Knight Rampager by Tze Kun Chin

Commissar Severina Raine by Jake Murray

Link the Fire is the first of four Dark Souls commander decks I'm working on, inspired greatly by the Warhammer 40k decks- which are both really excellent, fun products and what got me into Magic in the first place!

Link the Fire is a Legendaries matter Mardu sacrifice deck with an emphasis on sacrificing your legendary creatures to maintain control over the board and keep yourself in the game.

The Gods in Dark Souls, and Gwyn in particular, obsessively create champions to sacrifice in the name of prolonging their power. All of that is futile, however- the Age of Fire is ending, and the best you can do is delay it. To that end, you may sacrifice Gwyn to prevent a loss- but once you've done that, you're only staving off the inevitable unless you find a path to victory.

Control is at its best when it's built in a way that encourages the control player to seek a fast way to close out the win once they've established control over the board. While there are means to flood your board with legendary creatures and negate the main downside of Lord of Cinder, they're not terribly common- and if you get to that point, I think it's quite likely you've done enough work to justify some security. There's always the threat of a board wipe or aggressive removal, and if all else fails Gwyn doesn't make it so that other players can't win the game- Laboratory Maniac to the rescue!

Hey Mark, I've been working on a UB-esque custom set, but one of my biggest problems has been getting the colors and factions balanced. I've thought about just designing the cards as commander decks so that color balance doesn't matter, like what you guys did with the black-heavy Warhammer 40k, but I really want a limited format and already have seeded archetypes that work well together. All that said, are there any inherent problems with making a color-imbalanced set/limited format?

It will fight player intuition and lead to poor deck builds. If the same people are going to keep playing it over and over, that will get adjusted for over time by the drafters. If you're going to keep wanting to introduce it to new players, I wouldn't recommend it.

What do you think about the power level of recent sets as pertaining to eternal formats?

Ok, so, how do you define "recent sets"... And "eternal formats" too. I will try to give my thoughts according to my interpretation of that, but it's fuzzier than you'd think.

I will say anything recent is anything more recent than any set legal in standard, and eternal formats cover Legacy, Vintage, Commander and Modern. I'll also put in a read more because that ended up being a pretty long ramble.

First of all, I'll clear up a bunch of them at once: Standard set have been fine, and in fact pretty great. They've provided powerful pieces to older formats, of course, be it Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Sheoldred, Ledger Shredder, Channel lands,... And all and all, if you ask me? Those have been pretty natural additions to the formats. Cards at the upper end of the standard power-level finding synergies and homes in decks.

Of these, channel lands are maybe the biggest offender here, as easy one-of answers any deck in their color can play, but in those formats playing a non-fetchable one color land that isn't a basic is actually a cost, even if it's one that people end up paying for Otawara and Boseiju.

I also need to address the beans in the room: Up the Beanstalk has been making some pretty impressive waves in older formats. Mostly because of its interaction with those formats' access to many powerful cards that have a "mana value" of 5 or more but can be cast for zero or one mana. I'd argue that this is an issue with those free spells and not Up the Beanstalk, but also I feel like this is a very normal way for cards to break into Eternal formats: through unforeseen interactions within the huge pool of cards of those formats. That's typically how Legacy and Modern got their most iconic cards, and that's why the Vintage restricted list can look so weird to a casual observer, with Ancestral Recall hanging around next to Lodestone Golem and Monastery Mentor.

Now, that leaves us with Baldur's Gate (ie the Initiative set), Warhammer 40,000, Unfinity, Transformers, Jumpstart 2022, the Lord of the Rings set, and very recently Doctor Who. Plus the smattering of commander precons.

From this list, Transformers and Jumpstart had no effect on eternal formats. Doctor Who hasn't had a huge effect so far, but also it released two weeks ago and isn't on Magic Online, so we don't really have any significant amount of data for Legacy or Vintage about that.

This leaves us with Baldur's Gate first, which added Initiative to Legacy, and also Minsc & Boo. Oh, and Pauper suffered Initiative too. While it might have been a mistake, it wasn't really one of power level. Or rather, the power level was fine for the multiplayer formats it was intended for, but unbalanced in the context of 1v1 competitive magic. This was entirely foreseeable even without testing, Monarch did the same thing after all. The question then become: should they tone down commander designs in commander sets that might make them less interesting in commander out of prudence for older formats? I do not have a definitive answer to that. Ideally, they'd be able to balance the two off of their differences.

