New Magic the Gathering Release:Eldrazi To Invade Zendikar!

By Mat K.

Don’t worry folks, the manga news isn’t phased out this week, I can still get to it in a minute. But for all of you who come upstairs know that aside from manga we also sell Magic The Gathering, and this Friday heralds the release of the third and final set in the Zendikar block: Rise Of The Eldrazi. In case anyone is unfamiliar and not checking out the spoilers online, Eldrazi are essentially Lovecraftian elder god kind of things. They are massive, with insane abilities, and completely colorless (without even being artifacts). Not to mention they are also expensive, and yet somehow this new set manages to provide lots of ways to get them into the field quickly. For creatures that can cost anywhere between 10 and 15 (colorless) mana to play, there are also tons of cards that spit out little eldrazi drone tokens that can be sacrificed to add a mana to your mana pool, so it really doesn’t take much.

One thing that all the major Eldrazi’s have in common is an ability called Annihilator, in which when they attack, whoever they’re attacking has to sacrifice a number of permanents, and that includes lands. That’s just how big and crazy these bastards are. Fortunately the mages on Zendikar (at least the blue, green and white ones) learned how to cast Umbras. These enchantment auras give your creature a nice kick, but even better, they can be sacrificed if the equipped creature were to be destroyed. Sweet.

Of course there are plenty of other gimmicks and surprises, not to mention 248 cards (where as WorldWake was only 135). But now it’s time to move on to the manga. The first and most interesting thing to come in this week is a hardcover book called Shinjuku. Now, it’s written by Christopher Morrison (credited as Mink), but it’s drawn by Yoshitaka Amano, and considering he’s one of the greatest Japanese artists in the last couple decades, it deserves to be inundated into the manga section, though I’m sure you can find it in multiple places throughout the store. With bounty hunters, danger, destiny and sorcery, it’s bound to be awesome.

Next on the list of this weeks manga of deserving notes is Kingyo Used Books by Seimu Yoshizaki. Basically an art student finds inspiration, a teenager discovers his true self in the pages of a manga magazine and it all happens at Kingyo Used Books, a place that helps people find their dreams. It sounds cheesy I know, but from someone who works in a book store, and spends lots of his free time in other book stores I can’t resist the cover of a manga where more than half the space is taken up by an overstuffed bookshelf full of nerdy goodness. But I digress. Aside from a couple of VizBig omnibuses showing up, the other honorable mention this week is the 3rd volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku. So there is plenty to check out upstairs this week, come by and see us sometime.

Ja Ne!