Dungeons & Dragons Magic

 While wandering the store, my perception roll was a success, and I spot the newest expansion set for the Magic: The Gathering card game. I quickly have to roll again, for a saving throw, to avoid passing out from excitement.

There's a few companies involved with the story, but Dungeons & Dragons was bought by Wizards of the Coast in 1997, which was then bought by Hasbro in 1999. The real mystery here is that nobody thought about making a D&D card set until... now?! Since it was never done, it was just thought that it would NEVER be done, so it was a shock to see it, in a good way.

I won't continue to bore you with company history stuff you can easily look up yourself. I'm only a little bit of a fan of Magic: The Gathering, but I'm a HUGE fan of D&D! Of course I had to get some cards to check this out. We went ahead and splurged on the big box with lots of stuff in it.

Creeeeek, opened the treasure chest! Should we have checked for traps first? Too late, we already opened it. Lucky for us there were no traps. That's a classic D&D lesson to learn the first, or last, time you open a treasure chest.

Here's some oversized "dungeon" cards. I guess there are rules for these about how you use them in the game. But right away you can get the feeling of adventure.

There's a couple of rule-reminder type cards. Like most collectible card games, the "rules" are kept simple, and the complicated parts are written on the individual cards. If you've never done this before, the idea is that you collect a bunch of cards and figure out the ones that work the best together. Or just collect them like cool trading cards, lots of people do that, too.

Basic land cards. You sort of need these in every deck, so they always come up with new cool landscape paintings each set, these ones are from Dungeons & Dragons places. Believe it or not, but this set is the first time they thought about printing "flavor text" on the basic land cards. Up until now, they have always been blank. If you don't know, Flavor Text is just cool lore they write on the cards for context, and doesn't affect the game play.

There were four basic land cards for each of the five "colors", and then there were also "foil" versions of each one, too! Foil cards are printed with a metalic shiny surface bits that make the cards sparkle as if they were real treasure. Usually foil cards are more rare and thus more valuable.

This box had 10 booster packs in it!  This time we checked, and I'm pretty sure there are no traps here. Let's start seeing what we got!

Right away, in the first pack, there is an overwhelming amount of classic Dungeons & Dragons goodness. That's an actual WISH spell! A couple of classic monsters, and another card that tells you to... roll a dice! All of that in the first pack we opened.

I didn't feel like going through each and every pack, that might have gotten boring. Here's some highlights, including the popular character Drizzt Do'Urden from various D&D novels and stuff. Before they made those novels, my friend made a similar NPC cool-guy Dark Elf wielding double swords. Coincidence? My friend's dark elf was able to leave the caves because he was wearing sunglasses, which made him look more awesome. Every time my friend sees Drizzt, he thinks it's like the character he made up first.

Character Class cards? Cool! Another D&D concept where you start with a simple thing and level it up when you can. Classic character class cards... classy!

There are some alternate-art versions of a lot of these cards! Some of those are called "rulebook variants" where they appear to be from old-school Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manuals. You can see I got a few of those and the matching regular versions. And this amazing land card looks like an adventure module! Those were the pre-done adventures you could buy if you didn't have the time to make up your own.

Several cards were based on adventure scenarios like meeting in a tavern or finding the villain's lair. It gives the impression that you are making decisions about the adventure by choosing what effect you play from the card. A very clever idea!

Here's another group of cards with classic D&D creatures on them. Rust Monsters and Mimics and Blue Dragons... oh my! All of these should be very familiar to Dungeons & Dragons players. 

More cards that any D&D player would get a smile from seeing. A few magic items and recognizable spells and such. Just seeing these cards is bringing back happy memories of adventuring.

You may have noticed earlier that the outer covering for the box had something printed inside it? Turns out the whole thing unfolds into a big Dungeon Master Screen! That's a sort-of "wall" that the Dungeon Master keeps up so the players can't look at all the various maps and notes and stuff about the adventure that has been planned for them. Not needed for the card game, but it's a cool thing to include for the D&D fans! Also, a cool box to put all you cards in.

Let's not forget about this neat d20 they included! That's a dice with 20 sides and is a standard attack dice for D&D. Note that it's common for Magic: The Gathering to use these dice for keeping track of life totals, but MTG uses d20s that are called "spindown counters" because the numbers are all connected; that is, you can clearly see the 20, then the 19, 18, 17, etc. A real d20 has the numbers mixed all around the dice, and this one is a "real" d20.

A few days later the excitement had not yet worn off, and we bought an expensive "collectors booster" which was going to have guaranteed alternate-art cards and stuff in it. Sure it cost more, but you are sure to get good cards out of it.

It was a little funny that the big box had a little box inside of it. What was even the point of the bigger outer box?

You can see that the actual booster pack is inside the other smaller box. That's silly, right? Can we open this yet? When do we get to the cards?

What can we do with an Orb of Dragonkind?! You can see a few of these are "extended art" where the artwork goes to the edge of the card instead of stopping at a border. And a lot of them are all foil-shiny. So indeed it's all a lot more valuable for collectors.

Even the "token" card with the goblin was foiled, and since it's just a token card that usually doesn't get shuffled into a deck, they put the Dungeon on the back of it, which was ALSO foiled! So it's foiled on both sides? That's cool all by itself. I'll probably be excited enough to get some more cards later, but for now I think I'll rest at the Inn.