The Planeswalker's Stronghold

Okay, here is something you have never seem on this blog before: Put down the Magic cards cause it's free comic book day ! In a more topical vein, Wizards has released a Magic related comic as on of the freebies.  What a great way to encourage reading in kids of all ages.

I can't believe it took as long as it did, but it was well worth the work. After nearly 4 months of sorting, I now find myself a little over 40,000 Magic cards lighter. This bulk of excess cards has become a $200 store credit with CFB, a finished Legacy Merfolk deck, a fourth Goyf, 4 blue Onslaught fetches, several restricted Vintage cards, most of the cards I wanted from the current Scars block to date, and a handful of casual cards. Most importantly, all this bulk of under utilized cards is gone, and the room it took up is now empty. Not only can I actually find what I'm looking for far easier, even when a card has been misplaced. I also have discovered that the two bookcases in my office, are now empty, their sole purpose in life having been to house my massive Magic collection. They have found a better home else where. Before the Purge It was really amazing, not to mention startling, to discover just how much good stuff I had that I really and truly didn't even kno...

The last few months have brought about a lot of changes for the Magic Community, both on the personal, local, and global level. Wizards continues to make, what I can only describe as poor decisions regarding it's player community. Restricting TO affiliations, decreasing professional level events, dogmatic enforcement of the Reserved List, elimination of the Player Rewards program, universally hated changes to the B/R list, and an ever increasing barrage of narrow products, seem to do little but add to player frustrations. I hear from an wide swath of players, who truly wish the simple things could be simple. If Wizards is going to continually fight TO efforts to promote their product, and build their community, then honestly why bother? This is forcing me to reevaluate many of my own community driven efforts. It has become clear to me that my status as "simply" a TO is not effective, and not really desired by Wizards. I feel that I must either forgo being a TO, or expan...

Another stellar month here at Planeswalker's Stronghold. Not as much content as I normally like, as many folks have been busy, including myself. Despite that, we did have another break through month on readership, with nearly 2200 views for the month, and putting us over 10,000 total views. We had a great Repack event in the month of March, with old friends coming out, and several new folks also. The current pack mix appears to be working well, and we have far more consistent packs. This improved pack consistency has made the "snow covered" rule less important, as the cards don't appear as frequently, but the current thinking is to keep the rule around as long as Coldsnap is in extended, and then go from there. Aprils pre/release schedule puts April's event right around the corner, so we may see a little slip in attendance, but we will have to see.

Periodically, this great game of ours finds itself in a position which requires a change. With Wizards recently announced back peddle to more stringently enforce the Reserved list, I believe the game finds itself at the precipice of just such a change. Brief History of Magic Formats: 1993 (290 cards) Magic debut with Alpha late 1994 (1 year, 9 sets, 985 cards) Magic deck construction rules are formalized and Standardized by the Duelist Convocation, giving birth to what would later be called type 1. late 1995 (2 years, 14 sets, 1,446 cards) Magic deck construction rules were officially split into 2 separate formats, Type 1 and Type 2. Type 2 was later called Standard, Type 1 Eternal. (Type 1.5 was also used to signify a format with which the type 1 restricted list was instead banned) late 1996 (3 years, 16 sets, 1,903 cards) Extended was created as a format. Standard had a rotation of approximately 1 year, Extended 2 years. 2002 (~8 years, ~45 sets, 6,056 cards) Standard and Exte...

Now that's Big! Please note the card number is 6 of 248. This means if they stick with traditional set numbering, that this set is most likely all colorless, having no colored mana symbols in the costs. It could also indicate that there have been a change to the numbering system, and that either colorless creatures come first, or that all Mythics or Eldrazi spells come first. My money is on all colorless, after all they just did the first all gold set! Please note how the art extends into the frame. I love it! is this something we will see on all future cards, just this set, just Eldrazi? Don't know but I like it. In other news, this little corner of the Multiverse had another stellar month. Both January and February generated +1400 unique hits to the site.

If you are reading this, it probably comes as no surprise that the Legacy format has become a power house recently. It has experienced unprecedented growth over the last year, and the format is more popular today then at any other point in it's history. Some very reasonable estimates indicate that there are 10-20x more active Legacy players today then there were just one year ago. Even taking into account the recently massive growth of Magic on whole, the Legacy format has been growing by leaps and bounds. Wizards, the DCI, and TO's of all sizes have done a great job of giving players reasons to want to play Legacy. That is what brings us to the potential problem. We have created a situation of relative limitless demand for the format, and thus the cards with which the format is built. Supply of many of these cards doesn't even come close to meeting the current demand. Future demand runs the risk of being insurmountable in magnitude. For instance nearly every multi-color ...

Contributed by special guest correspondent Paul Abduela It's been another exciting week here on Planeswalker Idol. Sorin put the bite on the competition, and sucked the life out of Garruk. Nicol on the other hand, did not rise to the occasion, and may have been to proud to allow America to decide his hate. This last week puts Sorin, Ajani, and Jace head to head, in a fight for the 2009 Planeswalker Idol title. Lets put the spot light on a couple of our last contestants. Ajani Goldmane is a planeswalker who wields white magic. His specialty is magic of the purification of body and soul: spells that heal and strengthen his allies, and spells that evoke the inner, spiritual essence of others. Ajani Goldmane is torn between his leonin ferocity and his sense of justice. He was born as an outcast within his own family, an albino leonin never accepted by the rest of his pride. The only person who cared about him was his brother Jazal, the leader of their pride and Aj...

