Category: card
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Microsoft Acquires Magic: the Gathering Brand, Announces Magic 8
REDMOND, Washington – Jul. 25, 2012 – Microsoft Corp. today announced their acquisition of the publishing rights to the trading card game Magic: the Gathering from Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro Corp. “It seemed like a natural fit,” said Don Mattrick, president of the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. “We’re in your living room with Xbox, in your tabletop with Surface, and now, with Magic 8, we can be on your tabletop, too.”
Starting with Magic 8, the new Metro card layout will replace the Modern card frame. The design follows the other products in the Microsoft tablet-top experience. “We’ve designed Magic 8 to give you instant access to your stats, your abilities, and the information you care about so you can spend less time searching the card and more time doing what you actually want to do. We’ve made rules text a first-class citizen. Playing with the cards is fast and fluid, with updates to card text happening in real time,” Mattrick said.
“Magic 8 represents a reimagining of Magic from the cardboard to the experience,” said Tina Gaffney, a spokesperson for the Magic 8 team. “The Magic 8 designers have had a ball making it. Will the players have a ball playing it? All signs point to yes. But don’t worry – we’re not neglecting our online players. Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers for Xbox will support a fully-integrated experience with Magic 8. And we’re planning some backend improvements to Duels of the Planeswalkers for Playstation and Steam that should bring those players’ experiences much closer to playing Magic Online today.”
The Magic 8 Consumer Preview is set to release in September, with a full release planned in December. With Microsoft Surface integration for each card, the MSRP of a Magic 8 booster pack is expected to be $69.99 – well under the price point for Apple’s recently-announced iMajica trading card game offering. The Good Gamery staff are thrilled at the news and will continue to report on new developments as they flow out of Redmond.
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Zealous Mic-Night
STREET WRATH PEOOOOOPPLEEEE
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Horrorcane
Avacyn Restored is a set about the good guys. Thalia has freed the archangel Avacyn from her millenia-long imprisonment, and now a host of angels has returned to reclaim the night from the dark beings preying upon the plane.
But they haven’t won yet.If people expect the forces of darkness to just roll over and give back the world to a bunch of losers with wings, they are sorely mistaken. Demons, devils, spirits, werewolves, zombies and vampires have enjoyed free reign on Innistrad for a long time, and they like it just the way it is. What’s more, they know a thing or two about fighting dirty. They’ve got a few tricks up their collective sleeves that no-one quite expected. Here’s one of them.
If your first reaction on seeing this card is “black can’t do that,” then you obviously have not spent much time hanging around black mages. Black is the colour of breaking rules. When black is forced into a corner, you can bet it will do everything it “can’t do”. Black will do anything to win.
So while you might be right in thinking that black is not the colour of dealing damage to flying creatures, black definitely is the colour of slaughtering angels, and that is exactly what Horrorcane is best at. Black is also the colour of eating the last piece of the pie, so if green is going to leave a slice lying around, what does it expect to happen?
We asked the estimable Jarvis Yu to weigh in on this card’s impact on the Standard format:
The Estimable Jarvis Yu“Horrorcane shows that Wizards is willing to push color boundaries even further. Delver and Esper Spirits are certainly going to have problems with this card. It’s a great tool for Zombies to deal the last few points of damage on a stalled board. Esper Spirits itself can play this card for mirror matches and it has good synergy with Snapcaster Mage.”
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Stridin’
They see me blockin’
They hatin’
Controllin’, they tryna catch me stridin’ dirty
tryna catch me stridin’ dirty
tryna catch me stridin’ dirty
tryna catch me stridin’ dirtyAttackers think they can see me lean
I’m so tall it’s easy to be seen
When you see me stride by you can see the gleam
And I shine in this deck and on the seaIn triple Scars draft I’m like “hold up”
Make the poison decks clock slower
x-4 for 2 man, thought I told ya
Give a Cystbearer the cold shoulder
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The Flavor of Innistrad
It’s no surprise that Hasbro’s recent unveiled publishing deal with General Mills had a big effect on the top-down design of Innistrad. In week two of the Innistrad previews, Mark Rosewater talks about the influence that the five monster cereal tribes had on the set’s development.
Remember that the set was always going to have a lot of creature types that only showed up in ones and twos. We just had to figure out which one we could blow up into another major race. In the end, I was swung by breakfast cereal. In 1975, General Mills put out five monster-themed cereals: Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Boo Berry, Fruit Brute, and Yummy Mummy. Obviously, General Mills was trying to go with the most popular monsters. Vampires, zombies, and werewolves were all represented.
Breakfast cereals have actually had a big impact on M:TG for years – I am sure you all remember Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Pebbles, and Trix (famous decks), as well as Lucky Charms (a nickname for the Demon’s Horn cycle). For Innistrad it was pretty clear that Wizards of the Coast had decided to invest themselves fully in the breakfast cereal industry, but it ended up not working out for some reason. Normally you wouldn’t be able to see fully-rendered test cards like these, but our expert hackers were able to extract the following 5 tribal Planeswalkers from deep within WotC’s developer databases, along with some juicy developer comments:
TL: Innistrad’s spirits are blue and white, without any real mechanical identity. This fits in well with what we usually try to do with planeswalkers: Having them make no flavor sense whatsoever. This is a home run in that department.
TL: The main aspect of Innistrad zombies is that they say “Zombie” a lot on the cards, because market research showed that our most zombie-centric demographics would often forget what kind of card it was by the time they finished reading it. Someone designed this planeswalker, and then we threw that word in each ability and moved it around at random until the sentence made grammatical sense zombie.
TL: Blah blah blah, something something, here’s a planeswalker that costs six.
TL: Rawwwrrr! Werewolves! Yeah, I don’t know either, but creative called us like “hey can you make a planeswalker that regenerates werewolves” and we were like “what that’s stupid, regeneration sucks” and they were like “well you suck” and we were like “well no YOU suck” and then they said that if we don’t make one that they’ll stop Catherine from bringing in cake on Fridays and those cakes are really good and sometimes she’ll write a message to us in the frosting like “thanks for all the hard work guys!” and generally she’s just really sweet to us when she comes by with the cake (last week it was chocolate) so we said okay. Regeneration matters now, people! Really!
TL: Rules change with Innistrad at FNM level and below: If a player targets a creature for the sole purpose of gaining life, no one is allowed to respond to that ability. I mean, come on. That would just be mean. The lil fella’s just trying to gain some life, would y’all chill out a bit? It’s pretty adorable.
…and that’s the end of it. I wonder if we’ll end up seeing these unique new Planeswalker personalities in any upcoming sets?
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Flip split morph transform multi-TCG card
Elegant. Mysterious. Perfection.
