Robot Viking

The first expansion for the 2013 edition of Duels of the Planeswalkers came out this week. It adds five new decks and a ton of cards from the original Ravnica block to the casual video game version of Magic: the Gathering.

The bell tolls for thee, 4E. A lot of people have wondered what kind of D&D books will be released in 2013 if the D&D Next playtest is going to take two years. Menzoberranzan answers that question — edition-neutral books packed with fluffy lore and epic (p)ages of fictional history. That gives D&D fans a [...]

While I was at PAX I had the chance to talk to Magic Brand Manager Paul Levy about Return to Ravnica. Due to technical difficulties associated with a loud expo floor I can’t give a transcript, but I can pass on the highlights of the talk.

I was able to attend the D&D keynote address at Gen Con, talk with Mike Mearls about D&D for over an hour and play some D&D Next with him as the DM, and interview brand manager Laura Tommervik about Rise of the Underdark. I’ve gathered up all that info into one feature article that just [...]

I hope your GenCon was good. This week I would like to talk about a piece of gamer news that caught my attention at GenCon: D&DNext is going to take two years to playtest.

With the World Magic Cup going on at Gen Con, Magic Organized Play Programs Manager Scott Larabee must have been insanely busy. He still found time to sit down with me and talk about Commander, Grand Prix events and Planeswalker Points.

WotC announced at San Diego Comic Con that they would be releasing Commander products every year now, and that we’d have a November release this year. They’ve lifted the lid on that November product, called Commander’s Arsenal.

Some time ago, Wizards of the Coast abandoned their old Player Rewards Program, eventually replacing it with Planeswalker Points, a system by which you “level up” when you compete in tournaments and win matches, and which is utterly meaningless unless you’re one of the 0.5 percent of all Magic players saving up seasonal points for [...]

D&D minis are resurrected with this new skirmish game, pitting warband against warband in a deathmatch ruled by shifting orders and a constant influx of reinforcements. Dungeon Command borrows from the old D&D minis game along with a helping of Magic: the Gathering.

Sure, it’s Magic Week here at Robot Viking, but sometimes Magic is a little too complicated for the younger gamers in your life. You need a gateway game to teach them the fundamentals of card advantage, hand-quality, and creature combat. How about Kaijudo? The upcoming Dojo Edition will feature this creepy squid creature, Vikorakas.

Wizards of the Coast has been working on a new user interface/client for Magic Online for 180 years*, and this week they finally opened it to a public beta test. It vastly improves some aspects of the old client, but needs work in some key areas. Which sounds about right for a beta. *actual time [...]

I haven’t been playing much constructed Magic lately, so I won’t fake my way through an analysis of M13 for competitive play. Instead, here are ten cards from the set, both new ones and reprints, that I think are particularly interesting. It might be because they’re a sleeper draft pick, a surprising reprint, a fun [...]

It’s Magic Week at Robot VIking! What does that mean? That I’m going to talk about nothing but Magic all week. Duh. Hope you like Magic! Anyway, let’s get things started by roping up all of the wild bits of Return to Ravnica info that Wizards let loose at San Diego Comic Con (SDCC to [...]

In a strange bit of cosmic symmetry (or just skillful marketing), Wizards of the Coast killed off their Virtual Table on the exact same day Paizo announced their own version of the “way to play tabletop RPGs online”, called Paizo Game Space.