We Rank Every Set from 2024 | The Command Zone 648 | MTG EDH Magic Gathering

Summary

In this episode of The Command Zone, hosts Rachel Weeks, Jimmy Wong, and Josh Lee Kwai review and rank the Magic: The Gathering (MTG) sets released in 2024 for the Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) format. They discuss everything from the rankings and key takeaways of the sets to where to purchase cards. The team also reflects on the thematic approaches of the sets, the impact of mechanics, and the year overall for MTG releases. The hosts rank each set, discussing the best and worst sets of the year, and provide insights into what made this year unique in MTG history.

Highlights

• Bloomyo was celebrated for its unique theme and accessibility to new players, making it a fan favorite. 🐭
• Modern Horizons 3 continued the trend of powerful cards, though it didn't warp formats as much as its predecessors. ⚡
• Foundations breathed new life into the concept of core sets, offering something nostalgic and comforting. 🏰
• Mystery Booster 2 impressed with its curated chaos draft experience, though its limited availability was noted. 🚀
• Some sets felt repetitive with movie themes, leading to less excitement and a sense of déjà vu. 📽️
• The team agreed on a C rating for 2024 as a whole, citing the year's highs and lows. 🎭

Key Takeaways

• The Command Zone team extensively reviewed the 2024 MTG sets, ranking them based on their appeal and impact on the EDH format. 📊
• Bloomyo and Modern Horizons 3 stood out as the best sets of the year, capturing the hearts of fans and hosts alike. 🌟
• Sets like Assassin's Creed and Murders at Karlov Manor were less favored, providing fewer memorable experiences. 😕
• Themes played a significant role this year, with many sets leaning into movie genres and pop culture references. 🎬
• While 2024 had its moments, overall it was considered a below-average year for MTG releases by the hosts. 😬

Overview

2024 saw a mix of innovative and nostalgic themes in Magic: The Gathering sets, with The Command Zone podcast hosts taking a deep dive into each one. The year featured a number of striking releases that either thrilled the community or left them wanting.

Bloomyo emerged as the darling of the year, praised for its approachable theme and engaging gameplay. Foundations revived the core set concept, infusing it with a sense of magic nostalgia. However, not every set hit the mark, with some being criticized for over-relying on pop culture and movie genres.

As hosts Rachel, Jimmy, and Josh dissected each set, they found that 2024 was a year of moderate success for Magic: The Gathering. While some sets found a special place in players’ hearts, others were deemed forgettable, ultimately earning the year a mid-tier rating.

We Rank Every Set from 2024 | The Command Zone 648 | MTG EDH Magic Gathering Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 greetings humans you have entered the command Zone your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander enjoy your stay welcome back everybody to another episode of the command Zone podcast I'm your host Rachel weeks I'm Jimmy Wong how's it it's Josh leai and today we are breaking down every single set from
• 00:30 - 01:00 2024 that's right uh it's the end of the year so it's time to look back and just think about how everything went so we're going to talk about every set today everything from ravnik remastered remember that to the most recent set foundations uh I'd be lying if I didn't look at the outline go oh yeah ravika remastered it's always the first set of the year cuz it was also double feature that one time yeah it's always like wait that happened oh wait it's almost 2025 yeah we're
• 01:00 - 01:30 going to be ranking the sets as well and comparing what our rankings are to each other uh and just basically understanding what we thought were the best as well and the worst but they were all great to be honest they're all pretty good I think this year but before we get into it if you want to get your hands on any of the cards from this year well the best place to go is cardkingdom.com commmand that's where you can get your magic product singles anything at all you know with the holidays around we often have a little bit of holiday money hopefully hopefully that's what you got hopefully that's
• 01:30 - 02:00 what I get if you're listening just give me money yeah W oo to keep your house warm yeah there you go so if you want to spend that money on Magik cards which we know you do building new decks and such like that card.com commmand has a huge inventory they've got all the cards you're looking for in the virsion you're looking for they've got super fast shipping they have really good customer service so if anything gets messed up they make it right and they make it right quickly that's why we love Card Kingdom they are professionals like we are they have high quality standards like we do again card
• 02:00 - 02:30 cum.com commmand that's where you should go to get all your cards and once those cards are in your hand you're going to need to protect them go to ultrapro.com command to pick up all of the highest quality magic accessories in the business take that holiday spending money and put it into your decks make sure that they're kept safe and protected you can buy deck boxes or sleeves playmats binders everything that you need to have a safe and organized collection plus they have some very cool looking stuff as well they've got all the official licensed magic Art so you
• 02:30 - 03:00 can get your favorite art on a playmat or on sleeves they also have some collections of their own including the Mana 8 collection it's bright white it's got the big Mana symbols in the middle it's perfect for getting signed at conventions magicon Chicago is right around the corner you can get it signed or doodled on by an artist and then you can get it framed in their like cool playmat cases so you can hang them on the wall and remember magicans forever and you can support the show
• 03:00 - 03:30 while you're shopping there at ultrapro.com commmand the last way to support the show is directly patreon.com commmand Zone that's where you can get access to our Discord where Rachel myself Josh answer your questions on a daily basis you can communicate with our amazing Community there and join our fun fun group of people that get to watch game nights and extra turns a day early ad free incredible so if you want to get more amazing content and access to cool cool stuff on the other tiers we have some exclusive content as well just check it out there's a ton of offerings on patreon /c commmand and we shout out
• 03:30 - 04:00 one lucky Patron every single episode and so this episode is dedicated to William Co William you rock all right let's get into it there were 10 sets released in 2024 two of them were reprint sets and uh we're going to go through every single one of them chronologically and we're going to rank them as well so the ranking scale is similar to what you might see on Dance Dance Revolution or other video games where s
• 04:00 - 04:30 L I don't know s i i associate s tier with like video games for whatever reason but s is the very very tippy tippy top it's better than the A+ it's an altimer all the way down to F so s is there have been a few s's in the past but this is like it clears the line for every other set it's like way up and above we'll talk about it for years to come uh a is it's great it's good might not have the same Legacy power as s b is memorably positive I like what you wrote there Rachel yeah like I remember that
• 04:30 - 05:00 set being good yeah it was fun yeah yeah C is yeah it's fine I think a lot of people associate C with bad but I think C is just actually it's okay it might be forgettable forgettable is a big thing I think about when I think about C where it's just like yeah that was fine I don't like I don't remember a lot of cards from it I don't remember like really I didn't play it a lot I don't have a positive but it also don't have a negative connotation right down the middle association with y d is just memorably negative this said was not
• 05:00 - 05:30 great didn't enjoy it didn't have fun didn't play it that much uh the most recent example of this out that is either that or F was like aftermath I think or is that the one with the tiny L probably an F honestly yeah there yeah it's probably getting out to F cuz f is just outright disaster yeah as it should never happen again and if you don't see it happening again it's because it was not only rated an F by the community but also probably by the internal team set Wizards too probably hurt their bottom line a lot yeah exactly when it comes to the criteria that we using to grade this as well there are a few things uh first is just playability and this I think
• 05:30 - 06:00 applies cuz Jos and I love limited so you do so playability built from The Limited side all the way up to how it fits in Commander including the precons and all that uh whether or not the reprint value was good and ranking that as well the impact of new cards on the format and finally just was it cool was it sweet was it were people excited about it did people were people generally postive did it bring also like does it bring a new people it generate that kind of excitement that reminds you of the first time you got into magic things that do that for me always boost that grade up make magic as a game seem
• 06:00 - 06:30 you know better or more accessible in some way I I think the cool factor is sort of a big deal when we're talking about sets overall uh these are the the same criteria that we were grading the precons on so some things are weighted a little bit differently when you're talking about the full set I think playability and cool fact are a very big deal when you're talking about a set that you kind of get trapped in as a Limited Format or you get so many cards based on it that you just want it to be fun you want the theming to be cool yeah I I I notic as I was ranking them uh I'm
• 06:30 - 07:00 not a player that cares about theme a ton but it was pretty heavily weighed when I was ranking how good the sets were every year the theme tended to I was like man I guess I do care about theme more than I think yeah the other thing I wanted to mention is for new card impact it is a little it's also about like what new mechanics did it introduce to the game because you can kind of project forward like this is a cool mechanic you're going to be able to use again and so that's a boon to Magic as a whole if a cool mechanic came out that's that's going to be a well they can draw in the future yeah I think that
• 07:00 - 07:30 has a lot to do with Legacy like what we're talking about for the A's and s's is how much is this going to impact the future of magic how much Legacy not the format yeah exactly yeah surveil is like a really great example of that when they were finally like no let's put a name to this and we've seen surveil have a huge impact on the game since then yeah all right well let's yeah let's talk about the first set of the year which we already kind of intimated uh based on our reaction to having not remembered it what grade it might get Ravnica remembered
• 07:30 - 08:00 in this casee REM oh yeah oh yeah this is the 17th time we've gone back to ravnik and not the last time this year all right so uh this set ravnik remastered was released on January 12th about as far from this state as we can get in one of these um the most valuable reprint was cyclonic Rift which was 3175 um and is now down to $30 we kind of went down and back up it definitely had a more a bigger impact on the price in the immediate and that craw
• 08:00 - 08:30 back up over the course of the year which we see often especially with cards like cyclonic R buvac the grand eloquent was $30.25 and it's now $25.25 so that went down a little more about about five bucks um the shocklands were all reprinted in the remastered set which was one of the best things about it I would say and kind of got those numbers uh the the prices of those back down to quote unquote normal normal yeah I would like close to 10 to 12 is like sort of what I expect from shock lands and they
• 08:30 - 09:00 were well above that before ravika remastered and this is just a pattern that happens with shocklands and has always happened right where they get reprinted they go down for a little while then they slowly creep back up and usually when they're around 20 to $25 is when the next reprint happens surpresses them back down to around 10 and they're going to slowly creep back to that range again and we're going to see this cycle repeat itself because they're kind of like besides original duels the best lands you know that most decks want so yeah so getting them back into the ecosystem just re-injecting them is
• 09:00 - 09:30 something they need to do and this this accomplished that I really like this this like remastered set idea that they've been doing um they did it with dominaria remastered which was a great set and had great value in terms of what you could open I think ravnik remastered was basically just the shockland there was a couple of things you could open but like breac is a pretty narrow effect that like most people don't necessarily need and cyclonic Rift was like you either play it or you don't so uh having that price come down is nice but it was
• 09:30 - 10:00 basically you open it to try and get a few shocklands and uh that's it it felt like a Nostalgia play as well I remember when they announced this uh at one of the magicans and they were showing they had these cool old Border versions of Rapa favorites like the Mizit the shocklands as well yeah ratos got an old Border yeah they had the anime alt Arts which is very common now and much less special than when it first started and then some full art sharks as well so I think overall Ravnica didn't have that much impact on the format back then outside of like having cool legendaries
• 10:00 - 10:30 and those legendaries don't really stand the test of time compared to the legendaries we get now just look at new nib mes compared to the original ones they've also been reprinted a ton like there's not like nibm and Peron is not an expensive card ratos Lord of rides is not an expensive card yeah there's not a lot of them that you were like even Aurelia is like used to be expensive and now really has come down to under 10 fairly reliably I heard this sentiment a lot and I Echo it is like it's sort of weird seeing old like ravika in Old
• 10:30 - 11:00 border ravnik is a new frame set in my head like this is a modern magic set and putting it into like the old Border frames was bizarre to me it's funny because I also Echo that but it feels old compared to how fast magic accelerated a lot of other factors but yeah it's like one of those things where it's like did you know that the that the taking the time between you were born and now and then there someone that whatever is like the same amount of time you're like oh no I'm getting I'm ancient it's kind of what it feels like Ravnica is old oh
• 11:00 - 11:30 yeah I think this speaks to another sort of issue with raver remastered um the old Border thing was really cool the first time they did it and the second and third and fourth time they do it it becomes old hat full art lands used to be amazing and they would only do it once while do full art lands all the time and now it's not even worthy of mentioning and ravnik the plane is a place we have gone back to so many times that it was very hard to sort of get excited about it especially since the next set we're going to talk about is also set in Ravnica and just drawing from the same well over and over tends
