Magic: The Gathering returns to fairytales for Wilds of Eldraine

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Back in 2019, Magic: The Gathering Arena left beta testing at the same time as Throne of Eldraine launched, a set devoted to fairytales and Arthurian legends. (The trailer, featuring a gingerbread love story, is still one of the most memorable Magic trailers ever made.) Four years later, Wizards of the Coast is about to return to that setting with Wilds of Eldraine, which finds the land bereft of rulers and cursed to suffer under a magical slumber. It's all a bit Grimm.

Fitting the theme, one of the main focuses of Wilds of Eldraine is enchantment, in both new and returning cards. One that's returning is Parallel Lives from Innistrad, which doubles the number of tokens you get whenever an effect creates them. Since another theme of Wilds of Eldraine is cards that hand out food tokens—think gingerbread houses, poison apples, and the fate of anyone the Big Bad Wolf comes up against—that'll be a handy way of upsizing your meals, whether you use them to heal or to activate other effects.

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Wilds of Eldraine cards — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

A brand new enchantment appearing in Wilds of Eldraine is Extraordinary Journey, which exiles a number of your opponent's creatures (presumably sending them off to the fae realm or the deep woods or maybe the Upside Down). While exiled, the creatures' owner can play them again for cost, but the player who sent them on that Extraordinary Journey in the first place gets to draw a card each time. If a creature means enough to someone they'll bring them back from exile, but be handing over card advantage when they do. There's always a price to be paid in stories like these.

Wilds of Eldraine is also going to introduce multiple legendary creatures, and of those revealed so far it's hard to go past The Goose Mother. No poem-reading matron this, The Goose Mother is a feathery hydra with seven horrible honking heads. She's another source of food tokens, playing nicely with Parallel Lives if you manage to squeeze them into a Simic deck together.

Wilds of Eldraine will be out on Arena from September 5, and will release in paper form on September 8. You can try it out ahead of time by attending one of the pre-release events running from September 1 to September 7 at your local WPN store.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.