Once Again, I Think the Abandoning of the Block Model Does the Latest Magic Set a Disservice

 Lorwyn is back for the first time since it debuted in 2007.

I actually missed it the first time. I've played Magic the Gathering in kind of three distinct periods: one from Fallen Empires through Tempest Block when I was an elementary school kid (and I guess my first year of middle school,) again briefly in college for Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral (before a certain MMO took over my online gaming interest) and now my current era in MTG Arena once it came out for MacOS and iOS in 2020, which actually makes this current period the one in which I've played the most continuously (though I think there have been some gaps there).

Anyway, while Ice Age and Alliances had the beginnings of a block structure (much later they'd release Cold Snap to finally finish the trilogy off) Tempest, I think, was the first true Magic block, with three sets released over the course of a year that told a singular story (that of the crew of the Weatherlight journeying across the plane of Rath).

Subsequent years would hold to a similar structure, with Urza's block, then Nemesis block, then probably the most famous of them, the Invasion block (MTG's first giant climax storyline, which killed off nearly all of its important recurring characters - something WotC seems utterly allergic to nowadays - I don't think killing off characters is always necessary to establish the stakes and import of a plot, but boy did the March of the Machines really pull its punches after feinting toward killing off a number of planeswalker characters - frankly, it feels kind of weightless, even if I'm glad to have a post-post-Mending ability to see non-planeswalkers go to other planes).

Invasion block was followed by Odyssey and Onslaught block, establishing a new cast of characters and sticking with the bold mechanical themes established in Invasion (where Invasion was the multicolor block, Odyssey was the graveyard block and Onslaught was the first major tribal block,) the next block, Mirrodin, which coincided with the new card frames that technically debuted in 8th edition (and MTG's 10th anniversary) gave us a new plane that was connected to its central theme: artifacts.

The next several blocks had this recurring concept: a new plane, and on that plane, a new mechanical theme, with Kamigawa's legend-focused mechanics and Ravnica's two-color guilds.

Most blocks were three sets - you had the initial establishment of the mechanics, and then an evolution of those mechanics perhaps with a few more added in, and then a third set that often remixed the mechanics that had been brought in.

Lorwyn came in following Time Spiral and took the tribal theme from Onslaught block (Fallen Empires did it first!) and actually came in as a four-set block, which itself was two smaller two-set blocks. Lorwyn, we discovered, was only half the plane, while Shadowmoor was its dark reflection. The same tribes existed in both halves of the plane, and so there was cohesion between the sets, but there was a dramatic shift in tone - such as the tight-knit Kithkin, who were basically like Hobbits in Lorwyn, becoming xenophobic hive minds in Shadowmoor.

Cut to 19 years later, and we get a return to this plane, with an excellent Jim Henson-company-produced puppet music video. But for the past several years, Magic has not done blocks. Instead, each set is essentially independent. Even in cases where there have been sets taking place on the same plane one after another, like Innistrad's Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow, there weren't really any mechanical throughlines that held between the two.

I've talked in the past about how I think this leads to a homogenization of the standard format over the years. In the next three years, you can be pretty confident that there's not going to be continued support for a Kithkin-themed deck to grow and develop. Indeed, within this same standard format season (which was expanded to three years a couple years back) we had Bloomburrow, a world of anthropomorphic animals that also had a tribal theme, but it's not like there are a lot of "Mouse matters" cards that have come out since then, so if you've got a Mouse tribal deck, it probably hasn't changed a lot since 2024.

But I also think that a world like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor kind of demands to be represented in multiple sets. As someone who didn't play the block back in the day, when I look through my cards, I don't really register which side of the divide they're on. Yes, there's a cool cycle of legends who will swap which half of their world they're on each turn if you spend a little mana, but it all kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

And, again, because we've got so many other sets (including a number from other IPs - I was excited for the Final Fantasy set but in retrospect feel like that was a devil's bargain) it further dilutes how much immersion I feel in any given plane, from both a mechanical and flavor standpoint.

I will say, we've gotten some amazing original settings, and we wouldn't have seen so many of them had it not been for this shift. But there's a part of me that also would love if we had spent, say, a year in Eldraine, a year in Ikoria, a year in Duskmourn, and maybe we were still looking forward to the space opera of Edge of Eternity.

I realize I'm shouting into the wind here: MTG apparently has been raking in tons of cash with the influx of Universes Beyond into the standard format - I think the game made something like a billion dollars in the past year or something.

But the older I get, the more I wish that companies weren't motivated purely to maximize profits. I think the world we live in would be a lot better if the endeavors (business or otherwise) that people took on were to make the thing that was truest to their creative goals. I've always been blown away by the Magic creative team's ability to come up with all these exciting fantasy worlds and characters to populate them, and I just wish that they got the time they needed to breathe.

An Enticing Return to Original Magic IP

 The last set I really played much of was Edge of Eternities. I actually adored that set - I love that Magic decided to go all in on sci-fi space opera, with a fun justification for it. I've always been really happiest in the borderlands between sci-fi and fantasy.

Universes Beyond started as non-Standard-legal, and I sort of shrugged at its existence, as I play primarily standard (very casually - or at least as casually as one can on Arena). One could argue that the first incursion of UB sets into standard was the Dungeons & Dragons set, but that's a grey area, as WotC owns D&D and we've already had a bit of crossover between them, such that I almost treat them as para-canonically connected (my Ravnica campaign will ultimately end as a Planescape one). The next was Final Fantasy, and especially after playing FF I-VI in 2024, I was feeling a great deal of affection for that IP.

But with Spider-Man (though weirdly scrubbed of its identity in the Arena release) and then the Avatar the Last Airbender set (a show that I really liked, having watched it along with many others when it went on Netflix around the time that the Pandemic hit) in a row, it's felt a little like these sets are robbing the game of one of my favorite of its elements - the really inventive world-building.

Having never played Lorwyn/Shadowmoor (I think I stopped playing MTGO when I got into World of Warcraft in 2006) I'm eager to check out this plane.

My understanding is that Lorwyn/Shadowmoor was kind of the first real "fairy tale" plane, and famously didn't have humans on it (humans had only actually become a creature type a few years earlier in Mirrodin). Eldraine, of course, has kind of filled that same niche, but Lorwyn certainly has its own pretty clear identity.

I was really happy to see the puppet-based intro video for the return to the plane, with a duet between the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor versions of, I assume, the same goblin (known as boggarts in Lorwyn). I remember watching it and saying "wow, this is giving real 1980s Jim Henson vibes, like Labyrinth or the Dark Crystal," only to discover at the end that the puppets had, in fact, been made and performed by the Jim Henson company.

As is my constant refrain, I do miss the block model. Lorwyn was designed as a tribal setting, where you'd build decks around, say, elves or treefolk or giants. But we don't seem to see such themes embraced as much when the themes of each set shift.

But I am certainly happy to see come back to a Magic-original setting.

The Oddity of Through the Omenpaths

 So, there's a new set for Magic the Gathering, but it's got a secret identity.

I play Magic on Arena, the Hearthstone-like app that is purely digital (I have no idea if Magic Online still lets you redeem a digital set for a printed one - I suspect not - but Arena's whole economy is built not around actually trading, but being able to craft cards with "Wildcards," meaning that basically everyone can, fairly easily, have the absolute top-tier decks. Is this good for the game? Not sure, but it does mean that I think it's probably easier to limit how much money you spend on it).

For the past few years, MTG has been putting out "Universes Beyond" sets based in other IPs, usually owned by other companies. Most are print-only, and if you play Standard, the format that only allows for cards from the last three years of releases (it used to be two years. Also, as a note, while this format does require you to keep getting new cards and new decks, I think it's also probably the most inviting format because the constant rotation means that the power level doesn't get too high - you don't have to ensure your win on turn 2, necessarily,) tends not to allow them.

There have been a couple of exceptions. Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms came out a few years ago, and was Standard-legal. D&D, of course, is also owned by Wizards of the Coast, so the legal use of it as an IP was, I imagine, relatively simple to clear for the company. But on top of that, there's already been some crossover between the brands, such as a few campaign sourcebooks for D&D set in Magic planes (I myself have been running my longest-ever D&D campaign set primarily in Ravnica, one of Magic's most popular planes, and the first to get a full campaign setting book for D&D).

More recently, we got a set based in Final Fantasy. And this, honestly, felt like a bit more of a shock, because while Final Fantasy fits within the fantasy genre that Magic has always had, it's also probably a stronger brand than Magic the Gathering (D&D, as beloved and storied as it is, and as popular as it is today compared to earlier eras, has never been as big of a thing as MTG).

I will say that I actually enjoyed seeing the Final Fantasy set, even if there was a part of me that felt it odd as an addition, not as a kind of fun side-product like other Universes Beyond sets (which have done everything from Warhammer 40K to Doctor Who) but as a core, standard-legal set.

Which then brings us to this: the latest Standard-legal set is a Spider-Man set. I don't know the exact numbers, of course, but I'd guess that, at least in America, Spider-Man is a bigger brand than even Final Fantasy - probably the most popular and beloved of all the Marvel superheroes (though admittedly the MCU did really raise the profile of Iron Man and Captain America).

But if you play on Arena, it's not a Spider-Man set at all.

The folks on the Magic team at Wizards built an entire set around Spider-Man, and then their creative team (I'm assuming that was who was in charge of this) went through every single card and changed names and art to make mechanically identical digital cards that were just set in the Magic multiverse.

Spider-Man has been pushing a bit of its multiverse theming lately - which honestly probably has a lot to do with the fact that Sony still retains the rights to the character, and wants to make movies that focus specifically on Spider-Man and not branch out into the larger MCU, even while they've made agreements to allow Tom Holland's Peter Parker to play with Disney's cinematic universe (hope he gets better - apparently he had a nasty injury on the set of his fourth Spider-Man movie recently).

But Magic has also, within its lore, entered a new era in which inter-planar travel is far easier than it was after the Time Spiral block's Great Mending, which de-powered planeswalkers but also made them the only beings (other than Eldrazi) that could travel between planes. The conclusion of the Phyrexia arc a couple years ago ushered in a new era in which A: lots of planeswalkers became de-sparked and B: the paths the Phyrexians had used for their invasion made that less of a problem.

