Hello all, and welcome to Magic Monday, where Avocados can magically gather and talk about Magic: The Gathering. Each week I’ll talk about something Magic-related that’s on my mind, highlight a card related to those thoughts, and offer a prompt for commenting. This week, it’s all about the craft.
I usually buy about one booster box a year on average, and the forthcoming Edge of Eternities has me excited enough that I’m thinking it might be the one. In a minor departure from routine, the set doesn’t take place on a specific plane, but rather in outer space on the boundary of what are called the Blind Eternities, where planeswalker Tezzeret somehow wound up in the wake of New Phyrexia’s attempted invasion of the multiverse. I’m sure he’ll find something he can exploit out there!
Magic has been prone to exploring more divisive, less fantasy-adjacent settings in recent years, and a lot of people are worried about space being a little bit too far from fantasy. Edge of Eternities has been confirmed to be inspired by space opera, so it seems to be aiming to hew closer to Star Wars than Star Trek, which I’ll concede is a more appropriate target for keeping things in Magic bounds (for now, at least). I don’t go through spoilers with a fine-toothed comb, but nearly every card I’ve seen has elicited at least an appreciative nod from me. I’m reminded of another set with futuristic trappings that ended up winning players over to become an all-timer: Kamigawa Neon Dynasty.1Also, incidentally, one of my favorite/best box openings ever. I think the cards are going to be good enough to overcome fans’ doubts on the setting front.
But the biggest change Edge of Eternities is bringing to the game is the ability for legendary vehicles to be commanders. This is to accommodate the new Spacecraft subtype for artifacts, which become artifact creatures when enough power is tapped to provide charge counters for their station abilities, a keyword that reminds me of this every time I see it:
Unlike the Jeskai influx I talked about a couple weeks ago, where I preferred to stay away from more recent vintage, I don’t care about digging back through the past and trying to build a deck around, say, Parhelion II; I’m kind of interested in seeing what some of these spacecraft can do, which is why my Card of the Week is my favorite spacecraft I’ve seen so far, Infinite Guideline Station.
Infinite Guideline Station (aka Space Station Ravnica, or Deep Space Nine, or Infinite Diversity in Infinite Guidelines) costs WUBRG to cast and creates a tapped 2/2 Robot token for each multicolored permanent you control—which is nice, because those Robots can then be tapped to pay the station cost, which, once met, will get you some pretty nutty card draw depending, again, on how many multicolored permanents you have out. You can juice the card draw even further with something like Pride of Hull Clade, which would essentially turn it into a “draw your whole deck” kind of thing. It’s not easy to block damage coming at you in the air, after all.
COTW Value: Each week, the Card of the Week is rated on a scale of one to five dollar signs (see footnote for values).2$ = 0.01 to 4.99
$$ = 5.00 to 9.99
$$$ = 10.00 to 19.99
$$$$ = 20.00 to 49.99
$$$$$ = 50+ Card values typically aren’t too reliable before a set comes out, but right now, amid the hype that always precedes a new release, Infinite Guideline Station is sitting at $10.32. That’ll probably drop at least one dollar sign when the set actually releases, but if it’s easy to make fireworks go off with it or players discover a hot combo, it might not fall too much further than that. $$$
Prompt: How do you feel about outer space as a setting for Magic?
Bonus Prompt: Which cards, if any, are you looking forward to from Edge of Eternities?