Vraska, the Silencer's official oracle text ability now reads, "Whenever a nontoken creature an opponent controls dies, you may pay 1. If you do, return that card to the battlefield tapped under your control. It's a Treasure artifact with "Tap, Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color," and it loses all other card types." So right out of the gate she has synergy with Amulet of Vigor enabling you to "crack" your opponents creatures for mana on the turn they die which can go in tandem with cards that force opponents to sac creatures such as Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos. I figured Vraska, the Silencer would have deathtouch but why not add first strike or trample along with it? Arguably the best card spoiled in the set thus far IMO.
3 Goku's Kamehameha
3 Orange Bicycle Kick
3 Orange Heat Wave
3 Orange Power Point
3 Orange Energy Catch
2 Orange Dismissal
Deck Total - 60
______________________________________
Main Personality
1 Frieza, Resident of HFIL
1 Frieza, Golden
1 Frieza, Galactic Conqueror
1 Frieza, Revived
Mastery
1 Red Relentless Mastery
Events
3 Red Focus
3 Red Counter
2 Red Announcement
2 Frieza's Arrogance
2 Stare Down
1 Overwhelming Power
1 Time Is A Warrior's Tool
Physical Combats
3 Frieza's Captive Strike
3 Red Monstrous Blow
3 Red Sleeper Hold
3 Red Capture
3 Red Duck
Energy Combats
3 Frieza's Supernova
3 Red Shining Sword Attack
3 Red Charged Beam
3 Red Controlled Blast
3 Red Static Shot
3 Red Robotic Blast
3 Red Left Bolt
3 Red Interference
3 Red Body Block
1 Frieza's Death Beam
Allies
1 Chilled, Cackling Tyrant
1 King Cold, Caught Off Guard
1 Shisami, Enforcer
Game designer James M. (Jim) Ward, a member of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame for his contributions to Dungeons & Dragons and other games, has passed away, according to a post on his Facebook. He was 72.
Ward was a friend of Gary Gygax from the very early days of Dungeons & Dragons development. He and Rob Kuntz wrote Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes in 1976 for TSR, which was the first introduction of gods into the game. He also is the creator of Metamorphosis Alpha, the first science fiction RPG, also published by TSR (see "Jim Ward's 'Metamorphosis Alpha'"). He worked at TSR for 20 years in a number of executive positions, and left in 1996.
We knew Ward from his time at TSR in the 1980s and 90s, and found him to be a warm, funny man, and a gamer through and through. We last saw him at a Gamehole Con in the late 2010s, and at that point he seemed little the worse for wear and definitely had the same warm heart. Our condolences to his friends and family.
One of the things that I really loved about how Jim Ward designed Score's Dragon Ball Z CCG is that he actually cared about how to replicate the source material that he was working with in order to make you feel as though you were immersed in the game itself. Most game designers for Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games would blatantly copy and paste ideas from previous card games as they lacked a real sense of identity that was unique enough to stand out on it's own. The ONLY other card game that succeeded in this was Pokémon TCG under the stewardship of Wizards of the Coast before Pokémon Company International (TPCi) acquired the license and rights from them nearly 20 years ago. Sadly it's treated more as a collectible than it's mechanical identity as an actual card game.
It's a real shame that Jim Ward doesn't get talked about as much as Richard Garfield even though I've never played Ward's other card games that he designed such as Tomb Raider CCG and Babylon 5 CCG which never really had the cult following and lightning captured in a bottle like Dragon Ball did in North America back in the early to mid 2000's. This was also during the big Japanese Anime / Manga boom in North America so Ward was at the right place at the right time. Little did I know that Ward also had a history with Dungeons & Dragons prior to his success with Score Entertainment. Of course Jim Ward really wouldn't have been known about as a game designer had it not been for Akira Toriyama creating Dragon Ball who also sadly passed away recently as well. Too bad Bandai Namco cares more about profits than honoring a game designer's legacy.
