Category: mtg

  • Announcing… From the Vault: Magic: the Gathering: Online

    Magic Online has always been a source of great stories. Many named players on the Pro Tour got their start online, as well as many new players who use Magic Online as their starting point on a long journey to become the Multiverse’s greatest Planeswalker. However, often times cards work somewhat differently online as compared to their paper counterparts.

    From the Vault: Magic: the Gathering: Online is a collection of fifteen hallmark cards from Magic Online’s rich history, brought to life on paper cards with updated rules text and art to bring the questionably great experience of playing online to the offline world. Now you can play these iconic cards as the programmers designed, without having to look up online-specific errata.

  • Judge’s Corner #6

    Welcome back to our regular series Judge’s Corner, where we answer your Magic: the Gathering rules questions.

    Q: Can players decide the outcome of a tournament match by playing another game, such as Hearthstone?

    A: A match cannot be determined by a random method.

    Q: I saw a Mox Ruby the other day, and the type line says “Mono Artifact.” What does that mean?

    A: It means that Mox Ruby is restricted in Vintage.

    Q: What does “Until end of turn” mean?

    A: Turning a magic card is called “tapping.” So “until end of turn” lasts as long as it takes to turn a card 90 degrees.

    Q: The Eldritch Moon card Providence says that I may reveal it from my “opening hand” to make my life total 26. What is my “opening hand”?

    A: Pretend that you are unscrewing a pickle jar. One of your hands naturally holds the jar and the other turns the lid. The one turning the lid is your opening hand.

    Q: If there are no cards in either player’s graveyard, and I want to kill my opponent’s Tarmogoyf with a Blaze, what should X be?

    A: X should be silver, indicating that your Blaze is an uncommon card from Tenth Edition.

    Submit your questions to @goodgamery on Twitter using #judgescorner.

  • Gravecrawlers Refuse To Stand For Hymn To Tourach

    Controversy is growing this week as more and more zombies are remaining on the ground during the traditional Hymn. We reached out to well known Necromancer and member of the Gatewatch, Liliana Vess:

    “I am absolutely disgusted at this behavior. These mindless freaks don’t seem to appreciate all the empires that have fallen because of the Hymn. It is incredibly disrespectful for them to just drag themselves around looking for delicious brains while Hymn To Tourach is on the stack. It was bad enough before when they just refused to block, but this is the last straw. I am strongly considering replacing all of my Gravecrawlers with skeletons or ghosts if this continues.”

    Gravecrawler first began his career six years ago. A strong showing as a rookie tapered off when his set rotated out of standard, and he has spent a lot of time on the bench in the last few seasons. Many fans are skeptical of the protest, saying it’s just a stunt for the fading star to try to reclaim the spotlight, however briefly. The prevailing opinion seems to be that Gravecrawler just doesn’t have the numbers to deserve a spot in any competitive decklists.

    Gisa Cecani, a ghoulcaller from the plane of Innistrad, had a different view on the matter. “You have to understand, the Hymn doesn’t mean the same thing to Gravecrawlers that it does to us necromancers. Historically, Gravecrawlers have been the victims of discard, very often at the hands of people they thought they could trust. That’s something the average Lord of The Undead has never experienced. And it’s not like the Gravecrawlers are hurting anyone. They still do their job, attacking for two every turn, no matter how many times they get tackled.”

    The Hymn To Tourach has a storied history, seeing play in many formats for as long as it has existed. A perennial favorite of Necromancers and Demonologists alike, it has until now demanded a great deal of respect. But recent criticism of randomness in Magic has set off a gravestorm of controversy, and it looks like the Hymn has taken the brunt of the abuse.

    At a recent Legacy Grand Prix, an entire playset of Gravecrawlers took to the battlefield during a feature match, and not a single one of them stood for the Hymn. Players seem to be taking the controversy in stride, but fans are outraged, especially Liliana.

    “Look. I would totally stop keeping watch over this if I could. But I took an oath. And, for as long as it’s convenient to me personally, I will take that oath seriously.”

