This set is so bananas. I'm extremely excited about it. Not just for what's in there, but for what it suggests about what future sets could contain. And I know everyone's angry about the high power level of the Companion ability, but I honestly think it could add a great new dimension to 60-card Magic as it develops further, the way Objectives did to the Star Wars CCG. Not utterly mandatory, but you had to have a good reason not to be using one.
There has been an attempt at mob rabble against Mark Rosewater and the production team on Twitter and Tumblr with players accusing MaRo and Wizards of fumbling the ball on power balancing and not knowing what they are doing, since we've had some bans lately and we had a bad Standard last fall and winter. It's true that the power level was pushed a bit, and it's certainly frustrating when it leads to an unattractive format. But the reality is that Arena advanced deck tech faster than any tool used before, and brought powerful builds to the forefront at a far quicker cadence than Wizards had become accustomed to making format adjustments. The answer is to expect them to adapt, which I imagine will happen, not to have Wizards significantly scale down card power. Honestly, they should aim high every time, and anyone who thinks otherwise wasn't there during Homelands, Prophecy, or Saviors of Kamigawa.
That's about it for now, a partial article and concerned wholly with Magic, as there's not much to say about video games at the moment since so much stuff is sold out and distributors are bone dry on it. With a new console generation on deck at the end of the year, I wonder if Sony and Microsoft are a little bit grateful that the quarantine cleared the channel of their old stock just in time for nobody to get stuck on piles of aging inventory. It's a pleasant thought, anyway.
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