40K introduced a few cards into eternal formats, but none that I'd qualify as "broken", just some new powerful option, mostly synergy-based. Same with Unfinity, although Unfinity had other issues than power-level. Nothing was too strong, but making half the set eternal-legal including stickers and attractions, underpowering them to avoid competitive issues, and them still sneaking into competitive play, was pretty much the worst of all worlds. Comet and Embiggen and Pair O' Dice Lost are fine. ______ Goblin not so much, but again, not a power level issue. Kappa Cannoneer is a strong card, but I feel about it the same as I do about Up the Beanstalk: situationally strong and dependent on the environment and naturally added as part of a batch.

Which leaves us with the Lord of the Rings set, coincidentally the only one of these to enter Modern on top of legacy. To recap, the cards that mainly see play from this are the landcyclers (chiefly Lòrien Revealed), Orcish Bowmasters and the One Ring. And Forth Eorlingas! in Legacy only, as it is a commander precon card. There's a few others that might see occasional play, but those are the main ones you're likely to see.

The landcyclers I think add to the format's manabases, mostly for graveyard decks. Orcish Bowmasters is an answer, a strong answer, and I don't really like its design, it does a bit too much without even trying. It does one too many things, I feel. Either don't make the token, or only ping the opponent and make the token, or ping creatures but not players and planeswalkers. I'll put Forth Eorlingas in that bag too.

The One Ring is incredibly strong,... But I feel less annoyed by it. It is the One Ring, and it feels appropriate. It's also a 4 mana artifact with counterplay to it, and after spiking up in popularity, it's somewhat stabilized as a staple with both decks playing it and deck preferring other options. Regardless, I don't think its main strength should be being able to play multiple copies of it to dodge any consequences though. It barely cracks the top 50 most played noncreature nonland cards in legacy. So the main issue is in Modern, and again, it's a good problem to have, one that can be handled and isn't by a landslide.

So overall, the few pushed cards in LTR are the only ones I'd qualify as a "problem of power level in recent sets for Eternal formats". A huge part of the problem is that they were injected into Modern alongside Legacy, but also the cards were pushed a bit too far. Overall, not too bad a track record though, most of the additions have felt more or less organic. However, if I looked back six months more and we were discussing Modern Horizons 2, I'd have some more choice words about pushed staples, that was like LTR, but with half of its mythics and a third of its rares instead of a literal handful of cards. I sincerely hope Modern Horizons 3 isn't like that. And I hope future direct injections into modern aren't quite as pushed as LTR's targeted Competitive inserts were.

Oh, and I haven't addressed Commander, for two reasons. One, commander, as a format that isn't competitive, is much, much, much more resilient to any "metagame" or "power level issues" because it basically self-corrects. Two, is that there's less issues there because it's where most of these cards are aimed at. I will say, I don't think the One Ring is a positive addition to commander... But it's also a card too expensive for me to see anyone play it, so...

I LIED ACTUALLY I DID HAVE A VAGUELY INSANE EXPERIENCE AT THE WARHAMMER 40K MAGIC THE GATHERING COMMANDER RELEASE EVENT AT MY LOCAL GAME STORE.

We are sitting next to a guy who had the fancy decks, like the $200 all shiny decks, I got to touch them it was great, anyway we are vaguely talking about Warhammer 40k and he completely out of the blue is like

“not to get incredibly political, but I do think there’s something to be said for them keeping the Emperor alive past when he should have died... just like liberalism”

AND LIKE, THAT SHIT SHUT ME DOWN WITH CONVERSATION SO FAST IT WAS LIKE BEING DOUSED WITH ICE WATER.

Later he was like

“hey I realize how that could be misconstrued (DO YOU. DO YOU THOUGH. COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO HAD TO EXPLAIN TO SOMEONE WITH NO 40K KNOWLEDGE WHY I LOOKED LIKE A BOOTLEG FASCIST. DO YOU. I AM CONSTANTLY AWARE THAT I LOOK SCARY IN MY COSPLAY AND LIVE IN CONSTANT FEAR OF THE LITERAL N*ZIS IN THE FANDOM. HOW DO I PRESENT AS THREATENING IN CHARACTER BUT A NOT-CREEP PERSON IRL.), I just wanted to let you know that I’m totally a libertarian”

I am so sorry buddy but that continues to sour me on further interaction with you, and regardless that is a pretty wack take to have on 40k. I understand you were talking about how you are not really big into 40k lore that much and you are welcome to draw whatever interpretation you have from the setting, but that’s pretty wack. That’s a little nuts. You looked at the God Emperor of Mankind and decided to take a complete 180 from all of the other shithead fash fuckboys who compared him to Trump and went “nah, fuck that” and made your own equally nuts but politically opposed analysis. It’s wack.

