Welcome Magic lovers! Yes, it's spoiler season once again, and as we get increasingly inundated with card previews from the upcoming Tarkir: Dragonstorm set, the excitement for the new cards is rising more quickly than even the wind speeds on the tempest-wracked plane. With a multitude of iconic dragons soaring the skies, in addition to myriad multicolored spells and creatures, with plenty of legends and recurring characters thrown in, Tarkir: Dragonstorm promises to be a return to Magic: the Gathering's roots, at least until the upcoming Universes Beyond sets take us far, far from our home planes.

Welcome Magic lovers!   During the last spoiler season, when Aetherdrift was fully revealed before its release in February, the card that immediately stood out to me as a powerful engine that could be built around, was Ketramose, the New Dawn. In fact, I wrote an entire article about it here. 

Welcome Magic lovers!    

Welcome Magic lovers! As the Standard Regional Championship Qualifier season hurtles on, racing through Aetherdrift and setting its sights on the gathering storm on Tarkir, one may think the format has started to become stale. After all, tired, old Domain won the Pro Tour again, a Standard deck that's existed in one form or another for a full two years now, while Dimir Midrange and Gruul Aggro have been around since before last year's rotation, yet combined, they still manage to make up almost 50% of the metagame. However, as this past weekend's Standard Showcase Challenge on Magic Online has shown us, the metagame changes as often as the weather, with innovations and tweaks being made to several new archetypes, in particular Esper Pixie. A dominant performance by the Esper players put three copies of the deck into the top four of the tournament, with another copy just missing top eight, in no small part due to the work that incredible deck-builders, like the infamous 'cftsoc' on Magic Online (who ended up taking down the whole tournament), are putting into the deck.

Welcome Magic lovers! After an exciting weekend of watching some of the finest Magic: the Gathering players in the world battle for tens of thousands of dollars at Pro Tour Aetherdrift, it's now time to sift through the wreckage to see how the many different decks fared, and to determine the shape of the ever-changing Standard metagame to come. While format boogeyman, Domain Overlords, took it all down in spectacular fashion in the hands of seasoned pro, Matt Nass, it was an outlier deck, Azorius Control, that actually posted the highest combined win rate of all the Standard decks in the tournament at a staggering 66.07%, followed by the Azorius Omniscience combo deck with 56.67%. While the control deck did post a rather small sample size of only fifty-six matches (it comprised just 2% of the field at large), its win rates against the more aggressive decks like Gruul Mice, Mono-Red Aggro and the new Jeskai Oculus decks were very impressive, considering those are typically matches where control decks struggle. However, against the Domain Overlords decks, their win rate was less stellar, though that could be due to deck configuration, as not all the control lists ran the same numbers of key spells.

Welcome Magic lovers!   With Aetherdrift having finally screeched into Standard, it has many deck-builders all revved up about new strategies and synergies, while many other players are simply tinkering and tuning under the hood of the existing, established decks in order to find any new tools which may bolster them. Today, we'll cover a couple of the more interesting new brews that have surfaced and how they play out.

Welcome Magic lovers! Aetherdrift, the first of six Standard-legal sets coming in 2025, is already cruising into local game stores and players' hands in just a few short weeks, which means the pace of spoilers has been fast and furious. While the entire set hasn't been completely spoiled at the time of this writing, there are already several spicy additions to the Standard format which got people talking, so today, let's go over one of the most potentially powerful cards that have been revealed from Aetherdrift thus far.

Welcome Magic lovers!   As the arms race in the Standard format continues to devolve into who has the cheapest, most efficient threats, it seems like there is less and less space for late-game decks to thrive.