MTG Player's Guide

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Happy Wednesday MTG peeps,

With the prerelease for Journey into Nyx about one month away not only are our thoughts turning to this next Magic: the Gathering expansion set release but also back to the two previous sets in the block - Theros, and Born of the Gods.  Here at MTG Realm, we often review the previous sets Player's Guide, included within each Fat Pack since almost as long as there have been Fat Packs (we think Mercadian Masques).  

This serves two purposes :
 
• Assisting us in re-organising our collection ahead of the next release - we typically organise in the same order as listed in the visual card encyclopedia within the Player's Guide (by colour, then alphabetical) - this is meditative and very soothing for us.  Oddly enough, we sometimes 'rediscover' a rather good card we want to put into a decklist or identify a card we need to pick up from MTG Mint Card as we've somehow missed it.

• The second reason for reviewing the Player's Guide is that this serves to help us speculate as to what we could expect in the next set, either from a storyline theme or cards.   Wizards of the Coast are often rather good at providing a 'hoser' card in their effort to balance sets in order to ensure no one build strategy dominates.

 

Anywhoos, we've realised last evening going through the Player's Guide for Theros and Born of the Gods just how much we appreciate these guides.  We've been picking up Fat Packs since we first started in Lorwyn and do not ever anticipate not getting one in the future. 

 

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From the storyline review and what we have from the Magic Creative Team we do know that the epic conclusion to this block will likely again involve Xenagos.  Should Heliod and his chosen champion Elspeth fail, so would the plane of Theros.  The safety and security of Theros stands upon a knife's edge.  Should Elspeth (and possibly Ajani?) stray but a little in their effort to defeat Xenagos, we would be looking at another Mirrodin or Zendikar.  Moving away from the flavour, we can totally see a spell such as Erase which exiles an enchantment (Gods = creature enchantment), or perhaps a weapon from Heliod - essentially an artifact with the same effect).

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