The point is, as seen particularly in sets like Aetherdrift, plane-hopping is now available to the masses, and so it makes sense for a set to explore what happens when the multiverse becomes more easily traversable.

But there is something very kludgy about all of this: one might ask why there's so much spider-theming in this set about people traveling the Omenpaths. The real answer is because it's a Spider-Man set with the serial numbers scrapped off.

As fun as it was to get the Final Fantasy set (I think mechanically my favorite thing was how they treated Summons) I do think in the long run I'd prefer that they keep these Universes Beyond sets out of at least the Standard set rotation. I believe lead designer (who has been in that job since I was in high school or even earlier - I remember discovering his weekly Making Magic posts back when, like, Onslaught block was coming out) Mark Rosewater has been not happy with this move, preferring to focus instead on in-universe (or in-multiverse) sets and build out Magic's own brand and IP, which I do think is probably the right position.

That said, I think that the re-skinning of this set is far more likely to be a legal thing - after all, the physical cards are being printed with the whole Spider-Man theming (otherwise what would be the point?). I think Sony might have some special rights to Spider-Man appearing in digital games (like their PlayStation games that have come out to some acclaim in recent years) on top of film rights and thus it might be a legal headache to wrangle those while also making a deal with Disney/Marvel to print the cards, so this re-skinning is probably just a way for Wizards of the Coast to be able to just fully make their own digital product without having to deal with any of that.

This is all pure speculation on my part, to be clear.

However, to me it feels like this suggests that perhaps this set should have just been like other Universes Beyond, and kept out of Arena entirely like most of them have been. Then again, I imagine that standard-legal sets sell better, and with an IP like Spider-Man, WotC decided that they wanted to increase the likelihood of selling more of this, even if the advantage from the IP didn't translate to Arena.

I'm with Rosewater here (assuming I got his opinion correct). The cosmos of Magic the Gathering has plenty of value to me, and I would prefer to see them continue to flesh it out - something I'm sure they'll still be doing, of course.

And maybe this is the wrong post for it, but I truly miss the Block model. Starting with probably Ice Age and then going until only a few years ago, each "standard year" of sets would tend to introduce a new plane (or, in those early years, not always a plane, but often an arc of some sort) and tell a three-act story, with a set introducing that plane in the first set, showing some dramatic disruption to it in the second, and then coming to some conclusion with the third. In particular, it gave years more mechanical cohesion, and it allowed new mechanics to grow and evolve. So many recent planes have introduced cool new mechanics, like Ikoria's mutate creatures or Duskmourn's rooms, that I'd have liked to see evolve. I think by jumping around from plane to plane, we also tend to see more generic deck archetypes dominate the formats. Mouse tribal was able to briefly have a moment in the spotlight when Bloomburrow came out, but with no subsequent sets enabling that archetype, it was naturally subsumed into a more generic Red Deck Wins (the archetype that I get the most bored playing against, as it seems to be the one that is popular every single set rotation).

More to the point, though, is that I think the old block model allowed for the worlds of Magic to grow and develop their lore. Ravnica would not, I think, be as beloved if we had been forced to learn about all ten guilds all at once in a single set.

Checking Out the Lore on Edge of Eternities: Magic's Journey into Science-Fantasy

 Magic the Gathering is actually probably one of my foundational fantasy inspirations. I started playing when I was 8, roughly a year after the game first came out in the early 90s, and I encountered Ironwood Treefolk long before I read about Treebeard and the Ents' march on Isengard.

Magic always had little elements of sci-fi in it: Antiquities, the second expansion set after Arabian Nights, really launched the Magic story, telling the story of the Brother's War, though in an interesting way: the cards were antiquities - ancient relics of a bygone era. It wouldn't be until the recent Brother's War set that we got a look at that conflict presented with a contemporary perspective (one justified - I'd argue unnecessarily - by time travel and visions of the past). The point is, the Artificers of early Magic already infused the game's aesthetic with a quasi-sci-fi vibe, perhaps a "magepunk" or "dungeonpunk" aesthetic.

I'm always impressed by Magic's creative team and their ability to weave new worlds that are built around the game's central 5-color motif that nevertheless feel distinct from one another. If there's one disappointment to all of this, it's that the game and its flavor are somewhat divorced from one another (though the championship finale for Eldritch Moon, which saw the winner's Liliana and Zombies deck beat their opponent's Emrakul deck, was a surprisingly canonical expression of the events of that set's story).

In recent years, Magic has really started to push outside of the standard fantasy genres. While Kaladesh (the plane now renamed to Avishkar to better reflect a more likely "fantasy India" world) brought in significant technological elements, the technology was all based in more fantastical resources, like Aether.

I'd say where things really started to turn (and this includes the revisit to Avishkar in Aetherdrift) was the transformation of Kamigawa in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Kamigawa was introduced in 2004 as a Japanese-themed setting that focused on Legendary cards as its biggest theme. However, the block (back when Magic had year-long three-set blocks) was also set in that plane's distant past - the central hero, Toshiro Umezawa, was an ancestor to one of the original legendary creatures from Legends, itself I believe depicting an era prior to the Brothers' War.

Coming back to Kamigawa thousands of years later, Neon Dynasty imagined the plane had progressed in its technology, appearing not as a feudal land of clashing kami and mortals, but fully a cyberpunk future of cybernetic implants, towering skyscrapers, and, as the name implies, a night lit by colorful neon.

Not much later, we were given Duskmourn (honestly one of my favorite recent sets,) a plane that is just one big haunted house, inspired by horror movies of the 1980s, with 80's technology like camcorders and televisions (a setting whose flavor was, admittedly, sometimes a little confused, as Spice8Rack pointed out).

It's thus, perhaps, not that surprising that we're getting a fully science-fantasy setting with Edge of Eternities. What is surprising (perhaps) is that the setting expands out the lore of the Magic multiverse in rather shocking ways.

I just read through the Planeswalker's Guide to Edge of Eternities, which takes the form of a kind of intelligence report delivered to Tezzeret. Tezzeret, one of Magic's enduring recurring villains, has strategically played the role of second fiddle to other big-bads like Nicol Bolas and later the Phyrexians, but his role in the March of the Machine and the Phyrexians' simultaneous invasion of nearly all the planes of the multiverse via the Omenpaths saw him sent somewhere beyond.

And we're now learning what that "beyond" is.

The Magic multiverse contains the various planes all sitting within an area called the Blind Eternities. But what I've read in the latest Planeswalker's Guide suggests that there's something beyond - and it's more or less a change in genre.

As Tezzeret writes in his notes, the universe he's found himself in is profoundly advanced in technology, but utterly primitive in the use of magic. The people of the Annular Space use things like Aether and Mana, but these materials are treated more as power sources for technology. What is annular space? Well, an annulet is a ring, and describes something like a toroid. There's this idea of a "donut-shaped" universe, where if you travel far enough in any direction, you'll come back around to the same point. It's a little different than a sphere, because if you travel "north" on a toroid, you'll still come back to the same point, but without also crossing the other side of the ring. Notably, the world maps in a lot of video games, like much of the Final Fantasy series, actually work like Toroids. A Toroid has a big advantage in making maps because you can flatten it out into a rectangle, unlike that of a sphere (you've probably seen how the Mercator projection of the world map makes places like Greenland and Antarctica look enormous while shrinking places closer to the equator, because those northern and southern reaches need to be stretched out to unroll the single points of the north and south poles into an equator-long line).

While a toroid-shaped space (obviously, this is an abstraction, flattening three dimensions into two to then imagine the shape in three dimensions, when we're probably talking about something that's more like four or more dimensions) doesn't have any edges, per se, there is something described in the Planeswalker's Guide where there are two edges - one inner, which is blue-shifted, hot, and destructive. It seems very much like the firewall just above the event horizon of a black hole. Essentially, because of the intense gravity at the surface of a black hole, only the very most energetic stuff has the momentum to avoid getting sucked in, and so there's this high-energy wall that will obliterate anything that tries to pass through it. Edge of Eternities also has a "Quiet Barrier" where things are red-shifted and fade away, which is actually also a phenomenon in our universe - the universe is continuing to expand, and the farther something is from us, the more space there is to continue expanding between us, creating what is effectively faster-than-light departure from us (which cheats the universal speed limit because it's not stuff that is moving faster than light, but just the space between us getting larger). Past a certain radius, the speed at which things are getting farther from us means we cannot (at least without figuring out FTL travel or observation, which current physics considers impossible) actually see anything beyond this barrier, thus creating a certain sphere around Earth that is the "Observable Universe".

Here's the really interesting thing, though: The blue-shifted, "Chaos Wall," is, I believe, implied to be the thing that separates Space from the Magic multiverse - in other words, we're beyond the planes, beyond "Dominia." This set takes place in a realm beyond. And, again, it's a realm that trades fantasy for science fiction.

Some other fun elements:

One of the central conflicts is between the Summists and the Monoists. I don't think either are implied to be "good guys," but they have vastly different philosophies. The Monoists see holiness in black holes, or supervoids (I'm not sure if supervoid is the in-universe term for black holes, or if it's an actual physics term describing them, or I'm actually mistaking it for something else,) and turn stars into them with their technology.

The messianic savior of the Monoists is the Immortal Faller, who they can see in not just one, but all supervoids.

This is actually a really cool reference to a real astrophysics idea: that if you observed someone (or an object) going into a Black Hole, time would warp in such a way that they would seem to be falling into it forever. (What's even more bizarre is that from the perspective of someone falling into a black hole, if they survived the fire wall, their experience would not match the observations of outsiders, and would maybe not even notice as they passed the event horizon - the fact that they can never return to compare notes allows for this seeming split in the reality of what actually happened to them - quantum physics is weird.)

Another big note: there is ample reference to an ancient conflict called the Fomori-Eldrazi War.

As far as I can tell, this conflict is like a "millions of years in the past, before any of the current vaguely-humanoid spacefaring species were around" thing. But it's one of the few places where familiar proper-nouns are introduced. The Eldrazi, of course, have been a big part of Magic's lore since their introduction in the first Zendikar block, posing a comparable threat to the Phyrexians and villains like Nicol Bolas. The Eldrazi are right out of HP Lovecraft - bizarre and utterly alien monsters whose hidden existence allowed the mortal races to misinterpret them (I love the way that the merfolk of Zendikar imagined them as humanoid deities, their shapes vaguely reminiscent of their true forms).

