Welcome back to the second, more scientific section of our Dominaria United draft guide! With a bit more time and a lot more data under our belts since the format’s release, Limited players can now supplement natural intuition and personal judgment with statistical insights on how to consistently find a winning deck. Using large online datasets for this sort of …
As a plane, Dominaria’s mechanical identity is roughly “Magic the way Richard Garfield intended” — and Dominaria United returns to the core gameplay values people praised in the last Dominaria draft format. Matches are slower on average than in Streets of New Capenna or even Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. A lot of cards lock their power behind kicker costs or activated …
Dominaria United is bringing Commander back to the home plane of Magic at last, with its deep wellspring of legacy characters and lore references stretching back almost 30 years. It’s appropriate, then, that the primary commander choice for today’s Painbow precon upgrade guide is also making his triumphant return after a prolonged absence: TIP OF THE WUBRG Once upon a …
Dominaria United preview season is officially over, and as expected when returning to the original home plane of Magic, Wizards of the Coast served us a full portion of nostalgia. While the new storyline with Phyrexia is quite reminiscent of (and full of callbacks to) Invasion, there’s an even deeper layer of references to MTG history with the Legends Retold …
This week’s combo breakdown tackles one of the longest-lived archetypes in Magic history — and one of its weirdest names (and there’s some stiff competition for that crown). It’s almost always combo decks that garner the most esoteric monikers among the community. I blame the need to find distinct shorthand references for tons of specific strategies combined with their creators’ …
Standard has been good in 2022, particularly since the bans to Alrund’s Epiphany and Divide by Zero. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Streets of New Capenna both managed to shake up the metagame despite the high power level of the established decks — the former by adding super-powerful staples to underplayed colors and the latter simply by bringing better manabases to …
When Magic: The Gathering Arena launched Explorer, its stated purpose was to ease players into Pioneer by aligning the formats over time. A key part of this process are anthologies — a specifically curated collection of cards injected right into Arena, available for purchase as a whole. And now, three months after Explorer’s release, Explorer Anthology 1 is here. But …
UNFINITY, like any Un-set, continues a 25-year tradition of having fun by stretching Magic to its limits as a game. However, Wizards of the Coast is breaking with tradition by making half the set playable in eternal formats like Legacy, Vintage and Commander, where tournaments sometimes take place. While adding more cards to these formats is usually cause for celebration, …
For most of its first two decades, Magic was designed and marketed as a competitive discipline — a puzzle to solve with tournaments as its apex experience. However, while it may be hard to imagine now, Commander was once an upstart format which defied that default assumption about how and why people play Magic. Elder Dragon Highlander (and later Commander) …
We have a bit of a breather in the Magic release schedule…so time to look ahead! Tom gives us his best guesses for Dominaria United! I almost hesitated to pitch this article to my editors. For many months now, it’s felt like the community is nearly drowning in new cards. There’s regular mixups over whether spoiled cards are Standard or …
