The EPI-log

Once again I find myself in the position of watching everyone else have fun at Prerelease for the new set and this time I cannot put into words how disappointed I am to be unable to partake. Believe me when I say 'This is a good set!'. To help you wrap your head around it and help with deck building for prerelease I have compiled the Mechanics and Archetypes into a single blog post you may scroll through to help. Mechanics Returning mechanics from Unearth, to the underutilised Meld mechanic, are all back. The Brother's war leans heavily into the lore of the book that it shares a name with, Powerstones, artifacts and the ramp for artifact dominance. Without further adieu let us look at the new Mechanics in The Brother's War. Prototype The Prototype mechanic is new to MTG, providing players with an alternative way to get giant mechs and war machines onto the battlefield. Within the brother's war set, there are multiple Artifact creatures that have big stats and a pric...

It may not be Urza's Saga but Urza is back baby and this time he has a Planeswalker card (kinda). Whilst I could hype up the things Im excited about in this upcoming set this blog post is not a fluff piece but made to inform you about Prerelease at EPIC Ipswich. EPIC Ipswich will be running two Prereleases with the first happening on Friday Night as Sealed and on the Saturday day with Jumpstart. Sealed Prerelease (Friday) EPIC Ipswich is running a sealed prerelease on Friday the 11th of November at 6:00 PM. Entry is $45 includes a prerelease kit in addition to a set booster from the new set. Announcements are held at 6:15 PM with deck construction happening from 6:15 - 7:00 PM (7:15 PM if more time is needed). Pairings will be run on  event link with an additional set booster added to your prize pool for each round you won. Ideally four rounds due to time constraints but will depend on turn out. Remember to see us before leaving for your prizes. Jumpstart Prerelease (Saturday) We t...

  Just under a week since the final of Season 1, and as excited as we are, next season will start in 2023. We have received a lot of feedback and can promise you we are not taking any of it lightly. We have heard and look forward to implementing some of the following changes for next season: NOTE - These are ideas and we cannot promise that all these changes will come into effect Changes to Thursday Night Once our new member cards (you read that right) come in, we can allow people a 10% discount off all magic products. This is due to the $17 Modern Horizon II boosters going out of stock, whilst we give one away with the $15 entry, this business model is not going to last long and needs to change. By allowing 10% off, it equates to around the same discount our players are already receiving. Prizes will also change on Thursday. We want to reward the hard work of players, however we don't want people to feel the need to play for sheep stations and be discouraged from not getting to th...

  12 legendary weeks of trialing matches - 1 week of finals. The EPIC Battle League saw a lot of cash given away. The Top 8 The leagues Top 8 played off on Thursday the 6th, with a top prize of $200 everyone was eager and keen. congratulations to Ryan Kruger, Greg Davies, Rowan Haynes, Matthew Macinante, James Nicol, Liam ED, Patrick Collingwood and Tim Stieler who had all made it valiantly into the top 8. A huge congratulations to James Nicol who one the evening. Ahead of the final match-up both James and Ryan agreed to split the prize money regardless of the results each taking home $150 - excellent sportsmanship. Saturday saw a massive attendance from the 17 people that attained a 75% attendance rate, 12 people attended the event proper and many more attended to buy swap and sell with Jene's MTG who helped sponsor the league and will be sponsoring next season. After a muck around in round 3 due to the shameful tournament organiser (myself) mislogging a match pairing. Results wer...

 There is a terrible terrible stain on my soul - As a long-time player of Magic the Gathering. I moved from standard and settled into Commander due to the ever-rotating legal cards in standard. It's the quick rotation of Standard that has made a lot of players and game stores cease their regular games of the Standard format. Whilst other formats have found little success outside of a few smaller communities, Commander became the main face of Magic the Gathering's community. Unfortunately, since the parent company of Magic the Gathering (MTG), Wizards of the Coast (WotC), have failed to sell their newest sets due to the failure of the standard format, their greed has destroyed what I'd argue as the last great format Magic has left - Commander. It all began with the concept of MTG Universes Beyond, a frantic cash grab to sell more products to fans of other series. MTG universes beyond introduces cards specific to fan bases like The Walking Dead, and Warhammer 40,000 and will ...

