Adventures in the Forgotten Realms - MTG's D&D Set

 Well, I've played for several hours now with my new D&D-themed magic cards. Here's my takeaway:

Naturally, this being a new set and myself being at best a very casual player, I don't know what archetypes are likely to get strong with this release. There are a few themes running through the set:

First off is Venture into the Dungeon, a keyword ability that lets you choose one of three dungeons to move "room to room" in, each room having a different effect. There are cards that also care if you've completed a dungeon, so picking one of the shorter ones can be important for those.

Second, we have the d20 - there are cards that have you roll a d20, always getting a reasonably useful effect, but getting better ones with higher rolls (and usually a crazy good one with a Nat 20.) There are also some cards that give you advantage on the roll, letting you roll twice and take the higher result.

There is also a set of Class enchantments that are often pretty good to start with but will get better as you "level them up," which just costs mana and has to be done at sorcery speed. I've found that the Rogue one is great for a classic Dimir Rogue/Mill deck.

There's also a pretty strong theme of dragons, unsurprisingly, with a fair number of cards caring about dragons, and dragons in every color (which just so happen to correspond with the five "chromatic" dragon types from D&D, conveniently enough. Not sure if Richard Garfield was considering that when he came up with Magic.)

Another theme, found I believe only in Red and Green, is "pack tactics," where creatures get a special bonus effect if the total power of your attacking creatures is six or more.

I built a couple decks around cards I got. Naturally, the archetypes of the Strixhaven/Kaldheim era are still quite prevalent, and my cobbled-together decks have been a mixed bag (I only burned one Mythic/Rare wildcard to get a second Xanathar.) You can definitely build a deck around Venture into the Dungeon, but I'd recommend figuring out your best dungeon path ahead of the game to make sure you make good decisions in the window you have. If you stack this effect on a lot of creatures, it can be quite amazing, but again, knowing where you want to go is important.

I managed to build a deck around a couple cards that buff skeletons - one is an enchantment (I'm blanking on the name) that forces you to attack with all your skeletons each turn, but also gives them a bonus to power equal to the number of skeletons you have, and then if a creature dies on your turn, you get two skeleton tokens at the end of it (I think you might get one if nothing dies.) There's another card, something Priest of Myrkul, which buffs vampries, zombies, and skeletons by +1/+1, and then if a creature dies on a turn, you can pay 1 mana to make a skeleton token.

Anyway, I'm eager to see what big strategies become popular with this set. So far I'm having a lot of fun, but I guess as a more recent D&D nerd than MTG, I'm getting a kick out of what for me is a new thing coming to this older thing.