Earlier this month, Magic: the Gathering released the newest expansion of the popular trading card game. Planechase is a set of 4 different decks, each coming with a ready-to-play 60-card deck and 10 of the 40 planes cards. Sure, all players are used to new expansions and new decks, but the plane cards add a new element to already fun gameplay.

There is a special die that is included with the set. Four sides are blank, one side has the Planeswalker logo, and the last side has the Chaos symbol. Players may either use their own 10-card deck that came with their set or a modified one from multiple sets or they may decide to use one communal deck with all or most of the planes.

At the start of the game, the first player flips over the top plane card. This can either be something useful like Goldmeadow which allows players to put 0/1 goat tokens into play whenever they play a land, or something troublesome like Lethe Lake that makes players discard cards off the top of their libraries at the start of their turns. My personal favorite to start with is The Maelstrom, which allows you to reveal the top card of your deck and put it into play if it is a permanant (a card that isn’t one-time only use). This is a great way to get extra lands or a really big creature into the field early on.

This is when the joys of the die comes in. Anytime a player could play a sorcery (the first and second main phase during a turn), they may choose to roll the die once for free. If the chaos symbol is rolled, then the triggered ability on the current plane is activated. If the planeswalker symbol is rolled, then that player flips over the next card on the planar deck. This is when any plane with a “when you planeswalk to” or “when you planeswalk from” ability activates. If a blank is rolled, that’s okay. Each extra roll just costs one mana more each time, so the second roll costs 1, the third costs 2, and so on.

The decks themselves are actually pretty nice. There is an updated artifact deck that holds some giants like Bosh, Iron Golem (originally from Mirrodin), a mono-black Zombie deck that can get pretty mean, a red-white deck that has some really nice burn/instant damage spells, and a red-green elemental deck that can outplay most casual decks with the large creatures.

These sets go for about $20 in most stores and are well worth it. Even if you never play planar games, may it be because you don’t like that part of game play or your opponent(s) don’t consent, the decks are nice and are good already, before modification. 60 cards, a pretty die, and 10 plane cards? Yeah, so worth it.

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