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Magic: the Gathering - War of the Spark previews have started
War of the Spark is the next MtG set, coming out on May 3.
They released an official trailer today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5W9t62t10I
As of the time of posting, there are 32 cards revealed so far, available here: https://scryfall.com/sets/war?order=spoiled&as=grid
They previously revealed that every booster pack will have a Planeswalker in it, so the set looks like it will have quite a few of these unusual Planeswalkers with no way to add loyalty counters to themselves.
I never liked the concept of Planeswalker cards. They tend to make the entire game pivot on them as soon as they hit the board, and there isn’t much playing around them. It’s not very fun.
But I do like the idea of ones with only negative loyalty. It basically turns them into a sort of enchantment that the opponent can attack.
My hope is that this set will finally tire the community out on Planeswalkers, especially since theyve been pretty played out at this point. I'm thinking of trying a limited tourney or two just to demo the environment, but I cant imagine its going to be great. Theyre pretty warping - cant imagine any format entirely around them working unless burn and trample are REALLY strong.
Well, can you play around enchantments? I view planeswalkers as limited use enchantments that you can interact with in combat.
Enchantments usually aren't as powerful as the planeswalker cards tend to be. It's not the mechanic really, it's how powerful the cards end up being. Once they hit the board it's like a ticking time-bomb to deal with it with no other card interactions involved. It suddenly becomes a game of kill/protect that one card.
You can build a deck around a card to be that way, but with the planeswalkers they're almost ALL that way.
I think a lot of it is supposed to be balanced around the ability to kill them in combat, though, I can't just slam a planeswalker if I don't have much board to protect it. But ticking-bomb-Teferi is real, yeah.
Many good cards require you to play around them as soon as they hit the board. A good planeswalker usually forces you to choose to deal with it, but it's quite easy to deal with most planeswalkers; they're counterable, attackable, and damageable with direct damage. Since planeswalkers have usually been expensive (both in terms of money and mana cost) it makes sense that they have an immediate effect on the board; many creatures, enchantments, etc. have a similar "must deal with this" effect.
I think this set in particular has done a good job with making planeswalkers more common, and making the more common planeswalkers less powerful; they need something else to really ramp them up, because they only have "minus" abilities. I think a lot of them are pretty interesting.
The new Bolas is totally broken in a hilarious way though.
I'm excited for the story and lore. I play a little MTG Arena, but I've always liked reading the short stories. And now that there are novels coming out again, finally resolving the story line that's been going on for the last 10 years or so, I'm even more excited to read it.
The trailer by the way, was amazing. Though I think that it probably didn't make that much sense for those who don't know the story. I really liked the step from the older trailers which only had some moving images to full, quality animation.