Didn’t talk to him much after that! Did ask for some rule clarifications since he had a lot of Magic the Gathering experience, and thanked him for letting me see that cards of course, and he was mostly pleasant but like.... Dude. Dude.

Got any commander decks?

Part one for those interested.

I have two Commander decks built, three planned, and ten concepts. Let's get into it.

My first Commander deck is a Vorthos deck, because surprise, I'm a Vorthos player! (Not a surprise, I love lore and the little people on my cards.) It's a Blue-Black-Red deck based on the antagonists of MTG, focused mostly on Nicol Bolas with some of the other little bastards sprinkled in. I recently switched the Commander from Crosis, the Purger to Marchesa, the Black Rose. She is a QUEEN and deserves to lead these idiots to victory, because maybe then they'll finally be successful.

My other built Commander deck is Falco Spara, Pactweaver (to the surprise of no one who has been following me for even a few minutes). It's a "Counters Matter" Green-White-Blue deck. And to save myself the math, it's not JUST +1/+1 counters - it's shield counters, charge counters, keyword counters, et cetera. I used to have a Green-Blue Merfolk Tribal deck that was almost solely +1/+1 counters and it killed me to keep track of the math so I killed it. Spara's deck is something of a spiritual successor to that one, much like my Blue-Red Instants And Sorceries Matter deck was the spiritual successor of my first precon deck.

I may as well just use Spara as my bridge to my three deck plans, since one of them is also about him. I call it, "Are You Sure These Are Demons?" and it's Green-White-Blue Demon Tribal.

Yes, you read that right.

During the writing of this post (and the deck in Archidekt), there are exactly three (count them, three!) non-Black non-Red Demon cards: Falco Spara, Pactweaver; Heralds of Tzeentch; and Lord of Change. Yes, the latter two are from the Warhammer 40K crossover commander decks. As you can probably guess, the Changeling keyword and Shapeshifter creature type are carrying this theme, hence the snappy title.

Hungry Hungry Dragon is a Black-Red-Green Food Token Theme deck headed by Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. Didja see what I did there? Honestly, not much to say here. Make Food Tokens, sacrifice things, the Dragon gets stronger. And yes, Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar is there.

Pennies On The Dime is me laughing at Ob Nixilis. I have the same emotions towards this abhorrent man as one has towards a beloved yet annoying younger sibling. So laugh we shall! Iiiiit's Black-Red Devil Tribal. Get out a bunch of Devils that do damage when they die, sacrifice them, use them to empower Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin and let him haul ass towards your opponents. LET HIM KILL! And then bully him for getting bodied by 18-30 year old women (Chandra, Giada, Elspeth, etc).

And then there are the ten who have not been built or figured out. These will just be bulletpoints:

Lord Xander, the Collector: Blue-Black-Red mill (because I enjoy being hated, I guess)

Henzie "Toolbox" Torre: Black-Red-Green Treasure Tokens

Ziatora, the Incinerator: Black-Red-Green Dragon tribal

Ziatora, the Incinerator: Black-Red-Green sacrifice theme

Falco Spara, Pactweaver: Green-White-Blue Bird tribal

Falco Spara, Pactweaver: Green-White-Blue Saga cards

Tatsunari, Toad Rider: Black-Green-Blue Enchantments

Tatsunari, Toad Rider: Black-Green-Blue Frog tribal

Mathas, Fiend Seeker: Red-White-Black Vampire tribal

Reaper King: White-Blue-Black-Red-Green Scarecrow tribal (which used to be a 60 card deck and I'm ready to reanimate it)

I hope you enjoyed reading this, anon!

~Jasper

lord help me the 40k commander decks are actually making me interested in warhammer

Transformers cards are coming to Magic: The Gathering

Today's HasbroPulseCon Magic panel revealed the remaining nine Transformers cards in MTGBRO Even as the war on Dominaria rages on, Hasbro is taking the opportunity to weave another of their IPs into the mix. With the Transformers joining the world of Magic: The Gathering (MTG), this is yet another solid crossover we’ve seen from the company following the Warhammer 40K commander release. Featuring a suite of 15 cards, the Transformers are legendary artifact cards that tie in nicely with the upcoming Brothers’ War Magic: The Gathering expansion. After all, the “Brothers” here refer to Urza and Mishra who are two powerful sorcerers who fabricate and invent various artifacts in the MTG universe. Each Transformers card has the normal look and also one that is in the Shatter Glass frame which is an alternate universe where Autobots are evil and the Deceptions are a force of good. These cards are reminiscent of past releases which saw Godzilla and Dracula cards being offered as alternative styles for existing cards. However, these Transformers MTG cards are all brand new card designs plus they will be available in both set and collector boosters for The Brothers’ War expansion making it easier for most folks to acquire them. With a whole host of Transformers to tap on, we can expect many more such cards to enter the market. It won’t surprise us at all if we see full-on commander decks being made for Optimus Prime, Megatron, and Voltron decks featuring the combiners.