I've often argued that what makes cosmic-horror monsters so fun is that they're an invasion into whatever genre they're in from another genre. In more rational, sci-fi stories, they are like demons and monsters from the fantasy genre, but in fantasy, this is kind of flipped, with them emerging as something more alien and defying the mythological hierarchies of gods, demons, and such. They live in that uncanny area between the rational and the mythical.

And holy crap, if the Eldrazi are originally from this "outer" space beyond the primary Magic multiverse, doesn't that just retroactively make them that much more cosmic in nature?

Also, the Fomori are a name we've heard before: Thunder Junction, the Wild West-themed plane (another step outside of the typical fantasy genre) was home to a vast Fomori Vault. Are we now discovering that that vault might have served a purpose in that grand war? Did the Fomori send the vault through the Chaos Wall to preserve some part of their culture or world as the Eldrazi came to wipe them out? What else comes from the Fomori? (The Izolith on Ikoria feels like a prime candidate).

One last note: Edge of Eternity has a planet of sapient Kavu. Previously seen only as non-sapient beasts on Dominaria, there's apparently a whole planet (that's in the process of falling apart, prompting a global evacuation) of technologically-advanced, intelligent Kavu. Notably, this isn't like the typical "we use this creature type for the humanoid version of this creature" like Aven are for birds or Rhox are for rhinos, but instead, it seems like the Kavu of Dominaria might just not be living up to their potential. Did they emerge from a Fomori Vault on Dominaria?

Pure speculation here, but I've been playing with the idea of making the Golgothian Sylex come from outside of the Magic multiverse in my Ravnica D&D campaign - it was already a mysterious ancient artifact when Urza used it to end the Brothers' War. My plan for my players is that when they hit level 20, they'll go to the D&D multiverse and we're essentially going to have a Planescape campaign as the final chapter, with the Sylex created by two of my original deities as part of their path to apotheosis.

But canonically, could the Sylex actually be a technological weapon built out here?

Anyway, I'm really, really excited to get my hands on this set - obviously, the mechanics of Magic do all encourage you to ignore lore and just build whatever archetype does well (I'll be so sad if Red Deck Wins keeps dominating. I'm so sick of red aggro decks) but I think it's such a cool aesthetic and story move to go into the realm of science fantasy.

Duskmourn: House of Horrors First Impression

 This is my jam.

While I'm a real wimp when it comes to horror movies - and there were such scary horror movies in the 1980s (though I don't know how much my feelings toward that are because I was born in that decade and thus my first exposure to horror as a genre was largely what had come out then and in the early 90s) I've always been a big fan of the horror aesthetic - frankly, I blame Magic the Gathering for that, when I pulled a Royal Assassin in my very first mixed Revised Edition deck box and learned to love playing Black.

I am also, as shown many times on this blog, a big fan of genre-bending fantasy. I was thrilled when Kamigawa Neon Dynasty reimagined modern Kamigawa as a magitek-cyberpunk world, with real technology in concert with magic. Duskmourn embraces the idea of television screens and other modern tech, though filtered through a different world's alternate history.

But beyond that, this has some serious Stephen King vibes - a house taken over by a demonic presence that grew and grew until in consumed its entire world.

As is always the case with new sets, the meta-game takes a few weeks to shift, and I fear we won't be free of the plague of aggro decks until the Dominaria/Phyrexia year rotates out of Standard.

But the deck I've found myself enjoying the most is built around Rooms. (Found on MTGA Zone).

Rooms are a new enchantment type, and Room cards let you cast one side of it or the other, but once it's on the board, you can "unlock" the other side to get the effects of both. Many simply have an enter-the-battlefield (or I guess now just "enter") effect, but this deck is built around Central Elevator / Promising Stairs as a win condition (and in my experience, it's been the condition that usually wins the game for me).

Promising Stairs has you surveil 1 during your upkeep, and then if you have eight separate rooms unlocked (which could be just four room cards on your board if you unlock them all) you win the game. (I believe they have to be unique rooms - while you can double up on multiple copies of the same room, you'll need eight unique ones here).

The deck is primarily in Izzet colors, with a few white spells to help facilitate things and maintain board control. I honestly wonder if there's a more elegant and efficient true Izzet deck, given that all of our rooms are either red or blue (or red/blue) but we'd be giving up some important control elements, like Inuqisitive Glimmer (which reduces the cost of our Rooms, whether casting them or unlocking them) and Ghostly Dancers, which can help retrieve Rooms that have been lost to removal or, more likely, dumped in the graveyard on early turns via surveil to dig for spells we can actually afford. (The Dancers also give us an alternate win condition, quite efficiently producing 3/1 spirit tokens that can swing in or help with control by being scary blockers).

One of the important rooms in the deck is Smoky Lounge (which comes with Misty Salon,) which generates RR on our upkeep that can only be spent on casting or unlocking Rooms.

In a weird way, while this is sort of a control deck, it's also vaguely aggro in the sense that you have a lot of parts that ramp up to get as many rooms out there as you can as quick as you can. Because most decks don't have a ton of enchantment removal, you're kind of racing the clock to get eight rooms opened up.

Here's what I especially love about the deck: It has a real flavor to it.

Duskmourn is a setting where an entire plane has been swallowed up by a single mega-haunted house. And I imagine, in this planeswalker-duel of a game, that winning with this deck is accomplished by successfully trapping the opponent within the labyrinth of the house. We don't even kill them - we just swallow them up to the point where they can't escape.

There's certainly some removal, largely in the form of direct damage from our red cards, and a delaying tactic with Meat Locker, one of our blue rooms, which taps a creature and puts two stun counters on them. But for the most part, we're just trying to get our haunted house assembled before the opponent can take us down. And I think that's neat!

The New Standard: You're Not Getting Rid of Farewell That Easily

 Kamigawa Neon Dynasty was a fantastic card set. A return to a plane that didn't really work when it had the whole 2004-2005 release year and three different sets (blown away by the perhaps overpowered Mirrodin block and the absolutely beloved introduction of Ravnica in the subsequent year,) KND was exciting and fun, and it also bent Magic: the Gathering's genre more than it had ever before - for the first time, we saw futuristic technology that wasn't some vaguely-defined magitek, and showed the the fantasy genre can easily blend with other genres, such as Cyberpunk.

But, as a popular set, it also brought some popular cards that are... well, perhaps a little overpowered.

Maybe the biggest offender, as in, it's the card you basically are going to put in every single deck you have that uses red mana, is Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, one of the call-back Sagas that refer to a legendary creature from the original Kamigawa run.

The thing is, I don't actually mind this so much. It can become very powerful if left to its own devices, eventually copying creatures with powerful ETB effects or death effects. But it takes four turns to actually hit that point (or three if you have a way to get its flip side haste) and there are ample opportunities to deal with it.

No, the card from KND I can't stand is Farewell.

Farewell wipes the board. It wipes the graveyard. Selectively, it has the potential to wipe out everything the opponent has built up to this point in the game other than planeswalkers.

Basically, you build around using this, and on turn six, your opponent is set back almost to turn 1.

Board wipes are a healthy part of the game, mind you - they're a useful tool for control decks to get some good asymmetrical card advantage and stall things out to let them build to their finishers. But this one, which does not destroy but exiles, and wipes the graveyard, and artifacts, and enchantments, on top of creatures...

If this existed before Lorwyn block it would let you clear every single thing out of the game other than lands and cards in hand, and libraries.

So, I was, with some bittersweet joy (I love, for example, the Innistrad dual lands) looking forward to its rotating out with the Wilds of Eldraine.

But it seems we will not so easily be rid of Farewell.

That's because Standard, which has for as long as I can remember (and I think I was first aware of formats when I was playing MTGO back in 2005-2007) been composed of sets from the past two years, rotating out the older "block" (even if we don't use blocks anymore) in September, is now going to have three years' worth of card sets.

In other words, for this year only, there will be no set rotation. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, and Streets of New Capenna will all remain in Standard until fall of 2024.

When they rotate out with the as-yet unannounced (I think) set that comes then, we'll still have another full year of the Phyrexia Arc sets, meaning Dominaria United, The Brother's War, Phyrexia All Will Be One, March of the Machine, and March of the Machine: The Aftermath.

So, the good news is that if you're still playing that werewolf deck you made in the fall of 2021, you're going to be able to keep playing it for a good long while in Standard. But if you are sick and tired of losing attacking creatures to a flashed-out Wandering Emperor any time your white-deck opponent has four mana open, well... you're going to have to deal with that for a bit longer.

Battling in Out with March of the Machine's New Card Type

 March of the Machine is the climactic conclusion to this year's Phyrexian arc, which seems to have more or less brought an end (until WotC wants to pull them back out of the vault) to the second generation of Phyrexians that started with the Scars of Mirrodin block. This is an "event set" similar to War of the Spark, which itself had concluded a years-long arc about Nicol Bolas' plans to restore his pre-Mending godlike power via just a whole lot of Planeswalker murder.

This set sees really the biggest event in Magic's history, with the Phyrexians led by Elesh Norn invading more or less every plane we've heard of at once (and some of these are deep, deep cuts). And, given how big a deal that is, the folks at the Magic team decided to create a whole new card type to represent the battles of this massive, multiversal war.

This marks the first brand-new card type since Planeswalkers were introduced (as someone who stopped playing around Time Spiral during my MTG Online days in college, coming back on Arena meant getting used to these newfangled Planeswalkers,) which, previously, were I believe the only card type ever added to the game since the game premiered in 1993 (ignoring discontinued types like Mana Sources, which were things like Dark Ritual that had initially been Interrupts. I believe 6th Edition of the Core Set is when Interrupts and Mana Sources were folded into Instants).

Every Battle we get in March of the Machine also has the subtype "Siege," which might imply that the mechanics of future Battles could be different, but here's how they work:

You play a Battle, and it goes onto the Battlefield on your opponent's side of the board, though you still control it (just like, say, an aura attached to an opponent's permanent). The Battle usually (I think always in the ones we have) has an enter-the-Battlefield effect, meaning sometimes that will be the extent of your use of the card. However, each Battle has a number of Defense counters on it, set by a number in its lower right corner (similar to a Planeswalker's starting loyalty). Just like a Planeswalker, you can choose to attack a Battle, and any damage it receives will reduce its defense counters.

