The Gathering Magic team is ready to start the year off on the right foot - with plenty of Magic content, culture, and Fate Reforged previews. There's plenty to be excited about in the new year, and this week we touch on a little bit of everything from our love-hate relationship with the Fate Reforged previews to Magic culture and community halfway around the world. Can 2015 really mean bigger and better things for Magic as a game, community, and culture? We're only one week in, we're pretty optimistic.

Picks of the Week: January 04, 2015

Adam Styborski is Content Manager for Gathering Magic, writer of Command Tower for magicthegathering.com, text coverage reporter at Grand Prix and Pro Tours for Wizards, a Pauper Cube developer, and known curmudgeon.You can find him sharing things on Twitter as @the_stybs.

The Song and Dance of CES

The Consumer Electronics Show is coming this week and I find myself excited. While I’m certainly a fan of technology (and a shirt that says “All My Vices Are Devices.”) the show really isn’t where the best companies put on the most exciting technology.

It’s a glimpse into the wild and wonderful potential future.

Like how steam punk is Victorian-era science cranked to it’s impossible heights, so many of the devices and technology that appears at CES in the past few years are simply strange and outright weird. I love the ideas and creativity – raw, unadulterated creativity to drive attention – companies small and shockingly big pour into their visions of the future.

It’s a wonderful way to see that while it’s the Apples, Googles, and another others of the world defining our everyday experiences, there’s so much more possible that dreamers will always find a way.

Even CES ideas that go nowhere are fascinating little slices of imagination. I love it

Not a Vanilla but Manila Grand Prix Family

Based in the US Northeast, I haven’t (Yet!?) travelled to any far and wide locales to cover a Grand Prix. As a content manager, community writer, and self-professed “Commander fanatic” I spend a lot of time reading and interacting around Magic.

Most of my interactions are with similarly aged, US-centered folks. If you’ve taken any course in statistical sampling you can begin to see a problem with this.

Reading coverage from Grand Prix far removed from my worldview (I’m looking beyond you, Europe!) gives me fascinating slices of Magic I’d have never seen without actively looking.

Reading that a family a literal half-a-world-away from me faced the same conflict of culture and experience, the same rapid growth of a child learning the game to blossoming into a competitor, and the same excitement around cards because they’re just freaking cool.

Magic is a game that bridges, binds, and builds a global community, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Really? REALLY?!

It’s hardly a secret that I’m not a fan of how powerful blue is in many formats. Particularly in Commander where two blue mana (or two blue and two green) not only counters your expensive spell but gives them mana to use on their turn, blue’s ability to stifle, disappoint, and annoy is so legendary the average monoblue commander is the same as painting a target on one’s face.

Obviously, Fate Reforged is giving blue yet another super annoying way to muck things up.

This card is amazing. It’s an instant, so it’s a tricky anytime in any turn. It’s also a Clone… at any time in any turn. Red, typically, works hard to just get a “shimmer” copy that sticks around for the rest of the current turn. Giving blue another permanent Clone, one that will often leave them ahead on mana and prepared to answer other threats while they wait with it in their hand, is pretty obnoxious.

At least they didn’t print a way to copy your Planeswalkers and… oh.

Add Some Flavor to Your Magic Diet

While what’s “good” or “bad” flavor is subjective to each player, I generally find there’s some surprising agreement within the community. Puns, inside jokes, and idiots are all things we typically appreciate, and the success of Uncharted Realms had put the pulse of the game’s lore at everyone’s fingertips.

While I don’t agree 100% with A. E. Marling’s claims, I found his 2014 flavor review fitting for a year defined by Greek classics and throwback hooks throughout releases. There was certainly plenty to appreciate and laugh at!

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.

Walking the Planes

In the week leading up to Christmas Nathan Holt decided to recap his personal favorite sketches from the popular “Walking the Planes” series in a send up of a brand new episode. The Wizard himself showed us pages of the spellbook, taking us behind the scenes and giving us a glimpse into the world behind the camera.

“Walking the Planes” is a different kind of content. It takes a look at the lifestyle surrounding Magic, the top level players and the grinders (heck even the high school clubs) and creates a more holistic world. We all know that Magic is more than just a game but these videos help to articulate exactly what is meant when one declares “I am a Magic player.”

