This week, I finally got to play Spider-Man Limited in the streamer event. Unfortunately, because of a copyright issue, Arena and the set's cards have different names, though they are functionally the same. The name change on Arena is Through the Omenpaths. Regardless of the cards' names, I had a good time with the set, especially with the new draft format. With this set, we'll be opening packs with three other players at the table, taking two cards per pack, and drafting as such. This solves a few logistical problems with the set's implementation. First, they wanted to attract Commander players to Limited and thought this would help. Also, while you get the same number of cards, you are opening a smaller number of packs. With many legendary creatures at common, this is an important change because you'd often end up with tons of legends at common if we were drafting with eight players. Additionally, there's no support for enemy color pairs in this set. You can easily splash cards and play multiple colors, but don't expect too many gold cards for your Boros or Izzet deck. There are some at rare and mythic rare for enemy colors, but not signpost uncommons. With so much mana fixing in the set, it's easy to facilitate some splashes if you focus on having allied color pairs as your main colors. The set's speed is average. It can be fast, but a lot of the games get bogged down. The creatures don't attack for a ton of damage off the bat, but they can start to snowball. Modified is a supported archetype in Azorius, so it often plays a bunch of small fliers like City Pigeon and loads them up with auras and counters. I don't enjoy drafting linear aggro much. I also like to explore the depths of the format, so I prefer to splash and draft cards with raw power. A deck I drafted many times over the course of the event was five-color spiders. Here's an example of a trophy deck. 5c Spiders I only recommend drafting this deck if you get Scions of the Ur-Spider/Cosmic Spiderman (paper). It's a mythic, so it won't happen that often. The set is small, and the card is hard to fit into any old deck, so you will get them out of almost any pack that's opened. I imagine more so on Arena, where there are fewer rare drafters, but regardless, it's a solid build-around. Scooping up powerful rare creatures, some removal, and Hot Dog Stand/Treat Trolley copies is a strategy that has merit. In this draft, I played against some strong players with good decks and still managed to get a trophy, which was carried by my rares. The two-color strategies that have looked the best to me so far are UW Modified and Dimir. Dimir has a couple of plausible strategies in self-mill and control, and both seem solid. Blue has access to counterspells and black to efficient removal. Outside of fast starts, rares and strong uncommons are of the utmost importance. It's not hard to get good rares and uncommons; however, you have to be flexible in four-player draft and willing to abandon more cards than normal. You need to be able to pivot to an open color and take advantage of what the other three players are leaving for you. Remember that these smaller draft pods make it much easier to figure out what is happening at the table and how to adjust to maximize the value of each pick. If you noticed there are no red cards left in packs early, and you happen to have a couple of red cards, abandon them and pivot into what's open. For this reason, colorless cards and good lands like Multiversal Passage are higher picks than usual because they always end up in your deck and allow you to read the table before committing to a color. Here are a few more decks I liked from the streamer event. Rakdos Mayhem This deck's core strength is that it gets value out of all of its cards. Excess lands turn into food for connive or get discarded to Romantic Rendezvous or Spider-Gwen, Free Spirit/ Wardens of Silverweb Summit. This archetype is solid but a bit worse than Dimir and Azorius. Rakdos has sufficient removal and makes good use of its resources, but the creatures are under-statted and rely on synergy to get the job done. It could be my small sample, but I felt more comfortable playing against Rakdos than a deck like Dimir or Azorius. The last deck I'll highlight may be my favorite, though I had a couple of bad draws in a row during best-of-one. You're out after two losses in the new system, so I only managed 1-2 with what I thought was a fantastic deck. Esper This Esper deck was super fun and would have been more enjoyable had I found a copy of Prison Break for my reanimator package. I had Knife Trick/Pumpkin Bombardment to discard my bomb seven-drops and Superior Spider-Man/Kavaero, Mind Bitten to turbo out my seven-drops effectively, which came up in multiple games. Sadly, in one of the games, I stumbled on blue mana, so my opponent was ready with the answer at instant speed when I copied Neach Pinnacle Pariah/Doctor Octopus, Master Planner. Overall, this is an archetype I'd like to explore more, but it won't come up often, as you do need some overpowered high-end creatures to reanimate to make a deck like this tick. This deck desperately wanted some Hot Dog Carts/Treat Trolleys, but none were available in the draft. Overall, while the set and new way to draft are fairly fun, I suspect the set will get stale faster than normal because it's so small. The cards will feel too repetitive quickly, and with bonus sheet cards being distributed more rarely in this set, we don't get much of that to add to the variety of packs. The fact that the cards are different in paper and online isn't a huge deal to me, but it craters the enthusiasm for many people, which has muddied what would otherwise be a highly anticipated release. As of right now, I'm eager to play the format when it opens on Arena. Part of me, for the first time in a while, has the urge to check out a pre-release. I won't do it because I have stuff to do, but I will feel FOMO for the first time in a long time. If you're wondering if this set is worth it and you're hesitant about drafting a new way, my honest opinion is that you'll barely notice a difference after a bit, and it's not any less fun than what we're used to. It's worth playing until you get bored, which I admit may happen sooner, but only because of the set size and not because it's poorly designed or the new draft style is an issue.

We officially have the full preview of the highly anticipated Spider-Man set. While the set is on the smaller side, let's see if it will leave a big impact in Constructed, after they finally rid the world of the scourge of Vivi and its consistent dominance in Standard. Let's take a peek at some more interesting cards. Spider-Man 2099 Spider-Man 2099 looks fairly solid. While you can't play this two-drop on turn two or three, it works well with the new Mayhem mechanic, allowing it to deal damage the turn it is put into play, and it attacks for four damage on subsequent turns. Clearly designed with Mayhem in mind, there are other ways to utilize its conditional triggers, such as plot and numerous red cards that play things from exile, including Gwen Stacy. Most notably, it seems like it would pair really well with Expressive Iteration in any format where it's still legal. The spell's cost efficiency makes it interesting, but it's not a card I'd expect to see tons of play due to its prohibitive trigger. It's an interesting card that isn't worth building around, but it's worth considering if your deck can consistently use its conditional trigger. Jackal, Genius Geneticist Jackal, Genius Geneticist is one of the set's most interesting cards. It's a two-mana 1/1 that can leave a devastating effect on the battlefield almost immediately. Ideally, we can play a mana dork on turn one, follow up with Jackal on turn two, and possibly an additional mana dork, creating a copy allowing us to play a two-drop on the following turn and a three-drop on top of that. In the meantime, we're copying all of it and have a massive battlefield presence. Jackal asks you to play a low curve of creatures and a lot of them for redundancy, but the payoff is massive. Inherently, Jackal and any deck fully utilizing it will be weak to sweepers. Hopefully, you can close the game out quickly before that occurs. Since we're playing blue, we can play some cheaper soft counters to protect the battlefield presence. Keep in mind that this is at odds with what a Jackal deck wants you to do, so it will be a delicate situation. Jackal will often want you to build a deck similar to Collected Company, which is tons of low-curve creatures that leave a lasting effect. Maybe we'll see these two cards in action together in eternal formats. Jackal is the kind of card I hate to play with, but also a card I'll be terrified of facing down. It's an extremely cool card that has the potential to see play in a variety of formats because of its powerful effect and low-mana cost. Symbiote Spider-Man Symbiote Spider-Man is disappointing because it's my personal favorite Spider-Man version. The card looks great artistically, but it lacks an evasive ability that a radioactive Spider-Man abducted by an alien symbiote would possess. Spider-Man can fly above the buildings, so at least give it a jump ability, and I can connect to trigger the ability. Find New Host is an interesting flavor win, but ultimately, Symbiote Spider-Man will have a difficult time connecting because of its low power for a three-drop. I'd love if this card saw play, but with no deathtouch or flying, it will likely sit in play and not connect. If I were to play with this card, it would be with the play style of a deck like Dimir Midrange already seen in Standard. It has a lot of creature interaction to clear the way and small evasive fliers that it can host to start drawing more cards. It's possible we see Symbiote Spider-Man in this deck style, but there's a high barrier of entry for three-mana creatures, and I'm not sure Symbiote Spider-Man makes the cut. Hydro-Man, Fluid Felon Hydro-Man, Fluid Felon is a new and unique design that nails the character's flavor while being mechanically sound. I don't know Hydro-Man's character well, but I've seen enough to know it's a villain that draws power from water and manipulates water to cause terror among everyday citizens. If you play this card with a bunch of cantrips, you can attack for chunks of damage. When your turn ends, Hydro-Man will disappear into the water and become the land itself. It will protect itself from sorcery-speed removal while giving you more mana on the opponent's turn, or in niche cases, your end step. This card is difficult to evaluate because it's a potentially potent creature and somewhat of a Rampant Growth, as it lets you cast instant-speed four-drops on turn three and makes it easier to hold up counter-magic for the game's duration. The design is amazing. I'm not sure it's good enough to see a lot of play, but it has a good amount of potential in a well-built deck. I'm excited to see what happens with this one. Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior is a hate bear that I think has some longevity to her because of her hybrid-mana cost and ability to play across all formats. Spider-Woman could even see vintage play as a card that can be used to discard to Force of Will while having a profound impact on the early turns against Moxes and Black Lotus. While I doubt it breaks into Vintage, we've seen this effect before on smaller ground creatures at two mana. However, Spider-Woman is also a flying creature, meaning it won't only prevent creatures from blocking the turn they enter, it can maneuver around a lot of opponents' creatures in combat and leave a lasting threat on the game. Spider-Woman is likely to be included in white and blue aggressive decks because its effect is instrumental in stopping potential combos. While this effect has been done before, we rarely see this type of thing from blue, which is the most interesting part of the card. Blue hate bears are scary because blue is the best at playing a tempo-focused game. It's not an all-star card, but I bet Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior will move in and out of decks of all formats for years to come. The Spot, Living Portal We've seen a million versions of Fiend Hunter, but this one is different, as the card's wording makes it very interesting. It's designed so that you exile your opponent's best permanent and a card from your own graveyard. If it dies, both cards go back to their owners' hands, so you get your best card from your graveyard back and your opponent gets their best permanent back. However, if The Spot were to die, the opponent's permanent doesn't go right back into play. Instead, it goes back to their hand, so they must recast it before it can start attacking or blocking or any of that stuff that might come up if The Spot died at instant speed. Where it gets more interesting is that The Spot has to die for these cards to be returned. If The Spot is exiled, returned to your hand, or if you happen to have a way to blink it, those cards are gone forever. This makes the card extremely interesting and potentially powerful. Where it has obvious Commander implications with the ability to exile cards as a favor to an opponent, these applications also make it a useful tool in a competitive environment. The Spot has a legitimate chance to see play in Standard because it's more than just a Fiend Hunter. It's only held back by its mana cost, but even then, it will likely find a home somewhere because it's too easy to exploit, and it's hard for it to backfire because it sends permanents back to players' hands. This is a cool card, and while I don't know anything about the character, I'm suspecting it's flavorfully brilliant, as well. This will likely wrap up my Spider-Man set review. Spider-Man is a uniquely smaller set that feels a bit underpowered. It's hard to get an exact feel for a set this new and creative. It feels like many cards have a lot of text on them, but that text isn't translating to raw power to the naked eye. I've heard criticisms that the set feels too weak to impact Standard, especially with Vivi lurking around every corner. Those are valid criticisms, but we'll need to play with this set first before making that determination because cards like the transform creatures will play out differently than they look on paper. I can vouch for this because I evaluate transform cards differently since we could never cast their backside and had to meet a specific condition to flip them. This is a new ballgame, and I'm excited to participate. We'll get our first look at the set in the Omenpath Early Access Streamer event, which I'll participate in. Omenpath is the Arena name for The Spider-Man set because they didn't get the rights to the digital assets, so while the cards have different names, they will functionally be the same. I'll dive into the new pick-two draft format and try to learn it well because it will be an entirely different way of drafting that may take a while to master. I'm always up for the challenge and can't wait to start.

Spider-Man is just two weeks away. I was a massive Spider-Man fan growing up, so this set hits home for me. Venom is my favorite Marvel character, and I can't wait to get my hands on some sweet Magic cards featuring my favorite symbiotic alien. Unfortunately, as rumor has it, WotC was unable to procure the IP for Arena, so that will be played with different card names, but the cards will remain the same. I'm hoping that doesn't take away from any potential Arena events, specifically the Collector Booster box events where I've done quite well in the past. Spider-Man will be a Standard-legal Universes Beyond set, though it's much smaller than usual, so it will be drafted in a new and unique way — four-player pods where you take two cards per pack. I'll certainly delve into some strategy on this when the time comes, but for now, let's take a look at some of the more interesting cards. Multiversal Passage Multiversal Passage is an insanely versatile new land that can facilitate any kind of multi-color deck. While it's not fetchable like a shock land, it will act as additional shock lands in Standard and potentially Pioneer where we don't have fetch lands. This card is one of the safer picks for a top card in the format, and much like Starting Town, it's too versatile not to see a good amount of play in formats without shock lands. Oscorp Industries Let's get the strong lands out of the way first. Oscorp Industries is another very strong land and is something of a Grixis Triome. Discarding this to your Fable is pure upside, as you'll get to play it straight from the graveyard for the small cost of two life. There are many ways to discard Oscorp Industries for value, however it's a big issue in 2025 Magic that it always comes in tapped. It will be interesting to see how this card is exploited with the plethora of loot and rummage effects. This card is bound to show up somewhere. It's a solid tri-colored land, but it would play better in a deck that can put in the graveyard freely and not fall too far behind on board by playing too many tap lands. Gwen Stacy Once upon a time, Abbot of Keral Keep was one of the most impactful cards printed in Standard. As someone who lost in the finals of a Pro Tour to it, I'm well qualified to speak on this card type's potential. Gwen Stacy works differently from Abbot. You can play the card as long as Gwen's in play, allowing you to play it on turn two freely and still get value if it's there when you play the exiled card. This is a different kind of transform card, as for the first time in standard, you can cast the back of a transforming card. This is a super cool new twist, and especially with Gwen, it's going to lead to some tough decisions of whether to cast her for two mana and transform her for full value, or to cast her flip-side outright for potentially less long-term value. Removing two counters seems difficult, but with connive in the set and the ability to put counters when playing from exile, it will likely come up here and there. Gwen Stacy seems solid but not broken. I expect Gwen to find a home somewhere in competitive environments, especially after we see Vivi hit the ban list and things become more tame. Gwen is both a cheap value creature, and a flying haste creature, so she plays on multiple spots on the curve, allowing for flexibility and a bit of power. I love this new mechanic and can't wait to play with these new, unique transform cards. Black Cat, Cunning Thief Black Cat is an interesting spin on Gonti, Lord of Luxury. It does not have deathtouch and costs one more mana, but it lets you look deeper into the opponent's deck and take an extra card. It would be super cool to see this steal an entire two-card combo from an opponent and beat them with their own tools. Mulldrifter is not what it used to be these days, but Black Cat has potential in some formats like Cube and Commander. It's not exactly a high-powered Standard card, but it may see play in small numbers as a grindy one-of for some midrange mirror matchups where a mulldrifter that always hits two spells is solid enough. This is a fun card, but it's not quite there for competitive play. Spectacular Spider-Man While there are many versions of Spider-Man in this set, this is the easiest to place, and if I do say so myself, has the best art. Spectacular Spider-Man is the perfect card for a white aggressive Standard deck that wants to apply pressure early but not overcommit into a sweeper. Flash allows you to dodge your opponent's sorcery-speed sweepers, and as the game develops, you have protection for potential sweepers later on with its ability to give your creatures indestructible. It's a solid little creature but nothing groundbreaking. It will see play if a Mono-White aggressive deck is viable. Even if Mono-White decks aren't viable, it can see play in a UW Flash Deck or any two-color white aggro deck. This is a cool card with even cooler art, but it's nothing too flashy. The Soul Stone The Soul Stone is an extremely interesting card. It's an indestructible and legendary mana rock in Standard. We don't get cards like this too often anymore, and when we do, they usually tap for colorless mana. The Soul Stone has a built-in top-end mana sink, though you can't tap it to pay the mana cost, as it taps to harness its power. The Soul Stone has some potential in Standard. Ultimately, I think it will fall flat as a legendary permanent. Generally, with this kind of effect, you'd want to play a full playset, but redundant copies of this card have virtually no use because it's indestructible and likely going to sit in play throughout the game. We may see some lists with one or two copies of The Soul Stone, especially in black decks that have a reasonable amount of creatures and a higher curve. It's always surprised me how little we see mana rocks played in Standard, even if it's just a single copy or two. I'm hoping we see The Soul Stone in play and doing its thing since it's playable if certain conditions are met. I do not think it's a card that should be built around because harnessing is too expensive. Spider-Man looks more fun than strong so far. It's a smaller set than usual, but there's still plenty more to see, and we'll get more into it next week.

