MTG Salvation

In 1998, Mark Rosewater, the Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering, created Mood Swings. The idea is simple: Make a trading card game that doesn’t require a ton of collecting or deck building to get into.  Unfortunately for Rosewater, making a good game and getting it to print proved to be far more difficult than simply pitching it.  28 years later, Rosewater’s creation has gone through a lot of iterations but is finally being released via Magic’s Secret Lair brand.  

Yesterday, I awoke to the news that Secret Lair’s Chaos Vault was dropping the highly anticipated Dandan deck.  Dandan aka Forgetful Fish is a highly interactive fan-created game mode, that graphic designer Nick Floyd pioneered 30 years ago, that uses a shared 80-card deck.  The announcement that it was coming to Secret Lair was birthed in a shroud of controversy as Floyd wasn’t initially contacted about it. Thanks to an outpouring of support from the MTG community, Nick Floyd was able to get credit for his creation, and the Dandan lead from Secret Lair, Carmen Klomparens, even posted to her social media that she could “not stress enough that this wouldn’t be possible” without Floyd.

Typically when I play magic, I play Izzet or Simic.  Izzet carries the ruthless aggression of red with the calculated control of blue.  Simic likewise relies on a splash of control while green takes your battlefield and makes it huge.  Jund, the color combination of black, red, and green is not something I would normally play because of the lack of instant control that blue would normally offer.  Still, I was so impressed with Auntie Ool, Cursewretch that I had to give the Blight Curse deck a fair shot. The day it released, I was forking over my hard earned money just for a shot at piloting this unique deck full of despair and decay.

Shock lands are a popular and versatile dual land option in Magic: The Gathering. Starting with Edge of Eternities, shock lands are making their way back into standard. With Edge of Eternities, we saw 5 of the 10 shock lands come back into play.  The last time we saw all 10 shock lands in standard was when they were released in the Ravnica sets from 2018 and 2019.  With Lorwyn Eclipsed, we’ll see the other 5 shock lands not in Edge of Eternities come back into Standard. 

The first Magic set of 2026 is just over a week away and the contents have been revealed.  According to the debut video posted on Wizards’ YouTube channel last week, the art in Lorwyn Eclipsed is supposed to have a hand-drawn feel to it.  I wanted to take a few minutes to look at some of the amazing artists that have brought Lorwyn-Shadowmoor to life and their incredible art.

Yesterday we ranked every set that was released in 2025.  This spectacular year in Magic: The Gathering saw us visit classic planes like Innistrad and Tarkir.  We went to nearby New York City and all the way to the edge of the cosmos. Today we look at the best cards to come out of Magic: The Gathering in 2025.

2025 was a banner year for Magic: The Gathering.  New mechanics and card ideas brought fun and innovative ways to play.  Still, not every set was created equal so some ideas were more successful than others.  Today, we take a look at the best and worst of what came to Magic in 2025.

It’s been a month since the release of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  In that time, we’ve seen cards like Gran-Gran begin to have a noticeable impact on competitive Magic. We’ve written about the near-limitless Commander options available in the set.  One of the biggest ways that Avatar: The Last Airbender changed the game was by introducing bending mechanics.

Avatar: The Last Airbender features many Legendary Creatures based on the characters of the tv show.  Many characters even have multiple versions of themselves to show the character transformations they went through. With the show’s bending being worked into an MTG mechanic, there are some powerful while flavorful cards that would make for a really great Commander Deck.