Read the full article

Sbro’s Mtg Sales Shatter $1 Billion for the First Time

While the company's fourth-quarter sales were lower than expected, Magic: The Gathering sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time, according to a financial report provided by Hasbro earlier today. Hasbro had a difficult fourth quarter of 2022, which included firing over 1,000 people and fighting with the Dungeons & Dragons community over the Open Gaming licence and the MTG community over the Magic30 booster packs. Even the company's stock fell during 2022. Yet, sales of Magic: The Gathering tabletop merchandise were unusually strong all year long. According to Hasbro, the trading card game generated over $1 billion in sales alongside MTG Arena for the first time ever. Each of the MTG Standard-legal sets that were released in 2022 set records by exceeding $100 million in revenue, while the supplemental set Warhammer 40K Universes Beyond Commander decks were reprinted three times to meet the demand from players. “As we announced previously, our fourth quarter and full-year 2022 results came in below our expectations,” Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said. “Despite this, we delivered our first billion-dollar brand in Magic: The Gathering and another record year at Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming, we grew key investment areas including licensing and direct-to-consumer, and we improved adjusted operating profit margin.” Hasbro is on a solid path to once again break the $1 billion mark for 2023 with MTG. The completion of the Phyrexian arc wraps up with Phyrexia: All Will Be One and March of the Machine. And a supplemental micro set called March of the Machine: The Aftermath is slated to drop in March. The Universes Beyond supplemental sets are stacked as well through The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth (releasing through digital and tabletop), along with the Dr. Who Commander decks. Read the full article

Necron Monolith by Anthony Devine

The Golden Throne by John Blanche

And the full version of the artwork as well.

Cornwall’s Random Card of the Day #390: Rugged Highlands

Rugged Highlands is a common from Khans of Tarkir, seen here in its....ugh....Warhammer 40k Commander printing.

So, I don’t like the Universes Beyond stuff. Big surprise, Cornwall doesn’t like something. But really, I like Magic having its own unique IP which can stand on its own, something which got me INTO this game in the first place, in fact. Borrowing IPs from other stuff just kinda seems...I dunno. For one it kinda denigrates the IP of Magic which I mentioned earlier, like, “Oh, wait, kids, you don’t have to use that lame ol’ original stuff, here’s some cards about things you REALLY like!”. I know, it’s just a feeling, nothing defensible in a factual way, but it really does feel this way to me.

Secondarily, one of the great parts of Magic was that it was a Card Game. Like, it existed ONLY to be a card game, not a tie-in to anything else, like almost LITERALLY EVERY OTHER COMPETITOR. And, I don’t think I’m being too controversial to an already-Magic-enfranchised audience here, Magic kinda kicks all those other games’ asses. Cause it focuses on being itself, not just some flash-in-the-pan appeal, not cribbing off the popularity of an actual product, Magic is Magic, through and through. Or, it used to be.

Honestly, this is all kinda part of the whole “Double your profitability. Oh, you did it? Do it again.” mentality which has been weighing this game down for a while, ever since the Hasbro execs realised that Magic was actually their best seller and decided to meddle the fuck out of it. Before then, they were kinda just happy to let Magic do whatever it thought was best for Magic. Which was not always the best thing, but I got the idea they were TRYING.

Back before the MtG site was a joke, they’d put out a bunch of great articles every week, and in them, they would often emphasise that WotC managers wanted this game to be a game to stand the test of time, not just make a quick buck and fizzle out. They joked you’d know things were fucked when they started reprinting Power 9 level cards, which they kinda, sorta, not-quite did. Even the Bank of America (which, terrific abbreviation choice, btw) has realised this shit can’t hold. Even a bunch of greedy, money-grubbing bankers are like “Whoa there, friend, you need to slow down!”.

So the Universes Beyond kinda seems like one of many ways that Magic has sold out its integrity to make more money. And yes, people buy it! That justifies it as a business perhaps, but as an artform? As a game? Cause I don’t have shares in Hasbro and I couldn’t give a shit how much it made beyond “enough to keep the lights on”.

