WotC New M:tG set announced: "Adventures in the Forgotten Realms"

[Parmandur]

I'll probably just mess around with the set on MtG arena rather than buying the physical cards.

I only have a few decks that aesthetically pleased me for casual play: they will probably have some offerings to fit into that.

 

[MoonSong]

They're boosters with no commons; uncommon and rares only.

And it depends on what you intend to do; if you want a complete set, singles are way cheaper. I'd you want a playable deck, your still better off with singles. If you want to collect one of every supplemental product, God bless your soul.

Decks are collectible, and the bundle and toolkit boxes are cute collectibles on their own. Then it comes the matter of I wanting enough cards to make a FR themed draft cube. I want volume/bulk.

Edit: And as someone said. There's the temptation of cutting the art and laminating it to make tokens. You need bulk for that.

 

[Remathilis]

Decks are collectible, and the bundle and toolkit boxes are cute collectibles on their own. Then it comes the matter of I wanting enough cards to make a FR themed draft cube. I want volume/bulk.

Draft early, draft often.

 

[MoonSong]

Draft early, draft often.

My FLGS drafts only once a month... and the events end quite late. No thanks...

 

[Dire Bare]

Well, it's official, I'm going to be a destitute bunnycat one year from now. And I'm not getting the DMG until 2022 at the least. In case you're not familiar with the MTG product line, it typically consists of these products:

WotC has been experimenting with Magic releases, so your info is a little out of date.

Except now they also have the Set Boosters, Theme Boosters, and Collectors Boosters and sometimes Commander Decks, if they go by the few sets: Zendikar Rising Product Overview (they might have stopped the Deckbuilders Toolkits though...).

• Five thematic decks (one per color).-60 fixed cards each plus two booster packs. about $60 for the whole set

Planeswalker decks (60-card preconstructed) are now sometimes swapped out for Commander decks (100-card singleton preconstructed). Which we'll get with the AitFR set (or something completely different), who knows? The Planeswalker decks usually contain only cards from the new set, while the Commander decks often include reprints from older sets.

• The deckbuilders toolkit.- 285 fixed cards, including a bunch of lands (I think there's 100) the box is sturdy and good for storage. About $30-40

Deckbuilder's Toolkits are good deals for those new to the game, but often include cards from older sets. So not so great if you're trying for ONLY AitFR cards. Also, not every set has a themed Deckbuilder's Toolkit.

• The bundle.- ten packs, one life counter, one booklet with the whole set illustrated so you can keep track of your collection and 40 lands. The box is sturdy and good for storage and double the size of the toolkit. About $50-60

These continue to be favorites with Magic fans. The "spindown life counter" is a 20-sided die, now they are super-sized compared to the older spindowns. Spindowns are numbered sequentially, rather than the numbers being all over the die faces. Good for life-tracking, less good for random d20 rolls.

• The gift box.- 4-5 packs, a pack of sleeves and a life counter. Not all lines get one. about $40-50

Gift Boxes are released with the fall sets, AitFR is a summer set. So, unlikely there will be a Gift Box. Gift Boxes are different now, they are essentially Bundles with a fancy-schmancy box and a collector booster thrown in, with a significant uptick in price over the Bundle.

• The booster box - 36 packs. about $100-120 each
• The event pack.- Five packs, a promo foil card, and a life counter. About $20-30 and you need to take part on the pre-view event. The cards in this pack are all on your local language version. So both me and @LuisCarlos17f can expect to have about 100 Spanish language FR cards.

Yup.

So, about $400 it seems. No way I'm not preordering with my local shop. I hope they make it to next August.

Edit: Also, cards take 1-2 years to make it into Star City games gold collection, so I'm expecting to get a couple of boxes in 2022-2024. (The gold collection is a box of 1000 cards including 80 lands. It is a mix of old and new cards, but the bulk of them are cards from the past two years)

Can't speak to the outside-of-the-US experience, but for those in the US . . . .

If you are looking to collect the entire set, or close to . . . . if you aren't worried about special foils, alternate art, alternate border cards . . . .