When the last counter is removed, the Battle gets flipped, and you can immediately cast the spell on the other side for free. Often, this will be a creature, but there are also artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalkers to be found at the successful conclusion of one of these battles.

So, what do we think?

Obviously, one thing this does is create a third potential target for your creatures to attack, and a board with an enemy planeswalker and your own battle (or multiples of each) will be a "target rich environment," with a lot of things that draw your creatures' attention away from the goal of hitting the opponent.

I will say that I don't find this to be too big of a problem, though: you're the one opting in to attack your battle, and so far there are no battles that create a pressure to attack them beyond the benefit of the creature or whatever you would get from doing so. Unlike a Planeswalker, who might be frustratingly difficult to take down while they use some deadly loyalty ability to hinder or harm you, it's fairly safe to just let a Battle sit on the board for any number of turns, and even to just make use of its initial effect and ignore it, essentially treating it like a sorcery.

The flip sides of these cards need to be pretty powerful to justify spending turns attacking it. Most have an initial defense of 4 or 5 counters, which can often mean needing to spend more than one turn (depending on your deck) going after them. So far, the ones I've played with have had pretty decent rewards, but that will be an interesting balancing act.

Defending players have only a few options to prevent battles from being won - they can block with their own creatures, of course, but beyond that I think the only other option is Proliferate, to bump up the counters on them. Of course, given that they become permanents after they flip (I think with the exception of Invasion of Alara, which becomes a Sorcery) you can also deal with them simply by using removal against the resultant reward.

Time will tell if these wind up being a one-off oddity from this particular set or if they'll become an evergreen part of the game. I'm curious to see what other design space exists for them. Does the "siege" subtype mean anything? Not yet, because every Battle is also a Siege. But what other kinds of battles might we see?

The Oddness of Magic's Instant Storytelling and the Lack of Block Structure

 When you have four or five primary releases a year in a game that is mostly about narrative-agnostic gameplay but that nevertheless has deep lore and stories, things get weird.

March of the Machine is the grand climax to the Phyrexian storyline that, at least in its current chapter, started perhaps with the arrival of Vorinclex on Kaldheim. The Phyrexians were the big bads in the earliest days of Magic, and while the notion of a grand, ongoing story that would go on for many years, rather than more thematic visits to periods of time, places (mostly on Dominaria,) and such, the first real lean-in to Magic as a storytelling (rather than vibe-promoting) medium came with Tempest Block (sort of Mirage Block before it, which introduced many of the key players).

The thing is, there's a kind of compression that happens. This is particularly true given the shift in recent years away from year-long block storytelling and to largely standalone sets.

As an example, the original Kamigawa block introduced a world where spirits were at war with mortals, and how that conflict shattered what had previously been a comfortable status quo. We then had two sets to see that conflict escalate and then come to its conclusion.

Perhaps more specifically relevant to the current story, Invasion Block took three sets to play out the invasion of Phyrexia, with the initial victories and defeats, the, again, escalation and ultimate climax of that war playing out over a year of releases.

But in recent years, Magic has tended to only get to the "war" part in a single set. War of the Spark was certainly built up to - the seeds of Nicol Bolas' plan were planted over the course of a few years, with elements like the Immortal Sun and the Planar Bridge seeded in earlier sets.

But Bolas' arrival on Ravnica and his defeat all took place in a single release, meaning a story that was temporally compressed such that you were getting the beginning, middle, and end all at once.

War of the Spark came out the same year as Avengers Endgame, as well as the final season of Game of Thrones. 2019 was a year of grand finales (little did we know that it would also be the beginning of a plague of epic proportions, though at least in the US, we didn't really see much of it until 2020.)

But once the cards were previewed, every moment of that eponymous war was on display, from the initial invasion, the terrifying dreadhorde invaders, to Gideon's heroic sacrifice and Nicol Bolas' banishment.

We're getting exactly the same thing here.

Indeed, the parallel with the MCU is rather fitting. Phyrexia: All Will Be One was something like the Infinity War to March of the Machine's Endgame - the story in which we find out heroes are outmatched and they suffer their worst failure before they can turn around and find a victory.

The thing is, we have to ask a question: what is the unit of Magic storytelling?

Invasion Block in its entirety, which included the Invasion, Plane Shift, and Apocalypse sets, I'd argue, was a singular story, with the sets representing the beginning, middle, and end. The larger saga had been continuing for some time - Tempest Block, with its own parts being Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, was a story that was part of that grander narrative. Urza's Saga focused more on the past as a kind of backstory-filling-in flashback/prequel. Mercadian Masques continued the story of the modern heroes, and then Invasion Block brought that story to a conclusion. I can't tell you how successful it was, because this mostly took place during what I think of as my first "Magic Interregnum." Tempest Block was the last set I played primarily with physical cards during my first foray with the game from ages eight through eleven. I wouldn't really play again until Kamigawa's block in 2005/2006.

The thing is, I sort of get the sense that, in the rush to showcase new planes and the game mechanics of those planes, Magic kind of rushes through the story.

This is particularly noticeable with March of the Machine. The trailer for the set shows us a literally broken and dismembered (but still alive) Karn lying helplessly before Elesh Norn, only for a newly ascended Elspeth, who has become an angel, to come down and fight her. The trailer ends with a card preview - Mirrodin Avenged, which shows a restored Karn holding Elesh Norn's severed head up.

So, perhaps my very first exposure to the plot of March of the Machine is what I imagine is its climax and ultimate victory.

And sure, it's possible the story will be more complex - that killing Elesh Norn doesn't put a full stop to the invasion. But... it must, right? The way this is presented, this moment is clearly meant to show that yes, the good guys win.

And I love it when the good guys win. Phyrexia is a great, creepy villain, but we like scary villains because it makes it that much more satisfying when our heroes take them down. I never doubted for a second that this climactic clash with the Phyrexians invading basically the whole Magic multiverse would end with the Phyrexians defeated.

But it's jarring to see that moment before I get a sense of basically anything else that happens during the war.

See, I think that only a few years ago, March of the Machine might be released in the fall as the first set in the "War of the Machine" block, and maybe we'd get something like "Triumph of the Machine" as a second set where things look particularly bleak, with a conclusion in the spring called "Fall of the Machine" as the heroes manage to turn things around and finally defeat the invasion.

Now, to be fair, this year has been set up as the Phyrexian conflict year. Dominaria United put their threat front and center, and the modern-era story of Brothers' War was a continuation of that. And Phyrexia: All Will Be One could be said to take the form of that first, failed attempt to solve this issue.

But I still feel that, in the old block-based design, this would be at least two blocks - one focuses on the looming, insidious threat as a kind of mystery, ending with the unleashing of the multiversal conflict, with the next focusing on the conflict itself.

This also has a mechanical aspect.

On a mechanical level, blocks historically (Mirrodin onward) focused on a new plane, and those planes tended to have unique mechanics or themes. Mirrodin was the artifacts-matter plane. Kamigawa was (at the time) the "legends matter" plane. Ravnica was the "two-color deck" plane.

And so, in each block, the first set would broadly introduce the themes they were working with. Then, those themes and mechanics would be played with in subsequent sets.

Say, for example, you had a mechanic called "Fubar 2." During your upkeep, you can spend two mana to create an artifact that has "at the end of your turn, this artifact deals 1 damage to any target." You play through the first set and every card with Fubar specifically has Fubar 2. But then, in the next set, you get cards with "Fubar: pay two life." Now, the mechanic starts to become more interesting, and might work in decks that couldn't really make use of the old Fubar 2 cards. And then, in the third deck, there are now spells that do something when you Fubar - "when you pay your Fubar cost, discard a card and then draw a card."

Because we hop between stories and settings with nearly every set these days, we don't tend to see these mechanics develop and evolve.

What's even stranger is that even when we do stick around, they still don't.

Consider our most recent trip to Innistrad. As someone who loves the aesthetics of Gothic Horror, but never played during the original Innistrad or the Shadows over Innistrad blocks, I was very eager to play those. And to be fair, I liked Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow a lot (I think probably leaning more toward the former). But it was strange to me that in some cases, mechanical ideas that were introduced in one were absent in the other. Midnight Hunt created "decayed" as a zombie keyword that was a penalty, but allowed (in theory at least) much cheaper creature token creation.

But, in the next set, which was set on the same plane and took place right after Midnight Hunt (as far as I know,) rather than expanding upon this mechanic, they simply used a different mechanic for zombies, Exploit.

Are the two synergistic? Absolutely - getting cheap creature tokens that you can use as sacrifice fodder for exploit cards works great. But there are no exploit cards in Midnight Hunt and no decayed cards in Crimson Vow.

Now, I realize that there might be some element here of being an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not as if I can complain that some new designer is ruining everything - Mark Rosewater was lead designer during my second Magic heyday such as during Ravnica's original block, and he still is.

But I do wonder if this direction for the game has undercut it both mechanically and story-wise. When I look at the most popular decks, they tend to fall into classic archetypes, scooping up all the most efficient and powerful cards that fit in a certain array of colors. It's rare that any of these put a strong thematic focus on any interesting new mechanic, because the likelihood of such a mechanic being strong enough on its own in a single deck to beat out some strategy that just picks all the best cards from the scattered sets in the Standard format is low - you're only going to find cards that care about that mechanic in one out of eight sets in Standard.

March of the Machine's Implications for the MTG Story

 I'll put this caveat here that I don't follow the Magic the Gathering story super closely, but I kind of absorb it from wikis and YouTube videos, and occasionally the short fiction they publish on the website.

There was a several-year build up to War of the Spark, which saw Nicol Bolas (the one Elder Dragon Legend I ever got, even if it was just the Chronicles version) attempt to restore the godlike planeswalking power he'd had before The Mending by harvesting the planeswalker sparks of as many planeswalkers as he could lure to Ravnica. Given that this was a plot based entirely around killing planeswalkers, it came as a bit of a surprise that only a handful of established planeswalker characters died - most notably Gideon Jura, who tanked the lethal curse baked into Liliana's pact so that she could turn the Dreadhorde against the dragon. A lot of people complained that the stakes, which had seemed to be elevated so high, wound up feeling sort of lower.

