Magic The Gathering — How to Play Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

Magic: The Gathering — How to Play Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

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Wizards of the Coast offers an early look at Magic: The Gathering’s newest set is Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, available now in Magic Arena.

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Magic The Gathering — How to Play Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

Magic: The Gathering’s latest set is Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. Unlike most premier sets, Adventures takes a journey to a world from another property, exploring the world of Faerun while also adding plenty of D&D-inspired flavor. While it’s not connected to the rest of the Magic planarverse, the set still has everything that’s expected of a regular expansion: planeswalkers, legendary creatures and a fully fleshed-out Limited environment. But that doesn’t mean it’s just like any other Magic set. It brings plenty of strangeness to the game, including dungeons, dice rolling and a new form of flavor text.

While the set won’t receive a physical release until June 23, it releases to Magic: Arena today. This gives Arena players a whole two weeks where the virtual client is the best way to access cards from the new set, both for Limited and Standard. Ahead of the Summer of Legend, CBR was able to get an early look at the new cards for Arena from Wizards of the Coast.

Dungeons

Magic The Gathering — How to Play Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

Adventures in the Forgotten Realms’ biggest new mechanic is “venture into the dungeon,” which lets players choose one of three dungeon cards to venture through, choosing a new level of the dungeon (and effect to trigger) every time they play a spell or activate an ability with the venture keyword action. When they do so for the first time, Arena will prompt the player to select which dungeon to venture into. Instead of depicting the flat dungeon cards used in the paper game, Arena uses the covers from each Fifth Edition module the dungeons are based on. Mousing over a dungeon shows its rules text, with the featured art used as a simple visual flourish.

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Once players pick their dungeon, it sits on the left-hand side of the battlefield, where the game displays ongoing effects like planeswalker emblems or upcoming extra turns. They or their opponent can mouse over it to see exactly what stage the dungeon is at, which is fairly important for planning out turns. Each further venture will pull that card to the center of the screen until the player finishes journeying through it and returns to the original three-dungeon selection menu. This is a situation where Arena’s capacity to “remember” information gives it an edge over the paper game. There’s no worry about forgetting to update a tracker card or having to hand it over to your opponent — all the information is stored cleanly, legibly and with a dramatic flair.

Dice

Magic The Gathering — How to Play Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

Dungeons and Dragons’ most iconic aspect involves rolling dice, with the iconography of a traditional d20 often standing in as a symbol for the game. Wizards has brought the dice mechanics to Magic by creating several cards that ask the player to roll dice. Dice-rolling previously showed up in silver-bordered sets but focused primarily on six-sided dice. This first foray into dice-rolling for black-bordered Magic uses the d20’s full range of possibilities. A one has a spectacularly bad result for the artifact Treasure Chest but isn’t especially bad on any other card. A roll of 10 or higher usually gives an average effect for a card’s cost, while a 15 or higher can result in a spectacularly powerful effect. This captures the tension of dice rolling in D&D but doesn’t quite transfer over to Arena’s digital interface. It’s just not the same when the computer is the one rolling the die.

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Decisions

Adventures’ last innovation is also its subtlest — the addition of a vast array of “charm” effects (Magic’s term for modal effects). Dungeons and dice are obvious signifiers of Dungeons & Dragons, but they’re not key to what makes the game so compelling. The best part of D&D is in the choices it offers the players. While most tabletop or video games have to rely upon the range of possibilities envisioned by the game’s creators, D&D uses a Dungeon Master as a facilitator for whatever adventure or choices the player wants to engage with. That’s a pretty esoteric concept to translate to Magic, but Adventures handles it deftly with its modal cards.

Each charm in Adventures has a title phrased as a second-person statement —”You Find a Cursed Idol,” “You See a Pair of Goblins,” etc. They’re all phrases that might come up fairly often in a game of D&D and structured in the exact method a Dungeon Master might lay out a situation to their players. The modal options for the spells are then options for how the player can resolve that situation. Italic “flavor text” at the beginning of each mode delineates exactly what each one is supposed to be. They also add a huge amount of strategy to the set’s Limited format. Multiple modes on cards let players run what would otherwise be niche or low-power effects since they can always pick the mode that’s right for the current situation.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/magic-gathering-adventures-forgotten-realms-how-to/

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