basilisk – Good Gamery

Challenger Decks 2019: Legacy

by A Cynical Marketing Director

Because the Challenger Deck series has been an absolute hit with our competitive player base, we’ve decided to punch things up for a second round of decks for the 2019 competitive season. We wanted to address multiple formats while continuing to find new ways to make Standard more exciting (creating new, functioning online play software from the ground up has been an unqualified success in getting players to actually play Standard games) and what better way than to address the needs of our most-neglected formats?

These are the first in a new series of Challenger Decks intended to address formats other than Standard. We’re well aware that older formats can be more difficult for new players to break into without having a substantial card base already. By providing these decks with no MSRP, we are allowing retailers to help their local players find the products that best suit their needs, without concern for budget or aftermarket value.

However, when designing these decks, we ran into an obvious problem with no obvious solution: reprinting cards that appear on the Reserved List. With absolutely no way for us to get around this self-imposed restriction, we got a bit creative and made a series of checklist cards that will take the place of these cards in the deck. While this does mean that you will have to acquire copies of these cards on your own. We leave this as a challenge for the players, as we cannot formally acknowledge any third-party vendors. Please contact your local Wizards Play Network store for information on how to obtain singles.

These decks are meant to be competitive once fully built, so get ready to load up TCG Player in a separate tab while you take a look at these deck lists!

Ad Nauseam Tendrils

Ad Nauseam Tendrils combines the blistering speed of zero-mana spells with zero-mana mana artifacts to generate a huge spell count in a short amount of time. Lion’s Eye Diamond is famous for being confusing to play with, degenerate when built around properly, and the only non-land card on the Reserved List in this deck.

Ad Nauseam Tendrils

Lands (15)

Spells (37)

Artifacts (8)

Grixis Control

Delver of Secrets has a reputation for being played in almost every format it’s still legal in (and some that it’s not.) Recently it’s been tearing up the tables in Pauper format, which is the only format you’ll be able to afford to play after you complete your play-sets of dual lands.

Grixis Control

Lands (19)

Creatures (11)

Spells (31)

Lands

Made famous by Jarvis Yu, the world’s most handsome Magic professional, this deck uses a $3,000 card to kill creatures, then wins with a 20/20 flying indestructible creature token. Demoralize your opponents on the battlefield and at the ATM.

Lands

Lands (36)

Not Lands (2)

2 Reclamation Sage

Also Not Lands (23)

Elves

We know you bought this to play at the kitchen table, which is fine by us. We aren’t judging you. We will judge you if you try to purchase a playset of Gaea’s Cradles, however.

Elves

Lands (20)

Creatures (29)

Spells (11)

Because we expect you to collect four copies of everything, each deck includes 27 checklist cards, one for every card on the Reserved List. Customize your Challenger deck to your heart’s desire, or collect all 2,268 and complete your set! If you have enough checklist cards, you have a Legacy deck.

April 23, 2019

Signature Spellbook: Blood Moon

PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT
APRIL 1st, 2018 | #MTGBLOODMOON

Outplay your opponent with this handsome collection of iconic cards.

Call on the power of the moon and control the game with this collection of essential Mountains, now with a stunning new look.

Each Signature Spellbook: Blood Moon will contain nine cards: eight cards and a foil version of one of those eight cards at random.

April 1, 2018

The Treasures of Thanksgiving

Celebrate Thanksgiving this year with these life-like Treasure tokens. Cranberry sauce not included.

November 23, 2017

Odric, Flippy Flappy Tactician

Boy, Odric, Lunarch Marshal sure can grant a lot of abilities! Here’s a look at the original design. We shaved a number of keywords after development raised concerns about “rules confusion”, “tournament time limits”, “shuffling nightmares”, and “how on earth would you even print this”. Take a look for yourself if you want to really flip out!

March 31, 2016

tumblr Magnet

July 17, 2012

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?

October 19, 2011

Dominion: Cornucopia Spoiler

Dominion: Cornucopia is the latest food-themed expansion for Donald X. Vaccarino’s award-winning card game, Dominion. It consists of 13 new kingdom cards and 5 unique Prize cards, which you can win in the food-themed tournaments.

Hover your mouse over the cards to see their full size.

You can also look at a larger visual spoiler and a full text spoiler:
Dominion: Cornucopia Visual Spoiler
Dominion: Cornucopia Text Spoiler

July 11, 2011

Elder Dragon Highlander Extreme

As Commander Week wraps up on Daily MTG, we’d like to reveal our biggest surprise yet – a new variant to the Commander format! Elder Dragon Highlander Extreme (EDHX) is super exciting, and you will be able to get products for it starting in August of 2011.

