This morning, Mark Rosewater put out his “teaser text” on his blog for the upcoming Magic: the Gathering expansion, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. There’s a lot of really interesting tidbits here for us to speculate on, but a few stand out as really exciting. Here’s our top 3 most exciting things that we can expect in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.
3 – Asmodeus
The tip that Maro hinted at that led me to this one is “Legendary Creature – Devil God”. In Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, Asmodeus was a Greater Diety, and the Overlord of the Nine Hells. We are unsure of his designs, but one avenue that Wizards could have taken with him is his ability to spawn Avatars of himself. Asmodeus would send Avatars to the other layers of Hell to keep an eye on things. One mechanic of the Avatars is that anyone within 120 feet of one of an Avatar is under an awe type effect, preventing anyone from attacking Asmodeus, unless they were attacked by one of the Avatars.
A translation of this effect could be, “When Asmodeus enters the battlefield, create X Avatars of Asmodeus creature tokens equal to his power, maximum of 10. Asmodeus has Indestructible as long as you control an Avatar of Asmodeus”. There’s most likely some other text that’s on this card, and he’ll probably have a high casting cost as well.
2 – The Xanathar
This one is an easy one. MaRo gives us the hint “Legendary Creature – Beholder”. Beholders are large spherical floating creatures with a singular central eye, but has multiple eye stalks with smaller eyes coming from it’s body. The pack art for the set portrays one of these beholders. One of the most infamous beholders is The Xanathar, who was the leader of the Xanathar Thieves Guild. This crime organization was one of the most powerful, and Xanathar, as the crime boss, holds a wealth of knowledge and information. I don’t have a design in mind for this creature, but I’d guess that it’s going to involve destroying creatures, and stealing or drawing cards.
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1 – Dice!
The number 1 thing that I find very exciting to look forward to in the set is the return of using die rolls as a mechanic. The bit that Rosewater gave us for this is “something only seen previously in Un-sets comes to black border”. There could be a few things that might fit in this category, but the one thing that is synonymous with Dungeons & Dragons is rolling dice. We’ve only ever seen die roll mechanics in Un-sets, and I’d wager that we’ll see this make its way into Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.
MaRo really left us with some awesome teasers to think about and we’ll soon enough get to see these amazing new cards when preview season kicks off! Which of MaRo’s tips has you the most excited for the new cards, and what do you think some of these are? Let us know in the comments!
READ MORE: Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms MTG Arena Pre-Order Bundles Revealed
Adventures in the Forgotten Realms is set to release on July 23rd on tabletop, and a week before on Magic Online and Magic Arena. Preview season is set to begin this week, and you can find all the new spoilers in our Spoiler Gallery. You can also preorder Adventures in the Forgotten Realms products now!