• 11:30 - 12:00 to have a sort of numbing effect and I think that's what we saw cuz time SP rematch would very exciting at the time and I was like cards we just didn't have access to in limited it just hadn't seen printed in a while this is not the case with ravik remaster we have seen these cards all the time we've been to this plane all the time it feels like we've been to this plane like every year you know more or less or every other year for like the last decade or so and it's like at a certain point it's like it's hard to continue to get excited about it because it's just happening all the time yeah the guilds were very popular obviously when they first announced it
• 12:00 - 12:30 completely created the standard for what those color pairings were called now it's just not so exciting so let's give some grades maybe well yeah I just want to say also from a draft environment perspective it is tough to have an environment with all 10 guilds and I found the draft like revena is sort of known as being an up and down draft just because of the two color pairings and how that works and I found remastered to be like okay yeah I didn't even draft it I didn't draft it I I mean prices like the packs being a little bit more expensive and and like the draft environment being not being super compelling and unique just sort of kept
• 12:30 - 13:00 me away from it I don't think I opened any of this product I drafted it two times and it was fine which Le into my grade uh which I give it a c which I I didn't necessarily view it negative yeah but maybe like a c minus is probably my true grade but yeah um I think it's fine I think I won't remember that this existed uh I barely remembered when we were writing this outline so yeah yeah I was a c as well this one was sort of classic forgettable and it's nice to have reprint sets and like the idea of these remastered sets I
• 13:00 - 13:30 don't think this was a particularly well executed one yep I gave it a c as well uh and I don't even consider this a main set nothing new about it it just kind of felt like one of those mandates of like we got to get one more set out this year it's got to sell pretty well all right let's pump it with some of the things that we know will turn that dial up all right the final grade we have for Ravnica remastered is a c and when you compare to double feature which sat in that slot the previous year it's better than that better than double better than that it looks better I still can't read
• 13:30 - 14:00 those cards all right uh let's move on to the next set of the year it was to in Ravnica this is Murders At Carlo Manor Mansion this came out on February 9th in 2024 this was the detective themed set so we're talking about uh Clues and um surveil came back and it had new mechanics like suspect which we remember
• 14:00 - 14:30 right every totally remember how supect something suspected disguise that we remember CU we played format uh cases were a brand new type of Enchantment that you could um solve and then get a bigger benefit from there was also collect evidence and of course investigate um so that was like sort of the vibe of the set in terms of what it did to Commander the most built new
• 14:30 - 15:00 Commander from it was of course Voya jaws of the conclave which was a um controversial controversial design uh pushed to say the least yeah uh an Aaron Hansen favorite game night yeah there was a lot of talk in the community after it came out about like why does it have Ward why does it care like why does it say wolfes on it at all like it's just it's just at least don't give it Ward let people kill it cuz it's very it's
• 15:00 - 15:30 too powerful it's so powerful it checks many boxes as a lot of the push commanders do these days yes there were some very popular new cards though there were uh the most played new cards were demand answers which is a new thrill of possibility allows you to sacrifice an artifact uh the much laed land cycle the surveil lands these are the ones that enter tapped and they're fetchable and when they enter you surveil one then also Arch Druids charm leaders call and
• 15:30 - 16:00 aftermath analyst all sort of are doing big numbers in terms of EDH wreck performance yeah all of them are sort of plays on Old effects in new packages yeah aftermath analyst we talked about this in another episode just an absurd card and saw a ton of playing standard as well as is going to be one of those yep you're playing Green and you want this effect it goes in there it's pretty cracked the surveil L I thought in particular that they almost single-handedly changed my grade because they are are something that's going to
• 16:00 - 16:30 impact Commander for a long time to come and immediately we're like one of the top non-basic lands that could go in any deck and yeah you know when you play with them they are awesome you often fetch for surveill lands instead of shocklands and that's a crazy thing to say so that just injected into the format to me is kind of a pretty big deal as far as like if you were to measure the size of the ripples created by Any Given set surveill lands by themselves from this set have a pretty big splash yeah the only thing I didn't
• 16:30 - 17:00 like about them is that they are all very expensive now as a result of being that and we're talking three times the price of shock CLS basically yeah well they've only been printed one time yeah I hope we see a lot more of them in the future because they will always be in demand in terms of reprints the set was a little light assassin's trophy was the big one uh it was nice getting some new art there but it did have a bonus sheet that had a ton of cool reprints including a very fancy field of the Dead which is now more expensive now than it was at the time of this it was 22 before it got reprinted and now it's 2775 just one of those lands everybody I
• 17:00 - 17:30 think that just says what the bonus sheet kind of does to prices it's not necessarily impacting the reprint value well we also don't get to see the parallel universe where it didn't get reprinted and what its price would have been maybe it would have been 35 or 40 so it's just hard to cuz it's field of the Dead like M they're just going to continue to go inex until the end of time it's just that good yeah just that good we wouldn't have a summary of murders at Carlo Manor if we didn't mention the ravnik glue Edition oh yeah remember that I do remember that because
• 17:30 - 18:00 whenever I'm deck building and I see a card that I'm like what is that why is there a big c on it and why is this weirdly good oh it's clue Edition it's clue why is it super expensive oh nobody opened it nobody opened it look I didn't play Clue that much beforehand and I'm still not going to play Clue that much afterwards uh it's not one of my favorite board games of all time but I thought it was a cute collaboration for what it's worth I agree I didn't hate the collaboration I I didn't like quite how many new cards were in that product
• 18:00 - 18:30 there was like a lot of really powerful stuff hiding there but like you can ignore it if you want and it was easy to ignore for I will say too that buying the thing didn't give you all the cards they included a randomized factor with that well and that was much know you open booster packs yeah there was controversy about that as well so you like opened a pack and it would be like you got theorious and then you get like some of the aor I mean are you surprised I'm not surprised I just are we weighing that into our grading cuz I was I think
• 18:30 - 19:00 that's all bundled up in M of all right the showcases as every set has a bunch of these there are these magnified cards the dossier cards and of course you had regular borderless cards as well they did the secret ink foils with these which I thought were really cool on the dossier you could like it had like secret text on some of them you know they tried a bunch of different foil treatments throughout the year I think this one was one of the like kind of cooler cuter ones for me yeah I want to before we give our grades I want to just touch on the theme of this set which I
• 19:00 - 19:30 think was one of the sort of more panned things about it which is it was a little weird a little specific it was like you said detective Noir film sort of we famously did our um CSI parody thing for that and and I don't think that CSI is the first thing you think of when you're talk about like magic as a card game it seemed like a weird fit and I think that might have been one of the reasons why the reception was kind of lukewarm to it
• 19:30 - 20:00 yeah it felt very silly because it was a lot of characters that we know and we know they lore and suddenly they're a detective yeah like why DUS had a similar problem I think yeah I mean so did a thunder Junction where it's just like suddenly all these characters we know had this like weird like hat stickered onto their head and it didn't resonate with people in terms of like what we know of ravnik like we know ravnik it's not full of detective yeah that's the thing they try and do this
• 20:00 - 20:30 where they take like something that's kind of narrow like a genre of you know storytelling and then say you know but this whole world is kind of that or everyone Hears A detective even in this in this narrow spot yeah the you know it's it's like can't can't just there be a couple detective characters and it's like well then how do you have detective typo work I guess I don't know but they try to do that with um new capena as well with like the whole world is a is Mob Boss like yeah there's got to be a better way to do this that doesn't like strain
• 20:30 - 21:00 credibility that that far yeah it's a bit like Rachel said it's like a little too top down in terms of like let's create a cool theme and now everyone's playing dress up yeah it it felt very um I we'll talk about thunder Junction in a second but it felt it felt very uh uh gu the cowboy world show uh Westworld Westworld where like just all of our characters showed up to detective land and we're given a detective outfit and and you're you're now given like canned Detective plot yeah I suppose it doesn't
• 21:00 - 21:30 make it better when we have so many universes Beyond as well that just feels like we're entering into more silliness sometimes and like less based in Magic lore more based in like cool setting let's just ah who cares about the guilds so much yeah the guilds match up but how are we going to for like force it in these sorts of way I don't know it just feels a little forced at least in Westworld the Western was a world like if you went back to the old west that was is a world that's not a place that's ever existed or makes sense to exist right sure there's some detectives mixed
• 21:30 - 22:00 among normal people but a place where just everybody is a detective that doesn't make like I don't know like that just doesn't seem like a world that would exist or it seems difficult for a design team to be like all right we got to do this in a plane that people know okay sure and we got to make characters that people know okay sure and now they're all detective or detective likeit what like okay ah can we have some just be like on the periphery here I wonder how much of this do you think was uh a result of the cluan do you think the cluan before
• 22:00 - 22:30 this or do you think they were doing this set and they said oh well that would match with clue but that's not like what clue is about clue isn't everyone's a detective right but I can imagine everyone's a murderer in I'm not saying this happened right we speculative but you can imagine a world where they go we're doing all this universes Beyond stuff but what properties does Hasbro already own that we could you know do our own universes Beyond type thing but it's not a univers Beyond because we get the tie in because we don't have to you know we don't need to meet with their lawyers in the same way and make the deal and they probably made a big list of all the properties that they own and clue is on that list
• 22:30 - 23:00 and it's possible that they circled clue and hey we could do or we wanted to do a detective thing I mean we could probably just read some marrow blog about it and they go like oh clue please please please do something here with it and then yeah it could it could force the just a little bit more in that direction I think that like that could have been the case but even if that was the case they could have done a better job like murder mystery Ravnica sounds cool everyone's a detective ravnik I have questions that's definitely another place where it could have come from cuz they're all game designers over there and murder mystery parties playing werewolf and stuff like that is all sort
• 23:00 - 23:30 of related and those are games that are fun and so they might have wanted to have some of that feel so I could see it I'm not saying the clue thing for sure happened I'm saying as possible yeah it's also possible it came from like movie genres which we'll talk about later but we very much followed and are still following the path of like let's mark off all the movie genres and do a magic set about those yeah this was also one of the lowest performing sets of the Year by a long shot um this was in maro's state of the for state of design uh article he he talked about call up manner uh and he was like we overdid it
• 23:30 - 24:00 I think he said he would have walked back detective typle I believe and he said he would have changed the name which makes sense to marov to marov uh he he said he would have removed the word murders entirely uh which makes a ton of sense and that also affects sales for sure yeah parents AR going to buy a set necessarily that says murder as the first word the first word child's card would have toned it down on the live that Carlo Manor doesn't have quite the same though all right let mystery at car love Manor I saw before you they done
• 24:00 - 24:30 yeah I mean I feel like like that's better if they had just said like Ravnica a new mystery or ravnik like mystery of mystery the mysteries of ravnik or something like that or like a mystery in in Ravnica now we understand what the set is it's in ravnik we've refocused it to like the thing that matters uh about this set that it's it's ravn God it's one of their biggest most popular planes yeah yeah the car marov thing is a real thing
• 24:30 - 25:00 too feels like a blunder in the naming of it because everyone wanted to call it marov it just rolled off the tongue better we made a joke about it in our video and we that was one of the biggest responses people laugh about that joke cuz they're like I say that every time yeah yeah and if it's like if people are already going to call it that you should think about calling it that but also like don't call it the other thing that it's that's not what they're automatically going to say yeah for sure all right let's do some rankings uh this is an easy C for me but closer to C minus almost a d I think I probably would have given this a the surveillance yeah bump it for me and I also did enjoy
