Preview season is here. The PAX Panel went down Friday afternoon. There are two Grand Prix this weekend in Miami and Liverpool. Between an awesome, flavorful Standard soon to be overrun with Dragons and awesome new takes on exciting characters, mindblowing new storytelling mechanics and origin stories for your favorite Planeswalkers in Magic Origins, and a teaser trailer for the chaos to come in October 2015, it's exciting time to be playing Magic. This week, we're excited to share just a few of our favorite things the week had to offer.

Picks of the Week: March 8, 2015

Heather Dawn Lafferty is the Community Manager for Gathering Magic, collector and creator of the 20 Tweets series, and resident Angel.Speaking of tweets, you can tweet her with your thoughts regarding Gathering Magic content, Magic, or Nintendo at @Revisedangel.

Let’s just spend a Saturday together. I’ll just leave this open and check in with you as the day drifts by. To begin with it is 6:45 am, which means I desperately need tea. Now being me, a uber geeker and committed fan, my tea can’t just be “regular”.

I have been an Outlander Book fan since I read the first book at age 22. There are only four series I have read the entire catalog (from start to finish, every damn word) more then three times: Outlander, Lord of the Rings, Game of Throne and Dragon Lance. So when one of my Twitter Sisters (and fellow #cmdr player) recommended a tea blend based on the personality of Jamie (swoons) from Outlander I had to order some. Being able to incorporate parts of your fandoms into every day life is AWESOME.

Now that tea has been brewed it is time to open search the web and sort the mail before the children awaken from their slumber. The first thing I notice is they have begun mailing out the Super Smash Brothers reward soundtrack for those of us that bought copies of both Super Smash on Wii U and 3DS (I know this because I just opened mine after retrieving the mail) . If you are one of the Nintendo Geekers but didn’t get this special don’t forget to go to Club Nintendo and start spending all your saved coins before Club Nintendo closes for good and morphs into something else. There are a ton of games you can download or cute little items to order.

I have spend the last two hours cursing Magic sites and checking out all the spoilers I missed during the work week. I won’t get into it too deeply here because I am sure my fellows here will have plenty to say in their Picks of the Week. One thing non-Magic related I was SUPER DUPER excited about is Shovel Knight has a freaking expansion coming out! I am primarily, above all else, a platform gamer. Shovel Knight is my beating heart and now we get to play as the Plague Knight! Though no one can ever take my original Knight of Shovel.

It is almost 11:00 am now and all my buddies will be coming over for Commander Day. One of my crew is working hard on getting in shape so I decided to make snack time a little healthier today.

I blasted out my Kaalia Commander deck and rained hellfire and angels all over their faces.

Now it is late in the afternoon and I have ship this off to my Team so it can be edited and published in the Picks of the Week series, which will go live tonight. I can’t wait to see what my Fellows were up to his week. I am still working on an Innistrad Commander Deck. Still having trouble picking a Commander.

XOXO

@RevisedAngel

Alex Ullman is Associate Editor for Gathering Magic, a renowned Pauper (cube and Constructed) player, and member of the victorious 2009 Magic Online Community Cup team.You can find him on Twitter as @nerdtothecore.

PAX East Panel

I've never attended a gaming conference. Sure, I've gone places for work and have been to a couple of Grand Prix, but never a true blue con with a capital C. Yet for the past few years that has not mattered in the slightest because Magic has brought the stuff that matters to me.Thanks to streaming, all the informationg I want is readily available. So of course I blocked off an hour of time at work (don't judge – it was a Friday afternoon) to watch the Magic panel at PAX East 2015. And I was not disappointed.

We had dragons, and Sarkhan, Unbroken and then we had people punching dragons. And then some more dragons. There was the almost mandatory Modern Masters 2015 Edition plug featuring Tarmogoyf, and then the unveiling of the super-cool transforming Planeswalkers from Magic Origins. There was so much awesome thrown my way I could not handle it.

Putting the brakes on for just a moment, I am really loving this Magic renaissance. The way the story and the gameplay are being woven together is intensely exciting for me. After absorbing the new Liliana, I could not help but recognize how incredibly right the card felt. Of course this is how you represent ascension – how else could it be done? It was a feeling I felt casting Craw Wurms and another I felt a few years ago when we all took a trip to Zendikar.

And then, the teaser. The landscape panning up to the floating lands and the hedron. Grab your backpacks and your towels, we're going to Battle for Zendikar. I. Can't. Wait.