    Jace Beleren, an associate of Miss Vess; and Vraska the Unseen, another planeswalker familiar with Zombies, were mysteriously unable to be reached for comment.

    When we finally tracked down a Gravecrawler and questioned him about his refusal to stand, he only had this to say: “This was never about the Hymn. I don’t have any legs.”

  • Judge’s Corner #5

    Welcome back to our weekly series Judge’s Corner, where we answer your Magic: the Gathering rules questions.

    Q: Can I regenerate Masticore after my opponent targets it with Pillage?

    A: Yes. The effect “it can’t be regenerated” only applies when Pillage resolves; while Pillage is on the stack you can still pay (2) to activate Masticore’s ability and give it a regeneration shield.

    Q: Does Unexpectedly Absent for 0 work?

    A: Yes, but only if the library has no cards in it. When you’re counting off from the top of the library, you start at the first card, so there can only be a zeroth card to put the permanent under if the library is empty.

    Q: I’ve read that if you have a Doubling Season in play and then play a Vivid Crag, the charge counters don’t get doubled. That seems very confusing to me. Can you explain why this is?

    A: Doubling Season says, “if an effect would place one or more counters on a permanent you control, it places twice that many of those counters on that permanent instead.” But when you put your Vivid Crag into play it’s not an effect that places counters on the land; it’s you that places counters on the land.

    Q: Relentless Rats is my favorite card. I’ve worked hard to collect a lot of them. Last week I brought my deck of Swamps and Relentless Rats to FNM only to have judge tell me that my deck wasn’t legal because Relentless Rats aren’t in Standard. But it says right there on the card that a deck can have any number of Relentless Rats! What gives?

    A: In general the rules text of a permanent card (such as the sentence “a deck can have any number of cards named Relentless Rats” on Relentless Rats) only functions while that card is in on the battlefield. Thus your deck is legal as long as you have a Relentless Rats on the battlefield, but when you start the game you don’t have any Rats on the battlefield and your deck is not legal. The judge made the right call.

    Q: I am at 1 life and my opponent is at 3 life. I tap my City of Brass to cast Lightning Bolt targeting my opponent. Do I die or does my opponent?

    A: Dies means “is put into a graveyard from the battlefield.” Since you are players and not creatures, neither player dies.

    Submit your questions to @goodgamery on Twitter using #judgescorner.

  • Judge’s Corner #4: Special Ixalan Edition

    Welcome back to the Judge’s Corner. This week we have a special Ixalan edition of Judge’s Corner where we go over some important rules notes and reminders about the new set in preparation for the upcoming prerelease.

    Q: When I deal damage to my opponent with Gishath, Sun’s Avatar, what I am supposed to reveal about many cards from the top of my library?

    A: You’re supposed to reveal that many of them are Dinosaurs.

    Q: Can you explain how explore works?

    A: Explore is a sorcery that costs one generic mana and one green mana and allows you to play an additional land (sometimes two) that turn and draw a card. You may cast it during the main phase of your turn.

    Q: I tried to play Torment of Venom on my opponent’s Carnage Tyrant, but he said that Carnage Tyrant’s ability stops that. Is he right?

    A: Yes, your opponent is correct. Carnage Tyrant can’t be countered.

    Q: Jace, Cunning Castaway has the type Legendary Planeswalker – Jace. What does this mean?

    A: No, Jace has the type Planeswalker. Legendary is a supertype and Jace is a subtype.

    Q: What is the difference between the new Treasure tokens and Gold tokens?

    A: Treasure tokens are colorless artifact tokens with the ability, “T, Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.” Gold tokens are only produced by the card Sword of Dungeons and Dragons from the upcoming Unstable set.

    Q: I control Admiral Beckett Brass and attack with Angrath’s Marauders. If my opponent doesn’t block, will I be able to gain control of one of his nonland permanents?

    A: Yes. Note that the name “Angrath’s Marauders” is plural, as you can clearly see three different Pirates in the art. Plus, they deal double damage so that’s already like, six Pirates in all. So you can totally gain control of one of your opponent’s nonland permanents this way!

