Bottle Gnomes

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

Another great weekend for Magic: the Gathering fans either attending or watching event coverage for Grand Prix Memphis (Standard format) and Grand Prix Vancouver (Modern format).  Here at MTG Realm, we had an unusual 'MTG-free' weekend ice-fishing and an enhanced understanding of what cold means.  Anywhoos - let's tottle on off to today's article and forget about our frozen digits.  

If you've endured all the maddening bugs of MTGO and have not rage-quit yet, they've announced a variety of strategies to address this on the mothersite which includes new resources, bug blog, and what not.  They've announced an upcoming new Magic: the Gathering Online (MTGO) product release - Tempest Remastered, somewhat similar to the online-only Vintage Masters set WotC had released a while back.  If you have a boat-load of nostalgia for Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, the Team has taken all 621 cards from these sets and whittled down a list that will lend itself well to limited play.  Speaking of limited, the set will be available online from just the 6th to 27th of May, 2015.

Here's the 4.1.1. - Tempest Remastered is a 269-card set, containing 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, 15 mythic rares, and 20 basic lands from the Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus sets. Tempest Remastered will be available in booster pack form, with each booster retailing for $3.99. Each pack will contain the following:

• 10 commons

• 3 uncommons

• 1 rare or mythic rare

• 1 basic land


Each pack has a chance at a premium card replacing one of the common slots, with the same odds as other Magic booster packs.

Although the indication is that there will be no new arts, the mothersite also provided a preview art for Bottle Gnomes (one of the very first cards we collected), which brings us to the title of today's post.  We wanted to do a spotlight on this card which we've got a bit of nostalgia for.

Tempest uncommon, illustrated by Kaja Foglio
Flavor Text:  "I am reminded of the fable of the silver egg. Its owner cracks it open to see what jewels it holds, only to discover a simple yellow yolk."
—Karn, silver golem

Mirrodin uncommon, illustrated by Ben Thompson
Flavor Text:  "Reinforcements . . . or refreshments?"

Out of the 7 Gnome creature types in MTG, only one was a 'lifelike' creature with the remaining being all artifact creatures.  Storywise, gnomes are typically constructs of artificers, dwarves, wizards, what-not.  Today we're only focusing on Bottle Gnomes, depicted as not very menacing mechanical automatons having a clear vessel filled with blue-coloured serum or lymph liquid.  This liquid is beleived to have been developed by Memnarch and sought-after by Vedalken and Neurok for its mind-expanding qualities.

Bottle Gnome Gold, by ThomasGereg on Deviantart

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