Beyond the Booster

Hello everyone! I am still sick, so I am home from work today. As awesome as not having to go to work is, it sucks sitting around/lying down by yourself all day. As I was lying, I realized I have managed to avoid talking about the Duel Decks and the FTV: Legends that Wizards has announced!

For a while now, there have been rumors of the next Planeswalker battle being between Ajani and Nicol Bolas thanks to some people following what WotC has been trademarking, but it was officially announced the other day. Obviously Nicol Bolas is going to rock a full Grixis-colored deck, which I expect will be more on the controlling side, it is unknown whether Ajani will be Boros or just mono-white. I think he will be Boros for a couple reasons. First, during Alara block the Ajani we knew was Ajani Vengent who was WR. Secondly, and more importantly, these pre-cons have been almost exclusively mono-colored except for the 5-color Coalition deck and the 5-color Slivers deck. I think WotC is going to break that mold and start having more colorful duel decks come out, which I'm sure everyone woul like to see.

Coming up much sooner is the other Duel Decks to be released this year: Knights vs Dragons. WotC released yesterday some ugly art that is going on the new Knight of the Reliquary:

That just doesn't that good at all.... But aside from that, the fact that Knight of the Reliquary is in the Knights deck obvously opens up having other green cards in the deck as well. I did a gatherer search for Knights, and there weren't very many green knights, but there were a healthy few. Here are some cards I might expect to see in the Knights deck:

Benalish Cavalery
Benalish Knight
Juniper Order Ranger
Kinsbaile Cavalier
Knight Exemplar
Knight of Meadowgrain
Knight of the Skyward Eye
Paladin en-Vec
Silver Knight
Southern Paladin
Steward of Valeron
Wilt-Leaf Liege

I don't have any guesses as to which will be the Mythic, but it won't be Knight of the Reliquary or Knight Exemplar.

On the other side of the battle we have the Dragons. I couldn't find where I had originally written about them in my 5 minutes of skimming through old reports, but there was some art released that started rumors of Bogordan Hellkite being the Dragon Mythic.

I would expect this deck to be mono-red, although a splash of black or green (or maybe both) is possible, considering Jund was the Dragon empire.

Moving forwards, the next From the Vault series was announced, and it is FTV: Legends! This will be 15 legendary creatures that span the history of Magic. The art that came with the announcement is very cleary of Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, who is abolutely epic to say the least. While I always get the Duel Decks, I have never gotten a FTV box because I didn't want to spend $100 on 15 cards I'm probably not going to use.

There is something very interesting about the announcement though, and it is how it conveniently matches up with the multi-player release this year being Commander. All Commander decks need a general, and now you're offered 15 generals that all have super-cool foiling. Also, M12's tagline is something to the degree of "gather your allies" so it can be assumed that Wizards is pushing this multi-player theme. Maybe we can expect to see Imperial Mask reprinted? That would be cool.

Anyways, that's all from me today. Hopefully I get better so I can FNM, I think Sphere of the Suns is my answer to color-skrew that often happens when playing 3-colors as well as it being nice ramp. Until next time, stay classy!