Tag: Juri

  • MAGIC FICTION: THE STORM CROW

    DOUG BEYER

    This week, we’re taking a break from the main Magic lore to bring you a special piece of poetry to commemorate You Make the Set 2016‘s upcoming release. Enjoy!

    YlBu6SO

    Once upon a Friday night,
    assembled players with all their might,
    netdecking unholy beasts of yore.
    I arrived, stoic, to instigate a fight,
    with my assembled deck of birds of flight,
    a deck of isles tapping for blue and nothing more;-
    one blue, one colorless, and nothing more.

    Beginning my first round in that hot July,
    upon which my Storm Crows I would rely,
    stacked a flock of forty in my library of forgotten lore.
    With twenty Islands to help them fly,
    toward my opponent’s face ‘cross the sky,
    forty Storm Crows, and nothing more;-
    forty 1/2s, and nothing more.

    Began I drew my hand and stare,
    six lands and Storm Crow, of company bare,
    less than lethal was the sum.
    Turn two I conjured my familiar there,
    prayers of victory or perhaps fortune’s fare,
    should I topdeck another Storm Crow fair,
    then tapped my Storm Crow and swung for one;-
    a single Storm Crow, it swings for one.

    A grin grew on my opponent’s face,
    his Eldrazi minions thrust forth with grace,
    while my Storm Crow swings for a measly one.
    Should I draw more gas and keep apace
    of the damage present and his quickening pace,
    he redzones his dude and attacks my sum;-
    Two points of damage, eighteen is my sum.

    Desperately I knock my lore
    of feathers and beaks, much still in store,
    should I draw my crows and begin the game in true.
    Yet my opponent he begins to snore,
    bored of our match and Eldrazi at his fore,
    me sitting cornered behind ample lands of blue;-
    a furrow of doubt grows behind lands of blue.

    Furious digging brings ill of fortune,
    my opponent chuckles at my misfortune,
    telling me I should “get good.”
    Yet ten cards yield no battlefield burgeon,
    my life total in need of a chirurgeon,
    it drops to twelve against forests of wood;-
    World Breaker then summoned by forests of wood.

    As time cruelly wilts the fragrant rose,
    his Eldrazi rise and raze and hose
    my mana base and library as they insatiably ingest,
    draining my resources and my heart froze:
    my second-seen Storm Crow exiled and my misery grows,
    unable to summon it and I digest;-
    my board state shrivels as he casts Infest.

    Soon a scoop seems necessary,
    but time for play is scant and I am wary,
    of starting this FNM zero-one.
    Strength failing, I place hand on library, wary,
    gulping deeply through my neckbeard hairy,
    for a third Storm Crow to attack him some;-
    another attempt to attack my opponent’s sum.

    Fate clips his wings and my deck delivers,
    a Storm Crow finds me and my heart it quivers,
    hubris wrapped in the guise of an attacker for one.
    I tap two mana, cast it, and my opponent shivers,
    cold to the stratagem I have delivered,
    and mercifully skips combat to see me swing for one;-
    a Storm Crow asking me, “swing for one?”

    Facing lethal in retaliation,
    beads of sweat punctuate my hesitation,
    knowing that this fight cannot be won.
    My opponent chuckles in anticipation,
    flicks his cards to my agitation,
    then instigates forth, “swing for one?”;-
    I commit to my fate and swing for one.

    Ought not that would I build this brew,
    a single game plan I was due,
    building and playing this deck simply for fun.
    But after twenty cards from my deck in view,
    only two Storm Crows took wing and flew,
    my life falls to zero and the duel is done;-
    the Storm Crow scooped after a swing for one.


    And now for your daily spoilers:

    StormCrowGlass

    StormCrowzilek

    StormCrowExpedition

    DragonStormCrow

  • CHANGES YOU CAN EXPECT FOR YOU MAKE THE SET 2016

    HELENE BERGEOT, AFTERWORD BY ELAINE CHASE

    After panicked and hasty consideration by Legal, we have a series of announcements to help players navigate this new and mysterious chapter in Magic’s history. This is intended to be an exhaustive and all-inclusive list of answers for questions the community has asked us over the past few days.

    DECK-BUILDING & FUNCTIONAL ERRATA

    With Grand Prix: Seattle happening this weekend, we were asked a number of deck construction questions, and how it would affect the Limited format chosen for the event.

