarves and goblins all featured prominently in its early sets, and were among the first creature types to receive dedicated typal support. But where elves and goblins went on to become cornerstones …
Wizards of the Coast has revealed that Magic’s 2027 release schedule will include multiple sets based on brand new original IP. The February ‘27 set will be Nauctis: The Sunken Realm a colorful underwater world of merfolk and fish-creatures. October will then see the release of Zhalfir, which focuses on the planeswalker Teferi’s temporally-displaced homeland. Wizards also revealed a third …
In a recent article on how high-level design choices made for The Hobbit, Mark Rosewater discussed which aspects of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth were worth carrying over to this new set. There were several mechanical wins deemed “must re-use” for how well they captured the feeling of Tolkien’s world on the tabletop. Others were put in …
The remaster of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag was released last week for current platforms, marking the most love this landmark pirate simulator has gotten since the franchise’s Universes Beyond tie-in. In hindsight, that Assassin’s Creed set flew slightly under the Magic community’s radar. Certainly not for a lack of power, but perhaps in part because it was so narrow in …
When you think about it, Draft plays an important role for Universes Beyond sets. Only a handful of the cards in Marvel Super Heroes are destined to find a lasting place in the metagame of Standard, Commander, or other Constructed formats. Even then, they will typically be just one or two Marvel cards playing a role alongside cards from other …
Wizards of the Coast have launched their first-ever sanctioned competitive format to utilize Commander rules, with the debut of “Competitive Brawl” on MTG Arena last week. The decision to enforce an official competitive-casual split in Brawl (Arena’s equivalent to Commander) was officially announced on June 1st, but the new format did not become playable until the 26th. Competitive Brawl is …
Wizards of the Coast has announced the latest Banned and Restricted list changes for Constructed formats, posted to wizards.com on June 30th. This time there were no changes made to the premier formats of Standard, Pioneer or Modern, though Pauper and Legacy saw individual cards banned to counteract unhealthy metagame trends. Compared to the sweeping, historic changes of the prior …