• 25:00 - 25:30 the limited environment even though there were some problems with it I there were some fun archetypes that were kind of like um yeah you know you could play for longer than it looked like so I bumped it to a c i I did do a d for this one um I didn't think a lot of the mechanics had long-term effect I thought everything was a little too themed a little too cute uh and the surveill lands weren't quite enough to save it for me I thought they did some cool stuff with it but um overall not enough
• 25:30 - 26:00 yeah not enough but uh two C's will round this up to uh see or overall from the command Zone I see I see let's move on to the next set of the year it is Fallout time to get universes Beyond this came out on March 8th 2024 so that's three sets in three months are you tired yet uh this was a precon only environment so no main set like we're going to be seeing nothing that goes into standard like what I think Final Fantasy is the first one to be doing
• 26:00 - 26:30 that um the major mechanics here we had rad counters which is like radiation and Milling energy made a big comeback here and uh has been also heralded the beginning of a lot more energy I think that has been entering into the format again uh equipment as well obviously because it's a video game treasure mhm and then junk tokens which is a sort of like another fun sort of video game is tie-in I thought junk was a really sweet mechanic I also really liked rad counters um yeah Rad Rad played really well that's the most built Commander is the wise Moth Man it is he's like the number
• 26:30 - 27:00 51 on Eda track or something he's I surprised yeah it's it's more built according to EDH Rec than uh Voya or VHA or vja or whatever it is vja it's it's also sort of the precon effect where it's if it's the face Commander over a precon it's going to have more deck list online so I don't know how realistic that that comparison is directly and there was less overall to choose from right mcam has a lot more legendary creatures so it gets diluted a little bit but still that's a high number yeah
• 27:00 - 27:30 dog meat also was a favorite uh I think for a lot of players just it's a dog on the card that's commander and it's equipment and dog me a funny name dog me's a very funny name most popular new cards nacac Cola vending machine that's right this card's correct codsworth handy helper equipment guy Y and power yeah and there's also like pre-war battle we I think there was actually a lot of like sneaky hidden cool Commander cards in here that play towards I think the energy thing is not to be uh discount at all energy is constantly
• 27:30 - 28:00 needing more cards that that do energy things um and so it's actually made it quite viable as a result of this and modern Horizon which we'll talk about a little bit later yeah we've seen an explosion in energy which makes energy less of like the same pile of cards that always is and it's becoming a lot more of a a standalone mechanic For Better or For Worse still can't convince me to build an energy deck yet though I'm going to wait uh most popular excuse me most valuable reprint in this entire set was heroic Intervention which was $12
• 28:00 - 28:30 now 10 uh but they did do that bonus sheet as well this is the um they were available in collector packs for Fallout they were the ones with the bobbleheads on them and ravages of War this was a big one $275 p3k card they think right all the way down to 12 yeah yeah because but you have to have a Fallout guy on it yeah yeah cuz it's just just wrath of God it's not like people actually needed it it it's not R of God it's Armageddon oh
• 28:30 - 29:00 Armageddon sorry it's just Armageddon is what I meant to say it's not like people really needed or wanted to play it that was just a high price T because of not very many had been made it was pter Three Kingdoms before yeah which is notably one of the least printed sets of all time Hearts to get sets yeah yeah but it's not like there's a lot of people being like I wish I had this to play with it was a collectibility we've seen a couple of examples of that in the past few years I think this was an interesting set for me because I'm not a big Fallout fan and uh there's no limited environment for it so I didn't really play with the cards all that often I
• 29:00 - 29:30 bought a couple of singles and put them into my decks and I think that's what makes this set really interesting is I didn't play it and I really wasn't interested in it and I wasn't going to build it but there are a few cards in here both in the uh like The Moth Man with the rad counter stuff and the junk tokens in the dog meet deck that I was like these cards are sweet mechanically these are very interesting and mechanically I want to like reach in and pluck a couple of cards out of it despite not understanding the joke or
• 29:30 - 30:00 the reference there which makes it a little bit more compelling uh in my book yeah I agree with that uh I almost built not the wise moth man but the other suti Commander that was in there oh cool the master transcend the master Transcendent um but ultimately I didn't I wasn't very impressed by this set I really thought that the special treatments were just ugly the ones that look like the Fallout video game just look like see I liked those it's just I don't know it's just way when they take it too far from the traditional frame and then becomes the whole thing it just to me really F felt
• 30:00 - 30:30 off oh you're talking about the the like pit boy frames yeah the pit boy yeah I didn't love those I agree that to me just like immediately turned me off um and I did not want to buy any of it it really didn't feel like it was worth it didn't want to open any of those treatments either so I think for me the set was largely just okay I think I have codsworth in like two decks it's pre- World formal War as well so that is like okay if I'm putting cards from this set into somewhere else that gives me a little bit more excit about it mhm Josh I liked the set I like the pre-con
• 30:30 - 31:00 environment I played with those preons in an environment for a number of games um and I usually don't do that and found that environment to be fun I thought that the energy stuff that you mentioned earlier was a Big Boon because and this is partially because what stuff we got later this year but energy has really become like you said a viable commander deck and by viable I don't just mean you can build an energy deck but you have different directions you can now go a little bit not a ton but we're getting there right and I thought that that adding energy stuff to the format and
• 31:00 - 31:30 making that more viable was a bonus um we haven't mentioned it but they did a really good timing with this where it tied in with the start of the show the show was very good the show was great yeah the show was really good which I I'm not a big Fallout person I've played a couple of the games I don't think I've completed any of them um so I'm not super steeped in the lore or anything but having the show kind of be good and watchable did make the cards a little more fun for me um so I had some frame reference for what at least some of them were like you said there were a number
• 31:30 - 32:00 that I have seen in many games at this point that are playable so I had a generally positive outlook of it although I don't think it was like the best set ever or anything yeah there's no limited environment which could be an upside or downside because it can't take away from it uh in my view and then I don't care about treatments and stuff at all I'm just not that kind of player so I didn't even notice now that you when you start talking about it I'm like oh yeah I can picture that in my head but it doesn't in my mind like weigh in heavily to does it hurt your psyche when you think it does hurt mine I'm like I
• 32:00 - 32:30 just think there's so many treatments now that they just all it's just it's just gray morass of nothingness to me and so I'm like whatever there's a lot of treatments there's a lot of treatments of everything and I just my mind just goes blank on that stuff it's just like what does card do yeah yeah where did you land on a grade for it so I gave it a B I thought I would be generally like yeah it was a good set okay yeah I think generally if you're into Fallout your your like land on like that was a pretty acceptable version of it and you I I think I'm sold on a B for it because it did have it was funny and
• 32:30 - 33:00 the car designs were interesting and it did make me look at it even though I fully didn't care about Fallout and that is not the case for the other universes Beyond set this year yeah uh so I'm happy to move up to a b here I was at a c Jimmy I'm going stick at a c uh I do like that energy was given a boost I do like that equipment decks were given cool things um but with Assassin's Creed 2 I'm like there's just a lot of support the more video games we do the more equip equipment support we're going to see so I don't think that really pushes
• 33:00 - 33:30 yeah I don't think equipment needed anything at this point yeah yeah so I'm going to give this a c uh just wasn't it was my least engaged with set I think this year outside of a few cards all right that means our final command Zone rating for Fallout is a b let me ask the two of you because I I don't know that I weighed this into my grade but for universes Beyond um how many people that were like into followup but didn't know much about magic you know do you have any read on that community and how this affected them cuz I think we can say
• 33:30 - 34:00 like Warhammer was in this mold but probably in the s or at least a here because the the design was awesome but we also had a lot of we heard a lot of chatter and had a lot of experience with like that actually affecting people trying out magic might be because Warhammer is sort of more closely related to or maybe I just there's so much universes Beyond now that that chatter just doesn't rise above the sort of D of everything else to be noticeable anymore but I don't know what was your read on whether or not was successful in what universes Beyond wants to be Su
• 34:00 - 34:30 successful at which is sort of you know getting some of the that that other community to try out magic um my read is only anecdotal and that I've like heard of a couple of people who came through Fallout to play magic and are now playing with the Fallout decks uh Sebastian who's an editor at the office uh he has or on the podcast has talked about a friend who only plays Fallout decks and will play Commander with them now because of the Fallout product um and I think that that example is is
• 34:30 - 35:00 helpful but it's also feels to me stronger than the impact that Doctor Who had which um I think was I had negative connotations towards uh cool card design but a mess in terms of decks this one feels much more cohesive much more playable it feels like a much better Gateway for getting players into magic I think it's much more for me the impact was with the Kyle Hills the people that already loved Fallout and already played
• 35:00 - 35:30 magic were excited to see it and excited to be in that world I really don't I haven't heard anything really about other players that came into the game as a result but I think if you liked Fallout already and you saw this set it was exciting for you but it wasn't necessarily pulling a Fallout player into this and I think part of it has to do is like Warhammer is a physical game you play it in person you paint your Miniatures just like you collect your cards and you sleeve them up Fallout and digital games are going to I think have that issue constantly which is if you're a computer game player you're kind of a computer game player you're
• 35:30 - 36:00 not even a console player necessarily right there's like there are Stark divisions between the types of games and what platforms they're played on so you know if you're a Hearthstone player different story you know you probably enjoy magic more than your regular person but Fallout didn't feel like it had as much of a crossover Final Fantasy is another example I keep bringing up that understandably makes more sense a lot of Japanese culture is also steeped in playing card games there's a big card game scene over there and just the type of games that Final Fantasy are I think lend itself more to players that would
• 36:00 - 36:30 enjoy a magic environment as opposed to Fallout which is like this is a real world it's kind of based in reality it just has all these funky things that happened because of radiation MH yeah I just think it's an interesting metric to think about when we're ranking the sets that I didn't really weigh but I also got the feeling that Fallout was like man medium on the like did it pull people in uh yeah I would love to know the actual numbers because it it could be that that Wizards was like no this is actually a big time success the fact that the Moth Man was number 51
• 36:30 - 37:00 on EDH says a lot to me that is that was the most built commander of the entire year in terms of face commanders and precons right but it's impossible to measure how many of those are people that already that already owned Commander decks and were building Commander decks and how many of those were people that were like that was one of their first ones and that kind of got them in and and that's I think a by which universes Beyond obviously Wizards cares about total sales and we know universes Beyond does really really well cuz they keep saying it over and over but I know I'm unclear about how many of those are good for the player base which is like we want new players coming in so there's just more people playing the
• 37:00 - 37:30 game did it accomplish that which I think we can say it feels like and we don't have real evidence Warhammer Lord of the Rings some other past sets did Doctor Who maybe did not and I agree with you it felt like it kind of didn't Fallout I'm just not sure where it falls in there I didn't have a good read uh just on sort of you know what we the chatter we hear so anyway I just wanted to bring that up my gauge is that if it's a strategy game in real life that you're playing like Warhammer or it's a book that you've read That's fantasy that's going to have a hard crossover as opposed to a computer game or anything
• 37:30 - 38:00 else that's like more so do you think it has anything to do with the actual card design or anything or once they've chosen what the property is it's pretty much done I think it's the property the property is the main thing and how well that cuz the vend diagram of people that play the original property and their likelihood to play a physical card game is really cuz this was not an arena right it really is that sliver and I think it's a much bigger sliver when it comes to Lord of the Rings which just already feels like elves dragons all those things are in that world already as opposed to this like the Crossovers like humans and zombies right so cuz I
• 38:00 - 38:30 look the wise moth man I'm like that could have been a character in bloom the wise Moth Man her example of Doctor Who kind of backs up what you're saying which is didn't seem like there was a lot of crossover and it it didn't feel like it actually created a lot of new players so a lot of people maybe bought it to put on their shelf because they like dror who but did they open them and actually play a game of magic didn't feel like it yeah I mean it'll be interesting Final Fantasy will be on Arena hypothetically so yes it has to be if it's in standard I was going to say so um yeah will that be more like Warhammer or that would be more like
