Let’s face it, magic is moving pretty fast these days. The hourly updates from a dozen official twitter accounts, Daily Articles from the Mothership, Blogatog, MTGGoldfish, even with it all lined up here on the subreddit, it can be a hassle. Especially for those of us only sort of paying attention. So, as a service to my fellow Magic playing Redditors, I have compiled a no research, half-remembered recap of everything going on in Magic right this second. TL;DR – I’m bored and not that funny.

1) MTGO still sucks. This isn’t really “going on” so much as a dependable and reliable fact that we can use as the bedrock for everything else. MTGO sucks for all the perfectly reasonable reasons it’s always sucked: The game wasn’t designed with digital in mind, it’s buggy and slow, it’s underlying architecture is probably described as “Minoan”, and it inexplicably still costs $10 to start an account for no good reason. Unrelated, my phone just pinged and told me that Hearthstone gave me a dollar in a desperate bid for my attention. I mostly included this on the list so no matter how badly I do from here on out, I get one right.

2) FNM Promos are going to be Tokens. Some people are REALLY upset about this. Other people are indifferent. Legends speak of an ultra casual player who might be mildly pleased. To those people who were ticked off WOTC said, “If you care that much about FNM Promos, you were probably going to FNM for the wrong reasons. Could you stop coming?”. Which is a terrible thing to say, but worked really well because most of those people have stated their intention to stop going to FNM.

3) Card Stock has been secretly replaced with Shrinky Dinks. This is a serious problem, since Cards now apparently roll themselves into scrolls if not immediately placed in a hermetically sealed isolation chamber. WOTC has been quiet on the subject though, and to answer why, here’s a transcript of an actual conversation recently had within WOTC:

Earnest, Hardworking WOTC Employee “Oh geez, have you seen these pictures on the subreddit? The current cardstock is garbage, we better switch it”

Realist Employee “Yeah, but we’ve already sent Ixalan out for printing, remember the leaked sheets? Plus maybe even the set after that. Better to stay quiet until we have a solution in place than acknowledge the issue and then do nothing for months”.

Earnest Employee “We could scrap all those garbage cards and just send the entire next set out for another printing.”

Realist Employee “We could also quit our jobs while lighting a big pile of Hasbro’s money on fire, like Joker in the Dark Knight. Seems like that might be faster.”

4) WOTC has decided that the REAL reason they’ve had to ban so much damn stuff lately is that they’re giving away too much statistical data to hardcore players. Only someone pouring over ten decklists a day could have possibly realized that they printed an infinite two-card combo in Standard, or that Turn 4 Ulamog is good. So instead, they’re adopting the “Baghdad Bob” position of releasing only the most carefully curated and hand selected decks from the daily MTGO data, hoping that the people hungry for that information will also be too lazy to click a whole two links over to review tournament results. Good luck with that.

In other news, some players were shocked to find out that Wizards posts winning Decklists from MTGO. Heeeeyyy…I could mine that for deck ideas immediately thought about 5000 players.

5) Wizards has signed up with Cryptic Studios to produce an MMO. There was much guffawing and chuckling about how WOTC is always “ten years” behind the curve and no one has cared about MMOs since 2007. Which is weird since apparently Cryptic still exists for WOTC to partner with, and employs about a hundred people, and only makes MMOs. Imagine their surprise when they find out they’ve all been doomed this whole time.

So there you go, 5 people still reading, a hazy sort-of useful recap of everything going on in Magic. That’ll teach my boss to give me access to reddit on a slow day.