MTG: Dominaria United celebrates 30 year anniversary

Magic: The Gathering’s latest card set Dominaria United has launched. Available on Arena and tabletop, this set returns back to the beginning.

Set in Dominaria, it’s the perfect way to celebrate MTG’s 30th anniversary. The set also marks a first for multi-set storylines. That means the Magic story will continue in the next card set. There’s also some new mechanics contained within the 281 new cards.

How to use the new skip function in MTG

In our exclusive preview article, we highlighted some of the new mechanics coming to MTG. To recap, they are:

• Stun Counters
• Kicker
• Read Ahead
• Enlist

Read Ahead or “skip” is a mechanic we were particularly interested in. It’s only after playing the new Dominaria United set did Read Ahead make sense. Each of the cards with the “Read ahead” are enchantment cards — Saga cards specifically. There two of these per color. Here are a few of them that are available in the Dominaria United set:

In order to use one of these cards, you must play the card with the appropriate amount of mana. Once you’ve paid the mana, you can play the card. Once you’ve played one of these enchantments, you can choose which effect will take place. For example, if you play “The Elder Dragon War” red enchantment, you can choose one of the effects to activate, either I, II, or III. After your turn, the card stays in place until after you’ve activated step III of the Saga.

In this instance, you might play the card “The Elder Dragon War” and choose chapter II. Then the effect activates. You can now discard any number of cards and draw the same number. Chapter I is skipped over and you can’t activate that effect. After your turn ends, the card stays in place. On your next turn, after your draw step, you can then activate chapter III. That means you can create a 4/4 red Dragon creature token with flying. Once your turn is finished, your Enchantment card is sacrificed.

This type of game play is very flexible and it means we’ll see lots of mix ups in the new meta. Players will need to adapt to different Sagas their opponents play. It also means players have more flexibility to choose the way they play. Players will likely skip straight to chapter III in later stages of the game.

Jumpstart returning to Magic: The Gathering

As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations, Jumpstart is making a full return to Magic: The Gathering. Starting with Dominaria United, Jumpstart booster packs will be available in all new and upcoming sets. This fun way to play suits both newcomers and veterans. It’s a great way to hold rapid fire tournaments and we could see Jumpstart making a splash on the competitive scene.

To play Jumpstart, players grab two Jumpstart boosters, crack them open, shuffle their new “deck,” and begin playing. Each pack is only one color so you’ll likely end up two a two-color deck; unless you’re lucky and score two reds for example.

This is an exciting way to play as players need to have broad knowledge of the sets and must use the cards they have rather than building combo decks. Play styles like this are popular in Shadowverse competitive tournaments in Take Two format. There’s a possibility we could see more Magic tournaments of this nature.