Purchase one each of the pre-constructed decks (usually contain unique cards) and one booster box ($100-ish), of either the draft boosters or set boosters. Then purchase the rest of the cards you want on the secondary market.

This is complicated by the new types of boosters WotC has been experimenting with. In addition to the traditional draft boosters, we also now have box toppers, set boosters, collector boosters, welcome boosters, and theme boosters, each with a different price point, number, and mix of cards. Some of the special alt-art/border cards are only available in certain types of boosters. There's also usually a number of special promo cards (unique art and/or treatment, but from the main set) only available in certain products or at certain events. And of course, by the time we get to summer 2021, WotC might have some new options available.

If you want to collect the special cards too . . . oh god, that can be quite the expensive journey . . . . there are currently extended-art cards, alternate art cards, alternate border cards, special promo cards . . . and most often foil and non-foil versions of each.

And if you want a complete play set, 4 copies of each named card . . . .

Plus, WotC is also playing around with sets within sets. For the upcoming Zendikar Rising set, in addition to the ZR set of cards, you will also find "Zendikar Expeditions" cards, a side-set of special border land reprints. You will also find what they are calling "The List" a collection of 300 reprints from classic sets. The Expeditions and "The List" cards can be found in certain types of ZR boosters.

It's hard to give a good recommendation of what to pre-order . . . . I'd wait until WotC starts previewing set contents (possibly as early as late spring 2021).

Pelor! WotC certainly makes it simple to collect the game nowadays . . . . . ergh.

EDIT: Clean up . . . and again . . .

EDIT: FUBAR'd some terminology . . . . a booster box ($100-ish) is a box of booster packs, usually 36 (but varies by booster type). A booster case is a case of booster boxes, much more expensive (although, a good deal per booster pack). Each booster pack usually contains 15 cards, but again that varies by the type of booster pack we're talking; draft, set, collector's . . . .

 

[MoonSong]

WotC has been experimenting with Magic releases, so your info is a little out of date.


Planeswalker decks (60-card preconstructed) are now sometimes swapped out for Commander decks (100-card singleton preconstructed). Which we'll get with the AitFR set (or something completely different), who knows? The Planeswalker decks usually contain only cards from the new set, while the Commander decks often include reprints from older sets.

Deckbuilder's Toolkits are good deals for those new to the game, but often include cards from older sets. So not so great if you're trying for ONLY AitFR cards. Also, not every set has a themed Deckbuilder's Toolkit.

These continue to be favorites with Magic fans. The "spindown life counter" is a 20-sided die, now they are super-sized compared to the older spindowns. Spindowns are numbered sequentially, rather than the numbers being all over the die faces. Good for life-tracking, less good for random d20 rolls.

Gift Boxes are released with the fall sets, AitFR is a summer set. So, unlikely there will be a Gift Box. Gift Boxes are different now, they are essentially Bundles with a fancy-schmancy box and a collector booster thrown in, with a significant uptick in price over the Bundle.

Yup.


Can't speak to the outside-of-the-US experience, but for those in the US . . . .

If you are looking to collect the entire set, or close to . . . . if you aren't worried about special foils, alternate art, alternate border cards . . . .

Purchase one each of the pre-constructed decks (usually contain unique cards) and one booster box ($100-ish), of either the draft boosters or set boosters. Then purchase the rest of the cards you want on the secondary market.

This is complicated by the new types of boosters WotC has been experimenting with. In addition to the traditional "draft" boosters, we also now have "box topper" boosters, "set" boosters, "collector" boosters, and "theme" boosters, each with a different price point and mix of cards. Some of the special alt-art/border cards are only available in certain types of boosters. And of course, by the time we get to summer 2021, WotC might have some new options available.

If you want to collect the "special" cards too . . . Oh god, that can be quite the expensive journey . . . . there are currently "extended-art" cards, alternate art cards, alternate border cards, special promo cards . . . and most often foil and non-foil versions of each.

And if you want a complete "play set", 4 copies of each named card . . . .