• 38:30 - 39:00 Fallout I think a% or more like set we're about to talk about that comes out in yeah it's it's it's a few from here but we're going to talk about it after this break because uh we're going to go to our sponsors we'll be right back all right byebye this show is sponsored by liquid IV seasons greetings Cool Cats this year I jetmir Nexus of rebels will throw the most perfect holiday party this whole crime family will come together as the the Halo Fountain well look we may have used up
• 39:00 - 39:30 all of our Angel juice at my meowoween masquerade but fear not I found a new source of hydration to keep everyone fully pumped liquid IV it's the best way to stay hydrated through the holidays with eight vitamins and nutrients plus three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink one stick of liquid IV with 16 ounces of water hydrates better than water alone so you can tear pour and live more never let a party leave you parched again whether you need to stay Vigilant on Commander Knights trample the dance floor or double strike
• 39:30 - 40:00 a pose on the runway proper hydration is a must Halo was good but this P Cola flavorer is simply Divine hey how do they make this stuff no Angels were harmed in the making of liquid IV stay hydrated through the holidays with liquid IV get 20% off your first order of liquid IV when you go to liquid iv.com and use code command at checkout that's 20% off your first order when you shop better hydration today using promo code command at liquid i.com and then I will play Brainstorm which lets me draw three cards and puts my
• 40:00 - 40:30 storm count to eight oh no this turn is taking forever you could be going for like 10 more minutes and I'm starving 10 minutes that's more than enough time to prepare a delicious meal from Factor holy crap how are we hearing each other's thoughts remember last turn I played telepathy oh right anyway with Factor you can get fresh chef-crafted meals delivered straight to your door that are ready to eat in Just 2 minutes and they have a ton of options to choose from each week so you'll never get get bored unlike this term that's right no
• 40:30 - 41:00 prep cooking or clean up means I can be done eating before this storm Kill it'ss 30 exactly and factor is way healthier and Destroy telepathy uh cheaper than takeout and it tastes better too what are you guys talking about nothing ooh yeah imagine if I was chowing down on their delicious spinach and mushroom chicken thighs right now hey were you guys talking telepathically without me again maybe we love facture and we know you will too get 50% off in free shipping on your first Factor box using our link cck click the link in the description or scan the QR code with your phone it
• 41:00 - 41:30 directly supports the channel and helps us make more content so click the link or scan the code and start eating better with Factor then I will cast a fabricate Jordan tell the truth is your turn almost over yeah really no all right it's chicken time I'm going to and our new merch selection is live ah that is a good feeling man Jimmy remember how long we just had no merch at all oh yeah I mean for years if we even wanted to sell a t-shirt I'd have to enter every order and address in manually and who's got that kind of time seriously we would not
• 41:30 - 42:00 have had time to do the podcast much less game nights but now we've got command Zone shirts hats wall Scrolls and even our own custom sleeves all thanks to Shopify nobody does selling better than Shopify they give you everything you need to get your product in the hands of your fans no matter where you are as a business whether you're a fledgling YouTube channel or a global brand like Al Birds Shopify is there with the best converting checkout system on the planet turning more browsers into buyers while leaving you free to focus on your product businesses that sell more sell on Shopify exactly okay I'm going I'm going to buy a t-shirt uh Jimmy you're a host you could just have a shirt yeah but I like
• 42:00 - 42:30 getting packages upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com tcz all lowercase go to shopify.com tcz to upgrade your selling today again shopify.com tcz yes I win probably anyway probably what's going on I just gold fished a huge turn on architect check it out they've got the best play tester in the business and tapping your cards is as simple as clicking them everything goes
• 42:30 - 43:00 right where you want it but you can drag things by hand and group them together in different ways too then there's easy shortcut keys for things like making copies sending cards between zones and starting the next turn nice so this is a tracka all that proliferating is got to take a while it doesn't actually just right click and hit proliferate all counters oh wow yeah you probably do win I think so architect is the best place to browse brew and play test Commander decks just go to arcade.com commmand Zone to get started that's Arc hi EK tc/ commmand Zone welcome back everybody we
• 43:00 - 43:30 are ranking all of the sets from 2024 and up next is Outlaws of Thunder Junction this came out on April 19th this is the fourth set in four months uh the major mechanics here were plot uh and crimes Outlaws uh which was sort of weird and vague uh deserts yeah Treasures mounts and spree uh the most built Commander from this main set was obca splitter of seconds Josh played that play it it's a
• 43:30 - 44:00 very cool deck I played against it a number of times yeah got to kill obca the the most popular new cards in this set were insatiable avarest which is a spree card the one yeah return the favor which was also a spree card bristly bill and lava spur boots yeah and then the Big Score roadside saddle sure and it also had some popular new cards in Commander sword of wealth and power Vault borne Tyrant and
• 44:00 - 44:30 generous plunderer have all seen a ton of play including uh in our content yeah biggest reprint here was Terror of the peace this needed one so badly it was $41 all the way down to $16.51 thank goodness the bonus sheet also had Prismatic Vista which do really Chang in price went from 2450 up to 25 this is another one of those lands where we should be getting these as promo cards box Toppers store prizes it's just
• 44:30 - 45:00 very very played very good bonus sheet just isn't going to move the number there no never uh Big Score also had the grand abolisher which is just a thorn in the side of many a player but very good was 10 bucks now down to 675 yay this also had the breaking news sheet so it had the bonus sheet the big score and the breaking news cards which were all uh crimes and they had the the like big Prosperity at the top yeah I actually like this look newpaper right wanted preaches you can't put words at the top
• 45:00 - 45:30 of a magic card that isn't the name of the card yes you can and they didel bad I'm going to play wanted wait that all of them said Prosperity if you lay them out like when you're when you're showing your like draft deck or something like that they just say Prosperity at the top it's such a bad design for a magic card I don't see that stuff as I established earlier yeah soive theive stuff yeah they're all kind of brownish and what's it do what's it do it thing cool I thought the design of
• 45:30 - 46:00 it was clever but yeah I agree the words at the top Prosperity debt not not so hot um for me this was very similar to marov Manor in terms of like what are they doing they're car oh my God that was real they're just putting silly hats on characters and now they're all thieves and they're working together and yeah there's some of them that are bad and some of them that are more good and Kellen is back for the 80th time doing something new oh this was back to back with with Carlo Manor this was so bad doing like and we'll take off our detective hat and put on the cowboy
• 46:00 - 46:30 hat like there was a bunch of character crossovers ratos was in both I think yep ratos was in both you're correct it's just like what he's got Wings he can fly what are we doing I do think this was much better than car Manor though in terms of just like okay I I get it and I'm happy to do it um and play it this theme worked much better for me uh just overall and I think the only like the big hit to the theme in my mind was that it felt very similar to Carlo Manor which was a bad
• 46:30 - 47:00 execution of this and I think this could have been a successful execution of like silly everybody's in a new world together thing if we hadn't just had this sort of yeah false uh detective situation yeah it's a little like the thing I was saying earlier where if you just do the same thing too often the novelty of it wears off and then you're just left with sort of numbness and care about that much and so this is the typee of thing I agree that they could do once in a while but
• 47:00 - 47:30 feels like they did it twice in a row here and have been doing this kind of a lot and then it's just of course lukewarm reception because it doesn't it could it could be like a nice like oh this is new this is a little different but it didn't feel different it similar and that's boring if they did it and the characters knew almost that it was kind of silly and then the characters themselves were playing into it cuz they knew that oh this set only comes along one right but now it's like no everyone's taking
• 47:30 - 48:00 themselves very seriously tiny bones is a burglar Thief I think we learned this with the unsets kind of right like where're like when they come around once every 10 years there's a lot more excitement than they come around once every two or three years J is an as did this it's not yeah it's not cool enough it the novelty factor is really what makes it successful and if you don't wait enough time then that there's no novelty cuz we just did it so yeah yeah I I think there's a lot of um positives about Outlaws of Thunder Junction I think the mechanics in particular were
• 48:00 - 48:30 way better than car love Manor in my mind I think spree was awesome I thought mounts were very fun I thought crimes was interesting and there's a lot of different ways to apply them I like plot was sort of fun it doesn't really impact uh Commander all that much but I do think it made for sort of an interesting choice in um in the limited environment so limited here was decent yeah I thought it was fun yeah and like more desert support was fun and a a slightly different style of deserts was pretty
• 48:30 - 49:00 cool so I like I thought the mechanics on this one are will last much longer and I think will just make more Commander decks because they're much less narrow applications in terms of the mechanics yeah I agree with all that I think we should also probably mention that this is the first time we' have seen a new character that is now a prominent member of the magic lore verse it's loot oh loot showed up and loot is now Magic's fluffy cute version of fibble yeah do we need a cute Mas is
• 49:00 - 49:30 debatable cute is debatable cute is debatable and I like that after all that vaulting and storming and getting into that cool Big Score it's just a fluffy little guy it's just a little guy yeah the treasure was the friends we met along the way yeah and the fact that we had to be Cowboys for a hot second there too speaking of the Big Score I do want to give Wizards credit the big score was originally designed as an aftermath style set to be released in smaller packs after Outlaws of Thunder Junction they recognized how bad aftermath went after March of the machine like we can't
• 49:30 - 50:00 do that just put it in the set smashed it all together and it did make the sets the packs themselves and The Limited environment kind of wild a good where it was like the big score and the uh the breaking news sheets made it for really bommy and have there was a couple of cards you're like oh I'm just playing against OKO or vorne Tyrant or like all of these bananas magic cards yeah limited I enjoyed it much more than car of Manor I thought it was just overall
• 50:00 - 50:30 pretty fun and I was okay with the theming of it um but when I started watching like I was I didn't watch the sendax until way after and then I was like what the heck this is a little little bit on the nose here for me yeah I think as a set I'm generally positive on Outlaws of Thunder Junction I don't think it's going to be like a beloved thing that we should return to all the time I settled on a B for it yeah I was also a B I was also a b too but now I'm kind of thinking about it I think this gets a B for me because there was so much sunlight in the card art it was just brighter and happier you The Vibes were better yeah Vibes were just better
• 50:30 - 51:00 be for Vibes and I was happier yeah I was happier to play this than I was the gloomy or you know the murders at Carlo Manor so yeah it's interesting how I was saying that yeah I found that too when I was weighing in or weighing the rankings and stuff was like The Vibes on the theme kind of did weigh into it more than I think it does when I think about actually playing it yeah weird Okay B overall from the command Zone B let's go to the next set which was Modern Horizons 3 this was released on June 14th so we got a bit of a break in May there was no set release the major
• 51:00 - 51:30 mechanics were elrazi energy and modified the most built Commander was ulle fused atrocity which had about 10,300 decks on E Tre um and I've seen a bunch of ux out there the most popular new cards were mdfc is there was a bunch in this set yeah so many so good yeah notably sink into stuper fell the profane and then other cards shifting Woodland fanatic of ronus which is an amazing card urza's cave yeah I mean I
• 51:30 - 52:00 think this list doesn't really do justice there's a lot pure amount of popular cards you could literally list almost all the mfc's yeah you I mean you make a powerful Eternal for uh product and we're going to have a lot of Commander cards out of it so uh and yes just about every mdfc is like fully playable especially the untapped uh mdfc well yeah it's to the point now where I can't remember the names of all the mdfc exist so I'm like which one is that what's the other side of that one it's
• 52:00 - 52:30 the whatever okay uh most valuable reprints for Xian Tower finally was it went from $38 all the way down to $12 now I think one thing about reprints and the changes in prices we should note is like this is now six months ago where stuff from car of Manor was a year ago so yeah big difference um Alli Allied fetches were reprinted the least excited I've been about a fetchland reprint ever I think was this set it was like yeah okay yeah sure cool it's good though when we got to the point where like yeah it's not like yeah exactly medallions
• 52:30 - 53:00 were reprinted which people have been asking for yeah this was their second reprint in a year cuz they were in Commander Masters as well this one hit their prices harder than Commander Masters did modern Horizon 3 might be their most cracked set I think for sure it felt like it a ton of packs are being opened Everywhere by everyone yeah for sure this was there's a lot of product opened and then on the bonus sheet was Solitude which went from $22 all the way down to six nice so again the reprints from this set had a pretty good um effect on prices which is nice overall this just had like old Border fe uh
