Checkbox – Good Gamery

Signature Spellbook: Oko

Available at all retailers this Elksmas season.

001 Oko, Thief of Crowns 002 Draining Elk 003 Elking Licid 004 Hogeelk, Arisen Nelkropolis 005 Masoko the Antlerless 006 Ulamoko, Gluttonous Horror 007 Elkclamp 008 Okoum Refuge

November 16, 2019

Owl you can Eat

You can’t lose if you keep gaining life.

September 29, 2019

LEAKED: WotC’s New Secret Dating App

Hot on the heels of the newest Magic the Gathering: Arena beta release, Wizards of the Coast appears to be taking the world of Magic into completely new territories. According to a message received by the Good Gamery staff earlier today from an anonymous source, Wizards appears to be working on their own entry into the dating app marketplace. Along with the tip, we received what are purported to be screenshots from the new service, and it appears the site is well into development. What do you think? Are these fake, or real? They’re probably fake.

September 4, 2019

New MPL Competitors Announced

We’ve heard your concerns about transparency around the requirements for membership in the Magic Pro League. We’ve reevaluated our selection process and are determined to strike the right balance of personalities. Here are our selections for the MPL class of 2020. We will not be responding to any questions.

These are real.

May 23, 2019

Judge’s Corner #9

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

Q: How does Asylum Visitor interact with Balance?

A: If Asylum Visitor is in play, it counts as a creature. If it’s in your hand, it counts as a card. It generally does not count as a land.

Q: Last week at FNM, my opponent got mad at me over a rough beat and called me a “buttlord” before scooping. After laughing with my friends about it, one of them said I should have called a judge even though the game was over. What would have happened in this case?

A: In this particular case, since your opponent conceded, we would simply issue a warning for Unsportsmanlike Conduct. However, if the match were still active, we would have issued a Game Loss to your opponent and given you an emblem with “All Butts you control get +1/+1 and have Swampwalk” to begin the next game with.

Q: What happens when I have an Illicit Auction for a Platinum Angel?

A: Wizards of the Coast, including the DCI, has a policy of not interfering in secondary markets. However, we condemn in the strongest terms any Magic trading behavior that violates laws of the relevant countries and territories.

Q: How many energy counters is that on Gonti’s Aether Heart?

A: Since it can be hard to quickly count a bunch of energy counter symbols in a row, we have added reminder text to let you know how many there are. Gonti’s Aether Heart produces two energy counters.

Q: I tap Rosheen Meanderer and four Mountains for mana. Then I activate Doubling Cube. Then I use all my floating mana to activate Ice Cauldron, exiling Fanning the Flames. I pass turn and my opponent casts Conversion and then Flashfires, destroying all my Mountains. On my turn, I tap Rosheen and my Ice Cauldron for mana and I cast Fanning the Flames with buyback for the maximum amount. My question is, solve for X.

A: Sorry, Mr. Bergstrom. You tricked us into doing our math homework once this way. You won’t fool us again.

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

May 7, 2019

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)

4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal

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

Light Up The Stage: The Full Cycle

A bunch of cards from “War of the Stage” fell off of a FLGS and we rescued them, discovering in the process that Light Up the Stage is merely one card in a cycle of five. Here are all of them in WUBRG order, just as the Lord intended.