Grip.Cards

Marvel Snap, Slowly Moving to Pay-to-Win

From digitaltrends.com

Complicated feelings about this article — but not about how factual it is, which is, very. It’s wild how one of the best and most generous ramp-up experiences gives way quickly to a progression hell that does not even attempt to hide the roadbumps it introduces.

Currently, the three bundles I have in the store tab cost a minimum of $49.99 (all the way to $99.99), and they each grant only a single specific guaranteed card — the $49.99 gives enough currency for a single other card from the token store, one of the $99.99 ones offers enough for three. I am not interested in spending this kind of money in this kind of game, and the only cheaper option is to play — a lot.

Null Signal’s Standard Ban List 23.03

From nullsignal.games

Looks like, from the reactions, great work getting a slightly skewed format back on track, including preemptive bans of unfortunately very recent cards to prevent cascading failures. One of these bans was Endurance, which has been a center of gravity for all formats it’s been legal in.

It also dawned on me that the opacity of “they banned the boat” to non-Netrunner players evokes the same energy as “Aqua got ’norted!” in a way.

Magic Announcements: LotR, Commander Masters, Arena

From magic.wizards.com

Running hot on the heels of the first look at the Spring set(s), multiple announcements from Wizards on non-Standard-legal sets coming this Summer & Fall:

• Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth is a “Horizons” set (a set of new cards that goes directly into a format other than Standard — specifically, this time, Modern and Alchemy/Historic) that will take up the summer slot;
• Newly announced Commander Masters, also in the summer, seems geared to entrenched Commander players, offering Commander Draft, new higher-level precons, and reprints. The precons have a handful of new cards, but the rest is reprints, as befits a Masters set.
• Arena gets release dates for the Alchemy add-on to ONE, and for Shadows over Innistrad: Remastered.

The amount of product year over year in Magic has not changed, but the announcements have been concentrated so as to leave more time to digest them. If one was feeling product fatigue for whatever reason, it is only likely to be less noticed, not less present.

A First Look at March of the Machine

From magic.wizards.com

An incredible amount of crowd-pleasers: mechanically unique double-sided Praetors, revisits to long-unvisited planes (including Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, Mercadia and Shandalar!), unlikely pair team-ups between creatures (I ship it), compleated antagonists from across all of recent Magic history, new Planechase cards as part of the Commander products, the mass return of fan-favorite card treatments, the ability to open special-frame copies of cards that currently go for $80-100, a compleated Omnath — and even a (tragic) peek at the Aftermath sub-set coming out in the early summer.

Reid Duke Wins Pro Tour Phyrexia

From magic.gg

The Top 8 was stacked with familiar pro names, including the first Pro Tour top placement for Nathan Steuer… the reigning World Champion (who had qualified using MTGO).