First up, there’s Path of the Planeswalker. This is a solid 200+ page graphic novel featuring the webcomics that can be found on the Wizards of the Coast website as well as a new story only to be found in the book. For those who haven’t read any of the comics, each one focuses on two or three of the five main planeswalkers, Jace Beleren, Ajani Goldmane, Liliana Vess, Garruk Wildspeaker, and Chandra Nalaar, and the adventures they have. This book is going for about $15 in bookstores now, as it was released January 5th. Graphic novel and Magic: the Gathering fans should pick this up and add it to their collection.

Next is the all-foil booster packs. This isn’t much different than normal booster packs except that every card is foil. The cards come from the Alara block which consists of Alara Reborn, Shards of Alara, and Conflux. These will hit store shelves on January 8th. If anyone gets them, let me know what you think! I’m really curious. Keep in mind, these will only be available for a limited time.

Worldwake and M11 comes this year, as well as Rise of the Eldrazi. Worldwake will be making waves starting February 5th. Prerelease events will be January 30th and 31st. For those that love the spoilers, those will start appearing on January 18th on magicthegathering.com, so keep a look out for them. The fun thing about M11, the core set for this year, is that it will stay in Standard with M10 until the October cycling, when M10 will be ‘demoted’ to Extended only.

A new duel deck set, Phyrexia vs The Coalition, will be released on March 19th. Phyrexia, the mono-black army, will face off against the Coalition, who represent the five-colors of magic. Duel decks are really fun because they allow two players to split the cost and each get an amazing preconstructed deck made to play right out of the box.

Whew! That’s a lot of excitement for the first half of this year! Keep on the look out for all these exciting products and whatever else the Wizards of the Coast team will come up with.

First of all, Wizards of the Coast unveiled the third of three sets that are in the Zendikar block. Rise of the Eldrazi, codenamed “Prosper”, will be joining Zendikar (October 2009) and Worldwake (January 2010) to complete the block. The set is announced for April 23, 2010, with prerelease events held in participating WPN (wizards play network) locations the week before. This will be a 248-card set and previews will start on April 5th on magicthegathering.com.

The upcoming Pro Tour and Grand Prix schedule was also posted. The stops cover 16 countries and numerous states. Some of the big ones are Oakland, CA and Houston, TX for the States, as well as events in parts of Europe. All grand prixes will feed into the pro tours for the respective area, IE Oakland’s grand prix and others in the surrounding areas will feed to the San Juan pro tour. The promotional card is an old favorite from Kamigawa, Umezawa’s Jitte. This card will only be available while supplies last. The first stop is, in fact, Oakland, on Valentine’s Day weekend (February 13-14).

In the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!, there has been an announcement from Konami about a new Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s league. The Pegasus League is already proving to be a test for any duelist’s deck-building skills. Konami will regularly select a new deck format for players to test their skills. For November, the challenge is for any deck built must contain four monsters of the following elements: Water, Fire, Earth, and Wind. Every time the format is updated, the changes will be posted on www.yugioh-card.com.

The final stop on the Shonen Jump Championships came to Columbus this past weekend. More than 800 players showed up to compete, and one man, Vincent Ralambomiadana, took the top prize. He was playing a French Twilight deck against second place Kevin Slapnik’s Destiny Hero / Zombie deck. Again, the top finalists from this championship have earned invitations to their respective country’s 2010 National Championships.

It’s been a busy few weeks in the world of competitive card games, so bust out those deck you’ve been meaning to play and have some fun!