Robot Viking

I’ve mentioned before that working at Wizards of the Coast seems pretty awesome, and the people who work there are equally awesome. Now’s your chance to become one of those people. Magic’s R&D is holding their second Great Designer Search.

Bob and John from GenerationD20 concocted this special segment of their infamous (or soon to be infamous) Draft Beer. They did an M11 draft and also put away a few bottles of Scrimshaw Pilsner.

My first day at Gen Con, I was escorted past the velvet ropes (well, there weren’t really velvet ropes) to the exclusive Wizards of the Coast press area. There, amidst leather couches and seemingly random room lamps, I spoke to Magic: the Gathering brand managers Paul Levy and Mark Purvis about Scottish highland dance competitions. [...]

Here are some interesting ideas, blogs and gaming sites I’ve been checking out lately. If you like beer with your games, non sequitur gaming chatter or frequent character death, there’s something for you here.

Small correction, the Twitter Magic thing doesn’t start Saturday morning, it started this morning. It’s on! Go to TweetMTG to play along. Current effect: “Until next tweet, creatures Ajani’s team controls gain double strike.” They’re also posting some fun flavor about the power of bogs and marshes, and creature vs. creature trash talk.

What if a card created counters that didn’t actually do anything? You’d have to rely on other cards to make those counters function. The real twist: those counters don’t always do the same thing. That’s the concept we’re exploring with this edition of Crash Test Magic.

One of the fun things about multiplayer Magic games is introducing a few random elements that can radically shift the game in weird and fun ways. It keeps one player from getting a runaway victory, or everyone from ganging up on one player. This weekend, by following a special Twitter feed, you can experience wacky [...]

Talking about new Magic core sets is so much more fun these days. Now that the sets are 50 percent brand new cards, there’s a lot more to talk about than, “what did they leave out/bring back?” My favorite thing about M11? Fun.

Wizards of the Coast plans to donate as much as $20,000 to the Child’s Play charity, which provides games, toys and books to sick kids stuck in hospitals. You can help make it happen just by playing Magic this weekend.

Magic: the Gathering’s new core set comes out in just a few weeks. M11 carries on a new Magic tradition — 50 percent new cards in core sets. Here’s one of them, a tasty beverage that can breath new life into a rundown deck.

This weekend, I got together with friends and Vikings to play some fun, casual games of Magic, grill and devour sausages and drink a fair amount of beer and Mountain Dew. We gave the new Archenemy multiplayer format a whirl, and as you can see my wife also discovered the bizarre special effects my digital [...]

I’ve had this card idea kicking around in my head ever since Grand Prix D.C., when I had to take Gallows Road to get to the convention center. I immediately decided it would be an awesome name for a Magic card, and would naturally be a land. But what would it do?

I was going to write some kind of coherent narrative encapsulating the entire journey, but quickly realized that was going to be impossible. It was like visiting the sausage factory, but instead of being grossed out, you discovered that sausages are made of rainbows and dipped in elementally pure Awesome, then packaged by elves and [...]

Ok, I’m at the airport now with a lot of time to kill. Here’s the last installment of my Community Cup Challenge report.