Extreme: To the Max!

You can probably tell that EDHX is extreme, but why is it that way? We’ve removed all of the dusty old rules for no-fun-havers, and replaced them with interesting, insightful, interactive rules that just make more sense. We hope you’re as excited about this new format as we are, because frankly, we’re frustrated by the stagnant and restrictive EDH rules that were dropped in our laps.

Card Restrictions: Breed Creativity

You get 200 cards and an Extreme General. Each card must be unique! The general has to be a Legendary Creature.

Bonus extreme rule: You can have two Kawasaki Samurai if they are your Extreme Generals, as well as any number of Relentless Rats, and up to seven Squadron Hawks.

Color Identity: It’s me, God. What color am I?

Each card has a color identity tied within its mana symbols and text, but sometimes things aren’t so clear. What about snow and Phyrexian mana? Hybrid mana? Purple mana? This is an easy area to be confused about, so we’ve redone everything. The only thing that stays the same is that the color identity of your Extreme General has to be the same as every other card in your deck.

Every spell has a cost – imagine paying that cost! It turns out, sometimes you can pay it in different ways. All you have to do is choose one of the legal ways, and lock that in as part of the color identity of the card. This means that hybrid can be either or both colors, alternate costs can go either way, and Phyrexian mana can be treated as colorless – but only if your general includes life payments as part of its color identity.

Costs as part of abilities on a card also count as part of the color identity, with a couple of caveats. If no one is ever known to have used an ability, ever, then you can skip over it. Armorer Guildmage’s green ability is an example of one of these. Remember, if you skip over one of the abilities, you have to cross it off with a marker.

If an ability is actually paid by your opponent, such as that on Quenchable Fire, then your opponent has to play with a General that includes that color. This rule is included for fairness, because wildfires are a serious problem, and if left unchecked, many people could become homeless.

Get a Life: I wonder how many times people wrote that in MTG articles?

Players in a game of EDHX start with 29 life, and take 14 poison counters to become poisoned.

Summoning your Extreme General: A new creature is born!

Your Extreme General starts in the Extreme zone, and you can summon it as if it was in your hand. Each time your General dies, put it back into the Extreme zone – unless it died in a really lame way, like to Snakeform and a 1/1 Citizen token.

Each successive time that you summon your Extreme General from the Extreme zone, it costs an additional 2 colorless mana.

Extreme Generals do an additional type of damage to players – not only does the helpless defending player take regular combat damage, but they get Extreme General Face Ouch tokens, one for each Extreme General damage. (A player with 17 or more Extreme General Face Ouch tokens loses the game.)

FAQ

Q: What is EDHX?

A: Elder Dragon Highlander EXTREME.

Q: Like EDH, but EXTREME?

A: Yes.

Q: In EDHX, can I use a Sharpie to change my general’s name to “He Hate Me”?

A: Of Course!

Additional Rules

Players must have a glass of liquid next to their deck at all times (no lids or sippy cups)
Rickety card tables are optional, but recommended
You have to play with Planechase and Archenemy cards
… and Vanguard
… and Old Vanguard
The entire time you must have both feet standing on a skateboard
Life totals must be kept on over-sized 30-sided dice
At all times you must have a slim jim in your mouth
If your deck falls over, each card becomes all Chaos Orbs
For each game you must have a separate general
You start with 1 additional life per foil card in your deck
To determine who goes first, hold a round-robin arm-wrestling tournament
If you only have one card in your hand you have to shout Uno
You start with 15 cards in your hand
You can play unglued cards, but only if their mana symbols match EXACTLY to your Extreme General
At the end of each turn, you must assume form of the something, and strike the appropriate pose
Whenever there’s a coin flip, you have to use a POG slammer instead of a coin
If a card is exiled, it is dipped in your glass of liquid
Rhys, the Exiled starts in your glass
Whenever you sacrifice a creature to Devouring Strossus or Doomgape, you must eat it
If you would create a copy of a spell or a token that is a copy of a permanent, you must immediately produce another actual copy of the chosen card or else the copied spell or token is not created.

Bannings

No sleeves allowed (on cards or shirts)
Commons are banned, except in some cases
Edged weapons (Maces and nunchaku are encouraged)
All other spells are legal in the main deck, except Shahrazad
Shahrazad is automatically cast when your life hits 20, then again when it hits 10
Subgames are played in the nude
60-card decks are banned in EDHX, except for the event deck that has two Stoneforge Mystics