I have to dip my toes into an Alchemy Limited set every time one comes out. Edge of Eternities was a format people either hated or hated to love. While I fall into the second category, I understood people's issues. Alchemy is another format that Limited players find problematic, which I don't understand. I get why people are turned off from playing casual formats that aren't supported by any kind of organized play system, as they'd rather keep their eye on the prize and pursue higher-level tournaments. Generally, Limited has long been forgotten in organized play, so the players who love and play mostly Limited are doing it for the love of the game. Alchemy is a remix of an existing format and has made it more fun every time. Adding a midseason twist to a format that I have drafted 100 or more times can only be an upside, but some old dogs don't want to learn the new tricks. Alchemy fixed one of the bigger problems I had with EoE, which is that the set is too underpowered for all the cool mechanics. If you've ever played Alchemy before, you know the cards are not what anyone would call underpowered. There are a few Constructed plants in there that don't translate into draft, but mostly, the cards are busted. I started the format off as I always do. I read the cards, drafted a mediocre deck, and got destroyed. I went 0-3 in my first attempt and felt like all I learned was that the Alchemy cards are indeed busted. That took me to a place where I realized that green, a color well known as the best color in EoE Limited, just got better. I've talked about green before as being a color I'm not willing to fight over. The format's power level is too low to fight for fixing, only to wind up with a multicolor underpowered deck. Once good cards started getting gobbled up early in drafts, I was done fighting over green. The format developed into a place where that was the case with a lot of people. Now, green is considered a solid color and not over-the-top busted. But then Alchemy came out. Green shot up in power level if you can believe it, and that's because you can reasonably play three-color green decks to scoop up even more powerful Alchemy cards. Red will largely be the same because of the various Lander cards, allowing you to support splashes of the format's new most powerful cards. After my epiphany that green will get even stronger, I've been on a green kick and am doing quite well. I started 6-0 in my next two attempts. I couldn't get the clean sweep in either, but I trophied the next two drafts with some interesting green decks. 4c Planets This deck was an absolute masterpiece. Brood Astronomer, Eumidian Lifeseed, and Volatile Orbit all came to play nearly every long game, and I got to do cool things with planets in every game, including copying Volatile Orbit with Adagia, Windswept Bastion to burn my opponent out slowly. The various green Alchemy cards not only provided win conditions, but they also provided mana fixing, allowing me to play removal of any color, pick up this Zero Point Ballad pack three, and play it in my deck with no fear. Games played out more slowly when I had ways to remove the true problematic threats. I realized that some cards, specifically the cheap removal spells, gained a little value because of a few powerful Alchemy cards you'll see more regularly. Typically, this is the case in all Alchemy sets, where the Alchemy cards tend to mostly be threats. Removal becomes more important because the threats are the most powerful cards in the format. Plasma Bolt, Depressurize, Bombard, all gain a little bit of value, and the mediocre curve-filler creatures should be knocked down a peg. For instance, that Ice Cave Crasher in my sideboard was a card I didn't play at all in EoE because I was getting a higher card quality early in the set's release. As people learned more about the set and my decks became less powerful, I eventually became happy to play Ice Cave Crasher. With Alchemy's release, it's back on my "let's hope I don't have to play this" list. In fact, having new cards pumped into the set makes you reevaluate each card, especially cards that were on the bottom tier of playable in your decks. Every color will have to make adjustments to this, and in some cases, the way you build your decks will change a good bit. But let's also talk about how much more power you can get in general because the packs are juiced up. Here's another draft deck where I didn't necessarily have all the Alchemy goods, but I got a lot of rares late because people were taking the more powerful Alchemy cards. Jund Rares This deck is more in line with a normal deck, but it was full of sweepers and powerful top-end. I only took one rare I opened, the Battleship, and the rest were passed to me. You can say "how did you get passed The Endstone" or even Thrumming Hivepool, but those cards are tame compared to the best Alchemy cards. Look at Mine Security in my deck. That's a two-mana 3/1 trample, which is not great but playable on its own. However, it puts a zero-mana Flametongue Kavu on top of your deck. Mine Security is an uncommon, the most common Alchemy rarity you can find. You'll be playing against it probably every draft. With this deck, I learned how strong that card can be with Volatile Orbit because Orbit can find Kavaron, Memorial World with eight counters on it, and the FTK for zero mana can finish crewing it on the same turn. After that, you're off to the races. This deck also started 6-0 and couldn't get the clean sweep, but we did close out with the trophy. An awesome thing about Alchemy is how many games you get to play with and against the planets. In the normal EoE format, I often had to decide whether to spend time stationing my spacecraft. In Alchemy, I've been deciding how to station my spacecraft or planets, as I've often had multiple in play. Overall, as I suspected, Alchemy has only improved the format. If you're sick of EoE Limited but love Limited, I highly recommend the experience. If you hated Edge Limited and couldn't pinpoint why, maybe it was because it felt like a core set power level but with spaceships, and you wanted more meat in the packs. If so, you may like Alchemy. Regardless, I'll be playing Alchemy on stream while it's available and enjoying every minute.

