Gather your party and pick up your +1 swords – Adventures in the Forgotten Realms speculation is heating up! It’s clear that WotC has a huge list of expectations to live up to this spoiler season. For one, AFR represents the next big shakeup to Standard at a time when most players agree the format desperately needs it. But furthermore, …
Modern Horizons 2 Draft Archetypes
The glamorous and much-discussed new Modern Horizons 2 is out in the wild this week, and players have rushed to celebrate its high-powered and exciting draft environment. The special charm of these Modern Horizons sets comes from WotC’s stated willingness to put aside many of their self-imposed rules for set design. By unleashing their wildest and most challenging card ideas …
Modern Horizons 2 is a Magic History Lesson
Few sets in Magic have ever been as highly anticipated as Modern Horizons 2. The passionate reactions to each day’s spoilers show as much — people have figured out that these Horizons sets are special, that no longshot reprint or kooky keyword portmanteau is off limits. When you dangle hope in front of players who had long since given up …
MH2 Promises a “Fair Deck Summer” for Modern
Spoiler season for Modern Horizons 2 is like none other in Magic history — save perhaps for the original Modern Horizons. Since every card is explicitly designed for the Modern format, even the commons often require close examination for their potential metagame impact – if not in Modern itself or Legacy, then in Commander or Pauper. No other sets in …
An Early Look at Adventures in the Forgotten Realms
Thanks to a blockbuster “season overview” from WotC, we’ve finally gotten our first glimpse at Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: the first official crossover set between Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. The article seems to indicate another top-down set design, emphasizing the flavor and even some of the mechanics of D&D. Adam Styborski writes that: “Adventures in the Forgotten …
Modern Horizons 2 Predictions
In case you’ve been bewildered by the sheer rate of releases, we’re only a month away from perhaps the most important set of the year: Modern Horizons 2. By June 11th, we will be almost exactly two years on from the original Modern Horizons set, so there’s been plenty of time to think through its unprecedented impact on Constructed. Urza, …
Upgrading Commander 2021: Witherbloom Witchcraft
Witherbloom Witchcraft and the other Strixhaven precon decks feel like a new evolution in Commander products, full of top-class new cards and many viable paths to upgrade them. Check out our reviews for those other decks, too, if you want – but if you already know your home is with the B/G Bog Goths, read on! THE COMMANDER Willowdusk, Essence …
Upgrading Commander 2021: Silverquill Statement
Each of the new Strixhaven-themed Commander precon decks is a treasure trove, worth exploring in its own right. But if you’re still waiting to be convinced after reading our other reviews, listen in: the Silverquill Statement deck can be very persuasive… And this deck makes quite a statement indeed. The designers have gone out of their way avoid any mechanics …
Strixhaven Draft Guide
If you want to draft Strixhaven, get ready to go back to school. This new set doesn’t concern itself with enabling a “vanilla” Magic experience — instead, it feels like drafting someone’s highly specialized Cube. Unprecedented mechanics like learn, an unusual set makeup, and a swathe of high-impact bombs from both the set proper and the Mystical Archive cards all …
Commander 2021 Breathes New Life into Lifegain Decks
Strixhaven, like every new Magic set, is designed with its own set of mechanical themes. But after nearly three decades, most have been revisited many times, reappearing in Standard over and over in slightly different forms. I think one of the coolest things to do with a Commander deck is to gather up these different incarnations of a theme and …