The title of this week’s War Report is brought to you by this article over on “the mothership” as it’s been affectionately called. It’s a look at the future of Magic, along with some of the observations made by the design team. Very insightful, and a good read for those of you who happen to be interested in the game. The main focal points of this article point to changes in the way the release schedule works, but doesn’t rock the boat too much:

• There will be 4 releases per year, but 2 block sets are gone. We’ll get three big releases per year. The additional set will be a revised core set (50/50 reprints/new cards).
• Planeswalker appearances will be toned down.
• Less Masterpiece series — the next set will not have them.

I’ve also borrowed this title because there has been a shifting of the sands within my own playgroup, and a wider net has been cast in our hopes to keep things fresh. Magic has been around for a long time, and the 25th anniversary is here bringing with it the promise of a return to a familiar schedule, re-visitation of old worlds and several interesting products. The full announcement can be viewed here, but the main gist of things I will attempt to abbreviate cut and paste here:

September 20, 2017	Ixalan releases September 29 and features Pirate Vraska battling Dinosaurs?!
November 10, 2017	Duel Decks: Merfolk vs. Goblins releases Novemeber 10, 2017.
November 10, 2017	The Art of Magic: the Gathering—Ixalan releases November 10, 2017.
November 17, 2017	Iconic Masters releases. Exclusive preview at HASCON.
November 24, 2017	Explorers of Ixalan is an out-of-the-box multiplayer experience that releases November 24, 2017.
November 24, 2017	From the Vault: Transform releases November 24, 2017 featuring fifteen transforming cards.
December 8, 2017	Unstable releases, a new silver-bordered set release on December 8, 2017.
January 19, 2018	Rivals of Ixalan, the second set of the Ixalan block releases.
March 16, 2018	Masters 25 releases, a 25th anniversary–edition Masters set.
April 28, 2018	(Return to) Dominaria releases April 28, 2018.
June 20, 2018	Core Sets return on June 20, 2018.

Honestly, there are some cool things going on here. We just recently saw the release of the Commander Anthology that brought back some of the strong commanders from past years, and there have already been leaks for the upcoming Commander 2017 sets. There’s a tribal theme going on as well, because the forthcoming Duel Deck release features two of the most iconic tribes that haven’t really been represented in the official WotC commander decks — it’s likely there will be some cards worth looting from that pack. We don’t know a bunch about Ixalan, but there’s dinosaurs n’ stuff… should be interesting to say the least.

So my playgroup has had a shifting 4th member for the past few weeks, and it seems that he is a pretty good player and being everyone else’s prior friend means he melded right in. The only draw back is that he apparently has plenty of cards in his collection, but hasn’t had the time to put together an EDH deck so he’s been playing ours. This is fine, but typically one wants to know the ins and outs of a deck before playing it competitively. I say competitively loosely, because we probably aren’t rocking tournament ready decks but we love kicking the shit out of each other nonetheless. Despite that lone drawback, it has been fun playing 4-player games, and we have all found additional weaknesses to our decks, particularly in the mana curve department. It seems we have all been playing rather slow, but it has worked out in 3 player games. That extra person makes a big difference with how you play the game, so we have all gone back to the drawing board a bit. We’ve also been discussing going to the next pre-release night at the local card store, but also in pitching in on things like the Anthology where we all get something cool but don’t have to buy the whole thing outright. Our group is expanding its horizons a bit and it’s been something I spend a lot of time thinking about. More so than video games most of the time, which is an odd thing. But I digress.

Recently I put together a “fuck you” deck, which is basically built around exploiting the commander’s ability to lock down the board. In practice (only took it for a spin once) I was doing okay, but then got eliminated. I think a few more games will help me determine what help it needs. The problem is that once I play a deck for a couple of weeks I want to build a new one, and the ideas are coming in faster than the money is to pay for this shit. I’m being budget minded and attempting to keep the spending to a minimum but holy shit this is cardboard crack. I’ve already built a deck that I just have to purchase the loose ends for, but also have a couple of other commanders in mind to build towards.

After our last play session, my friend and I were talking about cards that would fit well within my Reaper King deck and he suggested dropping a Sram, Senior Edificer into it. I agreed with him at the time and when I was at home I dug out my copy. It turns out I had two, so I thought to myself that he would make a pretty damn good commander himself. I started doing the research and built out an entire deck centered around artifacts — which also happens to be a great way to play some of the vehicles I have lying around like Heart of Kiran (which I’ve owned for 6 months without finding a use for). The card draw engine is incredible and it’s perfect for a “Voltron” style deck. After putting that one together (on paper) I felt like going mono-colored has some advantages, after having found great success with my Molimo ramp deck and feeling like “Sramtron” looks like so much fun (again, on paper).

I don’t really have much going on with red. Despite using it in both my Angel deck and 5-color Reaper King deck, I’ve stuck with minimal amounts of red. I want to rectify that, because there are some fun looking cards that I have lying around and others that I’d like to own. I thought about going Goblin tribal, but I’m going to wait for the Duel Deck and Commander 2017 releases because I feel like there might be more love thrown their way — even the 25th anniversary masters set is likely to contain some gems. Plus, Gobs are pretty played out from way back when, so I’d like to do something a little more unique with more cards available to me. Dragons are definitely just as played out, and though I’d prefer to play a 2 or 3 colored deck, we already have one of those in the playgroup. Mono-red dragons though, now that could be different. Granted, most of the dragons will be the same most of the time, but knowing the way he plays I should be able to find some different cards to shake things up. I’m thinking a burn sub-theme, but perhaps I’ll find some other tricks as I put it together.

Lastly, I started thinking about mono-black. I don’t know what it is about black, but I want it in all of my decks (and almost have that). Unfortunately many of the more obscure or recently black legendary creatures didn’t really excite me. I also don’t really care about vampires, but it was the next biggest theme in the color outside of zombies and demons. I already have plenty of demons in my angel deck and I have a zombie deck, so those were a no-go. So vampires it is. I think I’m going to go fairly aggro in this deck mainly because you can find various ways to beef up vampires so cheap ones will help out. Black is good at ramping as well, and big finishers like Nightmare can be fun.

Anyway, the state of the game is always changing, but it seems that we are all in it for a long haul. I’m hoping some of our journeys to game shops will expand our group and perhaps create other options for playing, because I tell ya once a week is not enough!