Because you will likely be in three colors, the format is a lot slower and mana fixing is more important. In previous drafts, many players would not take Guildgates very highly, and at times they would even table. Now, players are prioritizing Guildgates over most playable cards. This means that if you want Guildgates, you need to take them early. A slower format means that cards that were once unplayable in the previous sets will now see play with in the full block draft. Today I'm going to discuss some of the cards that got better in Dragon's Maze draft but were never really playable before.

Right on cue, you hear shouting from the other room, so you go in, and there’s Brady—a 50-year old regular that spends hundreds of dollars on product every week yet can never find two match wins to rub together—making a huge scene about not coming back if the store’s going to allow cheaters. Not only is he causing a commotion, but he’s getting the rest of the regulars 20-and-up worked into a lather, yelling—yelling!—about refusing to come back if this kid isn’t banned.

A quick glance at Gus shows him in the middle of all of this, softly sobbing and glancing around for an exit: windows, doors, a vent, whatever. It doesn’t matter; the kid just wants out. In this moment it’s pretty clear that this is a pretty standard example of a young child with no real-world experience that made a decision that he clearly didn’t realize would impact anything but himself. Because that’s the key to narcissism: it’s not malicious. They aren’t cheating to see you lose, they’re just cheating to see themselves win.

Le Multicolore

For those gold cards that are neither guild champions nor Fuse keyworded. "Multicolore" is also a variant of the Louis Vuitton Monogram design created by Takashi Murakami for those who are into either luxury goods or contemporary Japanese art.

One of the first things I had to wrap my head around when I became a developer was that the numbers we were working on were all mutable. When you look at a printed Magic card, sometimes you might say to yourself "I wish that cost just one mana less" or "I wish that it drew three cards instead of two." Well, that is the somewhat unique super power that the Magic development team has. We get to lock those numbers in. We get to try out different things and get an idea of what the best numbers are. Sometimes, the original stabs that design takes are correct, and sometimes there are numbers that work better with the card. It's more than just adding or subtracting mana; sometimes we get to double the mana for triple the effect, and that is just what makes the card the version we want in a set. Sometimes we remove mana and add a condition or drawback. Other times, we blow up all of the numbers on the card and find something that fits a similar role, but does so in a way we think will be more important for the set.

It's tempting, of course, to say, "Well, not everything can be for new players—what about the loyal fan base that's been with you forever?" There's some merit to that. But I'm not sure the set even succeeded along that axis, really. Innistrad proved you can create some truly great game play without having to use fifteen million words to do it. Meanwhile, cards like Cyclopean Giant, Plated Pegasus, and Glass Asp certainly contained references that I got, but I wasn't really sure why it was cool that I was getting them. "Ooh—two Cyclopean Mummys stapled together inside a Cyclopean Tomb! I remember now! What's better than three sucky cards? One sucky card that's a combination of all three!"