  After 11 weeks of league play, the final week of The EPIC Battle League is finally here, with our top 8 Thursday tonight and our Saturday Finale on the horizon, I thought now would be a great time to catch you all up to speed on the League! Thursday Top 8 After all the weeks of play, our top 8 players are playing off this Thursday, due to the restriction of eventlink, we cannot make top 8 in the custom pairings and keep it single elimination. The pairings will be as follows: Ryan Kruger VS Greg Davies Rowan Haynes VS Matthew Macinante James Nicol VS Liam ED Patrick Collingwood VS Tim Stieler A huge congratulations to them all, regardless on how they place during Thursday, they will all be walking away with cash. The prizes for top 8 are as follows: 1st wins $200 2nd place wins $100 3rd place will win $75 4th place will win $50 5th - 8th place all walk away with $25 In addition to top 8 this Thursday, our modern community has asked to do their own side tournament, each person cont...

If you read the title, you should know a more accurate title would be "Why aren't you playing Modern at EPIC Ipswich?" The Community Modern is perhaps our most popular Magic Night here at EPIC Ipswich, as I'm typing this blogpost, we currently have 26 Players still on their first round of the night. It's a testament to the loyal Modern Community in Ipswich, most people that play Modern with our local players end up becoming close friends, all incredibly grateful players that tease and support each other. The Leagues Modern at EPIC originally started with the local community wanting to play in a league (The Modern Masters League). Now known as the Aus Magic League, the Ultimate Guard sponsored, multi store league sees people accumulate points to compete in the finals and win some goodies along the way.  In addition to the Aus Magic League, EPIC has it's own EPIC Battle League, which tallies the accumulated points from the weekly plays and lets the top 8 battle ...

  Local trader of (the not so) illicit cardboard crack - Jene Johnston is here to do (not so) shady deals in the corner of EPIC Ipswich on September 23rd! Not just that - Every commander player on the night and everyone who purchases from his store go in a raffle to win a FOIL JEWELED LOTUS! A bit about Jene's MTG, Jene is a MTG Card vendor that specialises in competitive rates to get the cards local Magic Players need for the cheapest price around. As someone who has done business with him many a time before, both in person and online, he is the most modest and honest gentlemen you will ever meet. He has vended in EPIC Ipswich for Aus Magic Leagues finals and is based up in Toowoomba. Supporting as many local events as humanly possible! How Jene Buys: Card will be bought at a price of around 70% TCG Player for cash or 80% for Store Credit. This will vary for card like reserved list, card condition and general cost factors. SAVE THE DATE and we will look forward to seeing Jene on ...

Normally closed on Sundays, on the 11th of September EPIC Ipswich had other plans. After rescheduling our originally planned ANZ Super Series on Thursday the 25th of August, we finally saw the day come around. Magic players arrived early to gloss over the cabinet of singles, pay for entry, register and receive their promos. After a long day of play (originally starting at 11 AM and finishing late afternoon) the top 8 were announced for the Quarter Finals, all of which won a Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx alt art Promo card. Congratulations to our Top 8 Torin Kelderman Stephen Klease Matthew Macinante Heath Manning Taylor McCormick Thomas Barker Andrew Virgona Carl Frankel Semi-Finals saw Stephen Klease battle against the triumphant Torin Kelderman. A huge congratulations to Torin Kelderman who ventured all the way from Toowoomba to represent our local MTG community at the finals down in Sydney later this year. In addition to a ticket into the Final Torin also received $300 ($100 of which cove...