So for those old enough to remember the Pojo Message Board Forums before Social Media took off, Pojo himself told me that he still has Jim Ward's business card from meeting him at GenCon and Toy Fairs years ago. His DBZ business card title says "Product Development" on it with an image of Gohan. Believe it or not Score Entertainment actually hired a few Pojo staff members to work for them back in the day and that Pojo himself liked Score Entertainment as a company. Of course we all know that Score Entertainment went under in the late 2000's shortly after the release of the now defunct Bleach TCG. Then Panini bought out Score Entertainment to create Panini Z which they sold the Dragon Ball IP to Bandai Namco when Dragon Ball Super first launched in 2015 which the manga for it is now on indefinite hiatus due to the recent passing of Akira Toriyama earlier this month.
We are deeply saddened to inform you that Manga creator Akira Toriyama passed away on March 1st due to acute subdural hematoma. He was in age of 68. It's our deep regret that he still had several works in the middle of creation with great enthusiasm. Also, he would have many more things to achieve. However, he has left many manga titles and works of art to this world. Thanks to the support of so many people around the world, he has been able to continue his creative activities for over 45 years.
We hope that Akira Toriyama's unique world of creation continues to be loved by everyone for a long time to come.
We inform you this sad news, with gratefulness for your kindness during his lifetime. Funeral service was held with his family and very few relatives. Following his wishes for tranquility, we respectfully inform you that we would not accept flowers, condolences gifts, visiting, offering and others. Also, we ask you to refrain from conducting interviews with his family. Future plan for commemorate gathering is not decided, we will let you know when it's confirmed. We deeply thank you for your understanding and support as always.
Did my best to recreate my friends' old Ghave, Guru of Spores Abzan Stax EDH / Commander Deck that I had difficulty beating at one point. Unfortunately he didn't have a deck list available so I tried to remember what he ran at the time before he quit Magic: The Gathering entirely. The deck is designed to lock your opponents from playing ANY cards from hand and graveyard with no lands to tap mana for as well as no creatures on the battlefield.
I did try to toss in some infinite combos and synergies to go along with it to make it a bit more consistent though I may add in some new cards If I ever get around to actually building this deck on Paper. I did manage to stall against it one time with some hate bears like Gaddock Teeg with Uril, the Miststalker though I mainly got lucky on that. Ghave pretty much runs these combos or synergies to win in this order:
With the recent news of Twitch being unprofitable despite efforts from Amazon to prop them up just to stay alive made me wonder how this will affect the MTG Salvation forums going forward. They already laid off 500 employees and shutdown their operations in South Korea because they couldn't afford it. How will users on MTG Salvation be able to log in and out of the forums If their Twitch account ceases to exist since MTG Salvation is merged with Twitch? Granted I'm fully aware that MTG Nexus gets more active members than MTG Salvation after the recent split due to how severely fractured the MTG Community is as a whole as well as what went on with the COVID-19 Pandemic 4 years ago.
Aetherwell Animator3 Artifact
Whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery spell it instead enters the battlefield as a creature card with power and toughness equal to it's original mana value and it's oracle text now triggers as a creature entering the battlefield to trigger the effect. The same is true for instant or sorcery spells being copied while on the stack, except that they enter as creature tokens with power and toughness equal to the original mana value of the copied instant or sorcery spell.
I remember Game of Thrones used to be one of the most pirated TV series on the Internet for those who weren't subscribed to HBO Max's streaming services up until Amazon got their hands on the IP which is ironic because Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro is also partners with them as well. Unfortunately the writing for Game of Thrones fell off a cliff and there was a famous scene where one of the actors left a cup of Starbucks coffee filmed within the series. One of the guys at a barber shop I used to go to before the pandemic was a HUGE Game of Thrones fan. Unfortunately there's not as much hype for Game of Thrones nowadays like there is for the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.
Considering the success of the Lord of the Rings IP in Magic: The Gathering through Universes Beyond, one can argue that Game of Thrones would be great for sales in Magic: The Gathering since both franchises are very similar to one another and have respected fan bases for each of them. I can see Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro enhancing on the Monarch mechanic in Commander as well as the whole "Winter Is Coming" moniker with more Snow themed cards similar to what we saw in Kaldheim. I'm not too familiar with the Game of Thrones IP as I am with the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit IP's but it'd be interesting to see what Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro would do with Game of Thrones in Magic: The Gathering going forward.