• 53:00 - 53:30 product uh frames and then the full art cards it wasn't anything crazy fancy in terms of treatments I like that I like that a lot because it was crazy fancy when it came to mechanics these cards were wild and powerful and we don't have to talk about what they did to other formats because we're the commander show yeah it does feel like for the first time though modern Horizon 3 did not have the warping as powerful as one and two it
• 53:30 - 54:00 was still up there and I think there are still cards that people are not happy about yeah in terms of Commander I I think modern decimated modern um just wrecked it as every modern R prod has kind of done yeah like they suddenly have a boros energy deck that they cannot ban something from because it doesn't hurt it like it's it's wild uh but we're not the modern zone so we get to talk about modern Horizon's pop like positively
• 54:00 - 54:30 generally I thought this set was great I really enjoyed drafting this set I enjoyed opening the product I enjoyed putting the mdfs in my deck and just again any time that they do that which is like Jimmy you can replace a land with one of these you know you've got my number I'm in Jim me out there running 28 lands I don't even have land to my deck anymore they're all ndfc or go turbo new staple people already suspected that about you jimy but thanks for confirming now they know now they know it's been confirmed
• 54:30 - 55:00 yeah I mean these powerful sets and these these Horizon sets are so good because they can just do a one-off of this mechanic if they want to the the the shackles are really off for the design team and uh you know they can just give if they think of one good card that would be cool in Commander they can just give us that card without thinking like how does that fit into a pre-con deck or the you know everything else that's going on they think a little bit about the draft environment which I agree this one was good uh the fact that gr was maybe a little too good hurt it a little but it was still a lot of fun if
• 55:00 - 55:30 you talk about how much any set that came out this year changed or upgraded or optimized your current decks how many cards slotted in you know only the surveil lands really could compare with the mdfc cuz we just got so many mfcs and it it it just is kind of you know objectively correct in quotes to just replace a certain amount of lands you're running with some of these mdfs there are just so many now and so many of them are so good yeah I mean it's hard it's hard to argue with this set just being
• 55:30 - 56:00 overwhelmingly positive for Commander uh with the exception of Nadu y all right certainly was from the Set uh but handled itself relatively swiftly yeah um didn't even need the band to be honest but yeah it it's just great reprints for us it's just powerful new cards that don't necessarily raise the power level of your deck just make them more functional which is cool it had a lot of Sweet Lands in it which is always like obviously the mdfc is but I liked the Woodland sh Woodlands is is cool the
• 56:00 - 56:30 red one the cave cave oh that gives uh it gives two one yeah one to two things haste Arena of Glory Arena of Glory uh there all of those just go right into decks and make your deck more flexible and more fun to play so uh for me modern Horizons was an a it can't be an S because of the asterisk of what it did to the rest of the world I think yeah I forgot about n completely blank that this do set yeah they are glad yeah that
• 56:30 - 57:00 you did I mean it pretty much didn't exist to me the moment it was printed and if I ever saw the cross Daya I'd be like please play another deck before it got banned obviously MH uh yeah I gave this an a as well easy a for me yeah I give it an a I'm trying to think of why I didn't give it an S and I think to be an S you almost have to have the component of the setting or the vibe of the set really stands out as something you remember because modern Horizons 3 I bet in 10 years I won't really I'll be like is that two three was that four they all mush together which is not yeah
• 57:00 - 57:30 not a huge downside for it I mean it's still a good set and everything but I think in order to be S tier you really have to be a set where I'm like I can remember a lot about it and this is going to sort of slide in with the rest of them as like one of the better you know pieces but you know it'll be hard to tell the difference like I said in 10 years so yeah on the other yeah exactly uh a overall from the command Zone all right let's talk about another set that starts with a letter A it's Assassin's Creed not really a set really it was atish yeah there was a collection of
• 57:30 - 58:00 cards a wi set this was released in July 5th 2024 so we're up to six sets I or five sets or six sets in seven months um the major mechanics here were free running which is a sort of a in know kind of a a way to cheat stuff out if you attack if you connected with your commander or with an assassin you can cast things for Less yeah it's a cheap it's prow yeah prow yeah yeah yeah um uh mattered we had a lot of Assassins and we had a lot of pirates too yeah
• 58:00 - 58:30 obviously there were a lot of Assassins I would say too many assassins honest kind of the name of the it's called Assassin's Creed so I don't think we're getting around it assassins like every single assassin they created was like if you have assassins do more assassin assassin all your assassins are bigger assassinate when you're assassins hit assassin yeah like yeah uh the most built Commander was ETO aor de fenzi which is the main character from two I think uh there were 8,000 decks of this built on EDH Rec when we checked which
• 58:30 - 59:00 was the lowest number we've seen by a decent amount yes for a good reason this set was just okay uh most popular new cards though this is my favorite card maybe of the year one of them it's Brotherhood regalia yeah it's just a great unblockable way to make your commander unblockable very cheap equipped cost there was Excalibur sword of Eden which is hilarious a 12 Mana sword that can cast off and for free I've seen a lot more of this card than I thought we would yeah I've been I've been looking at it for a long time i' been like this card is just kind of cool yeah uh it's the only cool thing about the set I think outside of brother regalia and then overpowering attack
• 59:00 - 59:30 which was used by D on our episode to great effect which is just a really cheap way to get a another attack in because of the free running cost yeah uh big reprint in sort of feast and famine predictably it did I I mean it did something to the price I guess yeah it cut it almost in half it went from $38 to $20 that seems bananas to me was it reprinted somewhere else I don't I don't think so I'm just yeah I don't know if it I don't think it was but that almost
• 59:30 - 60:00 that's almost in half like that's that's really significant we've seen a lot of cards similar to sort of feast and famine go up in price after the reprint again this was July so it's closer to now than some of those others but still that has to be seen as a positive right that that is definitely a positive I I just when I was reading it I assumed it did nothing and then I looked up and was like oh yeah I will say though that this is the only set that I bought a little bit of this year and was immensely disappointed with when I opened the product yeah because there was really nothing in it and it was the packs were
• 60:00 - 60:30 so thin that you open it and you're like and I'm through the pack and I don't think anything excited me when I and I'm looking at the same cards over and over after a while it felt like the after effect yeah so it definitely for me was a big disappointment of a set it really didn't feel like there was anything in this set that impressed me cover of darkness is all the way down to $4.50 so these reprints did take a chunk out of uh some very expensive cards cuz there was a high likelihood you would open it compared to other sets there was also
• 60:30 - 61:00 Black Market connections is all the way down to $9 if you get it in the Assassin's Creed printing yep um so it had some very strong effects on reprints overall which is interesting because this is the only product I was actively telling people not to open yeah like most of the time I'm like yeah you should you like it's fun it's fun to open packs go nuts uh but when my friends showed up with a collector booster Assassin's Creed it was like what are you doing what are you doing
• 61:00 - 61:30 there is not you're just going to get four legendaries that you do not care about yeah well and and also going back to what I was asking about Fallout if you sort of try and get a read on like did this do the job of getting new players that are you know didn't play Magic but are interested in Assassin's Creed to try magic for their first time and it feels hard to imagine that a set constructed and structured in this way is going to do that because of the way the packs are construed right like how is somebody supposed to get in a magic opening packs that only have a couple of cards in them and it's just the same 80 cards or whatever it is total yeah you
• 61:30 - 62:00 know a preon environment makes sense this is just a weird way to pull off universes Beyond to me it feels like a couple of years ago they were pretty sure this like small booster pack thing for aftermath was going to because we know from Thunder Junction they were going to do it and in other places and they were so dead wrong about that that this is just still paying the price for that MH um but so anyway yeah I just think it's a failure on so many levels it's also just none of the cards are as cool as exciting uh besides Brotherhood regalia I would say as a lot of the
• 62:00 - 62:30 cards that were in Fallout mechanically this set was boring yeah so it was even just sort of mechanically like a dud yeah so speaking of dud I gave it a d I gave it a d all around uh just I thought this was kind of close to a failure I mean this is the closest I came to and half this is by far my most disappointing set of the year yeah basically me giving it a a d because I gave it a d as well was only because I don't benefit from the joy that this is Assassin's Creed so I have to recognize that there are people that were too
• 62:30 - 63:00 super stoked about this deck and like or about this set there though yeah I mean like I think D was re could ever be f i don't the fact that the reprints I feel like the amount of reprints and the impacts that they had on it do justify not giving this an F I was pretty close to an f on it but yeah opening it was miserable yeah yeah I mean that that to me is like you're actually doing yourself a disservice if you if one of the most fun parts for a lot of players for magic is the cracking of packs and getting cool stuff and you
• 63:00 - 63:30 diminish that plus try to get new players into the same time it's like you're shooting yourself in the foot yeah or you're getting assassinated without realizing it we comfortable with a d for this one it's a d all right let's to bloomo on the other side of the coin yep bloomo came out August 2nd 2022 the major 2024 it came out two years ago 2024 it came out two years ago what happened got time I'm sorry I said 2013 the other day we just in college
• 63:30 - 64:00 like what they're so long ago 2013 I have a brain worm the major Mechanics for a bloom bur were gift which I loved Offspring which I loved prowess which always makes for a fun Set uh there was food there was typle stuff there was scavenge which was weird Valiant which was heroic is y and then expend which was how much Mana you paying did you spend Mana good
• 64:00 - 64:30 good then will then you can give you stuff how about the reward the most build Commander is a fun one it's flubs the fool yeah the Box topper yeah unfortunately not that many decks though less than iio 7,500 decks is on EDH wreck this is a delution though delution I think a lot of choices so not everybody coales around any single one yeah in flubs everybody wanted to build I wanted to build it ad built it two other people in our play group built it like flubs was popular it's one of those
• 64:30 - 65:00 decks though that I think once you build it and try it you're like I don't know if I want to play this anymore as well I felt a lot of people did the whole round trip on it this looks so cool can't wait to do it why am I doing this oh gosh never mind I bu two deck list goldfish a few times and was like oh this is not fun I took it apart yeah and these numbers have the same thing as the reprint value which is like it's this was released in August so hasn't had as much time to acrew as as the other ones true Choo Cho that's something from mam let's say most popular new cards in this set was three Tree City land the Taps
• 65:00 - 65:30 for Mana for the number that of uh cards that you're type uh Patchwork Banner is three Mana rock with an Anthem effect on it Dawn truth is a white heroic intervention is and caretaker's talent which is another one that cares about when you make tokens and can copy your tokens most valuable reprint here was a fabled passage was six down to four I like to see fabled passage reprinted as much as possible we'd like a bigger ticket item there but that's okay and
• 65:30 - 66:00 the bonus sheet had marar yeah one of those just not reprinted cards ever this one had a huge drop it was $38 and now it is five it's like ravages of War right where it's like it just wasn't printed that much and but nobody really wants to play it so yeah ex the marinar r players Rejoice yeah uh by knowing I mean it doesn't like you might want one it's not a collection right yeah to have it for one R yeah that's it yes uh so that was
• 66:00 - 66:30 Bloom of course this one was uh soft and fuzzy and uh red wallish yep I think the theme was overwhelmingly popular and a success yeah to me that was the to legitimately I only think the theme was the most positive thing for me personally I had a dismal time playing limited I thought opening product was not fun cu the value was just not there m if we're talking about the most valuable reprint being fabled passage that to me is like okay all right well what else is in here I do
• 66:30 - 67:00 like fuzzy cute creatures I loved red wall I think the theme for me is by far like The Shining spot of this and I will say bringing new players into the game this had to be the biggest set of the year for that yeah I mean to me I agree The Limited environment was very mid it was fine but yeah it's not one of those sets you want to draft 30 times or anything like that but I thought they were Smart in how they position this set and it is a and and anytime you're going to have a typle set mhm so a set that's
• 67:00 - 67:30 really um interested uh with creature types like this it's not going to necessarily have a a huge amount of appeal for like really INF franchise players because it that that is just naturally a little bit of a paint by numbers strategy which doesn't isn't complicated so it doesn't tickle the brain of really experienced players as much but it's really good for new players because it is an entrylevel uh sort of complexity mechanic that you can really relate to you understand how it works oh if it says if it says squirrels
