There's a store near me with a lot of unsorted bulk and no consistent pricing policy. Usually, the owner picks out the valuable cards and prices them individually at market price, then either throws in the rest, charges a flat bulk rate, or doubles the price if he's too busy to check everything. I've always been fine with this, since I typically pay no more than 60% of market value.

Today, the owner handed me two boxes to dig through. One was typical bulk, but the other had quite a bit of value, including obviously expensive cards (think Hobbit book covers and a Mox Opal) that I fully expected to pay sticker price for because those aren’t getting past him.

After sorting, I brought up a stack about 18 inches tall to be priced. They took it in the back and said they had a machine that priced cards. I figured I wasn't getting my usual deal, which was disappointing but fine.

Then they came back expecting full market price for every single card. Their explanation was that the box containing the valuable cards wasn't supposed to be available for customers to search through, even though the owner himself had handed it to me, so they couldn't offer any sort of deal.

Am I wrong for feeling like they essentially used me as an unpaid card sorter, only to turn around and charge me full market price for the cards I'd spent hours digging out of their bulk?

Edit: I didn’t think I’d have to make this more clear but I 110% expected to pay market price on the expensive cards that I found in the box. The issue I have is that a large proportion of them were not expensive and were what you would call bulk and the owner use the excuse that there were all of those expensive cards in my pile to mean that even that which would usually be called bulk now was full price along with the expensive cards.

I did not think I was getting a mox opal at bulk pricing.

Edit 2: Just remembered this: after the machine calculated the market price for everything, I said I ought go through and put some stuff back (some cards were worth it if I got the deal I was used to receiving), to which the owner responded that if I did then I’d have to wait while they ran all the cards through again, as opposed to just reducing the price they already had by the removed cards’ value. Seemed to be trying to pressure me to buy it all.

Hi everyone, today we celebrate 1 year of the Planar Standard format! It's been exactly one year since the original format proposal, back when we were still known as Type 2, and so much has happened since then!

During this first year we:

• Evolved from the Type 2 proposal into the fully fledged Planar Standard format
• Created a dedicated Discord channel, the beating heart of our operation, now very close to 2000 participants!
• Got together multiple teams of amazing people handling both the format itself and the 80+ online events in the last year alone, with well over 100 as the target for the coming one!
• Created a whole official website for Planar Standard, recently updated with three new sections (News, Community and the much-anticipated decklist page)!
• Created a dedicated subreddit and Twitch channel
• Created a recurring Monthly Championship AND a Seasonal League, both entirely free and sporting real prizes provided by the community!
• Created two new exciting recurring event series, Mid-Month Madness and Legality Fracture
• Held our very first public ban vote for Jeskai Revelation and Tablet of Discovery, which after a lot of in-depth discussion and analysis, ended with both cards remaining legal
• Became officially recognized on Melee.gg, now the main platform of our Monthly Championship
• Got noticed by Mark Rosewater himself, who confirmed that the mothership is indeed keeping an eye on us!

This year has been a truly awesome journey: it's been great seeing the format develop into its own ecosystem, and I'm forever grateful to all of the fantastic people who helped every step of the way. Our community has grown into something really special, driven by our proactive spirit and our welcoming attitude, and that makes me so happy.

The mission remains the same, adamant since day 1: provide a slower, tighter and overall more sustainable alternative to Standard, closer to what the Standard experience felt like before the switch to the current 13 to 20 sets card pool.

Personally speaking, I was able to fully immerse myself in the three in-universe sets we got this year, with ample time to experience their Limited environment and playtest and explore a bunch of the new strategies they featured. I even managed to collect the two less recent ones (Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven) to near completion on Arena, without having to spend every day grinding rewards, like I no doubt would've been required to do, had I attempted the same with the entire yearly schedule.

As someone who felt overwhelmed by the ever-increasing pace of releases, it's been downright liberating, and I can't wait to discover what the coming year will bring us, since all three of the upcoming in-universe sets appear incredibly exciting.

I can't help but recommend the same experience to everyone out there! If you wanna play fun Magic with great people, hop on aboard the Planar Standard train, we're just getting started and it's going to be a [[wild ride]] !