Zarya in Overwatch

I don't play many video games (read any). I used to dabble in World of Warcraft and while the world building efforts of Blizzard impress me, I don't indulge. When I heard about Overwatch I was intrigued and enjoyed the art of the game, but that was about it. I had no idea about the response to the characters – the search for body diversity in female characters that had been provided to their male counterparts.

That all changed when I read about Zarya. And it makes sense. I have what you would call a non-typical body. As an adult male I'm short and skinny (and it has made buying clothing an absolute nightmare). People who look like me aren't the typical comic book heroes, but every so often we get something.

Zarya may be playing off a known trope, but at the same time she represents a step forward in promoting differing body types. I am hopeful for the day when we get characters like Zarya, Alesha, Ashiok, and Narset and don't applaud the efforts for diversity but rather expect the differences to be the norm.

Flex

Back in 2006 my then girlfriend encouraged me to submit an article to Star City Games. I as involved in the player run Pauper community on Magic Online and felt like I had something to say. I went through their open submission process feeling confident in what I had written. A few days later I got a note requesting some changes. That note came from Ferrett Steinmetz. My first editor. I made the changes and the article went up.

Ferrett was always a great writer. Ever since I remember devouring Magic content he was there, talking about multiplayer games before I even really cared about that style of play. It didn't matter – I read him anyway because the man knew how to write.

When he finally stopped sharing his love of multiplayer with the world, I followed his web comic, and then occasionally his blog. I saw the highs and lows of his life. I heard he was writing a book. This is that book.

Flex is enjoyable. As of this writing I'm about halfway through it and I can't put it down. I'd say it's a page turner, but I'm reading it on a Kindle, so there's that. Ferrett's persective shines through and it's so nice to see him use the langauge I am used to in a way to tell a greater story.

Don't pick up this book to support a Magic palyer- pick it up because it is a damn good writer telling a damn fine story.

Andrew Wilson is the Copy Editor for Gathering Magic. In his free time, he enjoys the Florida sun, winning games, playing Commander, and sharing some of the fun on Twitter. If you notice anything wrong, he's to blame!

Dice Masters caught my interest when it first came out. Launching with Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men, the game was full of some of my favorite superheroes and awesome little dice to represent them. Dice Masters plays like a mix of Magic and the standalone board game Quarriors, but I knew that even if I wasn’t going to play the game much at all, a few booster purchases at 99¢ each would be worthwhile just for some sweet dice.

However, by the time I bought my four booster packs, containing a total of eight cards and their corresponding dice—three of which, by some distribution of statistical probability, turned out to be Venom—the game was already pretty much sold out everywhere. When the news of a forthcoming reprint was announced, I pre-ordered a starter set for just over $11 from CoolStuffInc. Little did I know how far out that reprint would be.

Marvel Dice Masters: Uncanny X-Men released last year, giving players who had missed out on AvX the chance to finally get into the game. The set included a bunch of my favorite characters, which worries me somewhat—as an X-Men fan, I may find myself less excited by sets featuring Avengers, Spider-Man, and so on, as X-Men have now been mined for content. Fortunately, the mutant team has plenty more to offer, so here’s to hoping their titular set isn’t their Dice Masters peak.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Dice Masters: Series One released a month or so ago, featuring over a hundred cards (and dice) that interest me very little. However, I still enjoy the game, and some of the cards do have unique and powerful effects. Also, even if I don’t recognize the icons on the dice, they’re still nice-looking pieces of plastic.

But just a couple weeks ago, the AvX starters came back in to CSI, and I was able to fill my pre-order. Beast is one of the strongest characters I now have my hands on, and WizKids has said they plan to keep all their sets in print. I don’t know how long they can keep that up, but it at least means I should have a chance to buy some more boosters and have a shot at that super-rare Black Widow — Tsarina or Green Goblin — Gobby. My dream, though, is still to open Scarlet Witch — Controls Probability from UXM (so I don’t have to pay that $35 price tag for the single!).

Dungeons & Dragons Dice Masters: Battle for Faerûn should be coming out this week. As much as I’ve enjoyed D&D, and as much nicer the graphic design is for the cards than it was for Marvel or Yu-Gi-Oh!, I have to say I’m disappointed they’re going with monsters, dragons, and race–class adventurer combos instead of individual characters. DC Dice Masters: Justice League should be out shortly after, but DC is not my favorite brand of comics. Still, I love fantasy and superheroes, and I’m excited to mix treants with Nightcrawler, Green Lantern, and Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Oh, and Marvel Dice Masters: Age of Ultron should be out within a few months—let’s just hope for some X-Men.