Oh, also I hate crossing over with Warhammer in particular due to the abundance of facist sympathisers in that fandom. But this is a Commander deck so...uhhh....damage contained?

Are the Warhammer 40k commander decks getting a reprint? I thought I heard some rumors of an early 2023 reprint.

I believe they are, but that’s a hunch and not a thing I definitively know.

Dawn of war dark crusade faq

Each turn you choose whether to make a ranged, melee, or psychic attack and the relevant numbers get added up and damage exchanged. You build a deck of one warlord and a bundle of bodyguards, keeping three of them in play, replacing bodyguards as they die. It went through several iterations, and the 2017 version became a free-to-play videogame with painted 40K miniatures on the cards.ĭon't expect Magic: The Gathering. In 1998 Games Workshop released collectible cards with photos of Warhammer miniatures that had stats so you could play a rudimentary Top Trumps kind of game with them. (Image credit: The Phoenix Lighthouse GmbH) While the first two games are divisive and there are plenty of passionate defenders of each, Dawn of War 3 didn't end up appealing to anyone. In the story campaign you alternate between marines, orks, and eldar one mission at a time, never playing any one group for long enough to get comfortable with them-almost every level feeling like a reintroduction of abilities and tech it expects you to have forgotten, as if the tutorial never ends. Elites all have different things they can do and some of your units have an ability or two, but there are long stretches where it feels like you should be using them yet there's nothing for you to do. Dawn of War 3 tries to split the difference, and it's an awkward compromise. If you prefer a handful of units and heroes with their own special abilities to carefully manage, that is Dawn of War 2's whole deal. If you like the kind of RTS where you manufacture a huge amount of troops then drag them together in a glorious blob, the first Dawn of War is for you. It's entirely charmless, and not worth setting up the virtual machine you'll need to get it running today. The way they bark "SAPHON / search this area for / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" and "I haven't found / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" at each other will make you long for their death, especially when BETH-OR! shouts his name with the same cadence every time he's selected. The marines are chatty, but their dialogue is stitched together from samples. Everything's stuttery and enemies awkwardly pop into rendered CG when they're close enough for a melee animation. The big problem with Vengeance of the Blood Angels is that it came out when 3D graphics and CD audio were new and experimental and rarely any good. Once you do take command, it's just pausing to drop commands on the map, which is both less innovative than its 1993 predecessor with its realtime/turn-based combo and less satisfying than having full control over them. It's a first-person shooter where you get to control a squad, except the first six missions of the campaign don't actually let you. This was the second attempt at adapting the board game Space Hulk, and the worst. Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels (1996) In Talisman: The Horus Heresy someone might find a card that gives them +1 to the Resource stat and consider it an exciting turn. In the original board game players got turned into toads on the regular. It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,000, completely at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels game about chucking dice and laughing at your latest misfortune. This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10,000 years in 40K's past that's been the basis for a huge amount of novels, some of which are actually good. It was fantasy Snakes & Ladders with PvP. Even if the other players didn't drag you down, the luck of the cards and dice would. It was a race-to-the-centre board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to let you access the middle of the board, and the other half not letting someone else steal it from you. Games Workshop released the first version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game in 1983. At other times they seem more like the cyberpunk COOL FUTURE meme with power armor on. You can practically hear the writers striving to outdo each other.Īt their best, videogames have taken the same glee in depicting this baroque world, its cursed inhabitants, and their awful fates. In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underclass at the bottom of the hive city live on a diet of mould, rats, and food made from the recycled dead. In the Eisenhorn novels, an Imperial Inquisitor, so scarred by torture he loses the ability to smile, makes compromise after compromise until he's indistinguishable from those he hunts. In the board game Space Hulk, doomed space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor and then hunted by aliens through corridors they can barely turn around in. Though frequently balanced by a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its grimness.

Magic players, out of the ten or so major paper releases we got this year, how do you rank them? Just on how much you like them overall and subjectively. Bundling associated sets like commander precons, transformers and all that in the associated set. In chronological order, the list of releases I have in mind is something like...

-Innistrad: Double Feature (DBL)

-Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty (NEO)

-Streets of New Capenna (SNC)

-Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate (CLB)

-Double Masters 2022 (2X2)

-Dominaria United (DMU)

-Warhammer 40,000 Commander Decks (40K)

-Unfinity (UNF)

-The Brothers' War (BRO)

-Jumpstart 2022 (J22)