• 67:30 - 68:00 then I kind of want it and I want to look at it and it makes deck building a lot easier for new players so to me this had you know sort of the opposite problem of Doctor Who or something like that where it was a really uh good idea for a theme of a set and they also executed in a way that took advantage of the fact that it was going to be appeal to newer players and to me that's a really big success to get the community excited about it get people who aren't playing the game excited about it it is not a it's and none of that is based on like an outside IP or at least not
• 68:00 - 68:30 directly and you know that's a pretty big windfall uh to have your biggest set of the year and the thing that most excited within your community and outside of your community is something that fits all of those pieces so yeah I thought it was a pretty big home run on their part even though me personally if you ask me my favorite my favorite set of the year I wouldn't say Bloom bro yeah yeah but as far as biggest success for magic set of the year I would say bloomo yeah that makes sense I was trying to be very careful about not being biased about the preons
• 68:30 - 69:00 cuz I think the preons for the set were incredible and we've already given our rankings to the precons for Bloom bur but the more I looked at just the cards that were available and the mechanics that were available in the main set I think gift is a huge success really really fun for Commander and I hope we see more of it I think we will um I think that Offspring is a an adorable mechanic both flavorfully and mechanically it's very interesting and appropriate um and it made sort sort of for interesting card design I really
• 69:00 - 69:30 liked that uh prowess came back I think that's really fun but I agree The Limited Format for Bloom bro was not super compelling and when you did figure it out it was just Agro uh which was sort of when that's okay for a set like this because can you imagine if they did it the other way where they really Contra the limit environment to the detriment of it being digestible for new players this would be the wrong place to do that because this the way this set looks and the feel of it is open arms to
• 69:30 - 70:00 new players and then you need the gameplay to also be open arms to new players because if you're like well I'm open arms here but as soon as you walk in the door we're closing the arms and you know not letting you any further because it's the complexity level is in such a different dire that wouldn't make any sense for sure I think bloomo did everything they wanted it to do I thought it was cute I thought it was funny I thought the cards were adorable and the art Direction was right um and felt interesting enough to maintain um the core of magic players while still welcoming people in uh for
• 70:00 - 70:30 me bloomo was an S and I think it the things that Wizards learned from bloomo will affect sets long term I hope they' be careful about the novel thing we talked about earlier because this is again the exact same type of thing where you can very much go wrong like the UNS abolutely like like thunder Junction it's like Hey listen this is a thing you can pull off once in a while if you try and do this all the time it's the it's it will will not work it's it works cuz it's a novelty yeah turning
• 70:30 - 71:00 the Plaines Walkers into cute animals was quite a good idea I think that's fun yeah and they didn't make them wear a silly hat you know they just became silly creature you know I'm going to I'm going to raise my rank originally had this at like a B+ but I'll put it at an a uh because again I just thought opening the product and that's a big part for me is she's like do I want to crack pack to this and the answer was no and the foils also I don't know if people out there open collector boosters I opened a couple and the quality was for some reason extremely poor on everything I saw in open yeah it's like
• 71:00 - 71:30 kind of faded didn't pop in the same way um and I thought if you were a new player and that was the first foil you opened that would be a very disappointing experience if you were looking for something that really popped and looked good but they did have those gilded foils which I thought were gorgeous uh but obviously very limited in terms of who what you opened uh yeah I'll give this one an A so Jimmy up to an a Josh should we get an official ranking from you uh I gave it an S uh that means that uh Jimmy with you going up to an a we're ranking blindo and S
• 71:30 - 72:00 super I think it's a set we will remember for a long time for sure yeah if you ask me of the sets I remember this year that bloomo stands out um this next one stands out as well it's mystery booster 2 which uh came out I guess at the same time as bloomo yeah I the release date on mystery booster is kind of weird because like when they launched what it is is different than when like the product dropped is different when that you could get it in your hands so mystery booster 2 release date is there was no pre-release yeah it because
• 72:00 - 72:30 acquisition of it was different than normal you can't walk into a store exactly and buy it in the same way right um so this set was very interesting it is similar to mystery booster one the way that you could get it was only through the online store by buying uh uh mag Festival in the box or at magicon which was quite a controversial thing as well a lot of people were saying why isn't this available in stores um makes sense I blame them yeah it's very fair uh the most valuable reprint was urza's Saga which was at $44 and went down to 31 so that's that's a that is a drop but
• 72:30 - 73:00 it is hard to NE it was like you know are you going to actually open it the set had a ton of cards in it t just tons and tons it had a really cool most sets have like 300 350 cards in 2,000 or something yeah because it's trying to be like a chaos draft in the Box is always the sort of idea behind it and so yeah any single rare is way more diluted than your than your average set yeah yeah uh they had the really cool future sight frames put onto a lot of cards and they
• 73:00 - 73:30 also had these white boarded reprints which you know obviously divide people Right Down the Line whether not they think this is great or not that's why they're great that's why they're great uh they each box had very limited foils in them and those foils some of them are worth quite a bit and they're very fun to open if you do have a box opening experience the rating was one per box if you got two in then you're extremely lucky yeah yeah one per box is wild they had a bunch of play test cards like they did in the last pre mystery booster and these always add an interesting fold to the mix they introduce crazy wild
• 73:30 - 74:00 mechanics they make the draft environment very much more exciting and weirdo and then they had some unknown event graduates so cards that Gavin made at the unknown events at magikon in the past some of them graduated into actual cards uh play test cards in play test cards specifically these are not legal in any format but they're cool in the draft play and a draft and you can probably get away most of them yeah in the commander game as well uh and then they very interestingly made some cards that were usually only available in Reena prior and then they added an acorn
• 74:00 - 74:30 stamp notably Oracle of the alpha that was the a card that shuffles in the Power Nine to your deck when you play it so sick yeah it's all of those cards are only available in foil so they're extremely extremely Limited in terms of printing they're like most of them are like $80 plus but super cool but really cool yeah for me cool the cool factor for mystery booster 2 was through the roof it was wildly fun to play the cards the packs were really really fun to open even the ones that weren't the um future site and the white bordered ones you
• 74:30 - 75:00 could tell whoever made it Gavin had really excellent taste in magic cards and curation yeah it was extremely well curated list and a lot of them that you opened you were just like oh this is the first time it's gotten an English reprint or this is the first time it's ever been in paper for some of these Arena only cards the selection of this product was awesome and honestly if we're talking about like magic experience es us getting to draft mystery booster and reveal those cards to the world at Gen Con was like up
• 75:00 - 75:30 there I would say top three magic experiences in my life yeah it was so much fun to open this product yeah I personally am really high on this product because I love chaos draft and I think for a new player to open a pack like this you're getting cards across all of Magic's history that's like kind of Gavin's favorites in a lot of ways and Gavin really knows this game really well and there are a lot of really cool Fun Cards and they're I I remember opening a pack going like every single one of these I want to put into a binder yeah cuz they all have some use in
• 75:30 - 76:00 something and they're all old they're not necessarily these new busted cards that are just jam-packed with keywords but they're very simple but effective and so I I really enjoyed that fact about it and that you know I have a couple of them I got from magicon I'm I think the distribution thing is definitely a question for this and and it does bring the rating down a little bit for me yeah but these will be available for the foreseeable future at magicon so I think initially it's going to feel like they're impossible to get or hard to get over time more and more of them are going to enter into the world and I think that problem will be
• 76:00 - 76:30 mitigated quite a bit um but yeah I do feel for the people that don't want to order a festival in the Box um and or can't make it to a magicon or can't make it to a magikon yeah especially International is a big problem something we didn't mention is there's the future site uh printings of Legends that had the um oh no what are they called the like silver uh Vanguard art oh Vanguard art and all of those are really like super super cool they're like old
• 76:30 - 77:00 tadine on a uh Modern Magic Frame on the future sight frame yeah the future sight frame yeah for like four Mana they're really cool uh morass morass but the fact that they couldn't get this product into people's hands is a huge knock to it of course yeah I'm on the other side of the fence with that a little bit I I think we may be talking about this product a little early because limited availability means that my own interaction with it has been pretty limited as well like we drafted that thing and I think I drafted it one other time and that's it uh but from the
• 77:00 - 77:30 novelty argument I'm make I've been making this whole time I think it's kind of cool they created a product that's supposed to give you a unique experience at like a magicon or some reason to go and do a physical thing it's not something that you're supposed to draft 50 times in a row and I think that is kind of cool um so I understand sort of there's this tug and pull between like hey let's just give everybody everything all the time and like that can lower the experience though if you do that in the incorrect
• 77:30 - 78:00 way so then when they do the other thing I feel conscious about criticizing them too much for that yeah so I think this is going to be a thing that's going to be at Magic cons throughout next year and probably the following until they do Mystery boosters 3 which who knows how long that'll take uh so I think the idea of it is cool I I think for me there was some things outside of their control that took away from it a little the mystery in a box or sorry the festival in box thing had that problem where some of the stuff you got you could open the jeweled Lotus and you could open the
• 78:00 - 78:30 manac Crypt at a time when they had just been banned but you bought it at a time when they were not banned and it's hard to separate those two things even though Wizards are not technically at fault there and I don't want to get into that whole controversy here we're going to do a year end WRA wrap up and I'm sure we'll talk about you know the band itself uh further down the line but it's hard for me to completely separate that from the experience and that's a negative for sure of it so I think that I will look upon this positively um ultimately and I may look upon it differently a year from now when I've been able to draft it a couple of more
• 78:30 - 79:00 times and sort of interact with it more uh but at this point you know I I'm a little less high on it than the two of you are for those reasons so it's hard to separated from the festival in a box yeah there was just some real big downsides to like we had little staff members here excited got foil Jewel lotus in my Festival in box and the following Monday it's banned out from under him and you know that it that sort of marred it a little bit and I'm not saying I'm going to give it an F or something because of that in fact I'm
• 79:00 - 79:30 going to give it a b okay so I still think it was positive and I I think again if we talk about it again in a year which we probably won't because it won't be a new set but I would probably I would maybe adjust it at that point having been to more events had more chances to draft it but up till now I've drafted it two times MH I'm an A on this product I've drafted it a couple of times a couple times at um magicon and then I drafted their Festival in the box and every time it's been a blast I'm going to be an A on it as well well very rarely do I buy boxes to save and hold for special times and this I've gotten a couple boxes of I bought a festival in
• 79:30 - 80:00 the Box as well and I'm just excited to for the day when it comes hey you guys want to do a draft night cool I got a festival in the Box we don't need to yeah and I think anyone that's a magic player can sit down and play it without having to like the next set is dusk Moore and like you really have to understand how the rooms play out and all that stuff to have a fun time drafting that I think Festival in the Box I'm sorry I think mystery booster 2 has just the ability to be a very fun and easy draftable set for anyone to come into and just play and it could be a very sort of just like who cares what the theme is tonight but F but mystery
• 80:00 - 80:30 booster 2 is going to be able to provide a fun experience for you cool that means our final grade for mystery booster 2 is an a all right let's move on to the next set it's duskmourn house of horror yeah came out in September of 20 September 27th excuse me the major mechanics here were Eerie which is uh basically constellation uh but it also incl unlocking rooms uh rooms themselves manifest dread delirium and survival
• 80:30 - 81:00 yeah it cares about being tapped the most built Commander was vavo Herer of souls he's a face commander of one of the precons and a very powerful one at that the most popular new cards in the set were withering torment uh black got another enchantment removal spell this time at instant speed yep three Mana untimely malfunction which is a flexible SWAT spell and enduring Vitality is the other big one so this is the enduring cycle was a big cycle for Commander enduring
• 81:00 - 81:30 Vitality is the green one but the white one is also very popular as well and the blue one enduring curiosity and enduring innocence I think yeah most valuable reprints lay line of the Void not anyone too excited about this it was bucks went down to 50 cents but the bonus sheet did have Goro's Vengeance on it which was a very popular card not necessarily in Commander uh that was $25 and went all the way down to six so huge yeah just again that was just a card that was not had not seen very many reprints so