Last weekend, we had the privilege of playing Sealed for steaks, I mean, stakes. Edge of Eternities Sealed is a lot different in a best-of-one setting than I expected, at least, what I thought might be successful. My record in the Arena Direct was a 71% win percentage, converting three of the 11 attempts I made into boxes. Relative to others, it was a successful campaign. With a couple of more opportunities to play Sealed with the Arena Open this weekend and the Arena Champs Qualifier the following weekend, I thought it might be a good idea to go over what I found to be GTO (Game Theory Optimal). I went into my first couple of Sealed events thinking landers would make for some nice splashing opportunities, and everyone would have a bunch of multicolor soup decks. In reality, Sealed was a lot different. In fact, I found the exact opposite to be true. While the format has a lot of powerful cards, almost none of the cards carry games on their own outside of some of the mythic rares like Ouroboroid and Quantum Riddler. Normally in Sealed, you're looking to play your best rares and build your deck in a reasonable way so that you can play all of them, including splashing them. This would make sense with landers, however, as I said, I found that you want the most consistent deck from top to bottom. I found the decks easy to build once I understood the baseline power level of potential opponents' decks. It wasn't just all bombs all the time. While there are a lot of sweepers in the format to be careful of, I didn't find them that difficult to finagle around. It takes a delicate balance of figuring out when you can beat a sweeper and when you have to unload your hand. Generally, it was obvious when the opponent had them, and you could easily not overcommit on the board. The way I found to optimally build my decks was to focus on my best two colors and try to build a strictly two-color deck. Many of my pools would have zero or one total land, and it wasn't enough for splashing a third color. Green decks were more flexible, and while green was still the best color in Sealed, it wasn't for that reason. I'd occasionally splash a removal spell or two in my green decks, but I wasn't going too deep on splashes because the early mana was too crucial to board development. Green overperformed for me for one simple reason: the green creatures are extremely large, hit very hard, and there's redundancy of them at common. Between Icecave Crasher, Fungal Colossus, Germinating Wurm, and Drix Fatemaker, your four- and five-drops pack a huge punch, and any hiccup from the opponent would leave them buried. One thing I found is that my typical Sealed deck had less removal than my average draft deck. This meant that unchecked large creatures were a nice strategy. This is exactly what green was capable of. Take, for example, this deck: My mana was concerning with so many double-pipped creatures, but I had a good curve, some removal, and combat tricks. No overly broken rares. No sweepers. Just curving out and attacking. When my opponents stumbled on mana, I was able to bury them in combat. This deck went 7-1 for a box, and my only loss was to an easily top 1% pool with eight rares, six or seven of which were blue. Not really a strike against the deck. It's worth noting that Timeline Culler was absolutely fantastic in this deck and made my deck more resilient to sweepers. Here's another trophy deck. Again, black, green, and a nice curve of creatures. I'd be lying if I said my Elegy Acolyte didn't win me a game or two, but the deck won plenty of games without it as well. I curved out with creatures, used my mana efficiently, and made sure I was always winning on the board without overdeveloping into sweepers. I really liked Wurmwall Sweeper in all of these decks because one issue with this format is that the lack of dual lands doesn't only punish splashing bombs, it punishes two-color mana bases. Many more games than usual come down to players having smooth mana, so a cheap colorless surveil card that turns into an evasive threat on turn three or four is perfect for this kind of strategy. Typically in Sealed Deck, I hate combat tricks, but in this format, I usually want at least one, if not two. As you can see, I played Dark Endurance for the first time, and it was excellent. While Biosynthic Burst would have been better, I was able to protect creatures, win combat, and develop my board into potential sweepers because I had a flexible card. Since you're often left with less removal than you'd like, combat tricks in this style of deck felt more potent than usual. I disliked expensive cards. Cards like Mouth of the Storm and Pinnacle Kill-Ship felt underwhelming. Games weren't dragging on like they did in draft. A lack of interaction led to more curving out and "sweeper checking" the opponent. While you can certainly play these cards, understand that without interaction to bridge you to them, the game may not last long enough for them to have an impact. To start the format, I was all about playing my counterspells, even Temporal Intervention. By the end of the format, I was only playing these things when I ran out of cards I deemed playable. Fundamentally, all the rules of Sealed Deck, where you build your deck to go slower, try to out-bomb your opponent, and interact with their bombs, got thrown out the window. Both because there are few truly broken rares and the best-of-one hand smoother. I expect to have to adapt to best-of-three some, but regardless, I will likely build my decks in a similar fashion. I'm excited to try playing more competitive Limited in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you out as well.

I've been streaming a lot of MTG lately, and surprisingly, my community is growing faster than expected, which has motivated me to play more Limited. I've played Edge of Eternities Limited so much that, at the time of this writing, I'm ranked first on the Mythic Ladder. That's right, this fella got his groove back. For the first time, I'm on 17lands.com utilizing their excellent analytics. The most valuable to me is tracking my trophy and win rates, as well as giving me an idea of where to pick rares I haven't used much. In these analytics, I noticed I have a higher win percentage than most of the top players on the leaderboard. So, maybe I'm doing something right? I've talked and theorized a lot about this frustrating format. While many I talk to are struggling, there are a few things I think I'm doing differently than others. I avoid white: My first rule, that I'm always touting, is that I almost always avoid playing white. Why is that? Is white THAT bad? Well, no, white is actually pretty deep at higher rarities, and in a weak pack, taking a white rare or uncommon is probably fine. At common, white is abysmal outside of its premium removal spells in Banishing Light and Focus Fire. The creatures at common are so weak that I avoid the color because it's losing combats early in the game, and white does the worst job at prolonging the game and winning in longer, grindier games. I'm sure you can supplement your main color with white's removal and a couple of creatures at common, but you don't want your deck to be a majority white commons like you can with red, blue, or, of course, green. I try to avoid spacecraft: Spacecraft is supposed to be the cool draw to the set, but unfortunately, they're mostly too mediocre. The rare spacecraft is playable, but I tend to avoid the commons, uncommons, and even the rares regardless of whether they're solid enough. While I love Pinnacle Kill-Ship at the top of my curve, I try to avoid most of the spacecraft because they're tempo negative, and the rest of the format pushes you to play to the board. Larval Scoutlander is an exception, as it's one of the better ways to fix mana and help support the "unique lands" strategy. Spacecraft also have diminishing returns because they're sharing the same resource, your creature's power, amongst each other. You'll often be in a position you can't crew because you're playing defense, and multiple spacecraft in these spots is often game-losing. Even though I'll play them, I won't prioritize most of the uncommon spacecraft over other good cards. If one that is solid enough, like Fellgravship, falls in my lap? Sure, I'll take and play it, but I can't rationalize taking it over other good cards because I try to cap my deck's spacecraft count. If I have a Pinnacle Kill-Ship as my top end, then I'm not usually looking to play more than one other spacecraft. I'm prioritizing red: My Most Drafted Cards from 17Lands.com Green is the go-to color for most, but for me, it's red. The reason I prefer red is in this picture of my most drafted commons. Red's removal suite at common can cover all your bases. Bolts for small creatures, Bombards for medium creatures, and Orbital Plunge covers almost everything else. To me, Orbital Plunge is the best common in the set. It's a way to put a lander in play to fix your mana or ramp while also killing their best creature. Plunge is ideal for my game plan of almost every deck for controlling the board and winning games through small decisions. Red is the new green. Looking at mana curve differently: In most formats you can look at your mana curve based on converted mana cost. In this format, you have to approach it differently. There are warp costs, landers, and a bevy of other activated abilities that can fill slots on your curve. For instance, when you have a couple of Kav Landseekers in your deck, ideally your deck has a few more three-mana spells than four, so you can crack the lander the following turn, and hopefully ramp up to a six- or seven-drop from there. With Galactic Wayfarer, focus on more two-drops because you're likely to want to crack a lander on four and follow it up with a five- or six-drop the following turn. The format, at least in the early game, is about tempo and trying to squeeze yourself into an onboard advantage early, but also, not overextending into the plethora of sweepers in the format. It's important during deck building to look at your deck like this, but also during the drafting portion while you're painting your Picasso. Focus on the small things: This format is swingy. The games you play tend to be close, involve trading resources, and have back-and-forth Magic. Because of this, all the small decisions add up to be a lot more. Much of this is figuring out when to sacrifice landers and how long to hold onto sacrifice outlets like Nutrient Block. Cryogen Relic is a big one as well. There are dozens of small decisions per game. Taking time to think about how the game is likely to play out and plan a few turns a head is critical to increase your win rate. You want to spend your mana productively, and be mindful of opponent's counter-plays and what you may need to do in following turns. That's true in all Magic games, but in this Limited format, all the small things can make the difference between a win and a loss. This is counter to Final Fantasy where it was more important to focus on playing out your hand. Games were often won in the early game with a variety of strong legends that were either unanswered and won the game, or you answered them and were able to play on for a more stereotypical Limited Magic game. I find it weird that the more I play EoE Limited, the more I seem to be enjoying it. EoE is a tough nut to crack and that makes the puzzle more satisfying to solve. This month is full of EoE Limited events, so it's a good format to master and show off your skills in a tournament setting. We have an Arena Direct, Arena Open, and Arena Champs qualifier in back-to-back weekends. While a lot of the gameplay will be sealed, it will be fun to put this knowledge to use.

