Psychic Frog, Kozilek’s Command, and Springheart Nantuko… womp womp.

I believe the buyer’s name is hidden, which makes this all the more suspicious. I mean this is like 6x the price of the most recent highly graded alpha Lotus, which was only a year ago.

Coverage starts at 2pm ET today (and tomorrow)! On Sunday it’s an hour earlier at 1pm ET.

36 artifacts with [[Boom Box]] and [[Territory Forge]] as the land destruction spells. This is the state of land destruction in this game! It didn’t need to be this way 😭

I remember [[Avalanche Riders]] and ramping into [[Rain of Salt]] in my artifact/red Ponza deck back in saga block constructed ffs. I realize I’m in the minority on this one but I think resource denial is a core part of the game that’s been removed at the game’s detriment.

Link their updated philosophy page: https://mtgcommander.net/index.php/the-philosophy-of-commander/

Seems pretty reasonable, if not fairly neutered. Social, creative, and stable are their tenants and it seems like just a reaffirmation of how they love handled changes and their ban list over the past decade.

I think for the most part as someone who is a pretty casual/infrequent commander player, the ban list seems pretty well maintained. I like that they don’t ban cards for accessibility reasons and they seem to want to genuinely promote a fun environment. I honestly mostly wish WotC would stop creating so much directly for Commander, that seems to be the biggest issue if any.

It’s a cool interaction with manaless spells and undercosted ones like Days Undoing, but I just cannot see this being enough to make UW control at all relevant in Modern again sadly 😞 I think it just needs to be doing something better than this but hopefully it helps.

Wow wasn’t expecting that but I’m guessing it has something to do with the recent sets being poorly received? The estimated drop in sales can’t be helping and I’m wondering if this is in anticipation of a poor earnings call by Hasbro.

Relevant info on the streams:

• Pro Tour Thunder Junction will be streamed all three days of the event, April 26–28, at twitch.tv/magic.

• On Friday and Saturday—April 26 and 27—broadcast begins at 2 p.m. ET (8 p.m. CET // 3 a.m. JST 4/27–28) with three rounds of Outlaws of Thunder Junction Draft followed by five rounds of Standard Constructed.

• On Sunday, April 28 for the Top 8 playoff, broadcast begins at 1 p.m. ET (7 p.m. CEST // 2 a.m. JST 4/29) with all four quarterfinal matches, followed by semifinals matches then the finals of Pro Tour Thunder Junction.

• While competitors begin their Friday and Saturday at 9 a.m. PT on-site, broadcast begins later in the day at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) with a featured drafter to follow into their Round 1 gameplay. They’ll catch up throughout the day to avoid downtime.

• Sunday Top 8 playoff broadcast begins at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) showing a full quarterfinal match and then as many games from other quarterfinal matches as possible, moving on to a full semifinal match (and as much of the remaining semifinals match) then the complete finals.

🙌 Love it! Seriously awesome job

Dangit! Secret reach is one of the few ways this causal sneaks wins in limited 😞

Wow congrats!! What deck/format did you play the most?

I also don’t know Garfield’s reasoning for it but based on what I’ve read about how he viewed deck building and card acquisition he may have wanted the game to be more fluid or natural, like just use what you have or what you can locally trade for. Ante may have been natural for him as a way to get cards for your deck or have decks change over time.

It also may be relevant that other games at the time that got popular, like Pogs, would be played for keeps or for fun too. Marbles as well I believe. That may have been a more normal part of games, especially those with a collectibility aspect to them. I never played Pogs for keeps either though and hated that aspect too.

What Garfield is missing a bit is that better or older players can take advantage of worse or younger players, and it can create tons of feel bad if you lose a prized card. I think the trade offs just are not there at all and would love to find out more about why he liked it so much.

Always makes me laugh: https://youtube.com/watch?v=diJR5x3l0Og

Holy crap this seems like an awesome deal. Here’s a direct link to the entire card list: https://www.moxfield.com/binders/OLcEd5YJqEC4gafp5ysHCw

This looks like a ton of playables. Shocks, fetches, pain lands, really good base collection for only $40.

That’s a pretty succinct statement, and on a Friday afternoon.

I’m curious what “we had questions, too” means, it’s so vague. I guess given the likely law suit here they’re just staying ambiguous.

Wow Donato is a huge name/artist and long time MTG artist. This one is definitely not as egregious as others but I agree that the back arm and stairs (at least) are pretty damning, and the obvious other similarities aren’t helping.

Even if this was accidental, why she used reference art from such a well known artist in the same space is kinda strange, as is why she changed so little from it.

Awesome! I actually never knew there was an issue before #1 in 1994, this is so cool. Was this copy yours originally or did you get it recently? I started collecting all of the Duelists some years ago but never finished it, this might motivate me.

Looks like this might be a *scan of the whole thing for the curious: https://archive.org/details/the-duelist-0/mode/1up

ETA: scan not scam!

Wow that Dominaria stained glass play mat is gorgeous! Thanks for the heads up 👍

1000% agreed, hopefully this was enough of a mistake that they never add crap like this to eternal formats but I’m not hopeful. I can’t imagine what solution they come up with that isn’t “all cards that use stickers are banned.”

I feel this completely, been waiting for what feels like years to actually want to spend money on this game other than random old frame singles I like. Similarly excited for Bloomburrow I think mostly because it feels like Wizards getting back to an actual fantasy motif again with some novel lore.

To expand a bit on your point on product fatigue, I’ve noticed “moving on” from new releases much much quicker these days. MKM hasn’t even been out that long and it’s already spoilers and news on OTJ and the other releases coming soon. I’ve mentally checked out of MKM already whereas before we’d have 3 months to just think about it and get to know it.

Separately, even the products designed for “me” like Ravnica Remastered with all the old frame cards are just priced too high, with no way to get some of that back by buylisting anymore it seems. $150 is so outside my impulse buy range that I invariably just pick up singles again. It could be different if I had a local playgroup again big enough to draft with but without that I just don’t feel any desire to buy sealed products or crack packs like I used to.