    Q: My opponent claims he can Demolish my Hostage Taker, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. What gives?

    A: Your opponent is right, he can Demolish your Hostage Taker. This is because Hostage Taker was unfortunately printed with a word omitted in its rules text: it has been errata’d to say “When Hostage Taker enters the battlefield, exile another target artifact or creature until Hostage Taker leaves the battlefield.” This means that Hostage Taker is an artifact.

    Q: What does Tocatli Honor Guard’s ability do?

    A: Tocatli Honor Guard is the newest of a category of cards we affectionately like to call “rules reminder cards.” Frequently newer or less enfranchised players think that their creatures do whatever they do immediately when they play them. Tocatli Honor Guard is there to remind them that just entering the battlefield isn’t necessarily going to cause their creatures’ abilities to trigger. The ability doesn’t actually do anything. Some examples of older rules reminder cards include Heartbeat of Spring, Kami of the Crescent Moon, Vernal Bloom, Cavalry Master, and Dauthi Slayer.

    Submit your questions to @goodgamery on Twitter using #judgescorner.

  • Homarids Officially Declared Extinct

    Homarids declared extinct in the wild, Camarid breeding program on last legs

    “This is a disaster, an absolute disaster.”

    I was sitting with Thoruzon One-Thumb, the archmage in charge of lobsterman studies at Tolaria West.

    “What we have here is an indication that something is going wrong in the oceans. Dominaria’s native homarids are being pushed out of their ecological niche by other species that have been introduced by reckless planeswalkers.” One-Thumb was excited to talk to me, gesticulating wildly as he described the marine biology off the Otarian islands.

    “The homarids only really thrived during the great ice age of course, but they managed to maintain a stable population afterwards for quite a long time.”

    I asked him what had changed. “In a word? Slivers. When the Riptide Institute started breeding slivers, there wasn’t a lot of room left for noncompetitive creatures. Power levels had to rise, and while a rising tide may lift all boats, it often gives homarids -1/-1. And when these new slivers showed up, well, it took a while but now there just aren’t any homarids left.”

    One-Thumb took me out to the spawning beds on his magical dinghy. “You can see here, this whole shallow area used to be covered in camarid eggs. But between the Slivers and the Phyrexian oil spill, there’s just nothing.” He lowered his staff into the ocean water and dredged up a few egg fragments instead of drawing a card. “This is it for the once proud homarid race, unless we can do something.”

    Homarid Spawning Bed Magic Card This is where the Academy at Tolaria West comes into the picture. They’ve managed to open portals through time and snatch up unsuspecting homarids to breed in the present.

    When I asked if they were worried they might cause a temporal paradox, that they might grab a homarid that was important to the timeline, the researchers just laughed. “There were no important homarids” explained Vizra Nine-Finger. “Outside of Time Spiral limited, none of them ever saw any real action, so we can grab whatever we want. And what we want is big strong breeding stock like this fellow — whoa, almost turned into Vizra Eight-Finger there!”

    Later that evening in the Tolarian Tavern, I sat with the research crew. What made them choose homarids? “Well, the grant money is good,” Nine-Finger explained.

    One-Thumb was quick to add, “and they’re just homarids. Nobody expects much from our research. But in a way, it’s also a labor of love. We all love Homarids. Especially with melted butter.”

    The future looks bleak for these majestic lobster people of the Dominarian sea, with slivers still roaming the shores and a thriving market in their flesh. But with a return to Dominaria, perhaps new tribes of Sea Lobster men will come to the attention of players. And maybe, just maybe, some of them will be constructed playable.

  • Judge’s Corner #3

    Welcome back to the Judge’s Corner, where our extremely high-level Good Gamery judges answer your questions about the MTG rules.

    Q: Can I use Cephalid Snitch to make Iridescent Angel lose protection from black?

    A: “Protection from all colors” is just shorthand for having protection from each color individually. So you can make the Angel lose protection from black without affecting its protection from white, and so forth.

