MagicCon: Las Vegas is in full swing this weekend, and with it, we get previews of the upcoming sets. There’s a lot of neat stuff coming to the game this year with superheroes, dwarves, and an entire new multiverse to explore.
Marvel Super Heroes
We continue our foray into the Marvel universe with the Marvel Super Heroes set, and here we get a tiny look into it with The Vision:
When we discovered The Soul Stone in Spiderman, players were correct to assume the other Infinity Stones would be added to the game in future Marvel sets. In this set, we get The Mind Stone:
The Hobbit
We had our first breakfast with The Lord of the Rings, and now our second breakfast arrives with The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings set shook up the game with some powerful cards. Will The Hobbit do the same now that all sets are Standard legal? Here are some of the new cards that Wizards showed off:
As you might expect, The Hobbit is filled with Dwarves, with Thorin himself leading the adventure. The Hobbit gets a new card frame with the Book Cover frame:
Wood Elves make their return to Standard with new printings. This classic card has been fetching forests for Magic players for over 20 years:
We couldn’t talk about The Hobbit without mentioning the clear star of the book, Smaug. You tell Smaugh he isn’t the main character. I’m not doing it. He’s even the headliner card for The Hobbit with an incredibly shiny headliner printing:
There are even box toppers for The Hobbit with some great reprints. Everyone loves box toppers as extra value when you buy a box, and this is a great place to put needed reprints without them taking up space in the main set. I’m looking at you, The One Ring:
If you were disappointed that the special language cards were in Elvish, then this time around, they are in Dwarvish. These special language cards can only be found in collector boosters. I'm also going to sneak in these new full-art basic lands that feature the journey our heroes make throughout the book:
Reality Fracture
The Magic story has been building to a big event, which arrives at the beginning of October. Jace has built his own multiverse with blackjack and hookers! Well, not really, but he has built his version of the multiverse, complete with an alternate version of Strixhaven, Hexhaven. There, you can find the allied color pairs in their five colleges of Hexhaven:
With the new schools, there comes the reimaging of how the multiverse could be. Fresh from Secrets of Strixhaven, the Prepared mechanic returns with twists on the very foundational spells of Magic. This one is even the serialized headliner for Reality Fracture:
Reality Fracture will have a unique feature for its booster packs. Inside every pack, there will be two different copies of the same character, with one for the original and another for Jace's version. I wonder how well it will work in draft and if it's supposed to go with the Pick 2 Draft format:
There’s a lot more information that Wizards hasn’t revealed yet, but these peeks into the upcoming are great for fueling the fire of speculation. I was hoping for some looks into the Star Trek set, but as that’s the last set for the year, I’ll have to wait. I want to imagine how Jean-Luc Picard talks his way out of an Eldrazi incursion.