Plus, WotC is also playing around with sets within sets. For the upcoming Zendikar Rising set, in addition to the ZR set of cards, you will also find "Zendikar Expeditions" cards, a side-set of special border land reprints. You will also find what they are calling "The List" a collection of 300 reprints from classic sets. The Expeditions and "The List" cards can be found in certain types of ZR boosters.

It's hard to give a good recommendation of what to pre-order . . . . I'd wait until WotC starts previewing set contents (possibly as early as late spring 2021).

EDIT: Clean up . . .

EDIT: FUBAR'd some terminology . . . . a booster box ($100-ish) is a box of booster packs, usually 36 (but varies by booster type). A booster case is a case of booster boxes, much more expensive (although, a good deal per booster pack). Each booster pack usually contains 15 cards, but again that varies by the type of booster pack we're talking; box topper, draft, set, collector's, theme . . . .

Thank you for the update. I'm thinking of a draft box, a bundle, the starter kit, the decks, and I could see myself buying one (and only one) collector booster. Plus the event pack and the toolkit if it comes out -they seem to come once every two years-.

Edit: and a few start city gold collections over the two following years. Perhaps some people will get industrious and sell a set commons and uncommons in ebay too, seeing as this is a product with greater crossover appeal.

 

[Dire Bare]

Thank you for the update. I'm thinking of a draft box, a bundle, the starter kit, the decks, and I could see myself buying one (and only one) collector booster. Plus the event pack and the toolkit if it comes out -they seem to come once every two years-.

Edit: and a few start city gold collections over the two following years. Perhaps some people will get industrious and sell a set commons and uncommons in ebay too, seeing as this is a product with greater crossover appeal.

As we get closer to the release, I would recommend comparing the different types of booster packs that will be available with the set. Unless you actually want to draft (a style of playing), I'd consider a box of set boosters instead of draft boosters. You'll likely spend as much, get less commons, and more higher rarity cards.

But, I'm fully expecting some sort of collecting curve ball by the time we reach Summer 2021!

 

[AliasBot]

Slight tangent: Am I the only person who prefers 'Warrior' over 'Fighter'? I know, tradition, but 'Human Warrior' just sounds cooler than 'Human Fighter'.

I've been in this boat for about as long as I've been aware that D&D had a class called the Fighter. Warrior's a far better name for the concept.

Though I did see someone speculate on Reddit that the end of the latest Driz'zt book had an event that looked a lot like a Planewalker spark igniting for Driz'zt...

With how many books have been written about the guy, I would've figured Driz'zt would fall under the Jodah Rule by now.

(Basically, if you've been around long enough, and you've lived through enough crazy adventures and emotional extremes, and your planeswalker spark hasn't ignited...you probably just don't have one. In other words, "if it was going to happen, it would've happened by now." Granted, Jodah was over 2,000 when he made that observation, but it was only his second or third book: 30+ books over 200-ish years probably contain a comparable amount of experiences that would ignite one's spark.)

Then again, if the decision was made to make him a planeswalker for the set, it would make sense to establish it in his books, like how Vi was pushed as a character in Eberron, and Boundless seems like it's on the right timeline for them to have made that decision, then gone to Salvatore and told him to put it in his next book, so...probably shouldn't rule it out entirely.

I'd like to see new characters as the sets planeswalkers, heroes we've never seen before rather than the bigger-than-life Realmsian DM-NPCs.

Despite the above speculation about Driz'zt, I think this is more likely: when they give a character a planeswalker card for the first time in Magic, they almost always want to have the ability to use that character again in later stories and settings. Major existing characters from other franchises don't have that kind of freedom of reuse - because of the amount of ongoing dialogue between the different story teams necessary to keep continuity straight, if nothing else.

I think we'll get five new (or basically new, in the case of Vi, and maybe another character gets seeded in one of the adventures between now and next summer) characters as planeswalkers in the set, each being from a different one of the most popular D&D settings: unless the numbers have changed significantly since these survey results in 2015, that's the Forgotten Realms themselves, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape.

