Magic: The Gathering – Magic 2013

ime for a question: how many cards in the Magic 2013 are reprints? If you said half, then you are dead on the target.

Magic 2013 is this year’s Core Set and along with it are some pretty wicked reprints from bygone eras. Case in point, the mechanic ‘exalted’.

Exalted means that if you attack with only one creature, that creature gets a power/toughness bonus. That is all.

If you have three Aven Squires on the battlefield and you attack with only one, that single Squire will gain +3 power and +3 toughness, since there are three exalted abilities backing it up, including its own exalted ability.

Magic: The Gathering – Avacyn Restored

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nce every now and then I feel an incredible urge, an urge fuelled by excitement and driven by wonder and amazement, an urge to experience the out-of-the-ordinary and the brand-spanking-new, an urge to just dive into the random mess and make sense of it so as to ride the wave of logic to victory.

Do you know what that means? It means a new Magic expansion is on the horizon and I intent to make the most of the pre-release.

Magic: The Gathering – Two-Headed Giant FAQ

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n lieu of the Innistrad League that will be held at The Tavern this month of October, I thought I’ll write something related to that. This column is an explanation of some rules regarding Two-Headed Giant, a Magic variant that will be a part of that Innistrad League.

First we’ll begin with a comparison between a duel game and a Two-Headed Giant game. Don’t worry; I’ll explain them after this.

Duel (one player vs. one player)

Two-Headed Giant (two players vs. two players)

·     Each player starts with 20 life ·     Each player loses the game if he has 10 poison counters ·     Only one player may lose the game ·     Only one player may win the game ·     Matches are played best-of-three   ·     Creatures attack your opponent   ·     You block the opponent’s attack with your creatures ·     You can only have a maximum of 4 of each card (excluding basic lands)

·      Each team starts with 30 life ·      Each team loses the game if they have 15 poison counters ·      If one player loses the game, his entire team loses the game ·      If one player wins the game, his entire team wins the game ·      Matches are played with only one game ·      Creatures attack the opponents’ team ·      Your teammate may block the opponents’ creatures for you ·      You and your teammate can only have a maximum of 4 of each card (excluding basic lands)

Magic: The Gathering – Innistrad

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very now and then the people at Wizards do something crazy that shakes up the way Magic is played. The Innistrad expansion contains one thing that does just that.

Hallo and welcome back to another instalment of The Planeswalking Peddler’s Magic Tutorial, Innistrad edition. As usual, we’ll be looking at the mechanics of the new set and I’ll guide you through how they work.

Magic: The Gathering - Magic 2012

omes the time when every Magic player rejoices at the arrival of a new set. Magic 2012 brings to the table a lot of things that excite old and new players alike, and although some favourites such as Lightning Bolt and the nostalgic Giant Growth didn’t make the cut, there is still plenty of awesomeness to last us until next year.

Magic: The Gathering – New Phyrexia

t’s that time again. A new set’s release (or pre-release) came and went, and with it came a host of toys for our grubby little gaming hands to get a hold of.

Most of them are recurring themes and remain the same, like infect, living weapon, metalcraft, and proliferate, but one of the more interesting innovations to come around this time (in my opinion) is Phyrexian mana.
Phyrexian mana comes in the same five flavours as normal mana; white, blue, black, red, and green. That means that they are payable like normal mana, which is a good thing.

Now, the difference between Phyrexian mana and normal mana is that Phyrexian mana can be paid through an alternate way. You can pay 2 life instead of paying the cost for a Phyrexian mana symbol.

Let’s look at an example.

Porcelain Legionnaire costs 2 colourless mana and 1 White Phyrexian mana. You can either pay 2 colourless and 1 White to cast it, or you can take the cheap way and pay 2 mana plus 2 life. Taking the cheap route reduces your life total a bit, but it lets you bring out a 3-power creature with first strike as quickly as turn 1 or 2, depending on your deck. That’s nothing to laugh about.

Multiple symbols of Phyrexian mana work the same.

Moltensteel Dragon can be paid through the full mana cost (4 colourless and 2 Red) or you can opt to pay 4 colourless and 4 life, bringing down this big flyer with increasable power on turn 3. The cost of increasing its power can be paid the same way as paying Phyrexian mana in the casting cost. You either pay 1 Red to buff the power, or you can pay 2 life. You can pay more than once if you really like dragons.