While I got a small taste during early access, Edge of Eternities has finally been released. EoE has had a lot of criticism. While I don't find the set great, it's reasonable enough to keep me excited. Edge of Eternities is an extremely unique environment, and no, I don't mean outer space. The spacecraft mechanic has proven to be a tough nut to crack. It's better than I expected, despite the pitfalls. Stationing the spacecraft is unintuitive, which is a new puzzle to learn and solve, making the mechanic cool. I've heard a lot of feedback about how the games feel very hard to play, but I haven't had that feeling. I'm definitely playing a lot of games poorly, but not more than usual. I have developed some color preferences, including a color I'm soft banning from ever drafting. White is far too weak overall, and I don't like any of the common creatures. It is bordering on how bad blue was in Alchemy Horizon's Baldur's Gate, a set notorious for having a color that was about as close to unplayable as possible. White's primary identity is its creature base. When the core of those creatures is too weak, it's hard to compete with a color such as green that has a plethora of creatures above the curve. As far as my favorite color, well, it's always blue. For whatever reason, amongst the less-informed players, blue is always undervalued. However, green will likely be the best color. The commons are all strong, and green has a bunch of mana fixing in the form of Landers, which I discussed last week. EoE has a wide gap between its good and bad cards, so being able to splash any color and play any strong card you get, especially when the most aggressive color is weak, is critical because you want access to as many strong cards as possible. I've been playing best-of-three so far, so I don't have the hand smoother on best-of-one on Arena. However, I noticed a lot of games are decided by mana issues. It's not that I can't play my splash card or anything, but my normal two-color decks have struggled to have access to two colors of mana early in the game. This is a bit of variance, but it's also due to not having a cycle of common dual lands. Without being able to reliably fix my mana base with a dual land or two, I've been training myself to adjust by playing 18 lands in a lot of decks to help that issue. I often want more lands because I want to play a lot of card draw and top end. The games can get grindy, with you focusing on progressively going over the top of your opponent. For this reason, seven-drop commons, which are traditionally off the table, have overperformed for me. I want cards like Nebula Dragon and Pinnacle Kill-Ship in almost all my decks. The set is rampy, and having these at common is a good excuse to plan for a longer game and try to overpower your opponent in the end game. Below is an example of how I like to build even my non-green decks. Izzet Control Give me all the seven-drops in my green decks. As you can see in the picture below, I want to win the long games. Ideally, this deck would have more removal, but I didn't get enough here. The sweet spot is two or three seven-drops, but it's also dependent on how many good mana sinks you have. Green Ramp Currently, I want to always start in one of the Temur colors. This includes passing on strong white rares early to get into my lane. While black is far from banned, I don't want to start in black because I prefer the gold signpost uncommons in the other color combinations. However, I'm going to end up splashing cards like Gravkill in most of my decks, so I have no problem taking good removal early. Black has underperformed for me, but not nearly as much as white. I was lucky enough to achieve the set's ultimate goal of going infinite with a four-card combo of Umbral Collar Zealot with two Perigee Beckoners that can infinitely loop in and out of the graveyard, and the kill comes from Susurian Voidborn pinging them each time. It's a cool infinite combo that's difficult to execute. I didn't need to do this in the game, but it was cool that I got the chance. To infinity and beyond! There are a lot of sweepers in the format. There's a red Pyroclasm effect at uncommon and a variety of ways to sweeper the board at rare. Always play around it when possible. You can do creative things against cards like Terminal Velocity, Zero Point Ballad, and Singularly Rupture by not fully stationing your stations and instead getting them to the point that your follow-up creature after a sweeper will get into combat. EoE has been a new challenge. While far from my favorite draft environment, it's been fun to explore outer space and figure out a new set of play patterns with the new mechanic. Stationing is a unique and interesting mechanic because it changes how you play games, rather than just adding card value to the cards. Most mechanics, like flashback and cycling, are just tacked-on ways to give a card more value. With so many upcoming EoE Limited events, I'll be focused and streaming the set regularly, hoping to master the final frontier.

While Edge of Eternities hasn't hit shelves yet (as of writing), I was fortunate enough to be invited to play the early access streamer event. We played this event on our own accounts, making the event smoother and more enjoyable. My initial impressions of the format are that it won't stack up to Final Fantasy Limited, but it's been a lot of fun and a bit challenging to figure out exactly what I should be doing. My concerns leading into the format were that spacecraft would feel too slow and clunky. That is true in many cases, but it's not that challenging to turn them into real creatures. It usually slows down the game in some spots, but in other spots, you get a giant flier on a stalled board that demands an answer. The mechanic is more enjoyable than I anticipated, but I still have difficulty with exactly how to evaluate station cards. It will take many reps to understand the play patterns more intuitively. While there's a lot of removal, much like Final Fantasy, it's important to get a good amount. This is not a format that feels overly aggressive. There are only a few powerful, aggressive creatures, as well as several ways to interact. This may always be the case in modern-day Magic, where some creatures are so strong that they demand answers. We may no longer play formats where you can use combat tricks, rather than removal, to break through, because combat tricks won't interact with creatures that dominate the game. Warp has felt clunky. It has mostly been used as a tool to fill your curve and much less as something you need to do for value. One of the biggest mistakes I witnessed was warping a creature rather than casting it outright. They're generally trying to maximize value on the card rather than worrying about the tempo they're losing by not putting something onto the battlefield. The mechanic that has been the most impressive has easily been the Lander tokens. Lander tokens are an easy way to get fixing, trigger artifact matters effects, and trigger landfall. Cards like Galactic Wayfarer and Sami's Curiosity look innocuous but have quickly risen in my mind to premium green commons. Orbital Plunge is a red removal spell that doesn't look all that impressive, but it's almost always overkilling creatures, which makes it a common removal spell that essentially draws you a card. Lander tokens make it easy to draft a five-color deck, and my favorite archetype thus far has been drafting the "lands have different names" archetype. Bonus sheets are my favorite addition to Limited these days. My main critique of the format is that having lands as the bonus sheet makes it boring. There's a lot of fluff and a couple that are fun, but mostly it's a miss. Let's take a look at a few decks I drafted during the event. 5c Green This was one of my first iterations of "lands with different names." Ideally, you draft these decks with a green base and five colors. The All-Fates Scroll is a massive payoff for this deck. It fixes your mana in the early and mid-game. You can then cast it for a fistful of cards. I got up to a draw 7 in this deck once or twice. There's obviously more payoffs for this archetype, such as Survey Mechan. I suspect this is an archetype you will want to draft early because it seems people aren't valuing the important cards currently. I wheeled almost every scroll, and I don't think that'll be the case when people figure out what they want to do. This archetype's strength is that it can play removal of any color, making it easier to pick up, and it can play any rare it gets. The downside is that if you don't get a high power level, you'll likely end up in an underpowered deck with bad mana. This was an archetype that kept landing in my lap, so I drafted it a bunch. RB Stuff This is just a traditional RB deck with removal, solid curve, and good creatures. Most decks in the format will end up more like this once things settle. There's nothing too interesting here, but I'll note that this deck's strengths are its removal suite, and its weakness is that it's susceptible to flooding out. Let's move on to my last, and most unique, deck — Mono Red Colossus. Mono Red Colossus I wasn't intending on drafting this, but the pieces just came together. Terminal Velocity is essentially a sweeper effect, and I wanted to try it out. I managed to get multiple copies of both Terminal Velocity and Bygone Colossus. While I don't think I ever managed to put both of those pieces together, I dealt huge chunks of damage using Kavaron Turbodrone on the Colossus, or Full Bore, which gives it haste and trample. Red feels strong, and it was wide open. It's possible that Technician is a bomb by drawing multiple cards on its own. I was able to pop off with two. I wasn't sure about the land count. I went with 16 because the deck was weak to flooding out, but 17 is probably correct. I likely should have cut the Red Tiger Mechan. Either way, the deck got a lot of wins, one of which may have had an asterisk on it, but it was my event highlight. The clip is linked below. https://clips.twitch.tv/DistinctCarefulDolphinPMSTwin-b2U_qwIVb9ZmtZkE I will be doing a deep dive into this format, so expect more EoE Limited content in the weeks to come. I was surprised and elated to be invited to the streamers' early access event and can now share some early thoughts on the format. I'm far from figuring out the format, as I'm still unsure when I'm making draft picks. I'm pumped to learn the ins and outs at the upcoming Limited Arena Open and Limited ACQ. See you soon with more.

