We here at the GayGamer castle were lucky enough to get some exclusive spoiler cards from the upcoming Shadowmoor expansion to Magic: The Gathering! Well, technically only the Furystoke Giant is exclusive - we share the wicked-looking Wound Reflection card with another, as-yet-unknown site.
As exciting as our pal the Furystoke is, he's just a taste of the Shadowmoor experience, in which the Aurora has changed Lorwyn into the inky Shadowmoor, a plane of eternal night filled with warped and twisted denizens - expect to see familiar races from Lorwyn, but with seriously altered allegiances and all kinds of new powers.
Even the game itself has gotten a bit twisted: over a third of Shadowmoor's 301 cards will sport hybrid mana costs (back again), and -1/-1 counters get a kick in the ass from Wither and Persist effects. When Shadowmoor launches, Magic fans will be able to travel to Shadowmoor via booster, tournament and fat packs as well as theme decks.
I've got to admit, when I first heard about Gleemax way back at Digital Life, I was skeptical. Partially this was because I'd just stumbled off the plane from Tokyo and was, frankly, no longer familiar with the direction formerly known as "up." Also, I underestimated both Wizards of the Coast and the momentum generated by their three-pronged approach to modernizing tabletop gaming, gaming reference resources, and social networking.
But their showing at GDC stepped up their game big time. From their position as platinum sponsor of the IGF awards, and the dead-awesome awards they had manufactured (a brain in a green sphere gripped by some kind of awesome bronze steampunk business), it became obvious that Wizards is taking Gleemax all the way. While an alpha of the site is open now, don't expect the full features to be rolled out until later in the year when D&D 4.0 arrives - and when the site does go fully live, a certain subset of gamers will be psyched to explore the community portal. More will follow, because WotC is giving Gleemax something for everyone.
Pikachu recently made an appearance as a float for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, officially opening up the world of formerly-geeky trading games to the masses. Beowulf is now a horrible-but-popular film. Harry Potter. Even Superman. Cool ain't what it used to be - so it's "cool" to see Wizards of the Coast pair up with the New York Anime Festival to school the world on the new cool.
The Magic: The Gathering World Championships will be held in NYC's Javits Center from December 6-9, 2007, and should be a fantastic meeting point for all things geeky trendy - anime, trading card games, d&d - you name it.
Make the jump for more info and see you there!
[By Pirate Prince:]
All my life I've been a fan of board games. The only problem is that it seems there are very few people who are also fans. People tend to see board games as tedious, a lot of set up and usually hours of gameplay that they would rather not deal with. That's what I love about them--when you sit down with your game piece in hand (and what's not to love about a little game piece avatar??) you know exactly what you'll be doing for the next several hours and exactly what to expect. The pieces will always be the same, it is only the players that change. And winning is one of the best experiences of one's life, hands down, even if the joy only lasts for a few minutes.
So say you don't want to play Big Brain Academy on your Wii, say it's become tiresome, and you want to play with a group of people who actually, miraculously, are into board games. Then you're amazingly in luck, because University Games has made a "Big Brain Academy Board Game." I'm not really sure how it will work and still be a "Big Brain" style game, but you can be sure there will be trivia questions and some mind-benders involved. And hey, even if you can't get anyone to play it , you can set it all up and stare at it and silently weep, not that I would know anything about that.