You are approaching this in a very odd way. It's a fun gift for employees and not intended for actual play. You want to talk about bad card design? Actually look at these cards - they are tokens of appreciation first, not gamepieces.
The whole argument surrounding "game pieces" mostly had to do with collectors, whales, and people who buylist card singles getting upset about their non-Reserve List cards not being worth any monetary value due to the number of variants released in each product where as these Heroes of the Realm cards in particular are good enough to see actual play but aren't. Bad card design from what I've seen mostly revolves around reprint fatigue and Hasbro corporate not giving Wizards of the Coast enough time to properly design good cards for the game where we're stuck with only one or two good cards in each new set release with the rest of it being draft / sealed fodder. They can't rely on popular land cycles to sell sets like they used to especially with Shocklands being the cheapest they'll ever be in Ravnica Remastered since they've been reprinted into oblivion so many times.
These cards are completely broken and/or silver border territory. I wonder why anyone would even want to play them.
They look good enough to be in Commander Pre-Cons however they're not broken in the slightest. Elusen, the Giving is a card I can see the most play from these because she does things that most group hug Commanders don't do. In fact she's a better version of Zedruu the Greathearted with green added to the color identity but functions similar to Karona, False God where you can pass her around to other players at the table and isn't just a Voltron Commander that can pump dudes. Svega, the Unconventional is mainly built for 5 color Superfriends in Commander who run the following Planeswalkers mentioned in her abilities. I like how Heroes of Kamigawa adds a new restriction to deck building in Commander where all the cards have to be from a Kamigawa expansion minus basic lands where as Wizard from Beyond is only good in a 5 color deck that's Dungeons & Dragons themed.
This is the problem I have with Heroes of the Realm cards because all it does is divide the Magic community further through class warfare not in terms of how it's defined in Dungeons & Dragons but through a real life economical class system between the poor, middle class, and rich in Commander. Oh you're a peasant that doesn't own a real copy of Elusen, the Giving? Go run Karona, False God or Phelddagrif. It's actually kind of insulting to those who want to play these Heroes of the Realm cards in Commander but can't due to circumstances beyond their control unless they decide to proxy them. It also doesn't help that the print run of these cards are extremely low.
It's already scummy enough that they print and design mechanically unique Commanders as Secret Lair Drops but it's even worse when Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro prints and designs cards solely to keep for themselves instead of sharing them with the rest of the Magic community all while expecting us to pay double or triple the price on their Paper Magic products with lower quality and bad card design. No wonder why Reserve List prices are tanking right now because everyone is liquidating their collections just to get through this terrible economy right now. It's hard for me to be optimistic about Paper Magic when Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro continues to screw themselves over time and time again.
Bandai Namco is launching a new Trading Card Game / Collectible Card Game called "Union Arena" due in March 2023 consisting of popular Intellectual Properties such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Hunter x Hunter, Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Bleach, Tales of Arise, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Unfortunately we don't know when Union Arena will be released outside Japan to compete against UniVersus TCG which also has the My Hero Academia IP or what the Gameplay will be like compared to UniVersus TCG but like most of Bandai Namco's TCG / CCG's they're very linear. Thought I'd share this to see what you guys think thus far.
I talked to a couple of my friends about this and one of them thinks it's unlikely that Union Arena will be released outside Japan like with the new One Piece CCG and Digimon CCG that came out just recently from Bandai Namco. That and Bandai Namco will have to amicably resolve a number of licensing issues before even considering importing it overseas. Not quite sure how Jasco was able to get away with it for UniVersus TCG while Bandai Namco is now wanting to compete against Bushiroad's Weiss Schwarz TCG. If Union Arena does make it to the West then I expect the playerbases who are playing it and UniVersus TCG for the My Hero Academia IP to become more fragmented.
Turns out we ARE getting a North American Release for Union Arena after all:
Bandai announced an English Edition of Union Arena TCG, which will be heading to North American markets in October 2024.