Edge of Eternities is shaping up to be one of the most unique Magic sets ever. The set looks incredibly interesting. I'm still not sure how well the full set will shape up in a competitive environment because we haven't seen cards like a lot of these before. However, there are a few more cards this week that are interesting enough to discuss. Cosmogoyf Cosmogoyf is our brand-new Lhurgoyf friend. While its intended use within the set is alongside Warp to grow it naturally, we know that's not what we're going to end up doing with it. It's a worse version of Tarmogoyf in a vacuum, but there are interesting ways to abuse it in eternal formats. The most obvious would be using it with a delve spell like Treasure Cruise in Pioneer or Gurmag Angler anywhere else. It can get much bigger than that if you're willing to pay the price with cards like Spoils of the Vault or Plunge into Darkness. Ultimately, cards like this are too weak to build around, and this card does in some ways need to be built around, so I doubt it sees real competitive play. The Endstone While The Endstone is not a Constructed all-star, it's an interesting card to cheat into play early. Tinker is the most obvious enabler for this, but there are other ways, such as Tron lands, to put this into play early. The Endstone's drawback of going to half your starting life total in your end step can be used as an upside since your opponent will need to deal you 10 damage in a single turn cycle, or you'll be gaining life rather than losing it. This means you can spend life as a resource and regain it with The Endstone. On top of that, The Endstone makes it easy to chain through your deck because it lets you draw a card whenever you play a card. It's a powerful artifact at seven mana that is probably mostly a meme card, but I could see it being used in certain spots, such as Tron, for various matchups. Syr Vondamn, Sunstar Exemplar Last week, we looked at Umbral Collar Zealot, which is one of the better aristocrats-looking creatures we've seen in a long time — a sacrifice outlet with good stats that is looking for a home. This week, we see Syr Vondam, which is a payoff for a sacrifice outlet. Vigilance, Menace, gains life, grows, and takes down an opponent's permanent when it dies. There's no guarantee there will be a competitive sacrifice deck in Standard, but it looks like they're putting the tools into the universe if we try and build one. Syr Vondam is worth exploring in that type of shell, as it's a whole lot of card for just two mana. I'm hoping we get more support for this archetype because it's been a long time since we've had a playable version of this deck style. Beyond the Quiet I understand the comparison between Beyond the Quiet and Sunfall, but Beyond the Quiet is meaningfully worse. Sunfall was pivotal in some matchups to stabilize and end the game because it acted as a win condition in a control deck on top of a sweeper. Beyond the Quiet will pick up spacecraft. While it remains to be seen how many spacecraft will actually break into Standard, Beyond the Quiet is simply a way to stabilize and lacks the ability to close the game on its own, making it meaningfully worse than Sunfall. That said, I suspect we'll see Beyond the Quiet in Standard white control decks as the sweeper of choice because exiling the permanents is a massive upside that can't be overlooked. Rust Harvester This card looks super cool to me. I'm not sure how good it is, but it has potential for some explosiveness, especially in a format like Modern alongside cards like Cranial Plating, Mox Opal, and Arcbound Ravager. You can easily create a massively large Grim Lavamancer that can go right after the player or start killing creatures with its activated ability. We may need to work harder in other formats to fuel Rust Harvester, but it can still get a power boost via equipment or other sources of +1+1 counters. Rust Harvester may be in the unfortunate position of not being good enough for Modern and not being supported enough for Pioneer or Standard, but it's a one-mana creature with a high ceiling, so it's a card to watch. Rust Harvester seems like it could be played with Agatha's Cauldron, another synergy to follow. I'd love for Rust Harvester to be a strong card, as it looks fun to get going and seems like it could be strong enough to find a home somewhere. Sunset Saboteur Sunset Saboteur seems strong. Generally, cards with a downside are basically always bad, but this card makes sense in a deck with a lot of removal or control elements rather than just in an aggro deck, where it also might shine. Menace makes it difficult to block. Even if it's dumping counters onto something, you can kill it before blocks. Sunset Saboteur will quickly clock the opponent. The ward of discarding a card makes it problematic to kill early, as it will act like a Hymn to Tourach if they throw a shock, Fatal Push, or whatever else at it. Sunset Saboteur is an independently strong creature that may be solid within the context of any given format. The full package of abilities makes it look like it could see some play. This creature gets worse as the game develops, so you want to close the game out early with it. This is a solid creature that dies to anything, but at the cost of an extra card, which is not necessarily as punishing these days. I'm curious to see if this one is good enough for 75-card formats. Timeline Culler Last up for this week, we'll look at Timeline Culler. Timeline Culler fits the aristocrat shell perfectly. It provides a sticky threat that can come in and out of the game and travel from zone to zone, but always ends up back in play. You could see Timeline Culler in eternal formats with Vengevine because you can cast it from the graveyard, your hand, or even exiled from when it's warped. Notably, you can cast this from your hand or graveyard for its warp cost. It's not limited to just your graveyard. While the stats on Timeline Culler are nothing to be super excited about, its ability to come into play from any zone leaves it as a card worth exploring as just a sticky threat or a card you get value out of from self-mill or dredge effects. The double-black upfront cost is a bit prohibitive, but nothing too concerning since you can warp it for a single black then cast it from exile later. This is a cool card that's thematically flavorful and has potential in a variety of different formats. That will wrap it up for this week. If you haven't noticed, a lot of the cards that are standing out to me are somewhat aggressive black creatures, and none of them are slam dunks to see play. The set overall appears on the weak side, but we still have more to see, and I won't be surprised if we see some bangers. As far as Limited, the set seems like it could be a little slow, but there's no telling until we see how it plays out. As someone who prefers a slower Limited format, I'm curious to see the entire set to get a grasp on it for Limited. Hopefully, Edge of Eternities can fill the massive footprint Final Fantasy left on the Magic world, as it's a tough act to follow. We'll continue to look at Edge of Eternities previews right up until the set release. See you soon.