    As this is a Limited event, the regular deck construction rules apply with regards to quantities of Storm Crows available. That is, you may run as many copies of Storm Crow as you select or open during Draft and Sealed. We understand that players generally agree that running 45 copies of Storm Crow in a 40-card deck is suboptimal and thus players may not be able to use all of their favorite copies of Storm Crow, however we leave the answer to that as a problem for the players to solve. We’ll just say this: 40 cards is only a minimum.

    For Constructed events, Storm Crow now features functional errata which grants it the Relentless Rats Clause. This errata will not be printed on the physical product so as to not cause confusion to players who wish to play with two different versions of Storm Crow, it is instead a special rule inherent to the card name Storm Crow. The Comprehensive Rules will reflect this new system in its next update; the new Oracle text for Storm Crow reads:

    Flying

    A deck can have any number of cards named Storm Crow.

    The format of Grand Prix: Seattle will change from Booster Draft to Rochester Draft, enabling players to select from their choice of rarity and artwork, and because we wanted it to be a surprise if a player picked a foil-backed version of a card.

    COMMANDER UPDATE

    Storm Crow is now legal to use as your commander.

    GONE TO ROOST

    We believe these changes and clarifications will make this dark chapter in Magic a little gentler and easier for our extremely patient and understanding fan base, who are also handsome and charming. Please accept these new changes with our sincere apologies and desire to move past this.

    -Helene


    Afterword by Elaine Chase

    After responding to community outrage regarding what we at Wizards considered to be a straight-forward article clarifying in detail what issues lay ahead for this post-Storm Crow world, it appears we missed one major question that left players mad at us. We apologize. Here is our official stance on the issue:

    We do not care if you use Storm Crows as proxies for other Storm Crows. Do whatever you want.

    -Elaine


    StormCrowDAMN

    StormCrowWoG

    StormCrowDAMNATION

    StormCrowling

  • YOU MAKE THE SET 2016: ART AND PRODUCT PREVIEW

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    myVjAc7

    Set Name You Make the Set 2016
    Number of Cards 249
    Prerelease Events Grand Prix: Seattle
    Prerelease Format Booster Draft (3 You Make the Set 2016)
    Release Date March 4, 2016
    Launch Weekend March 4-6, 2016
    Magic Online Prerelease Events March 11-13, 2016
    Release Date March 18-20, 2016
    Grand Prix: Seattle March 5, 2016
    Grand Prix: Seattle Location Seattle, WA
    Grand Prix: Seattle Format Rochester Draft
    Official Three-Letter Code YMS
    Twitter Hashtag #MTGYMS, #CAW
    Initial Concept and Game Design Mark Rosewater (Lead), Aaron Forsythe, Worth Wollpert, Ken Nagle
    Final Game Design and Development The Magic Community, John Matson, David Attenborough
    Available in Booster Packs, Fat Pack (not available in all languages.)
    Languages Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, English (Cockney), Avian, COBOL (not available in English)

    Art

    Boosters

    Booster Box

    Fat Pack

    Die

    StormCrowToken StormCrowTips

    You Make the Set 2016 includes these fine cards, and many more:

    StormCrowSquire

    StormCrowElvishExpression

    StormCrowMurder

    StormCrowTransformA

    StormCrowTransformB

  • YOU MAKE THE SET 2016: HOW EVERY CARD BECAME STORM CROW

    Aaron Forsythe
    Aaron Forsythe

    We at Wizards of the Coast feel we owe the players of Magic: the Gathering a formal apology for the events of the last few months, and would like to take the time now to do so. We’ll also take a look ahead, to help you prepare for an announcement at the end of this article.

    mX96kqN

    What Happened

    Having reached out previously to outside companies such as Microprose and Stainless Games for help in creating new and interactive ways to play Magic: the Gathering, we decided to team up with the guys at Twitch to offer a once-in-a-lifetime experience to all the fans across the world who invest so much time and money into our game: we would let you, the fans, build a set; that set would become You Make the Set 2016.