    Q: How does Reflector Mage interact with morph creatures?

    A: As a 2/3, it can block them and kill them in combat without dying itself.

    Q: Can you explain exactly what happens next when a Goblin Test Pilot is activated?

    A: When a Goblin Test Pilot is activated, the player who activated it then chooses whether they want to pass or retain priority.

    Q: My opponent claims that she can cast Cabal Ritual with less than seven cards in her graveyard and still get the five mana, because “it’s a mana source, and nothing can stop mana sources.” Is that really how it works?

    A: “Mana source” is no longer used as a card type, so that argument doesn’t hold. However, remember that ‘threshold’ is an ability word with no actual rules meaning, so the Ritual effectively reads “Add BBB to your mana pool. Instead, add BBBBB to your mana pool.”

    Q: Can you explain what it means for a player to “have Book Burning”?

    A: The meaning of private property, while indeed a very interesting question addressed by such prominent thinkers as Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, is beyond the scope of this Magic: the Gathering rules column.

    Submit your questions to @goodgamery on Twitter using #judgescorner.

  • Exclusive Sneak Peek: Randy Buehler’s New Biography “Year One: The Skull”

    We at Good Gamery are glad to announce that we were asked to preview an excerpt from Randy Buehler’s upcoming biography, Year One: The Skull! We didn’t have time to read it however, both because we didn’t see the e-mail right away and we weren’t that interested, so we’re just printing it here as it was sent to us instead. Enjoy!

    My recollection of the events leading toward Pro Tour Chicago, despite lending themselves to my future recognition and fame in the greater Magic community, are somewhat hazy as I did not see fit to document them at the time. Some of the following descriptions and places have been recollected for me by those present to witness them, and as I began chronicling them for this book I found myself leaning on their oral accounts more readily. The following events are therefore transcribed with the best possible accuracy I could muster. It must be noted here that I do not seek to embellish or exaggerate my story, and the greatest portions of this tale are matter of historical record.

    Where my memory is clearest is the day I purchased my first Ice Age starter deck. At this time in my career I was a fan of the concept of snow-covered lands, as they enhanced the mystical flavor the game of Magic is known for, so I saw to fill my decks with as many of these lands as possible. I harbored a secret bet that snow-covered dual lands would follow soon, possibly in the next expansion, though this was a trivial wish as it relates to my story: I simply wish to impress upon you what the game meant to me during this era.

    Upon touching the pack of cards, I felt a cold pulsing feeling emanating from within its shrink-wrapped cardboard exterior. For the first time in my career, I felt something ominous and perhaps foretelling in that instant, as though there were some higher power and it was looking down upon me. However, this pack was not particularly great, as it sported four rares — lucky — but they were all Necropotence, a known junk rare that players were loathe to open — unlucky.

    About an hour after skimming through the cards and putting the Necropotences away in my trade binder, a sudden illness fell over me and I felt quite faint. I thought not of it, perhaps a reaction to the addictive ink we knew the product contained but that we had built a tolerance for — maybe this newest expansion was targeted at the hardcore addicts, those of us who had felt the hooks and developed the shakes yet could never be sated by something as simple as Wednesday drafts. After arising from a short spell my mind remained clouded, and I had not thought about the contents of the starter pack until some weeks later, when a small child of no more than ten years of age inquired about the four copies of Necropotence now on display. He, wisely and beyond his years, simply pointed at the card rather than making direct contact, and remarked that the art was “gnarly.” I agreed with a wry chuckle, thinking it ironic that such evocative art would grace such a terrible card; it will become clear later, dear reader, that “terrible” is not the most inaccurate way for me to describe the card.

