Magic’s in the air in Vegas. MagicCon kicked off last weekend, and MonsterVine was there to check out anything and everything Magic: The Gathering. We got to preview upcoming sets, solve puzzles as a student of Strixhaven, and, of course, play a lot of Magic.
Staying true to the theme of the current set, I started my day by enrolling at Strixhaven University. After exploring the area, marveling at the various artifacts from each school, it was time to choose a school and start doing… homework? Each school featured a series of logic puzzles you needed to complete in order to perform a final exam to receive a prize.
I’m gonna be honest, I went to design school. I emptied my head long ago of math and filled it with pedantic attention to color shades, so I was thankful to find a group to put our heads together on these. I started with my school of choice, Witherbloom, which tasked me with combining animals to find a secret message. Each clue had a highlighted word that was a scrambled combination of both animals. So one of the clues was “operetta”, with ape and otter being its answer.
I’m not going to bore you with Quandrix because it was literal algebra that we had to do, and I’m not gonna lie, I let my group handle that one. Silverquill appropriately had you create rhymes and piece them together to form a final answer. Prismari had me questioning my initial school of choice because they had a series of nonograms to solve, which I love doing. On top of that, each nonogram corresponded to a letter that then spelled out a secret clue for the final exam.
Lorehold was probably one of my favorites to solve, and was the most “reading the text explains the text” of them. They had a wall filled with an alphabet styled after runes. Below that were combinations of those runes, but split in half. You had to figure out which half matched with which, and that would give you a code like ICYR. That code would give the final answer in one of the seven clues. For example, one clue said “It conducts electricity during blizzards”, and if you sound out ICYR, it sounds like “icy wire,” which gives you your answer.
With the answers in hand, my group received our final exam and plugged in the final answers from the five schools. We then had to decipher some scrambled letters to form spell names, then take letters from those words to form our final answer for our prize, which was a really neat pin to the school of our choice.
After finishing that up, I went around exploring the rest of the convention floor. One of the standout features was a mini-golf and arcade space in the middle of the showfloor. The mini-golf in particular was a visual treat, with each hole featuring a design from all of Magic, like kami gates from Kamigawa or a woodland path from Lorwyn Eclipsed. The rest of the showfloor featured a variety of merch booths and, of course, artist alley. Your usual kinda thing if you’ve ever been to a con. I’m always a sucker for getting something that’s exclusive to a con whenever I go to one, to act as a piece of memorabilia from the convention, and I found some pretty slick card sleeves that I couldn’t wait to put on my Valgavoth deck when I got back home. After perusing some more, it was eventually time to head to the massive stage in the room to watch a panel showing upcoming sets releasing this year.
First up on the panel was a look at The Hobbit, a follow-up to their previous Tales of Middle-Earth set a few years back. We got early looks at artwork for various dwarves and elves, along with the Bilbo and Smaug cards; the big highlight was the reveal that Smaug is the headliner card of the set. I especially loved some of the narrative design on cards like the Tom, Bert, and William card; trolls famous for capturing Bilbo and company in the book, and for being turned to stone when tricked into staying up until sunrise. The card is a 5/5 creature that’s a card draw engine, that when killed gets to come back to the battlefield, but as a regular artifact now. Some cards also featured the return of Adventures, like The Arkenstone card, which is a powerful artifact that allows you to draw a card on your end step, give all your creatures +1/+1, and you can use its Adventure to search your deck for a legendary creature. It’s a card you’re definitely going to want to try to pull. We also got to see reprints from Tales of Middle-Earth like The One Ring and Sauron, the Dark Lord, both featuring some gorgeous new artwork.
Reality Fracture was probably the set I was most curious about coming into this panel, and they spilled everything on it. After the recent invasions from the Eldrazi and Phyrexians, Jace decided to create a new multiverse that’s free of suffering and is his perfect “corrected” version of the world. This means that we’ll get to see twists on various established Magic cards and characters. Not only that, but we’re quickly returning to Strixhaven, or at least Jace’s version of it with Hexhaven. As someone who’s been loving the Prepared mechanic in Secrets of Strixhaven, I’m glad to see it return so soon.
We didn’t get to see too many actual cards, but some of the few we did were ones like Stingcaster Mage, a red variation of the blue Snapcaster Mage that features Haste instead of Flash in Jace’s world. Bloodline Recollector features a black version of the iconic Ancestral Recall, this time as Ancestral Craving that still lets you draw three cards, but this time at the cost of three life. Chandra, one of the original planeswalkers, also saw some major changes. Before, a hot-headed fire mage red card, she’s now a calm and collected ice mage in the blue identity. Seems Jace is open to “fixing” his friends as well in this upcoming set. Chandra, Chill of Compliance is a new planeswalker card all about drawing cards, with its major ability giving you an emblem that states “Whenever you cast a spell, draw a card”. No doubt a powerful card in any blue deck where you’ll be playing a lot of spells.
Last up for the preview panel was the briefest of sneak peeks at the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set. They wanted to show off their vision for the set, and what better way to do that than by showing off the variety of cards featuring The Vision. We got to see the standard and commander cards for him, and we rounded out the preview with Paul Bettany, Vision himself, coming out to reveal the Mind Stone card. Both Vision cards feature some of his iconic abilities in Magic format, like gaining indestructible until the end of the turn from his density control, being able to fly, or phasing in and out of the battlefield. The Mind Stone continues where last year’s Soul Stone left off, with a powerful artifact that allows you to exile one permanent you control, then return it to the battlefield. A no-brainer card for ETB trigger-heavy decks.
We closed out the night with the Secret of the Archaics after-party at Area15. We were greeted with a DJ performing at a magical altar, five tents corresponding to each Strixhaven school, and an ominous orb at the center of the party. My group opted to do the Witherbloom tent and were greeted by a surly druid who was the superintendent of the school. He tasked us with organizing his disorganized vials of various monster parts, like dragon’s blood and troll teeth, and figuring out what was wrong in each group of vials and removing it. It was a fun roleplay session as we bantered back and forth with him before being shuffled out for the next group.
It was overall a pretty exciting peek at the next few months of Magic, and the reception to all three sets was pretty overwhelmingly positive from the crowd’s cheers and hushed whispering of what kind of deck to slot a card in throughout the panel. As the rest of the weekend went on, I got to attend some Q+A panels for the upcoming sets and interview some folk at Wizards, which you’ll be able to read soon, so keep an eye out for that.