• 81:30 - 82:00 duskmourn is interesting totally different vibe from Bloom bro felt very night and day uh we kind of got yanked all over the place in terms of tone this year um but I think my favorite thing about desor was The Limited environment surprised me and is was incredibly fun yeah I like the limited environment as well but I think this was the most punishing for gameplay mistakes out of all the limited environments this year it was very high complexity level and for that reason a lot of the pros and streamers really enjoyed it uh I found
• 82:00 - 82:30 it to be a little frustrating at times because just one small mistake or CL little error could really cost you um but for some people that's a really up big upside for me it was a little bit more of a downside yeah yeah I was going to say that's why I loved it and I thought this was probably the best draft environment of the year um I do agree as a followup to bloom bro for a bunch of reasons not just tonally but complexity and draft environment it it seemed oddly placed I might have flip-flopped thunder Junction in this um to just kind of not
• 82:30 - 83:00 have such a left turn from bloomo for those people that are sort of entering the stream at that point yeah uh but from personally me liking the set I I liked it a lot and I thought rooms were really cool addition to Commander you know Erie obviously is very good and with the limited environment being like you know maybe potentially an altimer U there was a lot to like about it yeah yeah I think thing that missed the mark the most for me was just the setting I just don't love horror movies in that horror world to begin with and I thought
• 83:00 - 83:30 the way that it was portrayed on the cards made it seem even worse hokey wise like Hoke wise than the Detective theme or the Outlaws of Thunder Junction Cowboy theme I think just like having a dilapidated TV with with static on it in a Magic World just didn't feel right and I also thought the treatments were so badl looking in this case the TV1 the TV one yeah it's so I think like it just felt it felt a little too not real not like actual magic the like confetti foil
• 83:30 - 84:00 ones where they introduced this very like anime card frame which I did not care for at all and they're contining to do that now as well it is it like it's funny you guys mentioned all this stuff and I'm like I can't even picture it in my head I don't even see it I don't it looks like a Japanese card game yeah it looks like a Pokemon Special foil the whole thing is just blasting at you with the foiling all the time now yeah yeah but this if you saw these in person I'm sure I've seen them but my brain just doesn't the thing about this doesn't catalog
• 84:00 - 84:30 them yeah it does make it hard to tell what the card does the foil like it's it's not it's not welld designed in my opinion um but yeah I really hated the the theme of this though I I just did not resonate with it one bit and it just didn't feel like magic for me for the first time yeah I guess switching it with thunder Junction would have made sense because of course they released it around Halloween yeah yeah which I guess they felt like they had to do maybe the answer was pushing bloomo I don't know it did it did feel like a jump scare after bloom where it's like it's easy it's fun and it's nights and little mous and it's scary thing that's complicated
• 84:30 - 85:00 too so it's like on both on both ends of the spectrum like yeah we had a cute theme and we went to the opposite of that and we had something that was pretty simple for new players and then we went to the opposite of that which I think you know that left turn I don't love about it but if you just took this in a vacuum I liked it I mean I'm a film guy and horror movies are kind of a basis for that so I did like a lot of the references that maybe I didn't get with some of the other sets I guess westerns that should have been true but it didn't feel hit me in the same way yeah I I didn't I do agree like TV screens and you know camcorders and
• 85:00 - 85:30 stuff I don't personally like tend to be drawn towards that in Magic as something that I I like so that that's definitely a downside I agree of the set yeah it felt too modern I'm not bothered as much by that I guess I think universes Beyond kind of numbed me to seeing Scooby-Doo on magic cards uh but they also made a Scooby-Doo on a regular Magik card with Sophia earlier in the year um so I that did didn't really bother me it did seem weird that it was just sort of another it felt like another detective set yeah
• 85:30 - 86:00 this and Mur could the like Mur well and R or sorry and we have inrad which is sort of a Gothic horror setting so it's not that far from that like yeah yeah yeah yeah it that was a little strange like I I sort of liked the story I like the idea I like the demon that has the lore the Theo yeah vavo that has this realm and he's expanded the haunted house and I like I liked that story just generally that's not really my thing but I thought that was kind of a neat idea I guess so A
• 86:00 - 86:30 whole world that's a horror movie I think has the same problems for me that Carlo Manor has which is like can't we just have a horror storyline that happens in a regular place like it's just hard for me to believe oh this whole world's a house okay I mean you just compare compare small plane about this compare Dusk otj and murders to the gravity and the coolness that March of the machine had and mom and neon Dynasty yeah those felt like oh those are worlds that you can believe exist and our magic
• 86:30 - 87:00 worlds and a threat an external threats coming in it's the fian it's whatever the eldrazi this just feels like we're just taking our cast of characters and putting them into conveniently cool worlds that fit something I don't know it's just they all have very low stakes it's a stretch I like your theme park I like your theme park analogy this felt like a theme park yeah yeah yeah yeah it it literally is the house of horror it's like Halloween Horror Nights it's like you go to Universal and all of a sudden it's like oh it's all horror theme today oh that's funny how they made this a slightly more horror is okay cool yeah
• 87:00 - 87:30 yeah it it took a lot of the stuff that I loved about new capena that was novel in new capena and then made the whole year new different new Capas and now I'm like okay we're good we you got okay at the very least draft was fun I think but draft was really fun yeah draft was good and and I think we'll see a lot of the cards being played in the future like the overlords are pretty cool and I think all the enduring ones as well are all playable for me the Bal the positives balance the negatives I gave this one a c yeah I gave this a c as
• 87:30 - 88:00 well I gave it a B I think I will look back and be like yeah I like that yep limited that brings it down to a c I definitely will want to draft it this will be a set where I'm like totally that stands out as like you know a neon Dynasty not as good as neon Dynasty but like one of those that's like oh of that year I want to draft this set yeahh yeah uh it also had a very unique draft environment fic it was very like it felt special it's like Jimmy said it's pretty punishing U small decisions matter a lot and that's novel because I don't think
• 88:00 - 88:30 most sets are like that and I think if that was the case all the time then I think I wouldn't necessarily like it right um but yeah yeah still uh C overall for dusk Martin one final set of the Year this is foundations came out November 15th 2024 um the major mechanics were very simple for this one it was like life gain and flyers and ramp and sort of Stompy and red was aggro like this would
• 88:30 - 89:00 been a great followup to bloom the color pie this would have been a perfect followup to bloomo and you can imagine where will that happen because there's only one set in between so yeah yeah normally in the old old magic times dor would not have existed it may have just been murders and Dorn together um well there was always a fall set so they would have moved Bloomberg to that spot though I think yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the most built Commander from this one was truus Sprout sire was a very popular new sappin Commander uh the most popular new cards were Blasphemous edict a
• 89:00 - 89:30 broken new board wipe Banner of kinship a very powerful typle overrun and scrawling crawler which is a cool new windc con yep the best reprints here were doubling season always goes up to $50 and it always comes down to about 25 and now they have the cutest version ever of this version get it now it'll be $50 in a year be $200 a year I think that card is yeah the uh bonus sheet had a chroma's memorial uh and that was $40 is now down
• 89:30 - 90:00 to 22 this also had play choral uh yeah and de can cheat it out I think but yeah it's there's got to be better stuff to cheat out yeah it's quite narrow these days it's fun yeah I feel in 2015 so like when was the last time you put a doubling season in the deck it's still $50 true season is yeah unfortunately not that good anymore good point good point Fair Point this Al had foundations jump start which had a lot of new commanders in it a lot of um the with the anime treatment this again brought
• 90:00 - 90:30 back the confetti foils and the like anime style border um but more importantly this is a foundational set this was designed to bring a teach new players how to play the game and uh make it accessible and make it look the most magic it's ever magicked and it's core sets all over again uh but done in a new way with a new title a little fancier I mean I love this set feels nostalgic it feels like what magic felt like when I was learning to play you know back in
• 90:30 - 91:00 the '90s I was surprised when we did the review of how many of the cards were relevant but they were still simply designed they didn't have as much text the mechanics are you know less complex or less specific um and maybe that's because when you get into this realm you're naturally going to be more Broad in your design and that's going to be more applicable to more decks so that might just be sort of the outcome or a symptom of that but still I don't know it's fun to go back to the world where one of my favorite moments happened when we did the pre-release here at command Zone and uh I just heard another game
• 91:00 - 91:30 going on and it was like I think gav was like okay I'll cast Sarah Angel and whoever he was playing with h and I was just like people have been making that noise to that card for 30 years and there's just something cool sh dragons that to kill you there was just something cool about the fact that like those cards are in this set and still relevant and still doing what they've always done which I just you know it just it feels like home it's like it just feels like a warm place in your heart this set felt like a relief to me
• 91:30 - 92:00 where it was like we had a whole year that was all wacky and wonky and we're taking characters you love and and dressing him up and giving him a feather boa and suddenly it's just like it's a knight it's a knight and an angel and a dragon and a cat yeah there's elves and there's Goblin and there's elves and and and that's it yeah just magic baby and it just felt like and it was accessible and it was interesting but simple and it just felt like it was an answer to a lot
• 92:00 - 92:30 of the problems we've been talking about with magic for the last two years which is it's too complicated it doesn't look like magic anymore and there's no beginner products we can't Point them to anything and suddenly Foundation appeared out of a cloud and was like I'm everything you want yeah Mac and I'm going to be on the shelves for ages and I'm reasonably proud and I was like oh thank God I will say I have a few friends that are like yeah keep drafting it keep playing it on
• 92:30 - 93:00 Arena because they're very new to the game and this does not require them to read a card that's sideways yeah you know and unlock part of it and only things at sorcery speed and this and that yeah so yeah everyone kind of knows how it works you run out of cards in your hand un limited it's just like a normal you know it doesn't have crazy complicated mechanics it's not super aggro so and I it was a fun draft environment it's not again it's not like I think 10 drafts and you kind of got it um but like it's proof that you can make a set that is
• 93:00 - 93:30 good for newer players but still funny enough for enfranchise players that they will play some of it and you can never I don't think you can ever expect that like we're going to create the set that new players are going to love and old players are going to be able to play 100 a thousand times yeah yeah I am going to bump my grade up on this I'm going to give this an a just a regular old a I think over time this will maybe next year I'll look back and go like nah that was an S because we really need more of this type of set to just pull that valve a little bit back and just give people just regular old magic but this to me
• 93:30 - 94:00 was in general a hit like there's also some cool cards like bloodthirsty conqueror and you know all sorts of like the I think the Mythic level real cards that like we will continue to put into deck yeah some fun Plaines Walkers and all that I'm an s on it today um this is one of the like it's the opposite of Assassin's Creed where I was scolding people for opening it I'm like if you're opening foundations I love that we're encouraging this kind of product I love that I can point to a product for people to buy that is going to welcome them into our game uh so I'm an S okay yeah I
• 94:00 - 94:30 gave it an a um it's probably my personal favorite set of the year but I think a core set type product is just going to be hard for it to stand out over time right now the novelty of it is what we're feeling because we haven't had a set like this in a long time Suddenly It's novel right yeah and and this is not the type of thing I think should be no but it is um but it's going to be on the shelves for a long time and I think by you know we won't I
• 94:30 - 95:00 I I don't believe we'll look back and really remember it by the time it's all said and done because of that fact that's but yeah that that doesn't take away from the set I think it's really great um and I I do wish they would do maybe not cor sets but this kind of thing a little more often and I don't know if the solution of like let's just do let's just have this thing be you know out there for this amount of time is really going to Sol yeah maybe like yeah every two years we do one rather than they used to do a coret every year
• 95:00 - 95:30 but yeah I also just don't understand why they didn't do Commander precons with foundations I just don't I just it feels so bizar it feels like there was a concerted sort of strategy from within the walls and we don't I don't know anything I haven't talked anything over there but what it feels like is that they really wanted to refocus on standard because they've been just saying the word standard and and focusing things I love that yeah yeah yeah but but they decided to coincide that with foundations right um which is why I think maybe there wasn't Commander precons again I don't know if that's why but if it's like oh but if we make