    I resigned to my apartment to sleep off whatever malady had struck me, hoping it was either some seasonal flu, a mild headache, or a reaction to the several cans of Jolt I had consumed while at the store. After a lengthy, dreamless nap, I awoke to a dark-lit room, aglow only with the pulsing of my computer monitor which, to my memory, was not on before my slumber. Approaching it, my eyes were not yet able to focus until reaching the desk proper; at that moment, they focused onto the familiar yin-yang symbol taken as a banner by the now-legendary Magic theory site known as The Dojo. The specific page it was loaded to would contain a deck list that would seal my fate and impress my person upon the collective Magic player base: Necro.

    I immediately recalled that I had acquired four copies of the namesake card in a prior hour, and dashed to my bag and binder to ensure I had not traded them away or perhaps not acquired them at all. It was then that I opened the binder straight to the page containing the Four Skulls of Apocalypse, as I had nicknamed them in the years following this story. I resolved then and there, from the bottom of my stomach and parts of my small intestine, to assemble the deck and give it a couple of tries before I wrote the concept off and went back to playing other decks.

    After taking the symbolic oath to Tourach and playing some test matches, progress was in short supply: I took to the deck immediately, as though I knew instinctively how to pilot it to victory. This period of time is admittedly somewhat of a blur, but the short version is I put a couple of smaller tournaments under my belt unde rmyb el t un and therefore felt comfortable enou gh t ota k e it to ta a k e i t t o the Pro Tour I had managed to quality for with a lesser, pitiable deck, not worthy of my devotion or love despite our good times together in the past — I clutched the deck with the fire of Hell in my eyes and threw it on the ground. There was no room for inferiority before this precious, precious gem with four heads and four Skulls.

    I will not belabor you with a retelling of events that have been well-documented, so instead I will speak only of the Finals, so as to impress upon you the majesty of deck design that we mere mortals havvvvve beennn blessd d ed to experience in our short, insignificant lifetimes. It was during this match that I felt what the believers of the gods of light would describe as an “unholy power” emanating from the ender of all tournaments, the literal representation of trading my soul for the pursuit of something greater, something distructive, something that allowed me to feed off my opponent’s very essence, their raison d’être: the Skull.

    I felt this power as a slow build, sometimes waning whenever I cast a Disenchant, but coming on strongly when tapping Lake of the Dead. It was in these brief low moments that I felt weak, cold, and somewhat abandoned, though by who I could not say. I would regain my draw step, and every single time, I hoped the top of my deck was another Necro Necro Neexrro xmecro nnnnnno

    It was during the Finals that you felt most powerful. It was when I was with you the closest, consuming all that you were and replacing it with a being higher-evolved, capable of ravaging the world and laying waste to all of these pitiful, verminesque humans. You would have your worldly crown and reclaim My throne as the ruler of this dimension, and I would accept the demise of our strongest opponent, David Mills. You once felt a fondness for him as a friend and confidant, but now only saw him as the most dangerous challenger to our ascendancy, worthy only of scorn and terror. His body count, after all, was as high as yours.

    You have done well to spread My majesty and infect others with My power. This power was manifested in even more perverse and sacrilegious ways, for example NecroDonate. No, seriously, that deck is terrifying even to Me.

    [Editor’s Note: The transcript of this report ends here. There is additional writing in his hand-written copy submitted for publication, however it remains untranslatable, resembling some sort of arcane symbolic language. After its crimson glow hypnotized one of our editing staff, we elected to not reprint it intact here.]

  • Which Magic Creature Type Are You?



    Which Magic Creature Type Are You?

    With each new block, Magic creature types grow in number consistently and confusingly. Having trouble deciding which creature type best sums up what it means to be you? We’re here to help.

    • How many arms and legs do you have?

    • Two of each

    • Six in an even mixture

    • Somewhere between eight and ten

    • One hundred and two

    • When the moon comes out, do you turn into another type of animal?

    • No, I stay the same

    • Only during full moons

    • Moon? I change all the time!

    • Would you say that your hands or feet are bigger?

    • Hands

    • Feet

    • About the same

    • I have neither

    • Can you block creatures with flying?

    • Yes

    • No

    • When describing your body mass, what state of matter describes you?

    • Solid

    • Liquid

    • Gas

    • Aetherial/other

    • Your result is: