By Mat K.
I know all you loyal Shibuya-Cho readers out there look forward to the weekly manga and anime updates, but this week something special came up, and being the guy upstairs, I felt this time we needed to share the love…and article space.
Anyway, if you haven’t guessed by now, (due to the subtle title change of this weeks article), Magic The Gathering is releasing the first set of their new block this week. Zendikar is going to be wild. If you haven’t already been scanning the web for visual spoilers, the artwork alone is pretty amazing, especially the mana art. The art for each of the mana is so wild they actually decided to print 2 versions of each mana card. The regular format versions you’ll get in the intro packs, but the new “full-art” format mana will only be available in the fat packs and that occasional mana you’ll find in a booster pack.
Fat packs are going to include all the usual swag, 8 booster packs, 40 mana, 1 D20 life counter, a card box with pretty art, more pretty art, and the sample book of Path of the Planeswalker which is the webcomic series from the Magic the Gathering website. And the intro packs are coming 10 to a display (instead of 5 like in 2010 and Alara). Not that that’s important to people who buy decks one at a time, but I figured I’d share the info now for those people who were thinking about buying a whole intro pack display thinking you’d get one of each kind.
Of course we’re also getting new and awesome planeswalkers in Zendikar. If anyone read “The Purifying Fire”, the Chandra Nalaar novel, you’d know that at the end she escapes to make her way through the infinite planes in search of one called Zendikar, and here she is. The new Chandra Ablaze planeswalker features a lovely rendering of a very pissed off Chandra. The other planeswalkers are an elf named Nissa Revane who I’m pretty sure is the first planeswalker who’s addition ability works in complete conjunction with having a specific other card in your deck (Nissa’s chosen), and a vampire named Sorin Markov who is capable of exiling every non-vampire card from the game.
So yeah, this is going to be a pretty exciting set, and we will have it on the official release date October 2nd (which is this Friday, assuming of course you’re reading this article Wednesday or Thursday). We may even get some pre-release stuff on Thursday since all those pre-release parties and functions happened last week. Either way, if you’ve never looked at Magic The Gathering before, this would be a good time to get into it. And for the manga fans, sorry! I promise next week will be totally manga-licious, but for now you’ll have to check out the new releases in the back of this here periodical. So til next time!
Ja Ne!