• 95:30 - 96:00 Commander precons then this won't be a product that gets people to playing standard and I think they want people to start playing standard because that was a core pillar of magic for so many years I think they're missing it and I think that's a a viable you know that as a goal makes sense yeah um and if I was Wizards I'd probably want to try and get people excited about standard again too but I don't know if your new product your new player product is the exact time to be doing that right yeah it's a hard for a set to be everything to everyone but I want it I this is pretty
• 96:00 - 96:30 close it's pretty close close it's close I think we're going to call foundations and a overall all right those are the sets that came out this year we've covered all of them uh I want to talk about we've given them all grades so we can have have a rough idea but I want to talk about the worst set of the year which one do you think was the biggest dud and I will want answers from all of you I've also pulled the staff and I've P our patrons for a little bit of context as well Assassin's Creed get out what Josh and the staff said this time
• 96:30 - 97:00 around the staff agreed with me the staff I didn't even influence them I swear Command Staff AG went around with candy overwhelmingly a lot of the reasoning that like everybody gave was just like I didn't care about it it didn't affect me the cards weren't interesting so I like it's a it's my least favorite uh which I think is fair I wouldn't like I didn't love it either so that makes sense yeah the command Zone patrons overwhelmingly said murder Zar love man oh wow uh and I agree with them I think uh I think it was the
• 97:00 - 97:30 design was weird and the mechanics were narrow and it's just going to we're going to look back on it and just be like yeah what was going on there what happened it's a mystery how did they take a ravnik cette and just turn it into such a d you need some investigators to figure that one out uh I said Fallout you know I just don't think that when I heard about all the universes Beyond stuff coming out Fallout I was just like I don't know there are guns in Fallout and and it doesn't just it just didn't feel great I
• 97:30 - 98:00 did like that there's more energy stuff and they found ways to incorporate that stuff but for me it just was not Assassin's Creed I was like yeah this didn't miss the mark for me because even though it sucked in terms of how the the opening experience and all that there are assassins and there are assassin weapons and there are pirates and if you ask me what I think about Assassin's Creed I'm like yeah that all tracks those are the things yeah those were the things so it didn't really upset me as much it is possible the things didn't like about the Assassin's Creed set or the things that wouldn't appeal to me about Assassin's Creed the game yeah yeah yeah yeah Fair uh all right we've
• 98:00 - 98:30 covered a lot of our reasons why let's move on to our favorite set of the year the one that we would call the best set of the Year again we pulled the staff the patrons the staff could not decide on this one we got tie two-way tie where five people voted for bloomo and five voted for modern Horizons 3 nice I mean some a number of people just didn't vote also yeah well everybody in the office well that's only 13 people but I think we've got 18 well they voted for other
• 98:30 - 99:00 sets oh got it got oh yeah yeah somebody said Assassin's Creed yeah yeah that makes sense who said Assassin's Creed nobody said Assassin's Creed nobody said assassin's one person here like hey I liked it I lik it was Mickey Mouse one the patrons uh voted was in overwhelming Bloom yes yeah it was 40% voted for Bloomberg yeah yeah that makes sense it's cute it's fluffy it's accessible and yeah I can see a lot that I voted for mystery booster too I think this is what foundations is to a more experienced magic player and that for me
• 99:00 - 99:30 is something that I really am looking forward to playing more of I think just chaos draft is one of my favorite things to do so for me this had everything it needed without having to be stuck in a weird mansion somewhere or a weird haunted mansion somewhere and it was nice I liked it Mr booster to for me the best out of the year uh was foundations I I think I liked Bloom BR a lot I like mystery booster 2 a lot but they both had asterisks on them things that I was like yeah we're sort of overlooking the limited environment we're sort of overlooking the the fact that like most people aren't going to get to play it
• 99:30 - 100:00 for me foundations was like everything I wanted the set to be and it delivers yeah I took this question I mean what was sort of my personal best set whereas a lot of my rankings were kind of like you know from a dispassionate View and so I think bloomo was the best set of the year but if you ask me what my favorite set of the year is I would say foundations yeah something about the The Nostalgia of it and it it just felt really warm and fuzzy to to uh to play um yeah I really enjoyed it so something
• 100:00 - 100:30 they didn't talk about we didn't talk about with foundations was it was really accessible really exciting Mechanics for people where it's just like people like life gain and there's life gain people like cats and there's cats and that that was very cool uh all right let's talk about 2024 a as a for a bird's eye view I want to talk about the year overall do you do we think this was a good year for magic sets how does it compare to the last couple of years they really waited till the end to make it good that's for sure the first half of the year didn't feel great they really had us within the first half yeah but the foundations bloomo mystery booster 2 like last swing
• 100:30 - 101:00 of the bat towards the end there in dmore and I was like okay cool we we climbed back but I I think this was the year I played the least amount of Arena up until duskmon true and then I played a bunch of Foundations as well on that and so I think for me this year was like a 5050 mhm and modern Horizon 3 was I think the standout that it's going to stand out in any year that there's mod set just because it just has such a high power level and affects the format so much but I think as far as other cards entering the format for me the surveill
• 101:00 - 101:30 lands and modern Horizons 3 were kind of it yeah I agree I was looking looking through the sets in the last couple of years and it it feels like there was a few years that were just Banger after Banger after Banger and this year was not one of those years it had a couple of like big highlight sets we were like modern Horizon 3 was good we expected that bloomo was fun we expected that and the fact that we're so on foundations feels like a reflection of how the rest of the year went uh good point so like I'm stoked on foundations
• 101:30 - 102:00 and everything about foundations says I'm not special right yeah I'm I'm the Baseline and I'm like oh the Baseline there you are there you are thank yeah we're just Baseline all the time we get bored with it yeah exactly so that shows you where we've been it's below the Baseline yeah yeah we've been we've been all over the place so I I think overall this was a fine year for sets there's a couple couple will look back on very excitedly and overall I would say it's worse than a couple like the last couple
• 102:00 - 102:30 years probably yeah to get context if you look at sort of previous years um you know I would say this year we had one s tier mhm and really nobody really put a lot of s it's not like we disagreed and everyone thought there was a lot of s's so it's bloomo or there zero Yeahs maybe yeah and I would say last year if we were doing this we're probably comfortably lower of the Rings and maybe Wilds of eldrin yeah lost Caverns was high as well so yeah so there's three potential s tier sets 2022 is an insane year we Brothers War
• 102:30 - 103:00 Dominator United 4K neon Dynasty yeah my guess is that's an abnormal year in the other direction where that is a even balers gate and N capena were awesome so that's a year where like I don't think we could expect every year to be like that this reminds me a lot of 2021 which was had the inrad said there was vow in Midnight hunt uh it also had uh modern Horizons 2 and then had like strick
• 103:00 - 103:30 Haven was sort of the high point and then cim was fine and like times P remastered was fine and like cool but i' much rather have a cim than a miss the marov manor Carlo Manor sorry it's like yeah he's not doing this on purpose not doing this on purpose I swear I think it's fair to say that this is a down year that's sort of below the average mhm uh of what but you know if you look back we usually get and I think you know our enthusiasm about the sets by the grading that we gave kind of reflects
• 103:30 - 104:00 that sure so yeah so so I think if I were to if you were to ask me what grade do I give this year overall it's probably a seat yeah C+ I think C's Fair yeah yeah this is a forgettable year in a lot of respects Foundation is really pulling its way towards the end and it's very possible that in 3 or four years we don't even talk about foundations because of the type of set that it is in which case maybe only bloomo stands out from this entire year as something that we really even sort of ever refer to or think about you know in years to come as
• 104:00 - 104:30 like yeah and that seems you know and I want to say like part of that I believe is we are in this moment where this was the movie year if you think about it right we did detective Noir movies we did western movies we did animated movies we did horror movies and we're about to go to car movies and space movies yeah they'd kind of dip their toe in the water with like the Harry Potter stricks Haven thing and then they did uh new capo which was
• 104:30 - 105:00 Mafia and I think they were like oh we could do that more and then they just decided to do and we're also in the middle or maybe the you know the rising of the universes Beyond moment which really mix into that in a similar way so it feels like everything is kind of movies and pop culture for notification it's like that guy that you're talking to that only speaks in movie quotes you're just like oh my gosh do you have something to say like why did you have to pair the universes Beyond stuff with all the
• 105:00 - 105:30 movie if your magic IP is paralleling that as closely as possible that feels like this lack of enthusiasm is tied to the numbing quality of the novelty problem that we've been talking about this whole time you got universes Beyond which is doing a lot of movies and pop culture stuff and then you at the same time chose to do all your IP sets as movie reference stuff so then that just feels very similar to that and it this all might have worked better if you you know you did a little zigzag where it's like okay we're going to do a bunch of
• 105:30 - 106:00 univers be on and as a result we'll do more foundations and fantasy like stuff which is bloomo and Foundations you know to to offset but no we leaned into what's already happening and that I think is is causing a lack of enthusiasm at least on my part and I feel that from the community as well yeah magic isn't Magic is what I keep hearing and this year did not do that argument it didn't it didn't stop that argument from being made yeah yeah okay to the listeners do you agree disagree what do you think were the best sets from 2024 the worst
• 106:00 - 106:30 sets uh let us know in the comments it should be a very Lively one don't forget always keep it civil uh because this is a game that we all still love at the core of it and we would love to also know like maybe what do you want more of in the future right is this something that you want to go back to well I just want to see more for exian I want more characters and villains that we know elrazi I don't care if we see him again I just want something that we're familiar with or do you want to expand into newer things newer villains newer baddies uh let us know in the comments as always um and thanks so much for participating as well and I also look
• 106:30 - 107:00 forward to the Discord for our patrons to have some fun discussions in there all right if you want to pick up any of the sweet sets we talked about today any of the cool individual cards in uh all of 2024 maybe we reminded you of some cool ones go to cardkingdom.com commmand Card Kingdom has a huge selection of singles throughout the year and sealed product if you're really into foundations or bloomo or maybe some of the ones we gave slightly lower grades to you can pick those all up in one place you know that card Kingdom knows cards because whenever you order a card
• 107:00 - 107:30 on their website they're exactly the card you ordered we talked a lot about different treatments and different foils and different versions and conditions and we're picky about cards so I appreciate shopping from a place that I trust to get it right and if something does go wrong they've got a great team to take care of it and make sure that you get exactly the card you're looking for so support the show and get some cool cards 2024 was a medium year but it did have some neat individual cards yep go to car kingdom.com commmand all right and once
• 107:30 - 108:00 you get those cards you want to keep them protected use the game accessories brand that we trust our own collections to here at the command Zone that's ultrapro.com commmand you can get your binders playmats deck boxes sleeves dice wall Scrolls sorry editors for having to show all that on camera but they do have everything you're looking for if you want to make your Battlefield look awesome or you just want to make your game room look awesome if you want people to go like whoa when they look just at your playmat setup Ultra Pro has the man eight line and they've got all the magic IP so if you have bought a commander you can probably get that on a play met sleeves and the deck box to
• 108:00 - 108:30 really match out the whole set so it's a great way to spend those holiday dollars maybe you got from your friends and family again ultrapro.com commmand and also they often have tons of huge discounts and I pretty much guarantee that after the holiday they're going to be doing stuff like that because that's the time at which hey you got the inventory left over let's discount it and move it out the door and they do that all the time it's one of the few newsletters I sign up for is ultrapro.com commmand all right big thank you to our amazing team here at the command Zone before we go we're to say thank you to Rachel Kendra Karina Cruz Sebastian Salazar gab gady Jamie block Jordan
• 108:30 - 109:00 Bridge and Jake Boss Eric LM Josh Murphy Manson lung Christopher Batista Evan lurger and Sam Waldo they're working really hard at the end of the year we push a lot of episodes and they're really long ones out so yeah please give them some love in your hearts and they will feel it I promise or you can give them love in the comments too and that's a good point and don't read it all right thanks everybody for watching all right byebye peace [Music] [Applause]
• 109:00 - 109:30 thank you for your attention for further inquiries send an email to command cast rocket jump.com or ask us on Twitter at jfwong and at Josh Lee see you later alligator greetings human yes