    We announced a partnership with Twitch wherein we would utilize the Magic the Gathering: Online servers during a scheduled downtime to host the vote, and Twitch would handle the traffic from viewers and from players who used the stream’s chat feature to vote. If you haven’t seen the video yet, viewers could submit to the chat a number and a card in order to replace the card which was assigned to a particular slot in the list. There were 249 slots, which we filled with 249 basic lands in order to give players a clean slate.

    It took about five minutes for the entire chart to be replaced with individual cards, but we had planned for the event to last 24 hours, so now the competition would begin. Cards were being cut left and right, most of which were dragons submitted by one particularly eager voter. The major cuts would happen in certain categories: after dragons, land destruction and counters were the next to go, followed by many of the game-ending cards and global removal spells. After about seven hours, the argument became about whether Avatar of Might or Plague Wind should occupy slot #64, and we fell asleep at our desks.

    We awoke after a short, accidental nap to discover Tarmogoyf and Storm Crow as the only two cards in the entire list, fighting back and forth over dominance over every slot. Three factions had arisen among the forums and the stream chat: those who wanted cheap Tarmogoyfs; those who were trolling with whatever option they found funnier; and those who opposed the idea of a democratically-created set and wanted to destroy the system, so they voted for Storm Crow. There were enough participants voting back and forth that the thread itself had slowed to a crawl, posts disappearing almost as soon as they had been made; a five-second lag time was activated by the server to allow itself time to process. The list was changing constantly, every player fighting a total war against the opposing side for a completely pointless fight; after all, the set wouldn’t complete until all the slots were unique. So we thought.

    We were wrong. For a split second, every item on the list was one card. The feed cut off immediately, and the servers exploded in a blast of blue electricity, knocking all but one of us out of our seats. An acrid smoke emanated from our screens, which was not the smoke of damaged equipment, but of some sort of … I can only describe it as an “evil” essence. Even if we had wanted to take on what was apparently an apparition of Satan himself crossing into our realm to ensure agony and torture be visited upon us, I don’t think any of us were in any way up to the task. It was though we had opened the door to Hell, but instead of Hell, it was a door to a room full of blue fliers for 1U.

    In hindsight, Magic: the Gathering Online is not well-known for its stability. We were not as surprised when we found ourselves asking the only one of us still in their seat, Worth Wollpert, if he had any idea what had happened; he replied with an exaggerated shrug and a dry, “yeah, that happens.”

    A few minutes passed before we were able to discover the truth of what happened. The smoke had cleared, the vote was over, and the players had voted for You Make the Set 2016 to be 249 copies of Storm Crow.

    What Are We Doing About It?

    Legal informed us that even though they had not planned for such an event, they nonetheless had to honor their contract with Twitch in that the set would be printed as-is once the voting period ended. They informed us that having the system literally destroy itself was about as close to a “dead run” as we could have achieved, and one of Legal’s nephews explained what that meant. Accounting said it would be too expensive to run another event like this. Our hands were literally tied. That was a weird meeting with Legal, come to think of it – like, not weirder than their usual, but –

    Oh, Legal also informed us that we have to do a week of spoilers, even though we just told you what the entire set is. If you’ve visited noted rumor site MTG Salvation in the last week, it’s been all the forums are discussing. We are officially confirming this rumor, along with the previously-announced announcement that is coming later.

    So, Let’s Talk About Storm Crow.

    Pros of Storm Crow over Tarmogoyf:

    1. Storm Crow is blue.
    2. Storm Crow has flying.
    3. Storm Crow starts at +1/+1 bigger than Tarmogoyf.

    Cons of Storm Crow over Tarmogoyf:

    1. Storm Crow stays small.
    2. Storm Crow can’t feed a Skullclamp.
    3. Storm Crow can’t be fetched with Green Sun’s Zenith.

    No Refunds

    Well, that does it for our preview card for today! Stay tuned all week for more hot and spicy spoilers as we dig into the sixteen new arts (and the ones we brought back), and be sure to click the sidebar for info on where to play a Release Event near you!

    WE’RE
    SORRY

    P.S. Here’s that announcement we mentioned at the beginning:

    We are inserting exactly seven copies of Storm Crow with foil backs into packs. These were made as a print error, but we thought they came out kind of cool and would be interesting, plus it’s not as if anyone’s going to actually buy packs of this for any other reason. Further announcement about these foils to follow the release of the set. Happy hunting!

    -Aaron