Even though I'm still enjoying Final Fantasy, there's another set primed for release. Edge of Eternities preview season has begun. While the set's space theme doesn't resonate with me as much as Final Fantasy, it's at least new and interesting in the world of MTG. Let's take a look at some of the previewed cards from outer space. Tezzeret, Cruel Captain Tezzeret, Cruel Captain is the cheapest colorless planeswalker we've seen. Tezzeret's static ability to gain loyalty when an artifact enters makes you want to play it as quickly as possible and then immediately dump your hand. Vintage, specifically Vintage Cube, is the best fit, where cards like Mana Crypt and Mana Vault exist. This is one of the few cards from recent years that I have to try in Vintage Cube. Outside of that, maybe it could be in a Modern Affinity deck. Especially with Mox Opal unbanned, Tezzeret could have an impact, but I'm doubtful if it doesn't have a serious engine to enable. This card offers many opportunities for casual play. However, I don't think there's enough support for a card like this in Standard or Pioneer, but it has some potential beyond these formats. Consult the Star Charts Consult the Star Charts is the best impulse effect I've seen to date. Often, when you're casting a card like this on turn two, it's because you're looking for lands or occasionally a removal spell. While this won't get you as deep as impulse would that early, it has a massive upside of looking at more cards as the game develops and eventually just becomes a Dig Through Time for four mana. Once the game drags on long enough, you can start chaining them while sculpting a perfect hand. Consult is also the kind of card selection that heavily favors control or combo control decks, rather than decks like Phoenix or Izzet Prowess. Those decks favor one-mana cantrips and support archetypes that are playing longer, slower games, which I think is great. In the past, a card like this would always see play and be one of the most played cards in several cases. It will likely see play in those kinds of decks, but it's unlikely to see play in a deck like Dimir Midrange or Izzet Prowess in Standard. Consult the Stars Charts is an incredible addition to Magic. It has the potential to see play in Standard and Pioneer and maybe even beyond that in some cases. Uthros, Titanic Godcore Uthros, Titantic Godcore is what we call a fixed Tolarian Academy. This introduces us to a new set mechanic called station. Stations are places you can dock your crew by tapping them to add their power in counters to the station and unlock an ability. In this case, once you've tapped twelve power worth of creatures, your planet becomes activated and turns into a Tolarian Academy. Your first question may be, if I have twelve power in creatures, why am I not just attacking? We can tap summoning sick creatures with these stations. Play a 3/3, tap it for three counter, untap, and attack on your next turn. As a Limited player, I won't like this mechanic because it incentivizes players to not block, which may create a much faster-paced game. That's not necessarily true, as it cuts both ways. Sometimes, we'll be racing to get our station online rather than attacking because it will impact the game in a more favorable way. Regardless, the concept is interesting, but sadly, this land cycle will likely be mostly unplayed in competitive play because they enter tapped. In 2025. lands coming into play tapped on any turn other than turn one is far too punishing. Ultimately, I think all of these cool lands will be largely unplayed unless one is previewed with a unique and extremely powerful ability. Nova Hellkite Nova Hellkite introduces us to warp, another new mechanic in the set. Warp is a cool concept similar to adventure. Looking at Nova Hellkite, the play pattern with this card will be to warp it on turn three, hoping to kill an opponent's one-toughness creature, attack for four, and exile the creature. Then, on turn five, we cast it again, hoping to kill another small creature, but this time, it will stay in play permanently. As cool as it is, I don't think Nova Hellkite will see tons of Standard play because it's a lot of mana to achieve the play pattern I just laid out. However, you can just cast it for five mana, and it plays something like a weaker Glorybringer. That's too underpowered for today's game. Warp gives us a lot of interesting wiggle room for card design, and I'm curious to see how far it's pushed. Generally, any form of cost reduction like this has led to something accidentally breaking in an Eternal format, so I'm interested to see if anything like that comes out as previews roll out. Bear in mind that not all warp creatures will have haste like Nova Hellkite, so they don't all get to attack. Most of them will likely just have some effect they provide temporarily until you pay their full mana cost. This is an extremely cool mechanic that provides a lot of player choice and adds a way to spend additional mana on cards, making it harder to run out of things to do. While Nova Hellkite would have seen play in some periods of Standard, I doubt that is true anymore. It's still an interesting card that, if perhaps things got more midrange with a lot of one-toughness creatures, you could see it pop up as a counter, but I don't see that being the case. Umbral Collar Zealot I wanted to take a quick peek at Umbral Collar Zealot since we normally don't get such efficient sacrifice outlets these days. We especially don't get those sacrifices outlets as repeatable effects. We have essentially this same card as a one-mana 1/1 in Viscera Seer, which saw tons of play, but it could sacrifice itself and scryed rather than surveilled. Surveil on this card is huge since it could be put to use with a card like Bloodghast, which could fuel the graveyard repeatedly or create some kind of chain that puts stuff into the graveyard to come back out. I could see that doing something powerful in Eternal formats, but even in Standard, we have Sephiroth that will play nicely with Umbral Collar Zealot. Umbral Collar Zealot's stat line is also incredible, as this card may have seen play as a 2/2. We haven't had a nice sacrifice deck in Standard in a few years, so it will be interesting to see if a combination of rotation and Umbral Collar Zealot will give us the right power level to play competitively in Standard. I could see Umbral Collar Zealot being played in any format as some form of combo and potentially used in more fair ways in both Pioneer and Standard. This is quite the uncommon here. Cosmogrand Zenith Cosmogrand Zenith looks quite powerful. While it's not on the same level as Cori-Steel Cutter, like I've seen some comparisons, it's still strong and will look even better in some cases. You want Cosmogrand at the top of your curve in a low-to-the-ground deck. Cosmogrand Zenith may feel like you want to load your deck up with creatures to push the ability to put counters on all your creatures, but more likely you want this card in a deck full of cantrips and cheap instants so you can trigger it on your and your opponent's turns. Cosmogrand wants you to play a lot of one-mana spells so you can play and trigger it in the same turn. It will demand an answer from your opponent unless they can ignore it by enabling a faster game plan, but they won't always be correct in that assessment because Cosmogrand can close the game quickly. If you're able to cast and trigger it on your own turn, and then chain two more spells on your opponent's turn, untap, and do it again, then you're already attacking for 11 damage. While that's not realistic on early turns, it becomes more realistic as the game develops with proper planning. I can't see Cosmogrand not having some immediate impact on Standard when it's printed, especially after rotation. It's not the kind of card I'm excited about because it dumps out power and toughness and forces your opponent to kill it or it takes over the game. In many cases, it will feel bad when it eats a removal spell and provides little to no value, but in other cases, it's going to take over the game on its own. This is an extremely strong card, not quite the power level of Cori-Steel Cutter, but it's still strong enough to raise some eyebrows, and it's likely the strongest card I've seen so far. Edge of Eternities looks interesting so far and potentially really powerful. I'm hopeful it's as fun to play as Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy is one of my favorite sets, if not my favorite set, of all time. I'm hoping Edge of Eternities can keep that momentum. I was skeptical when I heard the set theme, but so far it looks interesting and hard to predict without playing the new mechanics since they're fairly unique, which I love. We'll continue exploring outer space in the weeks to come as more Edge of Eternities previews are revealed.

This past week, WotC made a highly anticipated B and R announcement. Standard hadn't changed in many months because red decks were overrepresented and oppressive. Before I dive into it, I'm going to explain my theory on how we got to this place where a card like Hopeless Nightmare would need to be banned. It's not news that Magic design has catered to Commander, currently the game's most popular version. While Commander has its own sets and subsets, you can look at a set like Final Fantasy and see there's not much going on for the old-guard Standard player who wants to brew and play something new. Instead, we get countless amounts of legends and side quests, both figuratively and literally. So we have a longer Standard cycle, and my gut reaction is to hate it. Standard is the one format left saved from the "Eternal" formula. Removing that makes it feel like Pioneer lite. We've also realized that each set has many more cards that are designed solely for formats other than Standard. Each set is more like a watered-down version of an older set that aimed its cards directly at competitive play. Even with more sets, the efficient cards and decks outshine anything new. Final Fantasy was geared at casual play, and as a fan of the IP, they did an incredible job with the flavor and how it translates into Magic. As a Limited player, it's an all-time favorite Limited format. The flavor, the gameplay, everything is fantastic. As it translates to Standard, outside of Vivi, we've seen almost no play from other cards in the set. However, every couple of sets, we have a cheap, efficient, pushed card like Monstrous Rage, and they see more and more play. When something actually works, it's hard for other archetypes to break through because there are not many tools to compete. Now, time to get into how I feel about the bans specifically. Here's the list of cards banned from Standard: Full Article can be found here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/banned-and-restricted-june-30-2025 As you can see, this is basically at least one card from all of the most played Standard decks. It's funny to see a card like Hopeless Nightmare on the list, but their