Now, the plot also brought about huge changes to Ravnica, which might be the most popular plane, such as the fact that a lot of guilds have been totally reshaped - as a side note, the Ravnica D&D campaign I'm running has an Orzhov Cleric who now wants to kill the Obzedat Council, and while that's not really what my campaign is supposed to be about, I've been trying to figure out if I should introduce Kaya as an NPC and let that play out in-game as it did in canon, though with my party helping.

Still, following the conclusion of that plot 4 years ago (dear lord, time is weird) we're now gearing up for a new climactic arc-conclusion.

I will say, all of this seems to be much faster-paced than I remember older plot arcs, but on the other hand, I'm older. If you consider the original Phyrexian invasion plot to have started with Tempest Block in 1997, its conclusion with Apocalypse would have come after four years in 2001. We could say the current Phyrexian plot officially got going with Vorinclex's arrival on Kaldheim, which was in 2021, so... ok, yeah, that's only two years.

Anyway, very swiftly, the body count has racked up significantly. Not only was everyone's favorite Task Mage killed, but we've now seen a number of long-established characters compleated by the Phyrexians. The longstanding immunity Planeswalkers have to compleation (which, incidentally, is a major plot point in my D&D campaign) has been overcome, and so we've got beloved characters like Ajani and Nissa now playing for team body horror.

This kind of bleak, sweeping wipe-out of canon characters did, of course, happen once before in the past. In Invasion Block, the primary heroes of the past several sets were put through the freaking abattoir. Sure, Urza dying to destroy Yawgmoth for good (and so far it looks like that, at least, stuck) made sense, but we also lost Gerard, Hannah, and a number of other established figures. Basically, when the dust settled, there were only a few characters still around. The subsequent Odyssey Block introduced new characters as a new focus for MTG's story, though after the subsequent Onslaught Block, they decided instead to start jumping from plane to plane each year (and after War of the Spark, they'd start jumping from set to set - something I'm not 100% happy with, as it means we don't get to really become invested in any of these new worlds and plane-based mechanics tend to get swept away in favor of eternal deck archetypes - Kamigawa Neon Dynasty had a lot of cool ideas around Vehicles, but subsequent sets didn't really give us anything to develop that theme with).

That being said, I also think that MTG is a much bigger brand now, and as with all comic-book-like endless narratives, I'm always going to be a bit skeptical about their decision to truly kill off a character for good.

So, I see a couple possibilities for the aftermath of this plotline:

First, the Phyrexians have figured out a way to get to other planes without being planeswalkers. The Mending did bring Planeswalkers down to a power level where they could become cards, sure, but I think the total ban on non-planeswalkers traveling to other planes has been kind of stultifying for the story. We could never have something like the Weatherlight's journeys today (honestly, if there's one compleation I'm most upset by, it's that ship,) and I think it would be cool to have mere legendary creatures actually become recurring, plot-relevant characters once again. I think keeping Planeswalkers to just powerful individuals but then letting others journey between worlds could introduce some really cool new plot possibilities - I mean, just off the top of my head, wouldn't it be cool if House Dimir started planting agents on other worlds?

Second, I wonder if there's some redemption for any of the compleated planeswalkers. Phyrexia is a horrifying and implacable foe, but they've already established that while it's not clear that any Phyrexians are "good," so to speak, at the very least there are figures like Urabrask who are capable of resisting the hive-mind tendencies of Phyrexia and even tolerating the existence of un-compleated people. As it stands, any of the planeswalkers we've seen get turned have swiftly fallen in step with Elesh Norn's agenda of total conquest and conversion, but is it possible that some of them might simply develop new agendas that aren't entirely contradictory to more heroic characters' desires?

Third: is this the end of Phyrexia? I somehow doubt that they'd be willing to ever totally wipe out the Phyrexians. It came really close at the end of Invasion Block, with the destruction of Yawgmoth and even the original plane of Phyrexia, but then Karn had to accidentally bring a drop of oil to Argentum (I believe within the Mirari?) Again, we have to think of this in terms of comic book continuity. In any other medium, eventually bringing the Phyrexians back for a third time (arguably a fourth if you count Antiquities as their first appearance) would feel repetitive, but give it a decade or two and I'm sure that people will feel ready to face them again. I do, however, think that MTG needs to develop some new multiplanar threats (something that the first possibility could help establish).

Anyway, we've only gotten one card-art preview of March of the Machine, which seems to depict Thalia, from Innistrad, riding a legendary frog (can't recall the name, but he's summoned as a token) from Kamigawa, and possibly in Ravnica, which would seem to lend credence to possibility 1's likelihood.

Phyrexia: All Will Be One: Getting a Compleat Picture

 So, given that I'm running a Ravnica-set D&D campaign with the Phyrexians as the big bads, the focus on them in MTG's canon story has been useful to me for inspiration (I picked them just because I'm an old school MTG fan who started playing first during Fallen Empires and not long after our campaign started, Vorinclex showed up on Kaldheim).

The newest set is Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which puts these fantasy-genre cybernetic body horror monsters front and center (there's a card, I can't remember the name, that shows a bunch of humanoid Phyrexians who could very easily just be the Borg from Star Trek).

Now, I'll confess that I'm not the most adventurous deck builder. Arena's system where anyone can get any card pretty easily is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can get all the coolest cards. On the other hand, there's less incentive to try to scrape together a functional deck with just the stuff you have. Most players it seems are working with the carefully-crafted deck archetypes that the pros use.

That makes these early days of a new set kind of exciting. You don't really know what the good deck types and good cards are, so you scrape together what works. The downside is that you still encounter a lot of the really strong decks from the past set's era, which usually blows you out of the water with your weird new one. But occasionally, you wind up playing something that's just out of left field enough to work pretty well against people expecting you to play a certain way.

There are two decks I've found pretty satisfying to play - even if they're still not tuned up fully yet.

The first is a mono-black deck that uses a cool new threat called Archfiend of the Dross. This is a 6/6 flyer for 2BB - yes, it's cheap and huge. It also causes your opponent to lose 2 life any time a creature they control dies. The big and scary-sounding downside is that it starts with 4 oil counters, and each upkeep, you remove one of those counters. Once it's out of oil, you lose the game.

That sounds scary, and is clearly the downside that justifies its absurdly low cost for its size. The thing is: this gives you four turns to attack your opponent with a 6/6 flying creature. That means there's a good chance that you're going to swing in for the kill before you run out of oil - 24 total damage is more than enough to win. But then, also consider that you'll likely be removing more life from the opponent. One creature down and now the archfiend can finish the game in three attacks.

A creature surviving four turns is pretty rare in Magic anyway - you might swing in once and it dies to some removal, and now the downside has disappeared.

The other terrifying threat in this deck is Phyrexian Obliterator (a creature I've homebrewed stats for in the aforementioned D&D game - though it's not quite as nasty, if I'm honest). This is a reprint of a card that basically took its inspiration (the Negator - which I've also homebrewed) and turned the punishing drawback into a horrifying bonus. Again for just 4 mana (though it's BBBB, so good luck using that in a multicolor deck) you get a 5/5 trampler, and when it takes damage the opponent needs to sacrifice permanents equal to the damage dealt. Note that nowhere does it say "nonland permanents."

My experience with the Obliterator is that most opponents know that it's way more punishing to kill one of these things with damage than to just let it swing through and hit them - though any sort of kill, bounce, exile, or otherwise nondamaging removal spell works just fine. Still, I did play against an Izzet Prowess deck and the opponent must have either been desperate or not understood the text, because they buffed up a creature to kill my Obliterator and they wound up having to sacrifice literally everything they had on the board to start from scratch (or, they would have if they hadn't just conceded there - I can't blame them).

The deck uses a few black staples like Graveyard Tresspasser, Liliana of the Veil (a card I always feel a little skeptical about) and lots of removal. Gix's Command combos very well with the Archfiend especially against go-wide Soldier decks.

The other thing I've been trying to do is build a solid Toxic deck. Toxic is the new Infect/Poisonous ability that decouples the number of poison counters from the power of the creature (I actually wonder if this could become a retroactive keyword on old cards like Surveil did - does my Marsh Viper from The Dark now just say "Toxic 2?")

Initially I wanted to try using the new Phyrexian Mite tokens as a go-wide strategy with Toxic, but I'm not convinced it really works that well. I've had more luck with a Golgari deck of my own clumsy design that gets a bunch of cheap creatures (that are probably too simple to be considered by really competitive constructed players) with flight or deathtouch to make blocking them either more difficult or more costly. Venerated Rotpriest is a 1/2 for G that has Toxic 1 and also causes your opponent to get a poison counter whenever they target any of your creatures. Given how cheap my creatures are, this creates a bit of tension when it comes to removal spells where it might be worse to remove them than to just let them hit you (especially if I can get multiple Rotpriests out). Another insane green card here is Bloated Contaminator, a 4/4 with trample for just 2G (man, power creep is real) that has Toxic 1 but also lets you Proliferate when you hit the opponent with it. 4 power and trample along with Toxic is pretty nasty.

I can't say that this Golgari Deck is quite off the ground yet, but I've definitely racked up a few wins with it.

I will say, I now it's been a few years since they stopped doing "blocks," but I kind of miss it. I know that they've been able to introduce a lot of new ideas this way, but I also think that it often means that the really distinctive mechanics of any given setting or set wind up usually falling behind more general and kind of perpetual deck archetypes.

Also, while I don't really follow the Magic story very closely, I am struck by how this set really feels like it represents the darkest hour. While originally introduced in Antiquities, I think the original Phyrexian saga could be said to have run from Tempest Block through Invasion Block, so about four years. This one, has, I guess, gotten three years (certainly coming about after the War of the Spark). I do wonder if the relatively low bodycount from the War of the Spark and the complaints about it encouraged the folks at WotC to kill off a lot more established characters (to be fair, Jaya Ballard's the only one who has really died-died, but of course a lot of these folks have gotten a fate worse than death).

The Phyrexian plot here does suggest to me that they might pull back on the restrictions on planar travel that happened after Time Spiral. This allowed them to make Planeswalker cards in the first place, but I almost feel like, as cool as that is, Planeswalkers have kind of taken the place of Legendary Creatures, and now it's like anyone who isn't a planeswalker is an NPC in the planeswalkers' stories.