Extra answers for those still curious:

• What's "Planar Standard" again? Kudos for getting this far into the post without knowing: Planar Standard is a community-run format, inspired by the way Standard used to work : it encompasses two years of Universes Within Premier Magic sets (currently 2025 and 2026), along with Foundations, as an evergreen stand-in for the old Core Sets.
• Is any card banned in Planar Standard? Yes, currently Cori-Steel Cutter is the only card banned.
• What's the meta like thus far? Quite varied, our latest Top 8 featured Sultai Midrange (feat. Tarmogoyf), Esper Superfriends, 4c Control, Rakdos Aggro, Azorius Surveil, Golgari Midrange (feat. Vraska, the Cutting Glare), Izzet Opus Combo and Gruul Midrange (feat. Hexhaven Invigorator), which ended up winning. Since Reality Fracture just came out, the format is wide open, so who knows? Your hot new brew might just be the next deck to beat.
• I started playing with a Universes Beyond set, so I don't have a big in-universe collection yet, how can I get a taste of Planar Standard? This has been a bit of a blind spot during our first year, but thankfully we recently introduced a new Monthly event, Legality Fracture, where you can play your Universes Beyond brew alongside our Planar Standard decks! Wondering how? You can find out in detail over here
• Do you have a Scryfall link with the whole format on hand? Sure do+-name%3A%22Cori-steel+cutter%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=color)
• Anything else? Keep an eye on our subreddit later in the day for a little surprise!

I think that it's a unique redirect effect and niche enough to be free interaction in low brackets.

I was locked out of my work account yesterday so I thought I'd make a graph I'd been thinking about for a while.

One way to think about power creep is that, if you want to win and have access to the entire history of cards, you're going to be more likely to play recent cards, since they are power crept. Formats like Legacy and Pauper, where the outsized mistakes of early cards like the power 9 are not legal, should tilt recent. I don't have a general impression that this is true, though, so I wanted to see. I took mtgtop8 data from top 8 decks at competitive events (including sideboards, including MTGO) in April-September 2026 and graphed what I saw by the *original printing year* of the cards included.

We *do* see that there are way more copies of cards from recent years in the included decks. The top-left graph, which shows the total number of copies of cards from a given year played per deck has gone up since 2020, with 2024 (Modern Horizons 3) as a high watermark.

However, part of this is that they print way more cards per year than they used to. If we take things relative to the number of printed cards, it gets way more flat! 2024 is still a bit of a peak, but now the early years are the years with the top playrates, and the recent bump looks pretty similar to 2002-2003 (Mirrodin era) and 2010-2012 (Worldwake-Return to Ravnica). (note, banned cards are excluded from the denominator but if you track the share of cards that are banned by printing year it's fairly flat outside of 93/94 so this doesn't explain much).

Shifting to what share of cards saw *any* play (which reduces the impact of a single super-powerful card from an otherwise unimpressive year) or saw 10+ copies across all the submitted decks (which is similar but avoids random things like how yes someone did register a single Glasses of Urza in a top 8 pauper deck in 2026) also looks mostly flat, with perhaps a slight bump post-2020. All the graphs do show a big fallow period from roughly 2013-2019 where those cards don't get played much. Comparing pre-fallow period to post-fallow period, in Pauper 7.1% of all valid (ie common, non-Un) cards pre-2013 saw 10+ copies, while it's 9.3% in 2020+. In Legacy that's 2.1% pre-2013 and 1.9% (lower!) in 2020+.

Interesting takeaways:
- It's obvious to anyone comparing standard or limited formats across time that cards are way more powerful now than before. The floor is higher. But this analysis is about the ceiling - cards good enough to compete against *all* other cards in an eternal format. The ceiling is surprisingly *not* that much higher, with early (pre-2013) and recent Magic sending a fairly similar share of cards to the competitive level in eternal formats.
- 2013-2019 appears to be butts for eternal formats. I'm surprised how low 2025 is too (2026 is also low but keep in mind the data starts in April 2026 so not all the 2026 cards were legal as of this graph).
- It's really shocking what a high share of pauper-legal cards see play in pauper. In most years between 5-10% of all newly printed commons show up in modern Pauper decks in at least 10 copies. Granted there are like 4k Pauper decks and so 300,000 slots available to put those 10 copies in, but to me that's still a very high number. Brewer's paradise indeed!
- While I focused on the share of cards to try to get at power level, the top-left graph which doesn't adjust for number of cards printed is worth something too, as it tracks a bit more closely to "what share of the cards that you see are recent" which it looks like is going to be quite high simply due to more cards being printed, even if the per-card hit rate isn't that much higher.

I've virtually only ever played digital MtG (Duels and Arena) but my algorithm serves me a lot of "relatable" Magic content, and much of it are memes or skits about how e.g. blue players are "toxic" when they counter your combo or whatever.

I realize that 95% of this kind of content is nothing more than a joke; I'm not sure sure about the other 5%.

I have never been a super competitive gamer (I suck at most games lol) and I have no problem with using the bracket system or house rules to make the game more enjoyable at a casual level. But that should be done before the cards are dealt.

I don't disagree with the idea of "the game should be fun for everyone" in principle; but I would very much hate to apply it to mean that you shouldn't make moves that "ruin" another player's strategy because that would make the game "not fun" for them. If we haven't explicitly precluded some card or combo before the game started, I should be able to play it whenever I feel like without thinking about if it might hurt somebody's feelings. (Second-guessing myself this way is what makes the game "not fun" for me.)

