Posted in: Board Games, Games | Tagged: Magic: The Gathering, Mark Rosewater, MTG

Magic: The Gathering – On Announcement Day and Dominaria

Josh Nelson writes for Bleeding Cool:

June 14th marked a whole smattering of announcements for the renowned trading card game Magic: the Gathering. We got a three-set block set on a new plane called Ixalan, which appears to be a plane of pirates, dinosaurs, and, according to designer Mark Rosewater, a lot more.

Additionally, we get a number of supplemental releases such as:

• a new Duel Deck release – Merfolk vs. Goblins,  didn't we get goblins in a Duel Deck already? That said, I feel like they couldn't have chosen a better race to oppose the merfolk
• a new From the Vaults release, "Transform", which is said to be all – or at least primarily – double-faced cards. I don't know how they have enough DFCs, as they're casually referred to as, to merit this release, but I've been surprised before
• and, most surprising and delightful of all the incoming supplementals, Unstable, a new silver-bordered "joke" set

However, with all of these supplementals and a new block that harps on the most epic of popular tropes, the release I'm looking most forward to is the release on April 27th, 2018, Hot on the heels of Magic's 25th anniversary: a return to Dominaria.

As someone who has played Magic since 2001 (a bit late for the majority of Doninaria's storyline, but right on time for a quality chunk of lore), I pined for the spatial plane of Dominaria when we returned the first time after a few years. In 2006, we saw the Time Spiral block, which saw Dominaria in a multiverse-wide temporal crisis. 

You see, so many blocks were set in Dominaria and with them, multiple apocalyptic events, and this took a toll on the fabric of reality in the plane of existence. Temporal rifts – breaks in time and space – began to form, bringing back characters from the past (in many capacities, it turned out, as many characters didn't have cards to represent them already), alternate timelines (represented by new cards with shifts in color and capabilities), and even the future (a timeline where time rifts were apparently fixed, an anomaly that did come to pass).

Anyway, the truth of the matter is that he temporal crises of Dominaria, even once resolved, left it battered and broken. However the resolution also allowed the plane time to recover. We as players have absolutely no idea what this means, however, and it remains to be seen as to what we will encounter this April, after 11 years of pondering. I know that I'm hopeful for a full recovery, because I started there and have my personal biases towards Dominaria, but I don't expect any less than some amount of morose and nostalgic lore about how the world was changed. I don't know that I will mind that much amid the immense hype I know I'll be in, but it's something to consider more when the time comes.

If you want to read the announcements for yourself, they are here.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!