Carlos Gutierrez is an Associate Editor for Gathering Magic, an engineer-in-training, and a Commander and Pauper enthusiast. By day, he works as a STEM educator, but he spends his weekends hitting all his land drops and trying new board games, puzzles, and video games. You can find all of him sharing Commander craziness, baked goods on Twitter, and complaints about graduate school at @cag5383.

Awesome Announcements at the PAX East Panel

To be brutally honest, I've never really enjoyed Magic panels that I've been able to catch streaming from PAX East or Comic Con. It always felt kind of artificial to me. We know there are going to be some previews. We know we might get a sneak peek at the theme of the next set or block. We know there are going to be some number of questions that are almost all met with variations of "We can't discuss that right now."

This one was different. This time, the Wizards teams brought really brought their creations to life and showed how much thought goes into the worldbuilding, rather than focusing almost exclusively on mechanics and previews. I loved that there was more discussion of what happened in Tarkir and why it mattered. Why should I care about this set beyond just picking up the cards I think are most interesting? Because Sarkhan is now a character out of time. Because Ugin is alive now, and Nicol Bolas is going to find out. Because there's the promise of even more awesome cards and characters to come. And that's before they started dropping the real bombs on us.

The real thing to be excited about? Double. Faced. Planeswalkers. These new cards are an incredible take on creating a resonant and flavorful mechanic that accurately depicts a pivotal moment in a well-loved character's life. These awesome new cards start out as Legendary Creatures. After all, planeswalkers were all once relatively normal people. In a volatile moment, emotions and power surge, and a spark is ignited. The creature transforms into a Planeswalker. This mechanic is interesting, the cards seem powerful, but most importantly, they tell an awesome story. Liliana was a healer. She made questionable choices in order to try to save her brother, and they led her down the path of igniting her spark and becoming the iconic necromancer of Magic. Her desire to master death starts out innocently enough, but then devolves into something much darker. These stories are interesting, give more depth to characters that we already know and love and now we get to not only hear them told, but participate in them with these new cards.

New Technology with Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa

New formats are always exciting because you never know what to expect. New decks emerge by the hour, cards shift in relative value at mind boggling speeds, and you can never be certain of what your opponent is trying to do. New formats are dynamic in a very straightforward way. "Solved" formats are exciting in a different way. In more developed formats, it's not always about finding a new deck that breaks the format wide open. Sometimes it's just about finding a new sideboard strategy that increases your chances against the top tier strategies. Sometimes it's small shifts in gameplay patterns. Sometimes it's finding the one card or interaction that no one else has.

This week, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa started what I hope is an ongoing series that takes a look at some of the interesting, albeit subtle developments of the previous week. Why do these adaptations exist? Are they good? Will they persist and proliferate throughout the metagame? Or are they less valuable now that the cat is out of the bag? These kinds of subtle developments are often what makes the difference between good and great players. Besides, I personally think that, once a format is well-developed, it's more interesting to see the thoughts that go into changing the last five cards of a deck than it is to see how someone built something from the ground up.

That One card

Recently I've been in a deckbuilding rut. My Commander decks are all perfectlyl serviceable. They're also just not running as well as I'd like them to. I know exactly which cards are underperforming and exactly what kind of effect I want in that slot, but I just haven't been able to find the right card. I don't even know if it exists! We've all been in that kind of situation. One of the best feelings in all of Magic is that moment of inspiration, the flash of insight where you put all the pieces together and find The One Perfect Card that you'd been looking for.

For me, right now that card is Read the Runes.

I don't want to say too much, since I'm working on a longer piece about why this card, while so seemingly innocuous, is the perfect card for what I'm trying to do, but I will share a few thoughts. There are always excess permanents in Commander, whether they're tokens, lands, or something else altogether. Being able to turn those into real cards at instant speed and for relatively cheap is pretty insane. Similarly, you're going to find dead cards at some point, and the ability to filter through a huge chunk of your deck and stock your graveyard is pretty insane. And that's all before we even get to what happens when you can start sacrificing permanents at instant speed.

Read the Runes certainly doesn't look like much, but The One Perfect Card rarely does until it's put in exactly the right context.