  I cannot stress how excited I am for the Dominaria United set! I'm envious this is a prerelease I will regrettably not be partaking in on account of being the Tournament Organiser. In my enthusiasm, I am super excited to share with you the designed archetypes of dual-coloured decks in the newest Magic the Gathering set, as well as the returning and newest game mechanics. If you're planning on attending a prerelease, familiarising yourself with these will help give you the best advantage you could hope for when it comes to deck construction. Mechanics Returning mechanics from Kicker, to Sagas. Dominaria United has built upon some of the returning mechanics, added some new ones and has some sneaky hidden ones in the set design. Kicker We all know it and we all love it. Pump extra mana into a spell to do extra things. Dominaria United really adds the extra - in this set you'll be able to kick certain cards multiple times using two different colours of mana. Sagas (now with R...

 Announced earlier in the year was the Dominaria United Jumpstart boosters. These were derived from the popular set (Jumpstart) where players shuffled together two boosters and started playing. With the discontinuation of Magic the Gathering's Theme Boosters, MTG is introducing jumpstart boosters for each set, replacing theme boosters. Each set will have a total of 10 different themes that players can purchase from jumpstart boosters instead of theme boosters - and no, you don't need to play to the one theme, you can merge two separate theme packs and still play a fully functional deck! Each colour has 2 different themes in the Dominaria United (DMU) Jumpstart release. The themes are as follows: Coalition Corps: White Coalition Legions: White Mystic Mischief: Blue Arcane Mischief: Blue Totally Merciless: Black Totally Ruthless: Black Ready to Attack: Red Ready to Charge: Red Beast Territory: Green Monster Territory: Green This means you can play against another deck with the sa...

  If you've been following the blog you would have noticed all the recent posts pertain to Wizards of the Coasts recent announcement of their upcoming projects through to 2023. I had already gone over most of the content especially with D&D, today however is about something very close and dear to my heart - Magic the Gathering. I'm not caring about the universes beyond sets, this is focusing on the core sets, the story and my excitement! We saw how wrong I was with the Dominaria United story predictions and with the Magic 30 celebrating the 4 story arc - Dominaria United, The Brothers War, Phyrexia All will be One, March of the Machine  and a follow up set March of the Machine Aftermath . It is no surprise that there is plenty of speculation and concept art and hype around the fate of the multiverse. The Brothers War Continuing the story from Dominaria United, The Brothers War sees Tefari travel back in time to learn the truth about the sylex and all the secrets left behin...

It was 2AM on the 19th of August and whilst the rest of my household was sleeping, I was watching YouTube. Am I a chronic insomniac? Yes. Am I currently typing this in my cardboard box that I now live in at EPIC? Also yes. Am I excited to tell you about the new and upcoming stuff from Magic the Gathering and Dungeon and Dragons parent company Wizards of the Coast?.... If you haven't been able to infer what I'm saying, Wizards of the Coast recently did a live stream to promote their upcoming material they're releasing for their major games MTG and D&D, this was at 2AM Australian Time on YouTube. Some super exciting things on the horizon for both games and some that left me scratching my head. There were the reveals of upcoming sets and books, guest appearances from Jimmy Wong and Ginny Di and some surprising reveals.  D&D Announcements Teases for the next edition of D&D codenamed One D&D  and brings together an updated version of core rules, backwards compa...

  As mentioned last week, we were locked in and ready for our store qualifier on the last Thursday of August.... Notice the use of past tense in the former sentence. Yeah - Yup. It came to our attention that our excitement to house you all blinded us to the logistics of the event. A minimum 5 round qualifier that starts at 7 PM with a tonne of people. That wasn't going to finish til maybe 12 PM if not later. YUP. Our bad. We definitely needed to fix this and fix it we have. Changes to Prizes! Thats right, in addition to the prizes provided (See our last post here ), EPIC Ipswich is proud to announce that we are also awarding 1st place covered cost of entry for finals and $200 to assist them in their journey to represent our community and the Ipswich region in the finals! You Benevolent Owners at EPIC are truly generous and live up to their titles. Changes to our Store Qualifier The time and date for our store qualifier has been moved to Sunday the 11th of September. Starting at 11 ...