Anyway, the new set is gross and so far I'm having fun with it.

Holy Crap is Gix Good

 The early days of the Brother's War release I'd been on a bit of a losing streak. A lot of the exciting new decks people were talking about - Azorius Soldiers, an Izzet Prowess deck - were letting me down. While I really enjoy my Mono Red Powerstone deck, I've been thwarted in getting to actually ramp up (usually by hard control decks that counter absolutely everything and those very same prowess decks that never work for me).

But then, I decided to embrace my dark side.

Historically, Black has been my favorite Magic color, ever since I pulled a Royal Assassin out of my very first Revised Edition 60-card starter back in 1994. (Technically my second MTG purchase, as I had also gotten a Fallen Empires booster pack before I understood that I would not be able to do anything with it on its own).

This deck is a race-to-zero deck that is all about burning everything down, yourself included. The best card is Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor, which is a 3/3 for IBB (already pretty decent - remember how getting a creature with power and toughness for its mana value was generally something only green and white got to do? Scathe Zombies was a vanilla 2/2 for 2B). Gix has a triggered ability, which is that when you deal combat damage to a player with a creature, you can pay 1 life to draw a card. The more creatures you swing in with, the more cards you can draw.

Aggro's big challenge is usually running out of steam when you get into the main game, but I just won a game with more cards in hand than an Azorius control deck.

Gix actually has a very expensive activated ability that I don't even remember what it does because that first one is good enough. (Ok, it's 4BBB: Discard X cards and exile the top X cards from your opponent's library, which you can play (lands or spells) without paying their mana costs - really good if you can get it off (maybe using power stones) but we want to kill the opponent before we'd get 7 mana to play with).

Obviously, we use some standard aggressive black creatures - Tenacious Underdog is an obvious inclusion here. Graveyard Tresspasser is always good (and nice to use against graveyard shenanigans decks).

However, on theme with this is Defiler of Flesh. Like all the Defilers, this lets you treat one black mana symbol in any permanent spell as Phyrexian mana, which you can pay with 2 life instead of one black. Also, when you play such a card, you can give one of your creatures +1/+1 and menace until the end of turn.

Now, you combine this with all the cards we're drawing from Gix and then making our creatures better at getting to the opponent, and you get a feedback loop where you can get more things into play than your lands should allow. This thing's a 4/4 body for 4 mana, which is pretty good value. Also, multiple Defilers can convert multiple mana symbols, so, for example, your Tenacious Underdog can come in for 2 mana if you're willing to pay 4 life.

Again, this is a high-risk deck. You want to end things ASAP because you're going to be reducing your life total (ideally) faster than your opponent is. But it does two things that feel great as a magic player - it fills your hand with cards and lets you play those cards when you've drawn them.

Right now I don't have Sheoldred in it, because I'm trying to keep things relatively cheap, but I might swap her in for some others to give this more sustain (indeed, Gix actually winds up netting you positive life if Sheoldred is out). I think I have Henrika Domnathal, who does have her uses (the "sacrifice a creature" option is helpful to deal with a beefy defender).

I also have Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist, though I don't know if she's the right fit. Basically, she's a useful 1-drop with Deathtouch - a good combo with Gix because players will let her deal her 1 damage rather than lose a creature. But I haven't made use of her sacrifice trigger or her graveyard exiling to make minions - we usually have plenty of cards as it is to put creatures in the field, and we don't have the mana to spare for her ability.

Anyway, it's a fun deck and I've been racking up wins with it.

MTG Sets Through 2023 Announced

 While the preview season for Dominaria United is ramping up, WotC announced the next several sets covering the next year and a half of Standard.

Beginning in earnest with Dominaria United, we're going to have a year-spanning plot surrounding the Phyrexians' attempts to take over the multiverse.

Dominaria United, as we've been seeing, takes us to modern Dominaria where Karn uncovers an infiltration by the Phyrexians led by Sheoldred. Like the other non-Elesh Norn praetors, she's managed to travel between planes (though her organic bits burned away in the Blind Eternities). Dominaria is flooded with sleeper agents, and it looks like we know our next Compleated planeswalker: sadly, it looks like Ajani is playing for team P now, and might even kill Jaya Ballard. I guess when people complained that there weren't enough big deaths in War of the Spark, the folks at MTG took that to heart...

Brothers War, later in the year, will apparently be split between the war that was depicted in Antiquities as well as struggles on modern Dominaria. Expect lots of artifacts. (I'm really crossing my fingers for an actual Urza planeswalker card).

Next comes Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which will take place on the former Argentum/Mirrodin, which is now New Phyrexia. But this is apparently not the end of the saga.

March of the Machine will be about the Phyrexian war on the multiverse... which makes me wonder if the planeswalking rules that changed after Time Spiral might be shifting again?

Then, we get another set called March of the Machine: The Aftermath. Presumably we're going to see the Phyrexians defeated (otherwise the game's going to be permanently grimdark) and this will depict what comes after the war.

Next, in fall of 2023, it looks like we're going to be able to take a breather. First is a return to a new but very cool plane in Wilds of Eldraine, which will apparently focus on the more fairy-tale lands in the outer reaches of Eldraine. Hopefully not as overpowered a set, but also hopefully as fun of one.

Finally, in winter of 2023, we're getting The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, checking in on that plane now that the Immortal Sun isn't there anymore, with what looks to be a somewhat adventure-based set.

Given that I'm running a D&D campaign with the Phyrexians as the villains, I'm curious to see how my campaign's story compares to the one WotC is telling.

Dominaria United and My Weird Mind-Meld with the Creatives over at WotC

 As has been the trend for the past few Magic sets, Dominaria United is coming with a series of short fiction that tells what's going on in the expansion.

This post contains SPOILERS for those bits of web fiction.

As a return to Dominaria (most recently done five years ago, at the 25th anniversary of MTG) there have been a lot of old names popping up. The past two stories have had Karn as the viewpoint character, and the threat is the oldest big bad of Magic's lore, the Phyrexians.

What's funny is that for the past two years and change, I've been running a D&D campaign set in Ravnica, which was first introduced when I was in college, playing Magic Online using a PC emulator on my Macbook (it wasn't pretty, but I loved the set).

Given that I was going to let players be members of any guild, and the party has a Rakdos Bard and an Orzhov Cleric (who's currently a Warlock - it's complicated) and thus we were going to have a party with full-on evil characters, I wanted to bring out a villain that even a serial killer cannibal (the Bard) could find reason to fight against, and that's Phyrexia. The plot of this campaign has been all about the Phyrexians.

And I planned this in 2020, before Kaldheim had Vorinclex show up on another plane, meaning the last anyone had heard of the Phyrexians was New Phyrexia, which came out in 2011, nearly a decade before my D&D campaign started.

What's fun and a little spooky is that the Magic story has been working in parallel with a lot of the ideas I've got. Though I only just introduced it (to only one party member,) I've intended for the finale of the campaign to involve using the Golgothian Sylex on New Phyrexia to defeat them. The Sylex was used by Urza to end the Brothers' War, and was a card from Antiquities - really the first MTG set to start to flesh out Dominaria as a setting (also, it was a set hoser - removing all cards from its own set from the game, which is something that they also did in Arabian Nights but never did again). Well, it turns out that in the current story, Karn the Silver Golem intends to use the Sylex to do precisely that.

The Phyrexians were not exactly a deep cut, just an old one. But when I was playing around with Ravnica as a setting, I toyed with the idea of another deep cut. I made a Half Elf Dimir Shadow Sorcerer who got his powers when he was possessed by a fragment of an ancient necromancer. This being's soul was shattered to pieces back in the pre-Mending days before it was impossible for non-Planeswalkers to travel between worlds.

The figure in question was Lim-Dûl, one of the villains from Ice Age - the first true "Block" in Magic (though the third part wouldn't come out until over a decade later). This was a fairly deep cut - he hadn't been mentioned after Alliances, the follow-up to the Ice Age set, and the Magic story moved on with more recurring characters like the Weatherlight Crew.

Following the Invasion block, there were two blocks focusing on new characters on the continent of Otaria, but then Magic started hopping between planes, leaving Dominaria behind for the most part, and there weren't really many recurring characters until the introduction of the new Planeswalkers, which became a new card type. One of the most popular among them is Liliana Vess, the necromancer anti-hero.

Liliana's story involved a mysterious figure called the Raven Man, who haunts her across planes, driving her to greater mastery of necromancy. And for years, there has been some tin-foil-hat speculation that the Raven Man might be various known figures, such as Urza or Yawgmoth. But another contender that was suggested was Lim-Dûl. I wrote about it in this post. Well, as of the third part of the Dominaria United plot, it looks like those theories were 100% correct.

Yes, the Raven Man is, in fact, a fragment of Lim-Dûl's soul or consciousness that rested within an artifact buried on the Vess family estate. It's been Lim-Dûl all along!

When Nicol Bolas reemerged as a villain in Shards of Allara, and went on to become the big bad of Magic for several years, culminating in War of the Spark, I was kind of blown away. I've had a Chronicles version of Nicol Bolas since 1998, and built my deck around him (a deck I'm certain wouldn't be very good by today's standards).

I get frustrated with Magic as a game sometimes, feeling that it's always had a bit of a pay to have a chance to win structure, and that the lore doesn't really get reflected in gameplay most of the time. But it's also been a huge influence on my fantasy tastes since I was 8. So I'll confess, all this deep lore coming back is really hitting me in the nostalgia.

Mors Exponential Tokens

 Ok, I wrote earlier about a theoretical deck I wanted to make. Well, now I have. This deck takes advantage of the power of exponential growth, building up a small army of tokens that gets very, very big very, very fast.

It doesn't actually use Scute Swarm anymore, because while that's a great option in a ramp-heavy landfall deck, it doesn't play as synergistically with our other options.

The MVP of this deck is Rabble Rousing. This white enchantment for 4W gives you a white and green 1/1 citizen token for each creature you control that attacks. So, say you have two tokens out - now you get two more when those two attack. This includes any creatures you have that are attacking, so it could be your Prosperous Innkeeper or, most importantly, the very citizens that the enchantment created. If the opponent isn't killing the tokens, you've got a re-doubling army every turn, which can get out of hand very quickly.

