Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

 It's funny to me that I think D&D has become far more central to my nerd tastes than Magic: the Gathering. But I started playing Magic in 1994 (not consistently for those 27 years, to be clear) and only started with D&D about six years ago. So, for the vast majority of the time that I knew Magic, I would have been pretty unexcited about the upcoming Magic set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.

Now, however, I've been playing two campaigns set in the Forgotten Realms for a couple years now, and while it's not my favorite D&D setting, I think it's pretty exciting and fun to see all these things from D&D showing up in Magic (especially given that I've been running a D&D game set in Ravnica for over a year.)

I gave in and pre-ordered the 50 pack bundle for MTGA for the upcoming set, which releases on Arena on July 8th. The bundle comes with a Planeswalker card for Lolth. For those unfamiliar, Lolth is basically big bad evil goddess for elves. She's worshipped by the drow (dark elves - though WotC has been trying to move away from the idea that dark-skinned elves are inherently evil, and has specified that it's actually just one drow culture built around worshipping this spider-elf-murder-demon-god,) and she lives in one of the outer planes known as The Abyss, which is the plane of demons, and is associated with the chaotic evil alignment (in contrast to the Nine Hells, where lawful evil devils live).

Anyway, it looks like the flashy new mechanic coming with the set will be "Venture into the Dungeon." You pick a dungeon to go with your deck that lives in the Command zone (familiar to folks with Companions or who play the Commander format.) The dungeon, of which there seem to be three that are all named after dungeons you can explore in 5th Edition published adventures (unless there are more they just haven't showed off yet) is basically a flow chart of different rooms with flavorful names. Each time you Venture into the Dungeon, you progress to the next room of the dungeon, sometimes choosing between multiple options, and each room will have some effect like "gain two life" or "draw a card" or "sacrifice a creature." The Tomb of Annihilation dungeon, for example, has a rather punishing option on one side of the dungeon that forces you to sacrifice permanents and discard a card, but it skips you far closer to the end of the dungeon, where you get to summon a powerful legendary creature token, which would take a couple more "ventures" to get to if you go the other way.

Many cards use venture into the dungeon as a keyword. Others will sometimes get buffed if you've completed a dungeon, such as a creature that gets double strike if you've completed a dungeon at any point earlier in the game.

I suspect that the approach to this set was a top-down one, which honestly seems to produce some really fun sets. This is also, I believe, the only time we've had flavor text on basic lands, which are worded like a dungeon master describing a new location you've come to.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited for the set.