One of the recurring themes throughout the New Phyrexia set is Golems. Many cards produce Golem tokens and even give bonuses to said Golems.

All ‘Splicer’ cards allow you to put Golem tokens into play on top of bestowing some ability to your Golems. Other cards also help you generate a Golem army, but I’ll let you discover them on your own. More fun that way.

Now for something different. During all the Magic tutorials on this site, we have seen artifacts only as colourless cards. Artifacts can actually be coloured, and have actually been coloured, and are now coloured again thanks to the Phyrexians.

Porcelain Legionnaire is actually a white card because it has the White Phyrexian mana symbol. Phyrexian Metamorph is a blue card because it has the Blue Phyrexian mana symbol.

One thing to note is this: cards are coloured based on their mana symbols, not on what type there are. So artifacts are colourless based on their colourless mana symbols, not because they are artifacts. If an artifact sudden had a Green mana symbol, then it would be green. If it had a Black or Red mana symbol, it would be black or red.

That’s all for this guide to New Phyrexia. For more information on New Phyrexia’s recurring mechanics, read the Magic: The Gathering Tutorials Week 12 and 13.

Till next time, sayonara.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 13

‘ll make this quick. Today’s tutorial is a bit of an epilogue and won’t cover nearly as much as what we have done in previous weeks.

This week, we’ll take a look at the mechanics in the newest Magic set, Mirrodin Besieged. Plus a little extra.

Battle cry.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 12

eems we’re real close to the end of this series of tutorials. All the fundamentals have been covered and we just need to tie up some loose ends. Today we’ll be looking at a few keywords relevant to the world of Mirrodin and a bit more. Further articles will be written as new expansions are released.

Infect: when this thing deals damage to a creature, that creature gets -1/-1 counters instead. When this thing deals damage to a player, that player gets poison counters instead.

Infect is one of those seemingly complicated mechanics but is quite easy to understand once you get a hold of it. What infect does is simply replace normal damage with counters.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 11

elcome back, everyone. In the last episode we saw a few standard and quite important keywords in Magic, so read them up. In this episode we’ll finally explore the anatomy of a turn in a game of Magic. It’s going to get a bit scary, so mind your step.

The last time I remember, the turn structure looked like this:

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 10

ll right. We’ve come a long way in learning the basics. For all those that found this tutorial to be helpful, I appreciate that you took the time to explore it. For those of you that may need a bit of extra help, that is what this announcement is about.

Firstly, we are near the final instalment of this tutorial. Pretty much all basics were covered save what we will see in today’s article and the next few. Secondly, I’m willing to write additional articles at the request of readers, whether it’s about rules or about which cards are generally considered to have better synergy.

For now, the show must go on.

There will be one main thing that this article will teach. It will simply be some Magic terminology which can be written as follows:

Destroy: to put a permanent card from the battlefield into the graveyard. A permanent can be destroyed through a card (like Back to Nature) or through combat damage.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 8

appy Belated New Year, everyone. It’s not often that we get to celebrate an event as special as this (unless you live on Mercury, in which case you celebrate New Year every day).

So, how are things? Good? We’ve got a blank slate in the form of a new year and the initiative to do great things is all on us. What I’m trying to say is that today I’ll be comparing “counter a spell” with the vastly different “put a counter on this thing” ability of some cards.

As we saw in the immediately preceding article, when you counter a spell, it’s almost like you’re destroying the spell before it actually happens. That’s a somewhat accurate analogue of how “counter a spell” works.

Now we have something completely dissimilar. Take a look at the following card:

“Whenever an opponent shuffles his or her library, you may put a +1/+1 counter on Cosi’s Trickster.”

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 6

ountdown to the New Year begins… now.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot…

Wait, that’s five days away. You know what this means? It means there’s still time for me to explain how artifacts and enchantments work before next year.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 5

brief recap of the types of cards we have seen so far and some rule baggage that comes with them.

 

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 4

solid understanding of timing is essential to good strategy in Magic. We’ll move on directly from last week’s scenario.