Given how many creatures we're summoning, Prosperous Innkeeper is a very useful part of our deck. Even though it focuses on small creatures, this deck does take a little while to get set up. When all that exponentially-growing mob is coming into play each turn, we're getting a lot of life back from our Innkeeper, which helps us sustain. However, the treasure token the Innkeeper brings shouldn't be ignored - that will help us get the five mana we need without necessarily having to get to turn 5 (and get land drops on all of them).

Devilish Valet here is, I think, usually icing on the cake. If we get a token army and Rabble Rousing out, this guy is an utter menace - exponential upon exponential. If we have five tokens and we swing in with this thing, that means six more tokens, which means doubling the Valet's power six times, or 64 power if we're just starting at 1. Still, the Valet can potentially win the game for us even if the opponent has gone wide, thanks to his trample.

Jetmir, Nexus of Revels is actually a pretty strong part of the deck. While he doesn't really get insanely powerful until you have ten guys on the board, which even this deck only sometimes gets, getting up to six is not that difficult, and that means everyone getting +2/+0 along with vigilance and, importantly, trample. (Ten adds one more power and then double strike, and at that point you're basically winning immediately.) Jetmir is actually a great option for the Hideaway feature of Rabble Rousing, because when it triggers, you'll be getting Jetmir at his full power (the only downside is that you potentially warn your opponent - though if you have five creatures on the board when you plunk down Rabble Rousing with a Hideaway Jetmir, you can get it all in one turn. Even if they're only 1/1 tokens, with that play, you'll have five 4/1 double-strikers, which is 40 trampling damage that the opponent will have to deal with. And while an opponent should be nervous to see five creatures of any sort on the opponent's side of the board, they might not expect this massive of a threat.)

Wedding Invitation is naturally pretty useful here, pumping out tokens or potentially drawing you cards, and then paying off with an anthem effect that is always very good in go-wide decks.

We're actually going to get use of all three of the options of Cabaretti Charm - the direct damage can be crucial to destroy big threats, the creature pump (and again, importantly, giving them all trample) is great as a finishing move, and the token generation can be useful either to recover from a board wipe or to help enable Jetmir or the Devilish Valet.

So, lets talk about the deck's weaknesses.

The first is that it is extremely vulnerable to board wipes. Meathook Massacre usually doesn't have to be cast at a particularly high value for X to take out everything we have. Farewell (which, honestly, I think is a BS card) is a nightmare here, as it can also take out Rabble Rousing (there's another wiper from I want to say Strixhaven that takes out all nonland permanents that totally screw us).

This is also a bit of a feast or famine deck (which, to be fair, might just be the nature of the game). Ideally you'll be able to grow a big army and then swarm them down. But super-fast aggro decks might be hard to defend against, while permission decks will keep any of your best cards from ever actually hitting the table. The deck is a bit reliant on Rabble Rousing, and that enchantment is only useful if you also have some things in play.

Still, the strengths I think are that you can sometimes pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. Even without the crazy exponential possibilities of Rabble Rousing and Devilish Valet, you can catch a cocky foe off guard with cards like Jetmir and the group-pump of Cabaretti Charm.

Some of the cards in the deck that are kind of just filling slots here are Felidar Retreat (which might be a holdover from when we were doing more of a landfall thing) or Gala Greeters, which certainly benefit from all the creatures coming into play but might be too limited to really benefit from the huge number of tokens we're making. I'm also considering playing a bit with the lands - right now I have the Cabaretti "triome" lands and the pathways, but I might throw in some of the Innistrad dual lands as well to smooth things a bit.

Cabaretti and Exponential Aggro

 First off:

I didn't play during Shards of Alara (I believe it came out my senior year of college, and thus I had moved onto WoW as my primary nerdy time-sink,) so getting used to the shorthand of Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund, and Naya took me a while. I think I have even more trouble with the "wedges." (Let's see, taking the "enemy" color as the organizing principle, that's what: Mardu, Temur, Abzan, Jeskai, and Sultai, right?)

We get new "factions" with new sets. I got into Arena when Ikoria was a fairly recent set (it's when they made a Mac client) and so I had an easier time thinking of Savai, Ketria, Indatha, Raugrin, and Zagoth than the Tarkir ones. Similarly, we have new names for the "shards" with New Capenna thanks to the new factions of Brokers, Obscura, Maestros, Riveteers, and Cabaretti.

But hey, if we're going to stick with the first appearance of such a thing, I think that the "color and its two allies" should be named after some true legends: Elder Dragon Legends.

Thus, I think GWU should be "Sabboth," WUB should be "Chromium," UBR should be "Bolas," BRG should be "Asmadi," and RGW should be "Mors."

So I actually call this deck "Mors' Exponential Recursion."

It's not actually a full deck - I haven't burned the Wildcards to make it, so it exists in theory. What's the most powerful force in the universe? It's compound interest. So let's take a look at the three cards in here that, if they're allowed to go off, get freaking crazy.

Actually, before I get there, I have a story:

My maternal grandfather was a smoker (actually, both were, though my paternal one quit the moment the Surgeon General announced they were linked to lung cancer and never took another puff because he was a badass). His second wife asked him to quit, and he told her "I'll quit if you do the following for me. Take this chess board, and I want you to put a penny on the first square today. Tomorrow, put two pennies on the second square. Each day, I want you to put twice the number of pennies you put on the previous square on the next one. When you fill up the board, I'll quit."

My step-grandmother was not very mathematically-minded, and so she agreed.

On a 64-square chessboard, she would have needed 1.844 quintillion pennies, or 18.44 quadrillion dollars. To fill up the last square. She'd need practically as much as well to fill up the previous 63 squares.

Ok, so let's look at these cards:

The first is Devlish Valet. This is a 1/3 red devil warrior with trample and haste for 2R. It also has the ability word alliance - each time a creature enters the battlefield under your control, double Devilish Valet's power until end of turn.

Now, doubling its base power is not that scary - indeed, its trample ability isn't even meaningful until you do. However, if you have ways to put multiple creatures into play, this gets silly very fast. Five on one turn gets you to 32 power, and with trample, that's a big problem, because if your opponent can't just kill the valet or get over 12 toughness in front of that freight train, they're dead.

But five creatures into play in a single turn is tough, right?

Now we turn to the next piece in this madhouse: Scute Swarm.

Yes, Devilish Valet and Scute Swarm are on opposite ends of the Standard rotation, so this is the only period in which you can put both in a Standard deck (maybe I'm an old fogey, but Standard is still my default format). Scute Swarm is, of course, a 1/1 green insect for 2G. It has the Landfall ability keyword, so when a land enters the battlefield under your control, you create a 1/1 green insect token... unless you have six lands in play, in which case you instead create a copy of Scute Swarm.

Meaning that the next land you put out there, both will create a copy. And then the next time, all four will make copies - you see where we're going.

Scute Swarm is terrifying enough in a landfall-focused deck, as it goes wide very, very quickly. But if you put one of these into play, that's doubled our Valet's power once, then you play a land, and now you're doubling it again. Play something like Topiary Stomper on the same turn and now each of those is doubling and the Valet is up to 16 times its original power.

Basically, with these two out, there's an exponential growth on top of exponential growth. If one land gives us one copy and thus doubles the valet once, then a second (on that turn) means two more come into play, doubling the valet twice, so he's at 8. Does that mean we're basically cubing it? It has been a long time since high school algebra. No, I think it's more because a third land would be four new copies, and he's already at 8, so then we have 8 times two to the fourth power, which is 128, whereas 2 to the 4th power is just 16.

Yeah, don't remember how to layer exponents on exponents.

Finally, our third insane piece: Rabble Rousing, a white enchantment for 4W

This has hideaway 5, which is fine but not what we're really here for. Instead, its base effect is that when you attack, you create a 1/1 green and white citizen token for each creature that is attacking. Then, if you have ten or more creatures, you can cast the hideaway card without paying its mana cost.

So, let's imagine a scenario.

You've had Scute Swarm out and doubled it on a previous turn. Rabble Rousing is out, but you've avoided attacking because the opponent has things that can block. You have a Devilish Valet in hand and a land to drop.

So, you cast Devlish Valet. You then play the land. This triggers the two Scute Swarms, so the Valet's power is doubled twice to 4. Now, we attack with all three creatures. Rabble Rousing puts out three citizens. This means we double the Valet's power three more times - 8, 16, 32.

We can futz with this a bit to make it more effective.

Wedding Invitation gets more people on the board, but naturally its transformed state, giving all of our creatures +1/+1, is going to pay off tremendously when we double the Valet's power. With two of these active, the Valet starts at 3/5, and thus doubles to 6, 12, and then 24.

Felidar Retreat will let us either pack the board with more creatures or let us buff up the Valet (or our sizable horde of tokens).

Jetmir, Nexus of Revels of course rewards us significantly when we go wide, and given how quickly we can get a lot of creatures out there, getting his maximum bonus is not outside of the realm of possibility.

What I want to work on with this concept is seeing what spells support it the best - we're very vulnerable to board wipes - Farewell is particularly devastating, as it can take away things like Rabble Rousing or Felidar Retreat, which will allow us to rebuild after creature-specific ones like Meathook Massacre.

I think in play you also probably want to hold back the Devlish Valet until you can be sure to pump it up. If you let it sit on the board when the opponent gets a turn, they're going to probably blow it up ASAP. Thanks to its haste, you can wait for an opportune time to drop it in, though you'll also want to make sure you have all the other pieces in place to make sure you maximize the power.

New Capenna Decks I've Had Some Success With

 When a new set comes out, there's always this sort of awkward stage where it's really not clear what decks are going to be super good, and so I often make some new thing with a lot of new cards that I'm all excited about, only to be beaten down with decks that have spent the last card set cycle getting refined and tested.

However, in the five days or so of New Capenna being available on Arena, I've managed to cobble together (with a lot of help from online deck lists) some decks that actually seem to be able to win now and again.

First off, there's a Cabaretti (Naya) tokens deck. This one is very vulnerable to sweepers - something that we have a lot of in Standard these days, between Meathook Massacre, Doomskar, Burn Down the House, and Farewell. But if you can manage to build up a lot of creatures with things like Esika's Chariot, Join the Dance, etc., there's some great payoff. Jetmir, the legendary mob boss of the Cabaretti, can be the thing you plunk down on the battlefield and just win the game with - he gives bonuses to all your creatures based on how many you have out, and giving everyone +1/+0 and vigilance, then trample, then double strike is pretty nice (though the latter you need nine creatures out to get).