Union Arena is a popular Japanese common rules TCG engine that was launched in March 2023. The engine is built to support any number of IP titles working on a single rules set. The first three titles released for Union Arena will include Bleach: Thousand-Year War, Hunter X Hunter, and Jujutsu Kaisen. The cards released into the NA market will be localized into English, and the brand logo and back of the cards will be unique designs for the English version.
What Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro doesn't understand about Paper Magic is that it's been around long enough to develop different "ecosystems". Yes there's the Commander ecosystem however the Paper Standard ecosystem is what the entirety of the game was built around since the very beginning 30 years ago. Back when the game first debuted in 1993 you didn't really have a variety of different formats to choose from where players could only run 4 of playsets of individual cards minus basic lands with a Banned / Restricted List and that was it. Then Wizards of the Coast came in and invented the Paper Standard format which back then was known as Type 2 Constructed before they were bought out by Hasbro. Granted there was A LOT of push back when Wizards of the Coast first introduced Type 2 Constructed to Paper Magic because players wanted to play their cards how THEY wanted but ultimately Paper Standard is what saved the game from just falling off to being just a card game where people were like, "If you didn't have the best cards that were old then you can't compete". It kind of created a little gated playground that you could come in and play as a new player where you wouldn't have to worry about needing to run the last decade's worth of cards and acquiring all the stuff where you only needed to be concerned about the last two years worth of cards. More importantly, it also provided people to play with in-person right? If you don't have people to play then you're not going to have people come out to their Local Game Store (LGS).
Wizards of the Coast found out about this the hard way by messing around and it looks as though we're moving back to how Paper Standard worked in the past so having that kind of Organized Play program where you move up in tournament brackets is extremely crucial now at the local level instead of the convention level but you could still build up to the convention level. Wizards of the Coast used to have a very healthy release schedule for Paper Magic products where they mainly focused on Paper Standard which allowed all the other formats to take care of themselves but by catering to other formats through dramatically changing that release schedule to avoid power creeping Paper Standard those solutions created their own set of unforeseen problems creating a diminishing returns scenario. There's only so much that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro can try to get from Commander players because Commander players don't consume products the exact same way competitive Paper Standard players do. The fundamental market dynamics between Paper Standard and Commander are quite different to where the company NEEDS to actually create demand for Paper Standard, not Arena, by having FNM and In-Person Paper Standard events at Local Game Stores (LGSs). Healthy Paper Standard play is vital to Local Game Stores (LGSs) which leads to more new players coming into Commander without Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro trying to advertise the game in a way that isn't anti-LGS like what they've been doing for the past few years with all this gatekeeping nonsense.
Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro feels as though the Local Game Store (LGS) is a hindrance to the game itself and they actively want to get rid of the social stigma that comes from playing In-Person when that's what the game was actually built around in the first place. Magic: The Gathering was originally intended to be a localized community based card game that helped those who didn't fit in with the rest of society to feel welcome where as now they're unwelcome because they no longer fit in with today's societal norms. So Commander doesn't have to be competitive to get more new players at Local Game Stores (LGSs) when Paper Standard needs to be the driving force behind WHY these players migrate to other Paper Magic formats like Commander without it feeling as though it's being advertised more as a "take home and play" tabletop board game like Monopoly and Scrabble. I don't understand why that's so hard and difficult to understand because clearly Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro's marketing team for Paper Magic nowadays still feels anti-LGS when it shouldn't be. That's what happens when they copy directly off of a famous YouTuber's business model along with partnering with Amazon to dump products that didn't sell while somehow making their money back where there's literally no financial repercussions for them whatsoever. Even the gatekeeping by Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro on Social Media has gotten out of control as well.