Submitted by special guest consultant, Paul Abdula. Every January for roughly a decade, the counrty get hooked on the phenomena of American Idol, and while I'm no Ryan Seacrest, I think it's about time the superstars of Magic get in on the act. Our judges scoured the multiverse for the brightest Planeswalker talent to be found in 2009. In order to qualify for the Hollywood portion of the contest, these planeswalkers had to make it through rigorous rounds with the R&D judges, and get selected for the 2009 year. Now it's your turn America, to see what these Planeswalkers bring to the big stage, and decide for whom the spotlight shines. Lets meet our Contestants, and their round one results; Ajani Goldmane [ 13 ]  [18.06%] Chandra Ablaze [ 5 ]  [6.94%] Chandra Nalaar [ 6 ]  [8.33%] Garruk Wildspeaker [ 12 ]  [16.67%] Jace Beleren [ 13 ]  [18.06%] ...

Ever since the switch from Theme decks to intro packs, I've rattled on about how inferior of a product this really is. This week Aaron Forsythe gave us a peek at what is to come in 2010. One of these changes is pushing the Intro pack contents from a 41 card preconstructed deck to 60 cards, will still include the booster pack, and will only rise $1 on MSRP. This certainly increases the value of the intro packs, since the deck is playable and potentially customizable with no further investment. This assumes though that the base deck inside is reasonably playable out of the box, and a lot of what we have seen in Intro packs so far has been real crap. Certainly not all, but a lot. Wizards always wants to have an intro pack to highlight every theme and interaction in the set. This often means 4-5 individual products 4 times a year. That's 16-20 mediocre decks every year. Folks that's a lot of mediocre! I think the best thing Wizards could do for Intro packs is to simply make ...

This was a series of facebook posts made by the one the only Patrick Chapin. I'm pretty sure a few things are a bit out of order, and some of the facts have been simplified a bit, but it's mostly dead on! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and I really felt like it deserved to be saved. Did you know that Urza lost to Yawgmoth? Yawgmoth, who had fully corrupted Mishra in the first place presented Urza with the clockwork hell that had been torturing Mishra for thousands of years after his death and Urza bowed to Yawgmoth who then had Gerrard and Urza fight, Gerrard cut off Urza's head. Urza also had 9 Giant titan robots similar to battle tech that were driven by 9 planeswalkers, Commodore Guff, Tevesh Szat, Bo Levar, Daria, Taysir, Freyalise, Kristina, Lord Windgrace, and of course Urza himself. Like with Jesus and Judas, Urza knew Tevesh Szat would betray him and did not stop him. Unlike Jesus and Judas, Urza responded being putting Tevesh Szat inside a Nuclear Soul Bo...

Well this was a big month for our little corner of the multiverse, the biggest yet in fact. This month is the first time we had over 1,000 unique hits on the site. this is no surprise, since this was also our biggest month for content, with 15 articles, from 5 authors. Thanks to everyone for making this such a huge month for us. Legacy continues to be the soup of the day, with several events having been held locally. I'm pleased to say that we have several new members of the community, due primarily to the Legacy efforts. I've talked with several players, and we are going to try something new for Repack this month, shifting the events to mid-afternoon on Sunday. We will be forced to cap the events to three rounds, but I don't see it as being a problem. You may have already noticed that the Calendar function has already been removed. It worked correctly for a full day, and then never again. It looks to be a programming issue, which I hope will be resolved, but since I di...

(Rant mode on) Those that know me are aware that I am a pretty serious Indianapolis Colts fan. From the time I lived in Indiana in 1992, I’ve followed the Colts, through the dismal failure of Jeff George, to the brief success of Jim Harbaugh, through the misery of multiple 3-13 seasons, to the first overall draft pick, to the brilliance of consecutive 12+ wins in the last seven seasons. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise to me what happened yesterday afternoon. After starting the season 14-0, with home field advantage clinched through the playoffs, all of the personal milestones achieved (50,000 career passing yards, fyi), the Colts once again decide to bench all of their starters with about 6 minutes to go in the 3rd quarter. They were leading 15-10 at the time, with every indication that they were likely to defeat the New York Jets. But then they just gave up. Peyton Manning grimaced on the sidelines, pleading to his Offensive Coordinator Tom Moore to let him come back ...

Happy Birthday Buddy. We would have gotten you a bigger cake, but it turns out that many candles are a fire hazard, even on the internet! I know your big day is often over shadowed by that "other guy" born this time of year, and while you probably will never be the basis for a sweeping global religious movement, I truly appreciate you as a friend, and contributor to this sites efforts. I hope this year was twice as good as last year, but only half as good as the next.

Submitted by Jeff Darran So we had our first Sci-Fi Legacy tourney on Sunday. I decided to play the mono red burn deck I’ve been working on for a while, cause, well, to know me is to understand my relationship with mountains, lightning bolts, and generally setting things on fire. It’s “me.”  So I go rolling in with my deck (aptly titled Jeff Red – Legacy E d ition ) and proceed to get paired against Jeff Abbott (Crispy), the man responsible for me playing legacy.  I started off in an interesting state of mind though , an omen of sorts, as I count my board and find only 14 cards…. What? There’s supposed to be 15. So I pile shuffle the main deck and discover 61 cards. Well pooh. I start looking thru, and discover that I have done something horribly wrong. With all the excitement from FNM, then states on Saturday, where I took and passed my L1 judge test (official L1 Magic judge now! Woot) I have somehow forgotten to actually prepare and make sure there were no proxies ...