3 Million !

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Happy July 4th to everyone especially to our American cousins south of the border who are celebrating Independence Day. There, as well as around the globe, Magic the Gathering players are celebrating week two of Magic 2012 core set previews. Here at MTG Realm, we are celebrating our 3-Millionth visitor to the site - How are we celebrating? As announced on June 19th, we are giving away a Commander Deck - more on that latter - for now, let's get into some M12 spoilers and previews.

First off, there are some reprints to bring to your attention. Most of these reprints do not come as much of a surprise and we won't spend too much time on them. We welcome back the following cards to our favourite game : Autumn's Veil, Birds of Paradise, Blood Seeker, Celestial Purge, Combust, Deathmark, Flashfreeze, Honor of the Pure, Merfolk Looter, and Ponder.

Next up, some new cards to salivate over and start working into potential builds . . .

Garruk, Primal Hunter, 2
Planeswalker - Garruk, Mythic Rare
+1: Put a 3/3 green Beast creature token onto the battlefield.
-3: Draw cards equal to the greatest power among creatures you control.
-6: Put a 6/6 green Wurm creature token onto the battlefield for each land you control.
3

A new Garruk! With a converted mana cost of two colourless and three green, this will be pretty much restricted to mono-green. If you will play this, you will need two tokens - a 3/6 beast and a 6/6 wurm. We were expecting some relative theme with the signature planeswalker spells Garruk's Companion and Garruk's Horde but apparently that link is tenuous.
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Doubling Chant, 5
Sorcery, Rare
For each creature you control, you may search your library for a creature card with the same name as that creature. Put those cards onto the battlefield, then shuffle your library.

Obviously no chance of play in Commander / EDH unless sneaky ninjas sabotaged your deck to make you look like a derp at the game table. Otherwise, this could be splashed in any deck to dump additional (non-legendary) critters onto the field. We feel that this could be rather situational in standard constructed.
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Arachnus Spinner, 5
Creature - Spider, Rare
Reach
Tap an untapped Spider you control: Search your graveyard and/or library for a card named Arachnus Web and put it onto the battlefield attached to target creature. If you search your library this way, shuffle it.
5/7

If you were hoping for some weird casual tribal spider deck, you are likely to be happy with this card. This is huge on flavour and there are a number of great card choices out there to consider. As for the pre-release this weekend, if you open up this card as well as Giant Spider, and Stingerfling Spider, we think you are in good form.
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Grand Abolisher,
Creature - Human Cleric, Rare
During your turn, your opponents can't cast spells or active abilities of artifacts, creatures, or enchantments.
2/2

We rather like this card - especially against blue mages who may be running Mana Leak and / or Spellskite wanting to steal your precious auras. More importantly, this will also also put a stop to those irratating activated abilities that your opponent may vex you with.
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Righto - onto our 3-Millionth visitor contest result.


We have now surpassed our 3-Millionth visitor to MTG Realm, and as promised, we are now delivering a new Commander deck to a lucky contestant. We received 57 entries who all correctly answered the three questions. Participants were literally from coast to coast (Mt. Pearl, Newfoundland to Nanaimo, British Columbia) and had to provide a Canadian postal code to be eligible. From this pool, we used a program, called 'The Hat' to painstakening enter this lengthy list of eMail addys and then electronically pick a name from the hat.

. . . and the Winner is . . . 'Matt S' ! We will eMail Matt and get his details and mail off his prize. We want to thank everyone who participated and continues to read the MTG Realm blog daily. Next time, we hope to open up the contest to everyone worldwide (we've had some complaints from some guys in Buenos Aires and Bangkok actually).

Be sure to stay tuned to daily updates as we wrap up M12 spoilers this week and check out our M12 Spoiler List.
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