2016 Core Set Announced! Magic Origins!

As luck would have it, on the day that I decide to start this blog and begin wondering about what sort of articles I'll be writing, Wizards of the Coast made my job a whole lot easier by announcing something we can all easily get hyped up for.

Last year, Wizards announced that the next core set of Magic: The Gathering would be the last. You can read their full article on it here, but the basic principle is that Wizards believe that the core sets are fundamentally flawed - toning down complexity makes it more welcoming for new players and less interesting for experienced players, and featuring returning mechanics makes it more interesting for the more experiences, and more confusing for the new. Overall, Wizards felt as though the core sets were attempting to appeal to everyone and spreading their bases too thin, ultimately pleasing nobody.

But the core sets are going out with a bang! Or rather, a spark. Several in fact, as the new Magic Origins set focuses on 5 classic planeswalkers - Nissa, Chandra, Liliana, Jace, and Gideon - and promises to depict them both pre-spark and post-spark, allowing us to see the pivotal moments that changed the lives of these 5 planeswalkers forever.

Considering we now, oddly, know more about Magic Origins than we do about the upcoming Dragons of Tarkir, March 7th will be a very important date to see what kind of cards will be featured in this extremely exciting set.

Currently speculation runs wild, one popular theory is that each of the Planeswalkers will be depicted as a double-sided Legendary Creature, with the ability to turn into a Planeswalker under certain conditions. There's a few pieces of evidence to support this, in addition to the fact that we've been promised both pre and post-spark depictions of the Planeswalkers, we also know that there will be 2 brand new mechanics, and that the set was originally reported to have 277 cards, which was later rectified to 272. This 5 card difference could due to an error in counting both sides of a double sided card as separate cards, but of course, this is still just a theory.

Whatever happens, one things for sure: fans from across the world will have their eyes glued to the screens come March 7th, as we await what could be one of the most interesting sets in Magic's history. I'm positively giddy-on.