Stardust Overdrive Special Edition Available Now!

Today, Konami announced that the Stardust Overdrive Special Edition has been released. With an MSRP of $9.99, this three booster pack set is well worth it. On top of the three boosters, buyers will get one of two Super Rare variants. These variants will either be the hard-to-find Tempest Magician or the equally rare Charge of the Light Brigade. The Charge of the Light Brigade card was previously released as a TCG World Premier card in The Duelist Genisis. Both of these cards are wonderful additions to decks, and when they come with these boosters, it just sweetens the deal. Stardust Overdrive features monsters from all of the Yu-Gi-Oh! animated series’, including Stardust Dragon and Majestic Star Dragon. This Special Edition is available at card and hobby shops today, so go on out and have a ball.

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Magic: the Gathering Worlds in Rome

This past weekend was the Magic: the Gathering World Championship in Rome, Italy. An astounding 408 players from more than 50 countries showed up to participate. It was a grueling four days of head-to-head competing for the coveted title and prize money. Three new members were initiated into the Magic Hall of Fame, joining big names like Randy Buehler. The top eight players from the tournament span eight different countries. In the end, Andre Coimbra from Portugal took the title. Not only was the World Championship a great moment for these hardcore players, there were a lot of fun side events like getting a chance to play against the creator of Magic: the Gathering himself, Richard Garfield. Some other big-names like Mike Turian (one of the main forces behind Time Spiral), Aaron Forsythe (head, R&D), and Tom LaPille (developer), were around to play anything from Elder Dragon Highlander to Duel

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Community Cup Challenge, Day 2

So here we are, Day 2. We are the underdogs, the “Good Guys” as dubbed by ourselves and the community. We all arrived at breakfast pretty well rested and ready to take on the day. We ate and talked a lot about magic, including how our addition of Multiball would affect things. Multiball was something thrown at us mostly to boost scores. Our last member, John, arrived late last night, so we became a team of 9, as it wouldn’t be fair to just kick Randy out. The multiball round was a multiplier. If the multiball player won 3 games, we would get a 3x score modifier. For 2 wins it was 2x, while for 1 win, it was 1.5x. The first round was MOMIR basic while the rest of us played Unified Standard Construction. Unfortunately, the Standard format didn’t go so well. I had a lot of issues with

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Community Cup Challenge, Day 1

Hey everyone, greetings from Washington! So, this is day 1 of 2 for the Magic: the Gathering Online CCC, which you’ve been getting a lot of news about from me the past few weeks. We were met by Mike Gills of WotC at our hotel, had breakfast and interesting conversations about Littlest Pet Shop. Yes, that is relevant because the 8 Community members had to choose a LPS figure and write our name on it. It was fun; we got to dress them up. These were thrown into the Community Cup (yes, there is one. I’ll get a picture), and Wizards of the Coast members took turns picking a figure and that determined matchups. When we got to the WotC office, we were taken to the 4th floor and shown where we would be playing. I instantly claimed a chair right in the middle of one side because it looked

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Community Cup Challenge Prep

As you guys all know from my little post here, I’m participating in the Magic: the Gathering Online Community Cup Challenge at the Wizards of the Coast headquarters in Renton, Washington. I’ve been really nervous and really excited about this from the moment I was asked if I wanted to go for GamingAngels. I’ve since learned that not only am I the youngest competitor on both teams, the second youngest having 4 years on me, but I’m the only female on the community team. There are three amazing women on the opposing team that I’m really looking forward to meeting. I’ve been doing a lot of prepping to get ready for this. Yes, I’m just playing a card game that I know and love, but it’s online. I’ve never played online Magic before, but I’ve been playing a lot so I can learn everything needed. I’ve looked at so many

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Magic: the Gathering Online Community Cup Challenge

Hey everyone. Just a little announcement about something super exciting that’s going on Thursday and Friday this week. It’s called the Magic: the Gathering Online Community Cup Challenge. The basics of it are: 4 press members and 4 online community leaders face off against 8 of the Wizards of the Coast staff members in 4 different online play formats. The formats are: 100 card singleton, a standard constructed, and two drafts, Zendikar and Invasion. It will be held at the Wizards of the Coast headquarters in Renton, WA. for almost the entire two days. If Wizards staff wins, the community will get a free promo card online, but if the Community wins, the community will get a special avatar and access to awesome events online. And guess what? Yours truly is participating on the Community Team. All I can really say is that I’m so excited about this. I’ve been

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Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! updates

This week marks a couple of exciting releases in the world of trading card games. Both Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! are getting updates in the form of new decks. Magic: the Gathering gets the much-anticipated Garruk vs Liliana duel deck. The new art on the planeswalkers is beautiful, especially Liliana’s updated yet just as dark art and pose. Garruk looks just as fierce in always. Both decks feature some of the best black and green cards in the game, all of which are reprints and still just as useful. Both are complete 60-card decks that are ready to play right out of the box, perfect for two players looking to start off or enhance their game. The MSRP is $20. Full deck lists can be found here. Yu-Gi-Oh! also sees a new deck release in the form of the Warriors’ Strike Structure Deck. This deck comes with everything a

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Chris Bowling wins Shonen Jump Championship Austin

This past weekend in Austin, Texas, over 500 Yu-Gi-Oh! players showed their stuff and fought their best games to win the title of the 70th Shonen Jump Championship winner. Chris Bowling, from Arlington, TX, was the lucky duelist to claim this title. He qualified for the 2010 U.S. National Championship. To go along with this win, he also won the U.S. Championship in 2008. Bowling played Morandice Black in the final round after two days of working his way up the ranks. Both competitors were ready for an intense match, bringing their best game and their best deck. In the end, Bowling came out on top. Both competitors took home very nice prize back, and Bowling won a paid trip to the National Championships, while the top 16 finalists qualified to participate in their countries’ 2010 National Championships.

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Ancient Prophecy Special Edition

Yu-Gi-Oh! expansion Ancient Prophecy Special Edition is another chance for players to find all of those cards they missed out during the original Ancient Prophecy release or just gather more of their favorite ones. Also included is an additional card that has never been released in North America. Each box of this special edition set includes three booster packs of Ancient Prophecy and one of two Super Rare variant cards. One of these prized cards will be the Red-Eyes Wyvern, which was released only once before as a video game promotional card in Europe. Fans of the Lightsworn Deck can hope to get a Solar Recharge card, a re-release in this set, for it. This deck, for those that don’t know, made a big showing at the Shonen Jump Championship in Orlando. The Ancient Prophecy Special Edition has an MSRP of $9.99, which makes it a good value for the

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Magic: the Gathering Combos 101 part 2

Welcome back guys. I’ve been getting emails from my lovely readers about their opinions on these combos, even some suggestions! It’s really nice to hear from the community so much. So if you have any ideas, want to discuss deck-building, or just wanna say I’m awesome, feel free to send me an email. Okay, so let’s start. I’ve been debating for the past few days whether I wanted to focus on one of my favorite styles of play, Mill, and the fun things you can do with that, or do something completely insane. I decided to focus on mill strategies. First, mill is the term for when a player makes an opponent (or themselves, if they want to do that) discard cards straight from the top of their deck. A basic example of this is Tome Scour, which is for one Blue, where an opponent discards the top 5 cards!

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