Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! Last Sunday I attended the Magic Origins Prerelease at my Friendly Local Game Store: Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, MA, a lovely institution where you are as likely to find a pickup game of Warhammer or My Little Pony as you are to find Max Gladstone and Elizabeth Baer playing D&D together. With me …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! We’ll be doing a double feature this week to celebrate the newest set, Magic Origins. In this article, like I did for Dragons of Tarkir, I’ll break down Magic Origins for limited play and take a look at what the draft and sealed environments will be like—just in time for the prerelease this …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! By the time you read this, we’ll be just hours away from the biggest Magic organized play event in history: Modern Masters Weekend. This worldwide Magic-Palooza features near-simultaneous Grand Prix tournaments in three cities across the globe: Utretcht, Chiba, and Las Vegas. All told, close to 20,000 players will be …
Last week, writing at Star City Games, Jim Davis took a break from his normal oeuvre of deckbuilding and tournament practice to write an article about his top eight favorite Magic cards. His article generated plenty of discussion, and after a little thought, I left my own list of eight cards in the comments. …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! Last week we finished up our short series on themes. This week we’ll put some ideas from that series into practice as we look at my Selvala, Explorer Returned deck. This is a deck I was excited about, but it didn’t work out. I’ll talk about what was going on …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! This week we’re wrapping up our extended look at themes in Commander decks. In case you missed the previous installments, here are some links: Part 1: Series intro, Blink, Equipment, Tokens Part 2: Sacrifice, Artifacts, Tribal Part 3: Ramp, Fatties, Pillowfort, Lifegain Graveyard and Recursion One of the most robust …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! Last week, we took a look at the new set, Dragons of Tarkir, and tried to figure out what sorts of limited strategies its cards would encourage. Today, we’ll have a bit of a grab bag: first, having actually now played the cards at the prerelease, we’ll refine our picture of …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! We’re trying something a little different this week. As you may have heard (because I have been mentioning preview cards for the last two weeks), Dragons of Tarkir is on the way, and this weekend stores around the world will be hosting prerelease tournaments to give players a new chance …
Welcome back to Magic Gatherings! This week we’ll continue our survey of Commander themes, and take another look at new cards for Dragons of Tarkir which have been spoiled in the last week. If you missed them, here are the other two theme articles: #1 (Intro, Blink, Equipment, Tokens), and #2 (Sacrifice, Artifacts, and Tribal). Ramp/Big Mana …
Welcome back to Spells and Whistles! Two weeks ago we used Karla Ortiz’s fine work on [mtg_card]Liliana, Heretical Healer[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Liliana, Defiant Necromancer[/mtg_card] as a jumping off point for talking about Liliana as a character and her presentation throughout the years. But time flies in the Multiverse! This week, previews for the upcoming Dragons of …