Your Guide to The Gauntlet 2023: Fables
The Gauntlet 2023: Fables is coming to you live from Bellevue Mox Boarding House on Sunday! This year’s competition will benefit Game to Grow, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the use of games of all kinds for therapeutic and educational purposes, as well as community growth. This is the ninth Gauntlet event hosted by Gamers Engaged, a national non-profit. For ... Read More...
Streamlining Text-Heavy New Commanders
Have you noticed popular commanders are getting more mechanically complex every year? Recent sets have set records for the amount of rules text on cards, but it’s definitely most apparent on the legendary creatures leading our Commander decks. WHY SO LOQUACIOUS? The trend is driven both by general power creep and an even more insistent push for novelty. In 2023, ... Read More...
Embalm – MTG Mechanics Explained
Embalm is a creature keyword that works from the graveyard. When a creature with it is in your graveyard, you may pay that creature’s Embalm cost. When you do, you exile the creature from your graveyard and create a token copy of that creature, except that it’s white, has no mana cost, and is a zombie in addition to its ... Read More...
Why is Recurring Nightmare Banned in Commander?
While Commander’s grassroots origins make it different from many other Magic formats, it still has a ban list like the rest of them. However, since Commander is not a format with tons of tournament data to back up banning certain cards, some players are unsure why certain offenders end up on the list. Today, we’re going to look at Recurring ... Read More...
The Leading Cause of Mismatched Games in Commander
Commander is a format that relies on a shared vision to succeed. Whether it’s having a narrative experience or striving for perfection with tight cEDH gameplay, Commander games rely on communicating expectations and hopefully finding people who want the same thing. Pre-game chats, or Rule 0 discussions (a misnomer, if you didn’t realize, because Rule 0 solely involves deciding whether ... Read More...
Lessons Learned from Pro Tour March of the Machine
Paper Pro Tours are some of my favorite Magic events, and last weekend we were lucky enough to watch a fantastic event in Pro Tour: March of the Machine. It was an exciting tournament with all the hallmarks of a quality event: new cards making their big-stage debut, fringe decks making deep runs and a stacked top 8 field. Before ... Read More...
March of the Machine: The Aftermath’s place in Magic history
March of the Machine: The Aftermath is a very odd Magic set for multiple reasons. Technically a supplemental set, it’s the first such set to be legal in Standard. Every other out-of-normal-rotation set has skipped over Standard entirely. Even odder, however, is the set’s size and packaging when compared to the rest of Magic history. Aftermath has only 50 unique ... Read More...