Main Personality
1 Goku, Farmer
1 Goku, Warming Up
1 Goku, Godly Aura
1 Goku, Super Saiyan Blue
Mastery
1 Orange Energetic Mastery
Drills
1 Orange Charging Drill
1 Orange Crying Drill
1 Orange Intensity Drill
1 Orange Attraction Drill
1 Orange Absorption Drill
1 Orange Aura Drill
1 Orange Disaster Drill
1 Orange Investigation Drill
Events
3 Orange Juke
3 Confrontation
1 Time Is A Warrior's Tool
Physical Combats
3 Orange Leaping Punch
3 Orange Extension
3 Orange Beatdown
3 Orange Truck Lift
3 Orange Swerve
3 Orange Sidestep
2 Orange Enraged Bash
1 Orange Uppercut
Energy Combats
3 Goku's Kamehameha
3 Orange Bicycle Kick
3 Orange Heat Wave
3 Orange Power Point
3 Orange Energy Catch
2 Orange Dismissal
Deck Total - 60
______________________________________
Main Personality
1 Frieza, Resident of HFIL
1 Frieza, Golden
1 Frieza, Galactic Conqueror
1 Frieza, Revived
Mastery
1 Red Relentless Mastery
Events
3 Red Focus
3 Red Counter
2 Red Announcement
2 Frieza's Arrogance
2 Stare Down
1 Overwhelming Power
1 Time Is A Warrior's Tool
Physical Combats
3 Frieza's Captive Strike
3 Red Monstrous Blow
3 Red Sleeper Hold
3 Red Capture
3 Red Duck
Energy Combats
3 Frieza's Supernova
3 Red Shining Sword Attack
3 Red Charged Beam
3 Red Controlled Blast
3 Red Static Shot
3 Red Robotic Blast
3 Red Left Bolt
3 Red Interference
3 Red Body Block
1 Frieza's Death Beam
Allies
1 Chilled, Cackling Tyrant
1 King Cold, Caught Off Guard
1 Shisami, Enforcer
Deck Total - 60
It's a real shame that Jim Ward doesn't get talked about as much as Richard Garfield even though I've never played Ward's other card games that he designed such as Tomb Raider CCG and Babylon 5 CCG which never really had the cult following and lightning captured in a bottle like Dragon Ball did in North America back in the early to mid 2000's. This was also during the big Japanese Anime / Manga boom in North America so Ward was at the right place at the right time. Little did I know that Ward also had a history with Dungeons & Dragons prior to his success with Score Entertainment. Of course Jim Ward really wouldn't have been known about as a game designer had it not been for Akira Toriyama creating Dragon Ball who also sadly passed away recently as well. Too bad Bandai Namco cares more about profits than honoring a game designer's legacy.
So for those old enough to remember the Pojo Message Board Forums before Social Media took off, Pojo himself told me that he still has Jim Ward's business card from meeting him at GenCon and Toy Fairs years ago. His DBZ business card title says "Product Development" on it with an image of Gohan. Believe it or not Score Entertainment actually hired a few Pojo staff members to work for them back in the day and that Pojo himself liked Score Entertainment as a company. Of course we all know that Score Entertainment went under in the late 2000's shortly after the release of the now defunct Bleach TCG. Then Panini bought out Score Entertainment to create Panini Z which they sold the Dragon Ball IP to Bandai Namco when Dragon Ball Super first launched in 2015 which the manga for it is now on indefinite hiatus due to the recent passing of Akira Toriyama earlier this month.
https://en.dragon-ball-official.com/news/01_2499.html Discuss.
As for Bastion of Remembrance I was never really a huge fan of it however it does have potential with cards like Trudge Garden which goes infinite with Ashnod's Altar. It also has synergy with Blood Pet and Enduring Renewal. Leonin Relic-Warder does also combo off of Bastion of Remembrance with either Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, or Necromancy. I would probably also need to run Felidar Guardian and Oblivion Ring for more blink effects. I have been looking into some combat damage prevention tools like Spore Frog, Kami of False Hope, and No Mercy. Pitiless Plunderer and other Treasure support might seem good though I may reconsider. I appreciate the feedback. I feel as though the mana curve might need to be lowered a bit more.