There’s more, of course. Holt is rather adept at poking fun at the community at large. The comic relief is welcome, especially in the shadows of the Pro Tour which can often come across as highly competitive and super serious. Seeing titans of the game like Luis Scott-Vargas, Ben Stark, Eric Froelich, and Brian Kibler all in on the jokes make it even better. Also, there’s the feud with Mark Rosewater, which just adds to the immersive nature of the videos.

“Walking the Planes” is Magic’s court jester. It says what needs to be said in a way only it can convey. Bravo.

Fate Reforged

I was on vacation when it hit me. Coming home from a weekend away my fiancee and I had stopped off at an outlet mall to check out the shops. Then it hit 11am and I went to my phone and pulled up the latest cards.

After looking at Soulfire Grandmaster I opened up Twitter and wrote this:

I’ve been playing Magic since 1994 and the last time a set made me go “What in the world” was Future Sight. After what felt like years of “playing it safe” someone gave R&D the good drugs.

Don’t get me wrong - I loved the graveyard focused Innistrad and the old and new of Return to Ravnica. Theros hit me right in the mythological feels and Khans of Tarkir might be my favorite set to draft. Ever.

But Fate Reforged is turning all the knobs in my brain to sensory overload. Stealing counters on a white card? Returning a storm from exile? Non-red dragons? Modal enchantments? This set has everything, including attacking with face-down instants!

All I know is I cannot wait to Manifest a Contraption and give it Epic.

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.

Flowchart Magic

Chains of Mephistopheles is not a fun Magic card. I have had the pleasure of playing against it exactly once, and it was one of the most gut wrenching and demoralizing feelings I have ever had in gaming. The card doesn’t get played as much as it ought to. Partly due to its price tag. Partly due to it shutting down the effects that entrenched players tend to love: Blue card drawing and manipulation. Here’s the thing. If we’re being honest, Chains is mostly not played because it’s a pain to explain to people who haven’t seen it before. I do what when I draw a card? But only if I don’t have any cards?

I’m generally not one for alterations of art, border, and other kinds of personalization beyond small doodles and signatures. However, if I was going to play Chains, I’d definitely be using TheProxyGuy's brilliant flowchart version as a visual guide for unfamiliar opponents. The engineer in me loves flowcharts, and this one is pretty fantastically clean and easy to understand.

Embracing the Variance

Frank Karsten is one of my favorite Magic players and authors because of the calculated way he approaches the game. One of my most vivid Magic memories is staying up with a pair of my friends to watch Worlds the year that Frank piloted Greater Gifts to a finals appearance. That was a pivotal moment in my development as a player, and I’ve never looked back.

Frank’s subsequent articles about the math behind metagames and tournament results have been really interesting to the engineer in me. We can only play so many matches over so many tournaments to really figure out how a deck, matchup, or heuristic plays out. Computers can play many more matches much more quickly, and can consequently be enormously useful in determining how realistic our assumptions and “common knowledge” actually are.

As players, we often hear people talking about taking huge risks when they need to win big; drafting high risk strategies in the hopes of putting up a 3-0, for example. This week Frank takes a fascinating look at the frequency at which high variance decks actually pay off, and the assumptions that go into that. The results are both interesting and educational, and may just make you rethink the decks you were considering picking up for your next events.

Not Just for Summer

Is there anything better than ice cream? Rhetorical question. The answer is obviously no. This year, my sister gave me an ice cream churn for the holiday, and we’ve spent the last week or so in the lab testing all kinds of crazy combinations. Along with the churn came Ben and Jerry’s book about making ice cream, which I can’t recommend enough.

Ice cream seems like something that should require a pretty big investment of labor, time, or money. I’m still shocked that none of these things are true. It’s pretty cheap, all things considered. The recipes are simple, the stories are fun, and the results are tough to argue with. So far we’re pretty much just mixing together leftover stuff from the holidays that still laying around the kitchen, and the experiments are still always delicious (we have not had the need for a literal flavor graveyard. Yet.). You might say that January is the wrong month for ice cream, but you couldn’t be more wrong.