I’m going to fast forward these next two turns so You can get to the timing difference between instants and sorceries. I will need both players with all resources unused.

Red plays a creature, Akoum Boulderfoot. Simple ability: when you put this creature down onto the battlefield, you target (aim) at a creature or player. The Boulderfoot will do 1 damage to whatever you targeted, just like that.

Red targets his opponent, so the creature does 1 damage to White. He doesn’t attack and passes the turn. White takes his turn, attacks with the flying Griffin (can’t be blocked since Red has no flying creatures) and doesn’t do anything else.

Back to Red.

Okay, timing. This is rather important and might get a bit complicated, but I will need to show what can and can’t be done with instants and sorceries. This section will showcase cards previously unseen in this tutorial series. I’ve picked a handful of simple cards and erased the story text to make reading easier. And of course, I’ll explain in general what they do.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 3

et’s see… we left off talking about one-shot cards like sorceries. Guess I’ll need to elaborate on that a bit.

But beforehand, a look at the battlefield as it is now.

As per usual, click on the image to see a larger version.

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 2

t’s the second instalment of the Planeswalking Peddler’s official Magic: The Gathering Tutorial. Last week we saw what you need to play a game of Magic, how to set one up, and how to both play a simple resource and how to use that resource to put a creature from your hand onto the battlefield. In week two we’ll see a bit more about creatures and go into combat.

When we left off, the battlefield position for White on turn one looked like this:

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 1

Author's Note: Due to logistic issues, this tutorial was left on hiatus for some time. It is now back with updates every Monday, with a minimum of six episodes. Depending on how things go, tutorials after episode 6 will be geared towards specific game topics. As a measure of apology, episode 2 will also be updated today. End note.

alutations, everyone. Welcome to the Planeswalking Peddler’s official Magic: The Gathering Tutorial. This series of tutorials will be aimed mostly at beginners, but in the later episodes as we get the fundamentals out of the way, we’ll dive deeper into the twist and turns of the game and what advantages you can evoke from the rules.

And before that I suppose I should take time to introduce myself. You may call me Aihiave, or Ai if it’s easier. I have been a long-time player of Magic since 1998, but decided to be more a collector rather than delve into competitive play. The game has been a passion to me as a fount of inspiration for my writing more than as a contest of skill and judgement. Nevertheless I keep myself updated with the latest rules.

And now, on with the show.

Magic is a turn-based strategy game (TBS game, like chess), and is normally played between two opposing players. Both players start with an empty battlefield, and as the game progresses they gather resources to produce units with which to attack the opponent.

Like many other strategy games there are actually multiple ways to win, but the most widely employed way is to reduce the opponent’s life points from 20 down to 0. Summoning creatures and attacking with them is one way to do that. We’ll look at a simple game scenario and I’ll explain what’s going on.

Tutorial Returns with Tutorial 1,0

Magic: The Gathering - Tutorial Week 1

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alutations, everyone. Welcome to the Planeswalking Peddler’s official Magic: The Gathering Tutorial. This series of tutorials will be aimed mostly at beginners, but in the later episodes as we get the fundamentals out of the way, we’ll dive deeper into the twist and turns of the game and what advantages you can evoke from the rules.

And before that I suppose I should take time to introduce myself. You may call me Aihiave, or Ai if it’s easier. I have been a long-time player of Magic since 1998, but decided to be more a collector rather than delve into competitive play. The game has been a passion to me as a fount of inspiration for my writing more than as a contest of skill and judgement. Nevertheless I keep myself updated with the latest rules.

And now, on with the show.

Surprise on Sunday

This Sunday, the Tavern is working with the Peddler to come up with an interesting new twist to usual MTG nights.
Therefore, all MTG players are invited to come and join in this Sunday's events which will start after 6pm.

New logo and back ground!!!

YAY the planeswalking peddler has a new logo and back ground :)
anybody know how i can register these logos to the company? or trademark them?

That aside, there will be a poll posted in Midvalley's Comics mart starting tomorrow, about the M11 prerelease event.
For those of you not in midvalley you may vote here too.

You guys will be able to vote and pre register to join the event starting tomorrow, the votes will be about the timing and the availability of sessions.

DETAILS FOR M11 Prerelease Event:
below the break :)