Oil on gessoboard, 10” x 24”
Made for Arena

Like the title says. For the past month the mailman has been conveniently misdelivering my mail for the past month. I say "conveniently" because it isn't all of my mail. It is mostly just my orders from TCGplayer. At first I just assumed the first order got lost in the mail. It shipped without tracking stuff happens. That was about a month and a half to two months ago. Since then I've placed another set of orders with around a dozen different sellers. None of them have arrived. Most of them shipped without tracking. I assumed maybe they were just slow to arrive, but we are now past their estimated arrivals without tracking.

Well today I had a rather expensive card that did ship with tracking get marked delivered. Specifically, it got marked "Delivered at Mailbox". I live in an apartment complex that has one of the communal mail rooms so all the boxes are just on walls with the unit numbers. Each box obviously needs a key. The mail room itself also has a pinpad that requires a code to get in.

Either way, I'm excited because I'm obviously happy to get the card. It was the choco-track foil Yuna, Hope of Spira. It has been one of my favorite decks to play lately so I figured I'd get the cool shiny art for the commander.

Go to the mailbox and I got nothing. I don't even have regular mail in there today. I now believe that my mail is being misdelivered or straight stolen. I was also supposed to receive two new credit/debit cards in the mail earlier in the month as my current ones were about to expire. They also never arrived. Those for whatever reason the card companies didn't ship with tracking, so I called them up to send another set of new ones out. I figured, no big deal, but it did make me a little suspicious.

I've gone to the post office today and talked to them about the missing mail. They said they were going to have the mailman come back out and see if he can find my mail from today that was misplaced as they didn't have any of the missing mail there at the office.

As for the rest of the orders what do you guys think I should do? I'm worried TCGplayer will find it suspicious when I request refunds for all of the other orders I didn't receive. I doubt he's gonna find all of my mail suddenly. Hell I'm skeptical they're gonna call me back like they claimed they would at the post office. I fully expect to have to go there tomorrow to follow up.

Have any of you had similar experiences or had to request refunds on multiple orders on TCGplayer? How'd it go? That was the only order out of the bunch that got shipped with tracking so it is the one I expect them to give me the most hassle for.

Edit: I spoke to some of my neighbors who live next to me and have similar unit numbers to me to ask if they've gotten any of my mail. They said they don't think they have, but they will keep an eye out.

Edit 2: I've also double-checked the orders on TCGplayer's website and can confirm they all have the correct shipping address listed on my end.

Edit 3: I've been signed up for informed delivery for a long while now. I'm not always checking it, but I'm gonna go back through older emails around the first few orders that went missing to see if they ever showed up on there.

Edit 4: Thanks for all of the replies. They have been really helpful. At this point I'm leaning more towards theft as I am still receiving most of my other mail. The only things that have really gone missing have been cards (or things that seem like they would have cards in them). I'm still getting bills, ads, and junk mail no problem, so I'd be surprised if they were getting misdelivered. Although I'm not sure how they sort mail on the truck so maybe it is still possible.

I went to the post office today to talk to them about it, and they said they'd get back to me. I'm going to follow-up tomorrow and go from there. I'll also likely be calling the Inspectors tomorrow as well.

Our gobbo duo gets into the Reality Fracture Release spirit... maybe a bit too much ^_^

MTG, please keep these two for next year as well :D

My fiancée was just given all of cards from her grandparents, most of which seem to be Magic. Neither of us have ever played MTG, the closest thing we've done is buy the occasional Pokemon Card pack. It's a bit overwhelming looking at all of them, and I'm not sure how to even get started. Are there certain cards/decks we should look for in the lot? Would appreciate any advice.

Also if we end up not getting into it and decide to sell, how much would you estimate these are worth? Some of the cards seem valuable but I'm not sure.

I mainly play drafts in 2 different locations in my town. But both have a different policy regarding rules and rewards.

The first one allows you to keep whatever you pick during the draft. Then one promo pack is given at the end of the night (2 for the winner)

The second one asks for all rare and mythic cards to be put in common at the end of the night, and the winner picks one, then the second etc until no more rare or mythic card is available. We also get a promo pack in addition to these.

As I lose a lot during these nights I prefer most of the time to play at the first ship I mentioned. Which shop would be your pick and why ?

This may be a loaded question, but I think we can all agree that within the inner magic circle we all sit, exposed to more magic than a casual fan, it is all too easy to find parts we dislike, so here I want to know what is it about this game that you love?

For me, these are the aspects that keep me going, a binder full of memories, from accidental orders, to my favourite characters, a time when I tried to collect all of origins evident by one page, and art I adore. Looking through it is enough to spark joy, even if I never get to show it to anyone.

The promise of a weekly commander night and hope that the pod that shows up will be some of the fun ones who don’t bring out the worst the game has to offer.

The dream of more good times, of new cards to provide memories.

A character either Magic IP or not that I love, and the ability to brew some usually bad deck around them, bonus points if I enjoy the gameplan.

And lastly, the belief that one day I will have a group of friends I can sit around a kitchen table and play some form of magic with again like I got to in 2012, for those were some of the happiest times of my life.

But that’s enough about mine, what are yours?

I noticed on my oldborder Dragonstorm foil that the artwork actually has a foily texture to it. I looked at other old border foils and with them, it doesn‘t seem as extreme. Is this normal? Is this a fake?

Article is at https://magic.gg/news/metagame-mentor-modern-developments-at-five-2026-fall-regional-championships

The article also highlights the top five most played Reality Fracture cards in Modern (Theorist's Sanctum, Twinned Vision, Roiling Canopy, Dark Matter Manipulator, Pompous Battlemage) and a couple more recent cards added to Modern (Giant's Boulder and Way of the Paradox).

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

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'm building a deck with the commander [[Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait]] with it and being mostly built around Moonfolk. I'm just wondering if anybody knows if there's any cards that benefit from cards leaving your own battlefield not activated abilities like Moon folk or things like that but things that trigger from other permanence leaving your battlefield

We’re back baby with more Winston Draft.

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.

The deck as it currently stands has a ton of blink combos and under the right circumstances can be VERY powerful (draw the entire deck, infinite mana, infinite life, infinite damage, infinite blink, return all creatures to hand, et cetera), but it's often inconsistent and slow to start off - partly because many of my combos rely on a few specific cards, and partly because I'm often simply lacking in the ramp and card draw to get started before I begin to combo off. I also lack good protection.

Any suggestions?

The deck in question.