1 Ghave, Guru of Spores
Creatures (21)
1 Greedy Freebooter
1 Kami of False Hope
1 Spore Frog
1 Drannith Magistrate
1 Leonin Arbiter
1 Llanowar Druid
1 Remorseful Cleric
1 Vraska, the Silencer
1 Lurrus of the Dream-Den
1 Maralen of the Mornsong
1 Opposition Agent
1 Ranger-Captain of Eos
1 Setessan Champion
1 Tethmos High Priest
1 Abyssal Persecutor
1 Mindslicer
1 Pitiless Plunderer
1 Seedborn Muse
1 Massacre Wurm
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
1 Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
Instants (10)
1 Crop Rotation
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Assassin's Trophy
1 Eladamri's Call
1 Heroic Intervention
1 Natural Affinity
1 Sudden Spoiling
1 Teferi's Protection
1 Diabolic Intent
1 Farseek
1 Life from the Loam
1 Nylea's Intervention
1 Sylvan Scrying
1 Winds of Abandon
1 Dark Deal
1 Toxic Deluge
1 Nature's Resurgence
1 Identity Crisis
Artifacts (12)
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Altar of the Brood
1 Amulet of Vigor
1 Esper Sentinel
1 Expedition Map
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Skullclamp
1 Ashnod's Altar
1 Mirror Box
1 Phyrexian Altar
1 Thousand-Year Elixir
1 Kormus Bell
Enchantments (11)
1 Flickering Ward
1 Whip Silk
1 Mourning
1 Prismatic Omen
1 Enduring Renewal
1 Grave Pact
1 Life and Limb
1 Smothering Tithe
1 Titania's Song
1 Dictate of Erebos
1 Nature's Revolt
1 Wrenn and Realmbreaker
1 Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
Lands (32)
2 Swamp
2 Forest
2 Plains
1 Bojuka Bog
1 Cabal Coffers
1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Crystal Vein
1 Temple of the False God
1 Urza's Saga
1 Treasure Vault
1 Deserted Temple
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
1 Indatha Triome
1 Polluted Mire
1 Slippery Karst
1 Drifting Meadow
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Secluded Steppe
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Temple Garden
1 Godless Shrine
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Orzhov Basilica
1 Woodland Cemetery
1 Sunpetal Grove
1 Isolated Chapel
I did try to toss in some infinite combos and synergies to go along with it to make it a bit more consistent though I may add in some new cards If I ever get around to actually building this deck on Paper. I did manage to stall against it one time with some hate bears like Gaddock Teeg with Uril, the Miststalker though I mainly got lucky on that. Ghave pretty much runs these combos or synergies to win in this order:
1. Grave Pact to kill off creatures.
2. Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite / Massacre Wurm + Natural Affinity / Nature's Revolt = "Land Destruction" on crack via state based action.
3. Maralen of the Mornsong + Leonin Arbiter / Opposition Agent = Draw Lock.
4. Identity Crisis + Abyssal Persecutor + Mindcrank = Keep playing til they scoop.
Relic of Progenitus almost made the cut in here over Tormod's Crypt but exiling our own graveyard would've been too risky. I could probably swap out Elven Chorus for Cryptolith Rite to help lower the decks' mana curve a bit more. Pitiless Plunderer with Titania's Song and Abyssal Persecutor seems a bit gimmicky to pull off especially when there's not too many other cards to combo with Titania's Song. Yeah you got Poison-Tip Archer, Disciple of the Vault, and Vindictive Vampire but that's really about it. I also wanted to add more discard from hand combos in here but it seems very limited unfortunately.
Thoughts?
Artifact
Whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery spell it instead enters the battlefield as a creature card with power and toughness equal to it's original mana value and it's oracle text now triggers as a creature entering the battlefield to trigger the effect. The same is true for instant or sorcery spells being copied while on the stack, except that they enter as creature tokens with power and toughness equal to the original mana value of the copied instant or sorcery spell.
Discuss.
They look good enough to be in Commander Pre-Cons however they're not broken in the slightest. Elusen, the Giving is a card I can see the most play from these because she does things that most group hug Commanders don't do. In fact she's a better version of Zedruu the Greathearted with green added to the color identity but functions similar to Karona, False God where you can pass her around to other players at the table and isn't just a Voltron Commander that can pump dudes. Svega, the Unconventional is mainly built for 5 color Superfriends in Commander who run the following Planeswalkers mentioned in her abilities. I like how Heroes of Kamigawa adds a new restriction to deck building in Commander where all the cards have to be from a Kamigawa expansion minus basic lands where as Wizard from Beyond is only good in a 5 color deck that's Dungeons & Dragons themed.