explanation for some of these bannings makes a lot of sense, and I applaud them for being proactive. Rotation is around the corner, and they decided to make things interesting these last couple of months. Ban the obvious decks that we've seen before, and many of the cards will already be rotating. I'm curious about some of the choices, as they seem to be directed at uncommons and commons so as to not "ban" a card like Manifold Mouse and choose Heartfire Hero instead. Regardless, they want to put Standard in a completely new state and give players a puzzle to solve. I absolutely love this. This is why I play Magic and other games. I want to play new cards and try new things. I didn't get into Magic to master a deck and play it for thousands of reps. I know there are players who love that, and if history is any indicator, that won't be changing once a new meta settles after rotation. Those players will still get to spend the entire year mastering a deck once the format ends and is inevitably solved. For those of us tired of the same old, now we have something fun to explore over the summer until it's time for a new set and a rotation. Hopeless Nightmare stands out to me as a card that should indicate a problem, though. It's a weak card in a vacuum. It's an indicator that the card design is pushing certain mechanics, and Hopeless Nightmare is one of the things being exploited by that design philosophy. The same would be true for This Town Ain't Big Enough. These aren't strong cards in a vacuum, but in conjunction, they create powerful and annoying gameplay. Cori-Steel Cutter, while I maintain it was a bit overhyped in Standard, was obviously quite strong. For years, we haven't had two-drops that push the envelope on being difficult to remove, create a snowball effect, and work best with other cheap cards. Dark Confidant, for instance, at least gets one-for-one'd when cast. Cutter, you have to kill the equipment, yes, but you also can get clocked by the first free prowess token that generally comes out during the turn the cutter is cast. Abuelo's Awakening was obviously a powerful card that will only be exploited for its ability to put in an over-cost enchantment. There's plenty of available counterplay to it. I don't think it would be that oppressive, but it would force players to start with a lot of graveyard hate either in their main deck or sideboards. I'm fine with a card like this being banned in Standard since it plays way too much like a Pioneer deck that effectively ends the game after resolving one spell on a specific target. Up the Beanstalk is a flat-out mistake. It's extremely powerful with any cost-reduction mechanic and creates game states that make it nearly impossible for decks like Domain to ever run out of cards at the cost of two mana. Multiple copies chain together and end up allowing players to chain spells, making it impossible to catch up. This card would potentially have been fine if they made it legendary. There are some flavor reasons that would "play," but they'd have to change the name to "Jack's Beanstalk" or something. Regardless, Up the Beanstalk is an example of what the ban list should be for — a card that's just too efficient and effective. The last time I played Standard for any real amount of time was before players added the This Town Ain't Big Enough packages. I played Dimir Midrange, and it was excellent. I expect it to return as a heavily played deck again. On top of that, Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa, my GOAT, played an interesting Izzet Deck at the PT to an 8-1 record, and the deck continues to put up results. This deck is losing no cards, and while that sounds exciting, be wary that the format is completely changed. A deck that's good for one environment may not be as good in another, but it could also be much better. This is where I'd start if I were going to be testing Standard. PVDDR's Izzet Cauldron I believe the next Arena Championship Qualifier will be Standard, so I may have to test the format a bit before playing. I have my qualification locked up, so I just have to figure out if I'm free that weekend and what the format looks like. Overall, I think these Standard bans were well done, and I love the proactive philosophy. I am not a fan of the scheduled ban announcement as implemented because it's too slow. I love the idea in theory, but in practice, they should have more scheduled dates to allow for emergency bans that aren't instant. For now, I'm still interested in Final Fantasy Limited and will continue to grind it until something new comes along.

This past weekend was one of the most fun weekends I've had playing Magic in a long time, maybe ever. From the comfort of our own homes, we played the Arena Direct for highly coveted Collector Booster Boxes of Final Fantasy. The secondary market for these things is through the roof because of the set's hype and a certain serialized Golden Chocobo card. I spent almost all my free time practicing this set in anticipation. While I believe the format to be dynamic, fun, and re-playable, it is a tough set to get a massive edge in. I find both the games, drafts, and even Sealed deck building more difficult than the average set, but I enjoy the challenge. I can't complain about my results in Arena Direct. I entered 13 events and won six, finishing with a 78% win percentage across the best-of-one Sealed events. My only regret is not making time for another half dozen or so runs. Alas, I found the deck-building process incredibly challenging. I may dive deeper into Sealed deck building when we have the Play Booster event coming up soon, but for now, let's just talk about Limited as a whole. The format is well-balanced, and where I find success seems to fluctuate based on a Limited metagame — yes, as formats develop in Limited, metagames are created. Let me explain. Final Fantasy is the most popular set ever. With the IP, we got a bunch of newer and returning players, and if you want to play Magic using only the Final Fantasy cards, you're limited to, well, Limited. When I'm sitting on Arena drafting with seven random players, they're less experienced on average than the grindiest Limited players you'll find on MTGO or in a PT-testing house. Arena is how a majority of us interact with Limited these days, and the Arena Ladder pairs you against other similarly ranked players. Well, this means you're drafting with one group of players but only playing against players close to or at your skill level. This creates a particular metagame at the mythic level. If, for instance, Izzet is the best deck in the format, as it's widely seen right now, then it may be easy to force the archetype, but when you get to actual gameplay, you're often playing against those decks. As the format develops, we see fewer players drafting, which leaves more experienced drafters behind. This means Izzet will be harder to acquire, and your decks will look worse overall. Now, what if some strong decks are rarely drafted? I noticed this right after the Arena Direct. After swearing off white for a while because it's hard to move into an archetype other than aggro, I decided to draft around a card that scared me every time I saw it in play — Phantom Train. Choo Choo Every single time a player cast it, I'd evaluate the board and have an "oh crap" moment. I realized I had to get it off the battlefield or never risk attacking or tapping out again. It can gobble up everything on the battlefield and deal tons of damage in a single attack. Left unchecked, it will completely take over the game. While I was done with taking screenshots of my decks past 40, I found a great example of the deck I could replicate frequently throughout about 10 drafts, drafting it six times. Here's TheHamTV's draft, which he permitted me to use as an example for the archetype. TheHamTV's BW Train While I may have made a different card choice or two in his pool, the point remains that Phantom Train becomes grossly overpowered when you pair it with a pile of job select equipment, Undercity Dire Rats, Dwarven Castle Guards, or any card that puts multiple permanents in play for a single card. The Judge Magister Gabranth synergizes with it perfectly, allowing for easy turn-five goldfishes at times. Right now, the most popular decks I play against are Izzet, Golgari, and Dimir. The beauty of BW Train is that it doesn't want the same cards as those decks, so you only fight over the removal, which is always the case anyways. That said, you don't need much removal if you can get multiple trains. Train has a low win rate on 17lands (54%), which is likely weighed down by the requirement for a specific deck and not being easy to play. You don't want to expose it often to removal when the opponent has mana up. In fact, they have to respect the card so much that it can act as almost an Armageddon for the opponent. You can force them to leave their removal for multiple turns, especially if you're ahead on the board. You could protect it with a card like Restoration Magic, but the deck mostly wants to play spells that put permanents into play. The beauty of this deck is that the Train's average taken position is ninth pick. That's right, the archetype's defining card is easy to pick up, and while the deck will function without it as a simple low-curve white aggro deck, it's a hard card to replace for its effect. Right now, the cards in this archetype are at a low point. Rakdos's stock is down, making Black Mage's Rod easier to pick up. People aren't high on white because it's not in any of the big three archetypes, making white job select equipment easy to acquire (like White Mage's Staff), and Monk's Fist is basically free. While you shouldn't expect to get multiple trains, if one is opened, you'll likely always see it because of its draft position. You always want some, but not a ton of, removal for this archetype. Vicious Treachery is ideal because you'll always have permanents lying around that make it efficient, which is what the name of the game is with this deck. However, Slash of Light and Fate of the Sun-Cryst are serviceable and easy to pick up. White Auracite, while clunky, can remove a permanent and feed the Train if necessary. After blockers are declared, sacrifice it to the train to get lethal damage. Train can be played outside white decks, but it's tougher to support. Every color has its own two-drop job select equipment, but blue and red also have three-drops that put multiple creatures into play in Dragoon's Wyvern and Mysidian Elder. I've been experimenting a lot with the format, and this archetype is a moderately hidden gem that, while it's not a deck I'll force, it's definitely in my toolbelt now. I don't know of any Arena Open dates yet, but I'm assuming we will see one for the most popular set ever, and I want access to every tool when it comes time to draft. The format will keep evolving, and it's always nice to find a powerful deck that is underdrafted. I'll keep looking for more, and I'm excited to play more events with one of my favorite ever Limited sets.