GamesCard GameMagic: The GatheringMagic: The Gathering’s latest set gives you a good excuse to dig out those old cardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesCard GameMagic: The GatheringMagic: The Gathering’s latest set gives you a good excuse to dig out those old cardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
You’d think a card game with as many expansions as Magic: The Gathering would have done something as poker-adjacent as a Western set before now, but it’s taken until its 100th expansion for Magic to cowboy up.Outlaws of Thunder Junctionexplores a new plane full of arcane trains to rob and cactus-spider monsters to shoot—called cactarantulas, naturally—but it’s interesting how much this brand new set’s mechanics have made me want to go trawling through older cards.
For starters, there’s Crime now. Several cards improve or trigger abilities if you committed a Crime that turn, where Crime is defined as “Targeting an opponent, anything that opponent controls, and/or any cards in an opponent’s graveyard”. That covers quite a lot of ways you can mess with other players, but doesn’t include basic attacking. When you take a swing at an opponent in the combat phase, you’re not targeting anything specific, which I like to imagine as all your creatures marching forward windmilling their arms like Bart Simpson. Nothing criminal about that.
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The other backwards-looking mechanic in Outlaws of Thunder Junction is, well, outlaws. Rather than introducing a new type for this set like “faerie” or “ninja”, it’s a new batch that bundles existing types together: assassins, mercenaries, rogues, pirates, and warlocks all count as outlaws now. Having some of these scoundrels in play sets off interactions with new cards, just like committing a Crime. The Take the Fall card normally gives a creature -1/0, but that becomes -4/0 if you control even one outlaw. The vampiric Olivia, Opulent Outlaw gives you a free treasure whenever an outlaw causes damage. And the aforementioned At Knifepoint, which hands out free mercenaries when you do Crimes, also gives all your outlaws First Strike.
Outlaws of Thunder Junction looks back in a historical way too, as it sees the return of Desert lands. Dating back to the very first Magic expansion, 1993’s Arabian Nights, the basic Desert card gave you the option of tapping it for a point of colorless mana, or to cause a point of damage to an attacking creature. Though the subtype returned and was expanded in sets like the Egyptian-themed Amonkhet in 2017, now there’s a bunch of them that can be tapped for colored mana in a choice of two types, and they have evocative names like Soured Springs (for blue or black) and Festering Gulch (for green or black). They can still be tapped to do a point of damage as well, though it’s now specifically to a “target opponent”. Yes, that means deserts are capable of committing Crimes.
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