After all, there are plenty of low interaction board games out there you could play where the game is designed in such a way that other players can very rarely interfere with your game plan. If that's what you want, why even play a game that has counterspells?

As mentioned at the beginning, this is an impression based on consuming online content and not on playing the game IRL. Are there actually people out there who think this way or am I attacking a strawman? Let me know.

I'm realizing all of my commander decks are just pre-cons, or modified pre-cons. Anytime I start building a deck, I find a cool commander, start adding cool cards, and then burn out before it becomes playable. How do I actually start the process of deckbuilding from scratch?

I know a lot of new players may not know about Eternal Weekend, so i want to share the link. It's more than just a legacy & vintage tournament. There's pre-modern, cEDH, pauper, and more in the side events. It's also a great place to get your cards signed and/or buy older and rarer cards from international vendors!

So I've been buying dragon shield for quite some time now but I've noticed this card sleeves I bought had some oddities. For comparison here's a stack of sleeves with no issues then the next picture if you look really closely the white lines are broken and uneven. Am I going insane and tweaking out or is there genuinely no issue? I also received a banged up sleeve, good thing it was an extra one.

Like many, I am really excited about Nauctis. I was looking through the calendar to gauge when the first larger look could happen and all my hopes are pointed to next Tuesday. As far as I know, previews for Star Trek start on 26th, so 27th Oct is a stream for that. Based on previous patterns, we can expect at least the next three to be about the set too, which would put the next available slot at 24th Nov. With previous starting mid January for Nauctis, that feels a bit too late.

But perhaps I've just gotten used to how things were for the past 2 years. I can't remember a time where 3 months before a prerelease we didn't know a single card from the set.

https://bsky.app/profile/mtgsecretlair.com/post/3mxrfoaxpqc2d

If I have a Blood Artist and an Enduring Tenacity in its creature form on the battlefield and my opponent casts a board wipe that destroys all creatures, can I lay the death triggers of Blood Artist and Enduring Tenacity how I like, so Enduring Tenacity as an enchantment deals the extra damage from the life gain of Blood Artist to my opponent?

Hey all! I’m very new to Magic and I’m looking for a chill, welcoming commander pod in Fort Worth or the DFW area. I’m playing slightly modified precons and I’m still learning the jargon and some mechanics. I’ve played several 1v1 or “duel” games with a buddy of mine, but I want to experience a 4 player battle. If anyone is willing please reach out! I appreciate it!

I’m coming back after years away from the game, and was talking at work about trying to find a commander deck that won’t break the bank. One of my coworkers suggested I buy the precon called ‘Counter Intelligence’ not use the commander, and use the one I recently got in a pack called Vraska Soul of Stone. Is this valid? I don’t know enough about commander and that deck to know if this is sound advice. What does everything think?

Today, EDHREC is unveiling a brand new site redesign! Over the last year, we hired a new front-end dev, looked into every dusty corner and swept it up, worked to make the new EDHREC look more modern, added new features like Color Identity Filtering, updated card modals, and more!

We've got a Changelog and interview with the dev team for you to check out as the redesign makes its way to all of our users today. If you don't see it yet, don't worry, as it will take a bit of time for us to make the switch. Until then, give our articles about this change a read, and let us know what you think!

View our official redesign Changelog here

Check out our dev team interview here

These are from the FRA bundle, but every time I get them I’m kinda like “huh neat” then chuck them in the trash. They show up in prerelease kits too and I’ve only really seen people use them as like tokens but is that officially what they’re for? Or are they just like little bonuses if they were planning on printing extra cardboard they were kinda like “oh let’s do something cute and make it so you can punch out some art” or something. I’m asking if there’s an “official use” for these because the small punch outs are obviously stuff like deathtouch counters, +1/+1 counters and such and just wanted to know if these bigger ones are supposed to be used for something.

No release date is given in the article.

From Dark Horse Comics - https://www.darkhorse.com/comics/3014-480/magic-the-gathering-untold-stories-liliana-1/ the comic is available tomorrow, October 14th.

Liliana’s journey has brought her to Innistrad, the rumored location of Griselbrand, and a plane rife with corruption, chaos, and suffering. Determined to hunt the demon down and reclaim the piece of her soul he took, her task will not be an easy one—for Liliana Vess is not the only seeker of vengeance upon the plane of Innistrad.

Yes, you reading this, will not open a god pack.

If you open a pack, there is a 1/1000 chance you will open a god pack. If you open a box of 30 packs, there is a ~3% chance you will open a god pack. If you open ten boxes of 30 packs, there is still only a ~26% chance you will open a god pack.

For it to even be a 50/50, you would need to open exactly 693 packs, or 24 boxes. At MSRP, that's approaching $4000. You would need to draft every week for over four years to open this many packs.

Just something to keep in mind when you're tempted to splurge on packs come February. For all intents and purposes, you are never going to open a god pack.

https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial