Magic: the Gathering has been going from strength to strength with its Universes Beyond series of late, including the knockout Lord of the Rings set. However, that’s left the “standard” format of the game, where you use the most core sets to build your deck, languishing a little. Wilds of Eldraine is the newest set in that standard rotation, bringing some fairytale whimsy to Magic’s sorcerous and sometimes po-faced world.
What’s in the Box
There are various ways you can approach Wilds of Eldraine. Players who are relatively new to the game can pick up the Starter Kit, which offers two pre-made 60-card decks, with deck boxes, that match up well together for a fun game. It also includes a booklet on gameplay basics which is woefully inadequate. Beginners will need to look up a lot of stuff online.
Pre-made decks are also available in the commander format, which provides a hundred unique cards, a deck box and some tokens for you to play with. Commander is a popular format, particularly for multi-player games, that bends some of the normal rules. There are only two different commander decks available for Wilds of Eldraine. Fae Dominion let you build a fairy army, while Virtue and Valor concentrates on a smaller number of powerful, buffed creatures.
But these are just the beginning. If you have a good time with the pre-made decks, then you might want to get in on the secret of Magic’s success and start collecting cards and creating your own decks. To expand your collection, you can purchase from various different kinds of booster packs. Veteran players will, of course, probably want to just jump straight in with the boosters.
Rules and How it Plays
After many years of new concepts and refinement, Magic has become an extremely complicated game. Fortunately, you don’t need to know all the rules to start playing: indeed, you can have a great time with just the basics and leave the intricacies of tournament play to the professionals. Magic decks contain land cards which, when played, generate “mana” in up to five different colors, and you can use these to play your other cards which represent spells and creatures.
To get mana out of a land card, you need to “tap” it, turning it on its side to indicate it’s been used that turn. This is a central feature of the game, with many cards needing to be tapped to get their full effects. Creatures get tapped when they attack, but not when they defend, and a tapped creature cannot be used to defend in turn. During an attack you can use your creatures to block those your opponent is attacking with, comparing their power and toughness scores to see which get through in a fascinating tactical mini-game. Unblocked creatures deal their power in damage to the player’s life points and when that reaches zero, they lose.
There’s a lot more to Magic, but that’s out of the scope of this article. Suffice to say there are good reasons it’s such a hugely popular phenomenon, and one of them is the tactical depth and excitement of card by card play, with the advantage swinging from one player to the other until someone makes the final, fatal breakthrough. The question is: what novel ideas does Wilds of Eldraine bring to the game?
Well, if you take the commander decks in isolation, the answer is not very much. The two decks on offer here play well out of the box and seem to have been designed to complement one another to create an exciting game. One uses green and white mana to build a stable of creatures that buff each other while also healing the player to keep their life total up. The opposing deck uses red and blue mana in a classic burn effect, dealing large amounts of direct damage. They’re fun to play with, but neither gives you much of the fairy-tale flavor promised by Wilds of Eldraine. In fact, if anything, they hark back to some classic deck archetypes from years ago.
And that’s a shame, because when you dig into the card boosters, Wilds of Eldraine has glittering bags of fairy dust to enjoy.
One thing this set has in common with Tales of Middle Earth is an eye for creative card effects that bring home the theme. Take, for instance, Beseech the Mirror, a black sorcery that happens to be one of the best cards in the set. You can likely guess what fairy tale trope it’s referencing from the title, but to reinforce the hint it uses a new mechanic, bargain, which gives you a bonus effect if you sacrifice an artefact, token or enchantment. In this instance, the sorcery lets you search your deck for another card and, if you made the bargain, put it directly into play. Not only is this a very powerful tutor effect, it also brings home the magic mirror motif in its mechanics.
Other mechanics included in the set all lean into the theme. Roles are a new concept that act like specific enchantment tokens reflecting fairy tale archetypes. The monster role gives a card +1/+1 and trample, for example, while the cursed role fixes power and toughness at 1 each. They’re a little fiddly to learn but full of flavor when you get to grips with them, and the fact each creature can only have one role gives them some tactical nuance. Adventures, which are kind of secondary mini-card effects within a card’s text, make a return from Throne of Eldraine, a previous fae-inspired set from 2019. Finally, there are celebrations, a fun new concept whereby cards gain extra effects if you put at least two other non-land permanent cards into play in a turn.
While there are lots of great thematic cards to enjoy, because this set is part of the standard format, you have to consider how the various effects will integrate with other releases for the game. And the answer, on the whole, is very well. There are a lot of powerful cards here with great utility regardless of their fae stylings. Moonshaker Cavalry is a game-ending flying creature that gives all your other creatures flying, too, and a buff based on the number you control. Asinine Antics puts the curse effect on all opposing creatures, reducing them to 1/1 stats, making for an easy board wipe. And if you’ve got extra mana to spare you can cast it as an instant.
Together with the new effects, cards like this promise lots of new play options. The End lets you exile all copies of a named card from your opponent’s entire setup, which is a frankly terrifying way to get rid of win conditions and leading into some weird endgames. Several cards from the set are a part of one of the more popular and powerful meta archetypes at the moment, Golgari Midrange. At the same time, these cards aren’t as game-changingly potent as those from its predecessor, Throne of Eldraine. It’s a good balance.
Where it goes slightly wrong, however, is that there’s almost too much fairy-tale theme to stand out in standard. A lot of creative ideas have gone into this set and, taken alone, cards like Three Bowls of Porridge and Syr Ginger, the Meal Ender just look like enormous fun to play with. But when diluted with all the other cards in standard, they feel like thematic oddities. You can, of course, build decks or draft cubes solely from Wilds of Eldraine cards, but in some respects releasing this as part of standard rather than as something more stand-alone feels like a bit of a waste of great design.
If you’re a keen Magic player, there’s no question that you’ll be wanting to pick up some Wilds of Eldraine boosters to add to your collection. Even if they might stick out like sore thumbs among the rest of your cards, they’ll still become an integral part of the metagame until they rotate out, and they’re fun to use. If you’re new to the game, however, you might want to have a look at one of the introductory sets for a universes beyond range, like Lord of the Rings or the upcoming Doctor Who set, especially given the relatively dull starter box for this particular range. If you get the Magic bug, Wilds of Eldraine will still be waiting for you in its curious land of make-believe.