If the Forgotten Realms set is successful enough for Magic to come back to the D&D well, the most likely places they'd go, barring just doing the Realms again (focusing on different areas than they did the first time: as Dominaria showed, one Magic set can touch on a lot of different locations on a large, well-developed plane, but it can only focus on so much), would be the settings likely to be popular enough to get similar levels of broad appeal. Establishing planeswalkers from those settings in the first D&D set would then give you existing "face" characters to follow into their personal stories on their home planes, and it would offer the potential to seed further interest in the settings themselves through those characters.

So you've got an artificer from Eberron, some sort of psionics user from Athas, and probably a planetouched of some sort as the easy fits. I don't know Ravenloft super well, but I'm sure there are horror tropes it hits which Innistrad doesn't, and at least one of those tropes should prove a fitting source to build a planeswalker around. And...I have no idea what an "exemplar" of the Forgotten Realms would look like. If it was me developing these 'walkers, the FR one would essentially be a "fill" slot - figure out which colors still needs a PW after filling out the rest of the roster, then pick an interesting area of the Realms that would have a natural association with that color and start from there.

 

[Parmandur]

I've been in this boat for about as long as I've been aware that D&D had a class called the Fighter. Warrior's a far better name for the concept.
With how many books have been written about the guy, I would've figured Driz'zt would fall under the Jodah Rule by now.

(Basically, if you've been around long enough, and you've lived through enough crazy adventures and emotional extremes, and your planeswalker spark hasn't ignited...you probably just don't have one. In other words, "if it was going to happen, it would've happened by now." Granted, Jodah was over 2,000 when he made that observation, but it was only his second or third book: 30+ books over 200-ish years probably contain a comparable amount of experiences that would ignite one's spark.)

Then again, if the decision was made to make him a planeswalker for the set, it would make sense to establish it in his books, like how Vi was pushed as a character in Eberron, and Boundless seems like it's on the right timeline for them to have made that decision, then gone to Salvatore and told him to put it in his next book, so...probably shouldn't rule it out entirely.
Despite the above speculation about Driz'zt, I think this is more likely: when they give a character a planeswalker card for the first time in Magic, they almost always want to have the ability to use that character again in later stories and settings. Major existing characters from other franchises don't have that kind of freedom of reuse - because of the amount of ongoing dialogue between the different story teams necessary to keep continuity straight, if nothing else.

I think we'll get five new (or basically new, in the case of Vi, and maybe another character gets seeded in one of the adventures between now and next summer) characters as planeswalkers in the set, each being from a different one of the most popular D&D settings: unless the numbers have changed significantly since these survey results in 2015, that's the Forgotten Realms themselves, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape.

If the Forgotten Realms set is successful enough for Magic to come back to the D&D well, the most likely places they'd go, barring just doing the Realms again (focusing on different areas than they did the first time: as Dominaria showed, one Magic set can touch on a lot of different locations on a large, well-developed plane, but it can only focus on so much), would be the settings likely to be popular enough to get similar levels of broad appeal. Establishing planeswalkers from those settings in the first D&D set would then give you existing "face" characters to follow into their personal stories on their home planes, and it would offer the potential to seed further interest in the settings themselves through those characters.

So you've got an artificer from Eberron, some sort of psionics user from Athas, and probably a planetouched of some sort as the easy fits. I don't know Ravenloft super well, but I'm sure there are horror tropes it hits which Innistrad doesn't, and at least one of those tropes should prove a fitting source to build a planeswalker around. And...I have no idea what an "exemplar" of the Forgotten Realms would look like. If it was me developing these 'walkers, the FR one would essentially be a "fill" slot - figure out which colors still needs a PW after filling out the rest of the roster, then pick an interesting area of the Realms that would have a natural association with that color and start from there.

Yeah, I'm somewhat skeptical about Planewalker Driz'zt, but I saw that going around. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't do Planewalker decks, actually, and did Commander pre-constructed decks instead, as that has been big recently. Probably less of a headache to come up with Legendary creatures out of FR and D&D lore. However, Vi feels too much like a Planewalker deck set-up...time will tell...

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

There'd better not be a Planeswalker Drizzt - I need a legend Drizzt so I can make my Drizzt commander deck!