Holy shit?? They listened? Legitimately gobsmacked here.

Some of you are asking what a Rattlesnake card is, so i thought it'd be cool to do a refresher. The great @anthonyaalongi created this animal classification system for multiplayer casual cards a generation ago and it still holds up

https://twitter.com/ghirapurigears/status/1600533715825741826

First, as mentioned, the rattlesnake. a card that sits on the table and uses threat of activation to stop you from messing with them. Classic examples are like Nev's Disk or Seal of Doom- political cards that direct your attention to softer targets.

in what is almost certainly not a coincidence, the forthcoming innistrad: midnight hunt set comes out almost 10 years to the day that og innistrad came out. this is notable for a few reasons. In many ways, OG innistrad represents the real beginning of Magic's explosive growth period, and is also widely considered to be one of the top 2 or 3 limited environments of all time

a lot of folks have asked me how to downtune their decks to make them more 'casual friendly' for whatever that means, and while it is really hard to just tell you what to do (as it is more a mindset than strict card swaps) i do have one tip- swap in arcane denial for counterspell (or for you grognards like me, the proper versions)

So, who the hell is Vecna, and why do we have his random body parts? Time for a significantly shorter lore dive!

https://twitter.com/ghirapurigears/status/1412096396950315024

Our story starts back in 1976, with the 3rd supplement to the original D&D rules, Eldritch Wizardry by Brian Blume. (the first three books were men & magic, monsters and treasure, and underworld & wilderness adventures, followed by greyhawk and blackmoor)

Mordenkainen had to be a planeswalker. He's one of the most famous characters in all of d&d, being the PC of Gary Gygax himself, and the character who has been continuously active and relevant in the game the longest, since 1972 Mordenkainen is an archmage of Oerth, though he is well known on Toril (the realms), and he leads a group of wizards known as the Circle of 8, with folks like Bigby, Otiluke, Otto, Drawmij, and Tenser, all of whom are famous in their own right

I want to talk about Giant Space Hamsters for a second.

https://twitter.com/wizards_magic/status/1411038258184785927

Boo, the first hamster in magic, might catch folks who aren't familiar with Baldur's Gate off guard. It's a hamster. why do people care?

holy crap they made Acererak! The demilich that was the boss of the most brutal player killer dungeon ever devised, the Tomb of Horrors. So liches were great and powerful spellcasters who found a way to become effectively immortal to keep their power or whatever, and turned into horrific evil monsters. A demilich is a lich that evolved past needing a body at all, becoming an eldritch horror floating skull

let's talk about Magic in D&D! and not cards, but arcane nattering with wibbly gestures and spidery words and throwing little balls of bat shit wrapped around sulfur at people and watching them explode so back in the 50s, there were a lot of pulp novels of adventure, sci fi, and early fantasy. Among them were the fantasy short stories of Jack Vance, collected in a pulp novel called "The Dying Earth"

this is absolutely spot on perfect. lightfoot, btw, is a subrace of Halfling. The most common type, basically built to be a tolkien hobbit with the serial numbers filed off.

Hell yes, the king of source books had arrived! The Volo's Guides were my favorites to read, because they were literally all just flavor and spice you could add to the texture of your games. They read like in world travel guides more than Stat packs Volo's guides were either books of monsters, magical hodgepodgery, or setting guides to the various kingdoms and regions of Faerun

i think what is happening, and this is probably obvious, is that the demographics of magic players have shifted slowly but significantly over the past 10 years+, and wotc has finally decided to shift their spotlight and the magnifying glass that pointed square at the specific format of the tournament grinder/pro player was cool for an era, but when you look outside that lens, you realize the gigantic ocean of people you missed when you were looking at this tidepool

i'm in a weird place. I'm a casual, and hell, i'm one of the faces of commander, and yet i have a ton of friends who are top tier pros, who work behind the scenes at events as commentary or staff, and like, this sucks I want my friends to succeed, to be happy, to be paid and get to do cool jobs that are super fun. I also want my community to have events that allow us to gather and share our love of magic. I just don't understand why this has to be either/or.

this makes it sound so negative, and yet i'm hard pressed to see how this isn't fantastic for a large segment of the fandom. i think it's less that they only care about shareholders and more that they realize that pro play just isn't drawing like casual does.

https://twitter.com/DynamoNestico/status/1392890718939721732

like, remember GP LA where there were a huge bunch of us casuals thrown out of the hall because of the side events taking our space, and then GP Vegas where the new Command Zone area was half the hall and basically full, and then how incredible the command fests were

Today's scryfall random reminds you to mount up, as it was a clear black night, a clear white moon, and Warren G was on the street, trying to consume One of them decks was staxxy as hell, I said ooh I like your style
She said "you loop strip mine and you lock them good, do you pay the tiiithe"
I got a deck full of orbs and it's going real swell
The next stop is to send youuuu to helllllllll

No one asked for this, so here we go. Shivam's state of commander, a thread.

https://twitter.com/ghirapurigears/status/1371581868760461318

Let's start with the obvious: 2020 sucked for humanity. Like, out and out ended time levels of suck. Raistlin at the end of legends desperately draining life out of stars because evil cannot create, it can only destroy levels of suck.

i'm an optimist. a pollyanna. i try to see the best in people and always give folks the benefit of the doubt. but man, this secret lair is real testing. And i don't blame anyone for being mad, it's just real unfortunate that the target ended up being an unrelated third party. i think there were a bunch of things that went wrong here- *mechanically unique cards in a special edition
*time limited access
*geography limited access
*cost
*legality
*timing

i genuinely don't know what i want or expect to hear from wotc about these walking dead cards. four days later i'm just not sure what i feel about this. i value their ability to experiment and test new things and do wildly unexpected things, but i also am incredibly frustrated that they'd just unilaterally decide the legality of cards that are not universally available

My box toppers were a bit of a bust, but at least I have a deck for them? They look incredibly cool though

unofficial list of commanders i would totally let you use but can't convince the RC to legalize:
Partner Withs-
Bros Yamazaki
Brisela

Should be Legends-
Named cards from Arabian Nights
Uncle Istvan
Nephilim

The Wrong Half-
kamigawa flip legendary enchantments
elbrus
ormendal token creatures i'd allow to do commander damage-
voja
ragavan
stangg twin
karox bladewing
tuktuk the returned

here's an unfiltered and unfinished thought stream i am working on-
wotc's change of focus from competitive players to casual/edh players has been detrimental to both groups. By making cards that are strong enough to play in edh, they make cards that are completely busted in 60 this then creates really unbalanced and unfun standard, pioneer, and modern environments, leading competitively minded players to look elsewhere for their fun