Foundations Prerelease

The latest Magic: The Gathering expansion is now upon us, and this one is proving to be a truly special experience. Foundations brings with it an all-new core set experience, but unlike past ones, it's here to stay for quite some time. The card pool also has players of all kinds excited, either to see nostalgic favorites back once more or else for the cool new designs packed within. As is tradition, game stores around the world are hosting their prerelease events this weekend, so make sure you go out and get your first look at this amazing new set at your LGS!

Alternatively, if you're unable to make it to your LGS, you can find all your Foundations and Foundations Jumpstart needs right here on CoolStuffInc.com. Orders begin shipping today, so pick up whatever you need for the upcoming Standard RCQ season, that cool new Commander deck you're working on, or just plain whatever you like.

Marvel Secret Lair Woes

Amid a wave of extreme hype, the Marvel Secret Lair products hit the Secret Lair store page this past Monday. To put it plainly: it was an unmitigated disaster. We've seen previous high profile Secret Lairs have their share of issues before, like how the Monty Python and the Holy Grail ones sold out pretty much instantly. That one was already seen as rather problematic, but this one went far beyond the issues that one had.

We're currently experiencing a technical issue and are working to restore the site as soon as possible. The Secret Lair store queue is currently paused

— MTG Secret Lair (@MTGSecretLair) November 4, 2024

The first - and perhaps most prevalent issue - stemmed from the long wait times. This isn't anything new, as many popular releases have had roughly hour-long waits, but this one was so bad it caused the website to pause the line completely. This caused many players to lose their place in line or be uncertain on how they could progress further. To make things worth, select spaces of the community found an exploit on the website that enabled some to skip the line entirely, which was later found to be a known aspect of the software that enables the website. To cap it off, every single lair sold out within that first hour, with many instantly showing up with heavily scalped prices around the internet.

Players took to various spaces on social media to loudly criticize the drop, with innumerable discussions hitting sites like Reddit, Twitter, and BlueSky. Many hoped for a reprint in the near future and/or a total overhaul of the service to make it more available for all players looking to get the cards to be able to acquire them.

SCG Announces Two More 2025 Spotlight Series Locations

We are thrilled to announce more dates and locations of upcoming Magic Spotlight Series, MTG Regional Championships, and SCG CON events for the first half of 2025!

SCG CON Columbus - November 15-17, 2024 (Register Now!)
Greater Columbus Convention Center #SCGCOLUMBUS

Magic... pic.twitter.com/p5g3dnUFKy

— Star City Games (@StarCityGames) November 5, 2024

Star City Games revealed several more big event locations and dates for 2025. SCG Con events were previously noted in some spaces to be happening in Minneapolis and Hartford playing host to the next round of Regional Championships, but this is one of the first wide reveals of this news. Additionally - and perhaps more notably - the next two SCG-run Spotlight Series events were revealed to be happening in Denver on April 11-13 and Indianapolis on May 30-June 1. If you're a competitive player, mark these dates on your calendar and get ready for some truly high profile Magic gameplay!

Jonathan Brostoff Passes Away

This Monday, news broke that beloved longtime Magic the Gathering player and content creator Jonathan Brostoff had passed away. Jonathan was well known for his proficiency in Cube, so much so that he helped found CubeCon - a popular annual event dedicated to Magic's popular Limited format. Many players shared memories with JBro on social media, held tribute events, and helped raise funds for his surviving family on GoFundMe (currently just under $140,000 at time of writing). His passing leaves a massive hole in the community and he will be dearly missed by many.

Magic Online Fixes Long Infamous Bug

For years, one bug has notoriously been the bane of Magic Online players and developers alike: Wall of Roots. It proved tremendously elusive to fix and caused issues in certain specific spots, chiefly among them its interaction with Chord of Calling - a perfectly reasonable play to make in the Modern format.

In short, the issue was that Wall of Roots wouldn't allow you to simultaneously pay for and tap it for convoke to cover two mana. While you could work around this by generating the Green mana before announcing Chord of Calling, thereby paying the cost, this proved impossible if the Wall was at only 1 toughness. In recent years, this has been a common interaction within Golgari Yawgmoth decks and came up while Nadu, Winged Wisdom was still legal as well, given that both cards were frequently played in the deck.

Finally, at long last, Daybreak Games revealed in the Magic Online Foundations announcements that the team had finally come up with a solution. Wall of Roots will now work as intended starting next Tuesday, November 12 when Foundations officially hits the client. Check out all the details on this change, as well as everything related to the MTGO release of Foundations, here.

Decklist of the Week

Temur Combo | DSK Standard | cftsoc3, 7th Place MTGO Standard Challenge

• Creatures (13)
• 2 Questing Druid
• 3 Valley Floodcaller
• 4 Enduring Vitality
• 4 Thundertrap Trainer

• Instants (9)
• 1 Pawpatch Formation
• 4 This Town Ain't Big Enough
• 4 Torch the Tower

• Sorceries (9)
• 2 Song of Totentanz
• 3 Bushwhack
• 4 Analyze the Pollen

• Enchantments (10)
• 2 Bitter Reunion
• 2 Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna
• 2 Up the Beanstalk
• 4 Stormchaser's Talent

• Lands (19)
• 1 Mountain
• 2 Forest
• 2 Island
• 1 Karplusan Forest
• 1 Tarnation Vista
• 2 Fabled Passage
• 2 Yavimaya Coast
• 4 Botanical Sanctum
• 4 Copperline Gorge

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Into the Flood Maw
• 1 Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna
• 1 Up the Beanstalk
• 2 Dissection Tools
• 2 Ghost Vacuum
• 2 Negate
• 2 Pawpatch Formation
• 2 Screaming Nemesis
• 2 Volcanic Spite

Buy This Deck Export text Export Arena

Last week, I naturally wanted to highlight the deck Javier Dominguez took to a 1st place finish at the World Championship. However, that same event saw another wild breakout decklist from team Sanctum of All, and it seems they're not done with it yet. Pro player Rei Zhang, perhaps better known as cftsoc3, took the team's Temur Combo decklist to a top 8 finish in one of this week's MTGO Standard Challenges.

The deck works by generating tons of mana thanks to Enduring Vitality alongside a host of creatures and then using Valley Floodcaller to untap them all for more mana. Using This Town Ain't Big Enough and Stormchaser's Talent, you can generate enough mana to go infinite and attack with arbitrarily large creatures or casting a massive Song of Totentanz to win the game. This deck is wildly complex and can provide you with one heck of an experience if you're looking for a challenging deck to pilot at your upcoming RCQ events starting next weekend.