Magic: The Gathering goes to battle with its first new card type in 15 years

By James On Apr 21, 2023

For the first time in 15 years Magic: The Gathering introduced a new type of card to the game called battles. With the addition of the 36 new battle cards in Magic‘s latest range, March of the Machinewill redefine this update to the game’s ever-changing rules landscape of kitchen tables, tournaments, and battle math for years to come.

According to the set’s official Wizards of the Coast release notes, the battles serve as a thematic tie-in to the overarching story behind March of the Machine, where the cult army of Phyrexians has launched their invasion of the entire multiverse. As players, we see this war unfold over 36 sieges, the first battle sub-type, and a permanent (such as a land or creature card) lying on the battlefield for players to attack. Wizards of the Coast has also indicated that more combat subtypes are in the works for future sets.

The siege battles transform double-sided cards, with a front that is always played first on the table and gives a certain effect when entering the game. Later, siege cards can turn over to their other side – an entirely different card with different effects – when a certain condition is met.

The cover condition of the siege is the removal of defense tokens via combat or direct damage spells. Additionally, some new cards, such as the Etched Host Doombringer and Render Inert, help explicitly remove defense tokens.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Render Inert is a wizardry that removes up to five counters from a permanent, such as a battle.

Naturally, Magic adds new game mechanics to almost every release. Usually those are keyword skills like hexproof or horsemanship, and keyword mechanics like morph and mutate, which are essentially tweaks that reimagine how pre-existing map types interact with game rules. But a new type of permanent is a much more significant addition, as it potentially redefines the entire structure of games by giving players a new outlet to spend resources, deal damage, and rethink how their decks work.

Of the 36 battles, there are four or five in each of them Magichas five primary colors, one or two in each of the 10 color pairs, plus a battle colorless and another containing all five colors. This not only offers every type Magic new toys for the player to experiment with, but the sheer number and variety of combat means they can potentially support or disrupt many of the game’s most well-known and recurring strategies.

Without a pre-existing method of assessing battles and their role in them Magic decks, the coming weeks will be an exciting race to discover the most powerful battles with good old fashioned trial and error by deck designers and competitors alike. But how do we actually start evaluating these new game pieces and what are our criteria for recognizing the pieces worth keeping an eye on?

Let’s start by recognizing the range of the battles, including their in-game cost to play, known as mana value, and the effects they provide for that cost – possibly the most critical threshold to establish, as a A big part of effective deck construction is maximizing the return on your mana investment at various points in the early and late stages of a game.

Most battles cost between two and six mana. The cheapest fights, of which there are nine, hit all five Magic colors on their own or as part of a color pair. And thanks to their range of colors, these nine battles also offer a variety of effects for their price.

For example, the invasions of Azgol and Tarkir are removal spells that can kill enemy creatures on sight, while the invasions of Ixalan and Pyrulea have you looking at the top few cards of your library and drawing one of them. Invasion of Kaladesh even creates a creature when it comes into play, while Invasion of Gobakhan lets you look at an opponent’s hand and make one of their cards more expensive to play.

For the most part, these sieges basically replace themselves when they enter the battlefield, either by placing a new card in the player’s hand or by creating an additional permanent in play. Decent effects for two mana, but not exactly game-winning on their face.

But this reveals two more combat evaluation challenges: how easy are they to flip, and is the map on the back worth going to at all? Since flipping battles require some form of damage, players must now decide if their time would be better spent attacking opponents directly or if the game could possibly be won faster by focusing on the fight instead.

The easiest battles to flip, Invasion of Gobakhan and Invasion of Zendikar, each come into play with three defense tokens. On the other hand, the more challenging sieges, such as Invasion of Arcavios and Invasion of Alara, come in with seven counters. You’d expect the seven-defense sieges to always be the best battles to turn around, but that’s not necessarily true.

Both Gobakhan and Arcavios turn into enchantments that slowly generate value as you perform additional game actions – respectively attacking other creatures or casting more spells. But if time is the limited resource spent turning sieges, players will likely prefer a more meaningful threat to reward them for that effort and hopefully end the game sooner.

Lightshield Array, an enchantment, gives a +1/+1 counter to creatures that attacked at the beginning of your final step. Sacrificed, it has additional functions.

Invocation of the Founders is an enchantment that affects instant sorcery spells. Those spells are copied and given new targets.

Consider the other three and seven defense battles, Invasion of Zendikar and Invasion of Alara. Zendikar transforms into the Awakened Skyclave, a large creature that can block well and even tap for mana. Alara turns into Awaken the Maelstrom, a powerful sorcery, which draws you more cards, lets you play free artifacts from your hand, destroys an opponent’s permanent, and also makes your own creatures bigger. It’s a lot of text, but it feels appropriate for the time spent removing all those counters.

Awakened Skyclave is an elemental creature with 4/4, vigilance and haste with additional powers, including the ability to be used as a map.

Awaken the Maelstrom is all suits, the card says, and allows some unusual abilities, including drawing two cards and placing any artifact from your hand on the battlefield.

My personal favorite fight, Invasion of Ikoria, offers a flexible ability on the front that scales at different points in the game, then delivers an outright win on the back with a giant creature that has a unique ability to progress through. penetrate massive damage to your opponent.

The invasion of Ikoria battle, a siege, has 6 defenses.

Unlike most other battles, Invasion of Ikoria costs two green mana plus X, where X is as much extra mana as you want to sink into the card’s casting cost. You can then search your deck for a creature whose mana value is equal to X or less, and place it directly on the battlefield. In other words, for two extra mana you can play any creature you want, depending on the state of the game and the mana you have access to.

If the six defense tokens are removed from the battle, it turns into Zilortha, Apex, or Ikoria, a huge dinosaur legend that connects creature battles with opponents even when attacking creatures are blocked. In the right deck, where an adequate battlefield of creatures is located, transforming into Zilortha on the spot will win many games.

Zilortha is a legendary creature, a dinosaur, with range. It is an 8/8 creature with additional powers as well.

It helps that Invasion of Ikoria is a green spell, the color of the slope – Magic‘s term for speeding up mana production beyond the typical one country per turn rule. So while some decks might struggle to produce a big payout from an X spell, green strategies are often well suited to producing a lot of mana in a short amount of time, allowing cards like Invasion or Ikoria to suddenly put pressure on any creature also. the best solution for a given situation.

The most exciting thing for me is the versatility of the invasion across different game states. If you have enough mana to find a creature in your deck, each side of this card can single-handedly change the course of the game, whether you win, lose, or even find yourself in a stalemate.

If you’re ahead, this is the type of card that can bring you an even faster win by finding a creature that will prevent your opponents from ever recovering. If you lose, you can find a creature to turn the tide or stage a play to bring Zilortha onto the battlefield and stabilize it with legendary dino power. And even in a stalemate, it can also spawn a creature to breach an opponent’s defenses by directly attacking a player or transforming into Zilortha and nullifying any blocks.

As Wizards mentioned in March of the Machine‘s release notes, the 36 sieges are just the first version of battle maps. While time will tell how future battles work compared to this first batch, the prospects are good for this brand new map type to inject some novelty into a game that hasn’t seen this level of iteration since the introduction of planeswalkers in 2008.

Magic: The Machine Gathering March arrives as a physical deck on April 21 and is currently available to play online Magic: The Gathering Arena.