I’m not ever going to get deep into spoiler review here on LGS Net Income. Magic (and other TCG) spoilers are relevant to our businesses, but the reality is they are more than adequately covered in other channels, and they are honestly tangential to the product’s sales approach in many cases. The exception is generally when an extremely important spoiler occurs, such as reprints of the fetchlands, or if they were to break the Reserved List, the latter of which isn’t going to just happen in a vacuum one day, but would have to occur in tandem with other policy and production changes in order not to be a massive financial liability for Hasbro.
Today’s spoilers followed on to some things that we already knew, such as the various reprint subsets being in there, the newspaper cards, the vault stuff, special guests on the List, and so on. We also got to see a bunch of ordinary commons and uncommons from the set finally, such as this absolute banger:
I know it’s not going to amount to much as a memorable card, but you have to believe me when I tell you this is absolutely magnificent. The card abilities are fine for limited formats, which is all this heifer is likely to see grazing time in. But as part of the entire story of Magic’s first ever Cowboy Times set, finding a way to get card execution on the trope/catchphrase Holy Cow is a complete triumph.
Here is one of the reprints from the most-wanted/newspaper group of cards, Dust Bowl, which appeared way back in Mercadian Masques 25 years ago and has been dodging reprints ever since, only appearing in tiny quantities as an Oath of the Gatewatch expedition.
Dust Bowl is an interesting business case because it was a bulk-ish rare for a while, and has gradually built value as years ticked by with no real reprint. Obviously that price is going to crash somewhat now, to what level we don’t yet know. I do love this as a reprint, and I’ll explain why. It wasn’t enormously strong; you would never play it over Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter, let alone Wasteland or Strip Mine, unless you had an effective recursion setup going, which in Commander is totally achievable of course. But it was one of those cards that had an impactful ability at a moderate cost, and saw decks in Standard at the time, and created interesting gameplay as a result.
We got a reprint of the enemy fastlands cycle, which debuted in Kaladesh way back eight years ago and, until now, had only been reprinted once, as a Doctor Who themed secret lair drop. These are absolutely consequential reprints that will help sell packs, and that are played in decks in most formats in which they are legal.
As you can see, there is a panorama formed from the artwork of the borderless versions of the cards. Why were these previewed alphabetically instead of arranged to show the panorama? I can’t figure this out at all. Some decision maker was on break when they made that graphic and it must have gotten by them.
And by the way, it does appear they’ve ran with the “it’s magic, okay?” explanation of why Thunder Junction’s biome includes the saguaro cactus, a plant that appears only in a tiny sliver of one desert region on Earth and is not at all common to deserts and southwestern-ish settings everywhere as Hollywood would have you think. I guess the borderless Blooming Marsh even has Joshua Trees, so they are just leaning into this and saying everything goes as far as “western” tropes.
And by the way, the set includes Mana Drain, which in the Before Times would have been Wizards’ way of telling us that all of R&D got run over by a bus. Today it’s marginal and not even playable in every format where it’s legal. De profundis.
The spoilers will keep going all week and the prerelease isn’t long after that. I’m contemplating going and playing in it at Amazing Discoveries Chandler, just to be able to occupy space in that building without having any responsibilities. Hmmm.