Travis Allen has been playing Magic on and off since 1994, and got sucked into the financial side of the game after he started playing competitively during Zendikar. You can find his daily Magic chat on Twitter at @wizardbumpin. He currently resides in upstate NY, where he is a graduate student in applied ontology.
Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.
No matter which conversation thread you choose to look at after this weekend’s initial Kaladesh-legal SCG Open — the breakout performance of vehicles as an archetype, Aetherworks Marvel swinging for the fences and sort of getting there, or Chandra, Torch of Defiance mostly hanging out on the sidelines — there’s one giant narrative that none can escape.
Of course, I’m talking about the fact that 32 copies of Smuggler’s Copter that showed up in the top 8. It wasn’t 25% of the top 8. It wasn’t 40%. It wasn’t 50% or 60% or 75%. Literal 100% of the top 8 played four Smuggler’s Copter. Every single deck.
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Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.
Apparently I should complain about my lack of article titles every Monday morning around 10am, because each time I do, I get something exciting to talk about. A few weeks ago Rosewater posted the article about the Masterpiece Series seemingly in response, and this week, news of Hareruya’s Frontier tournament began making the rounds almost on cue.
What’s Frontier? Great question. Here’s the announcement:
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Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.
Kaladesh is pretty awesome looking, right? Aesthetically it’s a great blend of multiple inspirations, and the glistening flourish of the art direction is a welcome reprieve after the grimdark atmosphere of Shadows Over Innistrad. People are glad to see a new artifact set that isn’t Mirrodin. Vehicles are rather Star Wars Episode I: Pod Racery for my taste, but they’re fine overall. I actually think they’re probably way too good.
Wizards has a track record of setting the bar too high on new card types and subtypes. They were nowhere near where they wanted to be with the original five planeswalkers, and it took years before they finally got them to an appropriate level. Back in Mirrodin when they rolled out equipment it was laughably overpowered. Skullclamp, one of the ten strongest cards in Magic’s history, was an uncommon. Grafted Wargear exists. Loxodon Warhammer was an uncommon. Bonesplitter was common.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.
A little over a month ago, I wrote about Expeditions, the bonus land cycle found in Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. We explored how they’ve fared so far and the implications on the normal cards in the set they came from. “This will be useful if they ever print an Expeditions set again,” I said. Well, guess what!
Here’s all of the Kaladesh Inventions within Kaladesh packs:
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