Westgate Regent

 Back in 2006ish, I was playing Magic the Gathering Online using Virtual PC to emulate a Windows machine on my 2004 Macbook. It was not a great way to play the game. Magic Online is still operating, but I think has largely faded from prominence since the release of Magic the Gathering: Arena, which is a somewhat more fluid online version of the game, and, as of last year, also runs natively on Macs, which makes my life a lot easier.

Perhaps the biggest change between the two is that Online treats your collection as a collection of physical cards (I believe there was, at least at the time, even a service where they would send you your card collection in physical cards if you wanted to cancel your account, though I don't know if that service is still offered.) The main implication was that if you wanted specific cards, you needed to trade with other players. In practice, though, "event tickets" worth a dollar were used as a currency to buy cards from various bots that operated within the game.

In Arena, each pack you open progresses two six-tick clocks that grant you an Uncommon and Rare Wildcard, respectively, with the rare one every few revolutions giving you a Mythic Rare wildcard. Also, sometimes packs will have wildcards instead of normal cards. These can then be exchanged for any card of the given rarity.

You can also earn a pretty healthy number of booster packs just by playing, so in practice, any player who plays enough can actually build some very strong decks using the very best cards available.

This does make it harder to win with janky, weird decks, as the Metagame dominates even the unranked "play" mode, but it also means that you can really build the deck you want - if you've got the wildcards.

Anyway, the recent D&D-themed set: Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, has brought a number of pretty cool cards, some of which I was lucky enough to just find in packs when I got the 50-pack pre-order set, with famous names like Mordenkainen and Xanathar, etc.

One card I don't actually have any copies of, but that I'm very excited to try, is Westgate Regent.

Back in my earliest days, one of my favorite cards I had was Sengir Vampire. It would probably be considered underpowered these days, but back when creature removal was usually useless against black creatures (with cards like Terror being unable to target them,) Sengir Vampire was a monster. A 4/4 flyer for 3BB, any time a creature dealt damage this turn by the vampire died, you got to put a +1/+1 counter on it. As a 4/4, it could often block most creatures and live, and usually kill them, so it was a great form of board control - you held it back to block, and it'd grow more powerful, and once the rest of the opponent's creatures were dead, you were swinging in for a lot (note that this was when I was like 8-11 years old, and the notion of "just don't attack until you can get rid of the vampire" was a bit too complex a strategy for most kids that age.)

Anyway, that, along with my beloved Royal Assassin, was part of the reason I grew to love Black as my favorite Magic color.

In college, during my Online days, I built a vampire tribal deck. Note that this was around the first Ravnica block. At the time, no set had had more than a handful of vampires, so I was pulling stuff from many different sets. It wasn't until I believe Zendikar that vampires became a common creature type, filling in as the main black "race" of that setting, and by that point I had stopped playing again (WoW had kind of overtaken my online gaming niche.)

Anyway, so I have a soft spot for Vampires in MTG. And Westgate Regent, from the most recent set, is a card I kind of want to build around.

A bit like Szadek from the original Ravnica set, Westgate Regent is a serious finisher of a card. It has the same cost and body of the Sengir Vampire - 4/4 flying vampire for 3BB. It also, though, has Ward - Discard a Card. Now, granted, I don't think this has hexproof if your opponent only has a single kill spell, as I think the cost can be paid by discarding the zero cards they have in had. But, in a deck that builds around a discard-based control, this makes it that much more painful to try to take him out.

Why would you want to take him out? Well, every time he hits the opponent, he gets as many +1/+1 counters as the damage he did to them. So, 4/4 becomes 8/8 becomes 16/16, and at that point unless you're dealing with a lifegain deck, you've won.

This guy is going to be a lightning rod for removal, of course, but the opponent is going to need to be clearing out their hand in order to get rid of him.

Of course, just like with Iymrith, this guy is vulnerable to Soul Shatter. So I don't think he's going to win you the game on his own, which, in the tight metagame that is Arena, is a downside, but I'm really curious to see if we get some better cards to support a discard deck that runs this. I love it, conceptually, and really want to use it. But we'll see.