It's already scummy enough that they print and design mechanically unique Commanders as Secret Lair Drops but it's even worse when Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro prints and designs cards solely to keep for themselves instead of sharing them with the rest of the Magic community all while expecting us to pay double or triple the price on their Paper Magic products with lower quality and bad card design. No wonder why Reserve List prices are tanking right now because everyone is liquidating their collections just to get through this terrible economy right now. It's hard for me to be optimistic about Paper Magic when Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro continues to screw themselves over time and time again.
Bandai Namco is launching a new Trading Card Game / Collectible Card Game called "Union Arena" due in March 2023 consisting of popular Intellectual Properties such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Hunter x Hunter, Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Bleach, Tales of Arise, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Unfortunately we don't know when Union Arena will be released outside Japan to compete against UniVersus TCG which also has the My Hero Academia IP or what the Gameplay will be like compared to UniVersus TCG but like most of Bandai Namco's TCG / CCG's they're very linear. Thought I'd share this to see what you guys think thus far.
I talked to a couple of my friends about this and one of them thinks it's unlikely that Union Arena will be released outside Japan like with the new One Piece CCG and Digimon CCG that came out just recently from Bandai Namco. That and Bandai Namco will have to amicably resolve a number of licensing issues before even considering importing it overseas. Not quite sure how Jasco was able to get away with it for UniVersus TCG while Bandai Namco is now wanting to compete against Bushiroad's Weiss Schwarz TCG. If Union Arena does make it to the West then I expect the playerbases who are playing it and UniVersus TCG for the My Hero Academia IP to become more fragmented.
Turns out we ARE getting a North American Release for Union Arena after all:
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55893/bandai-announces-union-arena-tcg-english-edition
Wizards of the Coast found out about this the hard way by messing around and it looks as though we're moving back to how Paper Standard worked in the past so having that kind of Organized Play program where you move up in tournament brackets is extremely crucial now at the local level instead of the convention level but you could still build up to the convention level. Wizards of the Coast used to have a very healthy release schedule for Paper Magic products where they mainly focused on Paper Standard which allowed all the other formats to take care of themselves but by catering to other formats through dramatically changing that release schedule to avoid power creeping Paper Standard those solutions created their own set of unforeseen problems creating a diminishing returns scenario. There's only so much that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro can try to get from Commander players because Commander players don't consume products the exact same way competitive Paper Standard players do. The fundamental market dynamics between Paper Standard and Commander are quite different to where the company NEEDS to actually create demand for Paper Standard, not Arena, by having FNM and In-Person Paper Standard events at Local Game Stores (LGSs). Healthy Paper Standard play is vital to Local Game Stores (LGSs) which leads to more new players coming into Commander without Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro trying to advertise the game in a way that isn't anti-LGS like what they've been doing for the past few years with all this gatekeeping nonsense.
Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro feels as though the Local Game Store (LGS) is a hindrance to the game itself and they actively want to get rid of the social stigma that comes from playing In-Person when that's what the game was actually built around in the first place. Magic: The Gathering was originally intended to be a localized community based card game that helped those who didn't fit in with the rest of society to feel welcome where as now they're unwelcome because they no longer fit in with today's societal norms. So Commander doesn't have to be competitive to get more new players at Local Game Stores (LGSs) when Paper Standard needs to be the driving force behind WHY these players migrate to other Paper Magic formats like Commander without it feeling as though it's being advertised more as a "take home and play" tabletop board game like Monopoly and Scrabble. I don't understand why that's so hard and difficult to understand because clearly Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro's marketing team for Paper Magic nowadays still feels anti-LGS when it shouldn't be. That's what happens when they copy directly off of a famous YouTuber's business model along with partnering with Amazon to dump products that didn't sell while somehow making their money back where there's literally no financial repercussions for them whatsoever. Even the gatekeeping by Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro on Social Media has gotten out of control as well.