If you ask Mark Rosewater what the strongest features of Magic: the Gathering are, aside from the general idea of a Trading Card Game, he'll tell you they're the color pie and the mana system. Many people balk at that, complaining about Lands and mana flood or screw. Mark goes on to explain that they introduce a controllable form of variance that prevents games from flowing the same way, and that splitting available effects between colors forces players to accept having weaknesses or introduce variance to shore them up. I think he's more or less right in that reasoning, but the actual strongest feature of the game is a bit downstream of those first-order effects. Rather, Magic's greatest strength is Limited - or, more specifically, that it designs each set for Limited... [see more]

I elected to fill out my Kadena commander deck; I'm in the throes of receiving PWEs with cards, but hopefully soon I'll get a chance to take it for a spin.

There were some sneak peeks at Tarkir: Dragonstorm cards, and I'm cautiously excited. Dragons are good, Tarkir is good, Wedge clans is good. Only downside is it looks like there isn't any face-down stuff to act as a smoother. I would be super excited to see a Tarkir D&D book, though it looks like the next one of that sort will be a Lorwyn/Shadowmoor one.

It occurred to me recently that the last time I participated in a prerelease at Backstage was when I helped man the KTK one, more than a decade ago. Seems appropriate to bookend that absence with another Tarkir set. I'm thinking about nabbing a full run of the prere kits so I can get one of each spindown.

The Monsterpocalypse Kickstarter was a dud and consequently a huge loss for me - I had gone in hard on that game. Privateer Press will be releasing STLs as an apology for Mythic's mismanagement, starting with neutral buildings, G.U.A.R.D., and Planet Eaters. Hopefully I can get my brother to print those in resin for me, and get a run of cards and a mat or two printed. I'm glad to at least see something come of that.

EX1 is finally here! I've been excited for this set for a long time. Looking forward to cracking this open and tweaking most of my decks. In particular Vee Jamming may get a solid once-over - I might switch it to a blue-green Imperialdramon build instead.

I recently got a gaming laptop. It's nice having something that can reliably run games. Gonna be on a 4x trip here soon with Endless Legend I think.

I also built a new deck in Arena. Neoform plus Sea Gate Stormcaller is a sweet combo.

I decided to buy into Ikoria. Once I've burned through the packs playing Winston and Sealed I'll be making a set-emulation cube, like my Khans cube.