The next deck I've been playing is a Brokers (Bant) deck that uses Teleportation Circle for enter-the-battlefield recursion. Here, we have cheap creatures like Prosperous Innkeeper and Topiary Stomper to ramp up, but then things get really crazy when we get Workshop Warchief or Titan of Industry - the latter of which is going to bring a ton of pain to your opponent, as you can kill enchantments and artifacts, pump out 4/4 rhino warrior tokens, gain five life, or put a shield counter on one of your creatures, which is nuts.

A deck that I'm hoping to refine is a sort of Maestro (Grixis) control deck that make use of a few cards like A Little Chat - which is a simple but useful card-draw engine - and of course, Ob Nixilis, the Adversary, which is the new hotness in planeswalkers. Having a bunch of Eyetwitches and Shambling Ghasts means that sacrificing a creature for these cards is actually more of a bonus than a drawback.

It'll be a few weeks before the new, most powerful deck archetypes reveal themselves, and of course, a lot of fairly old cards at this point are still pretty dominant - I think we're going to have to wait for Kaldheim and Strixhaven to rotate out of standard before those nasty Izzet control decks go away.

New Details on New Capenna

 As we've been aware for some time, New Capenna as a setting is focused on five "shard" color trios. Indeed, we'll be getting "hideouts" that are the equivalent of Ikoria's Triomes. The five tribes are each an organized crime syndicate within the massive metropolis of New Capenna.

The urban nature of the setting (not to mention the multicolor factions) certainly draws some similarities with Ravnica, but the background on Capenna as a plane is very interesting, and also hints at the emphasis for future Magic stories.

First off, New Capenna and Old Capenna are not exactly separate locations. Capenna is the plane upon which the city of New Capenna stands. We're told that Old Capenna was what the plane was like prior to a catastrophic disaster. Fleeing the destruction and threat, the people of Capenna built the city in order to live in safety. It was during this time that the angels who safeguarded the plane made an alliance with the plane's demons - and by now, the angels are all gone, and the demons are in charge.

Each faction has what appears to be a former mortal (or vampire or dragon) who has become a demon and continues to rule their crime family.

But here's the interesting thing: it appears the big disaster that struck Capenna was none other than the Phyrexians - and not the new ones, but the old, Yawgmoth-era Phyrexians - and they're still out there, int he wilds.

Capenna was, previously, a classical fantasy world with knights and kingdoms. When they people were forced to hunker down together in New Capenna, their roles shifted. The knights-errant and paladins became the Brokers, essentially an army of lawyers. The nobility and historians became the Maestros, a league of assassins. The great wizards and sages became the Obscura, knowledge brokers and blackmailers, etc.

Another big reveal we've gotten is that Elspeth, the famed planeswalker, originated on this plane. She has tried to live up to a Bant-style ideal of nobility and valor, but she's forced to confront the fact that her home plane is now soaked through with corruption.

Just one set after Jin-Gitaxias showed up on Kamigawa, we now have Urabrask, the "actually pretty chill" Phyrexian Praetor from New Phyrexia on Capenna, who has come here to try to learn about the previous generation of Phyrexians. It also looks like we've got Vivien and Ob Nixilis, the latter of whom looks like he's trying to make a play as a mob boss.

I'm personally very excited to see Magic exploring post-medieval aesthetics and settings. New Capenna has magic-driven cars and firearms that shoot magical energy (and sometimes look like musical instruments - the old "tommy gun in a violin case" being made much more literal.

New Capenna runs on a resource known as Halo, which I'd assume was some final gift left behind by the angels of the plane, and so I now wonder if it's sort of the counter-agent to Phyrexian oil. (Given the subject matter of my current D&D campaign, I'm really curious to see what this place is like).

Naya Runes

 A little break form Elden Ring (I have roommates, so the TV is not always available, after all) to talk about a deck that I think has become fairly popular. It's relatively cheap to put together, with most of its staple cards being uncommon or common.

The deck is Naya Runes!

Runes are a cycle of auras from Kaldheim that you can place on any permanent, though they're primarily intended for creatures or equipment. Each costs one generic and one colored mana, and each creates an effect on the creature or any creature the equipment is attached to, such as +1/+1 and trample, flying, deathtouch, lifelink, etc.

More excitingly, these auras all let you draw a card when they enter the battlefield.

Now, let's talk about the two other key pieces:

Jukai Naturalist is a 2/2 human monk enchantment creature for GW (or is it WG? Can't remember the convention there) with lifelink. They also reduce the cost of enchantments by 1.

Runeforge Champion, then, is the first rare we're talking about, and is a 2/3 dwarf warrior for 2W. He has two important effects: first, when he enters the battlefield, you can search your library or graveyard for a rune card and put it into your hand. Next, he allows you to pay just 1 to cast any rune.

These two together create the most exciting effect of the deck: with the cost reduced to 1, that is further reduced by the Jukai Naturalist, and thus each rune is free. If you get lucky, the rune draws you another rune, and you can chain a bunch of these together.

And any deck that lets you cast a bunch of spells and draw a lot of cards is going to feel good.

So, we run Runes of Might, Sustenance, and Speed - I think 4 of the first two and 3 of the latter. Sustenance grants Lifelink, Speed grants +1/+0 and haste, and Might gives +1/+1 and trample.

Next, to fill things out, we have Generous Visitor, a 1/1 spirit for G that lets you put a +1/+1 counter on any creature whenever you cast an enchantment. This, of course, can be huge if we get a big rune-chain, but the deck has a lot of enchantments anyway, so it's a nice buffer.

Next, Kami of Transience is a 2/2 green spirit for 1G that has trample and gets a +1/+1 counter each time you cast an enchantment spell - these can get quite big. The massive benefit of these is that if an enchantment you control goes to the graveyard, you can choose to bring this back from the graveyard at the end of the turn, making this a recurring problem for your opponent.

Now, we like to have a lot of cards available to us, and that's where Showdown of the Skalds comes in. This saga starts by exiling the top four cards of our library and letting us play them this turn and the next turn, for 2WR. Then, the next two turns, each time you cast a spell, you get to put a +1/+1 counter on a targeted creature.

Where things get downright mean is Hallowed Haunting. This enchantment for 2WW causes you to create a Spirit creature token each time you cast an enchantment spell with "this creature's power and toughness are equal to the number of spirits you control," meaning that things can get out of hand real quick. Furthermore, if you control seven or more enchantments, your creatures all get flying and vigilance, and at this point you've probably got an unstoppable army to sweep the opponent.

Commune with Spirits is a nice utility spell - for G, this sorcery lets you look at the top four cards of your library and put a land or an enchantment card into your hand, and put the other three on the bottom of your library. Early-game this can work a bit like Environmental Sciences to smooth out your mana curve, while late-game it can help you dredge up runes or Showdown of the Skalds to keep up your card advantage.

Anyway, this is a fun deck that I also appreciate isn't profoundly annoying to play against - there are answers that can be brought against the deck, but it's also highly resilient and bounces back from board wipes with relative ease.

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is a Success

 Having played through the previous Kamigawa block back in 2004/2005, I never really expected or much wanted to return to the plane. There were cool elements - I liked Ninjas, for example (man, I am such a Dimir at heart) but in particular, the introduction of Ravnica the following year left Kamigawa in the dust, and I was happy to see decks that didn't revolve around Umezawa's Jitte, which might be the card I hate the most in all of Magic (though I think these days I'd be much better equipped, strategically, to handle it).

But, as readers of this blog will know, one of the easiest ways to excite me about a work of fantasy fiction is to introduce technologies and social systems that extend beyond Medievalism and maybe come up to modern day (or even surpass it in a speculative future). So, when they announced that we'd finally come back to Kamigawa 18 years later (and dear lord how am I this old?) that we'd be seeing a Cyberpunk, futuristic Kamigawa with cyborgs, holograms, mechs and robots, I was suddenly very intrigued.

Of course, Magic is a game where flavor has to serve the mechanics, and even a top-down world needs to have mechanics that feel fun to play.

And folks, it looks like it's working.

In all honesty, on a mechanical level, we're not seeing anything too profoundly revolutionary. The Mech theme is simply achieved through Vehicles. Cybernetics is accomplished through equipment (and creatures that can turn into equipment).

Gone is the kami-versus-mortals narrative from the original set, which it seems was sort of built out of a misreading of Japanese Shinto (as I understand it). The conflict here is instead between tradition and modernity - which the game represents through Enchantments versus Artifiacts, respectively. However, the two aren't really in direct competition - instead, they're just themes of "artifacts matter" and "enchantments matter" that you can choose to build around - or not.

And here, we start to see something that I think really makes for a good Magic set - a sense that you can pick what themes interest you. Ravnica felt good because, after a lot of samey deck archetypes in the original Kamigawa, we suddenly saw a lot of different archetypes arising (even if, say, Golgari was a bit overrepresented).

Now, the metagame is even more important on Arena than it was/is on MTGO given that you can simply pick the cards you want to craft rather than having to potentially spend event tickets at a bot to buy that one rare for like fifteen dollars. We're early enough in this process that I can't say that some archetype isn't going to become super-dominant.

But I have noticed that the people I'm playing against seem to be trying out new types of decks, and I've had fun building my own. Oddly, my homebrewed Mech-based deck seems to be my most consistent winner, which is a bit validating for someone who doesn't often have a lot of confidence in his deckbuilding skills.

Anyway, I think most times a new set comes out, we see slight tweaks to old dominant decks - maybe a card or two added in to an old archetype, but now it looks like a lot of people are feeling eager to try new stuff, which I think means we've got a success.

Also, as someone running a D&D campaign set in the Magic multiverse (though I did have a friendly Green Slaad show up tracking a Beholder that had found its way into Ravnica's undercity from the Far Realm in the D&D multiverse, so we're taking the Ravnica-based Acq Inc games as canon) my imagination has been set alight with the possibilities of having my players fight cyborg ninjas in Towashi and have to get in a 50-ft tall mech suit to fight some villain.