Arcane Musings

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

Over the weekend, two Grand Prix tournaments took place, both standard constructed formats.  Mike Krasnitski took first place at Grand Prix Verona with a 'Junk Rites' (reanimator) deck, while Jose Francisco Silva won Grand Prix Rio de Janeiro with an Aristocrats build.  Congratulations to both!

Today on the MTG Realm bloggy, we wanted to take a look very far into the past at a rather interesting card type - 'Arcane'.  Arcane is defined as requiring secret or mysterious knowledge, and in the world of Magic: the Gathering, it is a spell subtype seen on instants and sorceries in the Kamigawa Block and could be considered as a precursor to tribal spells as this subtype was often mechanically linked with spirits.  Flavour-wise, these spells are related to spirits or 'kami' within this block were typically referred to as 'spiritcraft' as there was a triggered effect whenever a spirit or arcane spell was played.

Here at MTG Realm, being the casual home-brew nutters were are, we definitely want to drop over to MTG Mint Card to dig up some older Kamigawa Block cards and get down to building a Spirit tribal deck.  Here's some choices which come to mind at the moment.

Finally, here are some other popular arcane spells which may be of interest -

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MTG Figures

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

For today's post, we'll be stepping into the time machine and travelling way, way back to 2005 at the time when WoTC was unleashing the Kamigawa Magic the Gathering block.

At this time, Wizards of the Coast (or perhaps more formerly, their parent company Hasbro toys), had made a foray into the collectible Figurine business.   This was not really the first time as in 2003, a short series run of six individually packaged figures featuring Serra Angel, Kamahl, Lord of Atlantis, Sengir Vampire, Ernham Djinn and Shadowmage Infiltrator were released by Hasbro itself.  

First 4 Figures obtained a license to produce several statues featuring some notable cards from Champions of Kamigawa and Betrayers of Kamigawa.  These hit the scene during the London and New York toy fairs in 2005.  A total of five different limited-edition (only 5,000 of each) resin figures were produced.  These stood approximately 9 to 10 inches tall, were mounted on a base, and sent out to retailers. 

The figures were -

Champions of Kamigawa Character Line-up
• White Magic - Eight and a Half Tails.
• Blue Magic - Melouku the Clouded Mirror.
• Red Magic - Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker.
• Green Magic - Kodama of the North Tree.

Betrayers of Kamigawa Line-up
• Black Magic - Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni

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Almost all retailers no longer have any in stock and few are available via eBay.  When one of these do come up for sale, they typically go for $60 to $80 each.  First 4 Figures never produced any more.  If you happen to stumble across a box at a yard sale going for a cheap price like this person who recently posted to Reddit, consider yourself lucky.

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Personally, we might just start a collection of MTG figures and mount them with the card from MTG Mint Card.

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