Arriving August 1st, Arena of the Planeswalkers: Shadows Over Innistrad is stand-alone set instead of just an expansion to the popular Arena of the Planeswalkers game. While the box image isn’t clear, we know we’ll be getting 5 Planeswalkers: Sorin, the Innistrad version of Jace, and what possibly looks like Arlinn and Nahiri. I can’t really make out the fifth one.

MSRP will be $29.99.

I’m really glad Hasbro is still supporting the game, though I miss the wave-style releases of figures that Heroscape used.

UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that both the 4th and 5th Planeswalkers in the box are Arlinn in her human and werewolf form.

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Remember back in August when Wizards of the Coast released The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Zendikar? Apparently it felt very similar to a D&D campaign setting book. Now, Wizards has released Plane Shift: Zendikar to supplement Art of Magic and allow you to turn everything into a D&D 5th campaign.

The free PDF is 38 pages long, and really gives you everything you need to play. The Art of Magic: The Gathering-Zendikar will help you flesh out the world, but you can also get most of the details you need on MagicTheGathering.com and the Zendikar plane profile.

It seems like it’s been a long time coming. I’m surprised there haven’t been any other official Magic/D&D crossovers until now.

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Though deposed this past year as Hasbro’s biggest brand, Magic: The Gathering still had a very strong 2015, according to John Frascotti, President of Hasbro Brands, its “seventh straight year of record-breaking results.” Speaking at the company’s Toy Fair presentation to investors, Frascotti revealed that the number of active Magic players grew 10.5 percent in 2015 and that the average player spent 16.7 percent more money on the game than they did the previous year.

Organized play too recorded significant growth. The number events was up 26.5 percent and the number of stores hosting those events up 8.5 percent.

Hasbro sees Magic: The Gathering as a competitor in the e-sports category, where the company says it ranks in the top-five. Last year saw a total of 850,000 competitive magic events. In the 55 classified as “global premier events”, more than 6,000 “premier” players participated and $4.1 million in prizes were distributed. Online video broadcast of tournaments attracted more than 1 million unique monthly viewers.

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Magic: The Gathering has been supplanted by Nerf as Hasbro’s largest brand. That news was revealed Monday by CEO Brian Goldner in the company’s 2015 earnings conference call. Nevertheless, Goldner also stated that Battle for Zendikar was the game’s most successful set launch yet.

Growth in Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering contributed to the 8 percent increase in the games category, absent FX. Magic had a very good fourth quarter with the release of Battle for Zendikar, which had the strongest start to a set in the brand’s history. In addition to higher revenues in our franchise brands and several other Hasbro gaming brands, Pie Face was a clear winner this holiday season and continues to be in high demand at retail. It was recently named Toy of the Year in the U.K. You’ll learn more about the next innovation for Pie Face later this week at Toy Fair.

The Magic Digital Next platform, which we first got a hint of in November, was said to be launching in 2017, and additional Magic initiatives to be announced at Toy Fair later this week.

With the potential of a Mattel merger recently in the news, Goldner offered this assessment:

We’re focused on executing our brand blueprint strategy… [though we] continue to remain open to ideas that enhance our strategic brand blueprint and the strategy that we’re executing. But we’re very focused on executing our own strategy.

Overall, Hasbro finished 2015 with a very strong performance. Year-to-year fourth quarter revenues grew 13 percent, or 23 percent before the impact of foreign exchange. Full-year revenues for 2015 were $4.4 billion and net earnings $451.8 million. That’s revenues 4 percent higher than 2014, or 13 percent higher without the foreign exchange impact.

Hasbro’s fourth quarter revenues in the games category were 18 percent higher than the previous year. For the full year, games grew 8 percent. (Both of these again representing numbers absent foreign exchange.) In comparison, the boys category grew 30 percent and the preschool category 28 percent, while the girls category shrunk 13 percent.

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The long-awaited return to Innistrad is right around the corner! On April 8th, Wizards of the Coast will be releasing the set fans have been eagerly awaiting, Shadows over Innistrad. The 297 card set will be released in booster packs, fat packs, and intro decks. Also, in May, we’ll see this year’s gift box with a Shadows of Innistrad theme.

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Digital versions of Ticket to Ride have undergone a major upgrade. Most importantly, all now support cross-platform multiplayer mode, so even us Android players can pick up live games with you iPad people. Also supported now are vertically-oriented maps. The first, of India, provides bonus points for looped routes. Digital Ticket to Ride is available on Android, iOS, and Steam.

Dominion, the original deck-building card game, has finally hit mobile. Both iOS and Android versions are free-to-play with the base set of cards. Expansion card sets are available as in-app purchases ($90 for everything). Beware though, even single-player mode requires a live internet connection.

Cogwind’s Revenge is an iPad app version of True Dungeon, complete with puzzles, combat, and even token-collecting.

Linkee, the trivia-ish party game of identifying commonalities, now has an Apple TV version. Instead of hitting a buzzer, the first to figure out a link is supposed to grab the remote and shake it over their head.

Defiant Development is in the process of releasing four separate new scenarios (three are out so far, one more will be before the end of the year) for the Steam version of its deck-building, action RPG, Hand of Fate.

Dragon+, Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons mobile-app-magazine, is now also available via the web, so it can be read via desktop browser.

A Macau Challenge Pack has been added to digital Splendor. The twist with this one is that it requires players to capture specific cards.

Magic: The Gathering Puzzle Quest is now a thing and available for both Android and iOS (free-to-play but with in-app purchases). In the game, it’s match-3 puzzle play that produces mana.

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The Top Chess Engine Championship saw Komodo calculate its way ahead of 23 other digital competitors to claim the title for the second series in a row. In the final round, facing Stockfish, another former champion, Komodo won eight games, Stockfish won two, and 90 were a draw.

Among humans, the Manhattan Applesauce defeated favorite team, the St. Louis Arch Bishops, to claim the 2015 United State Chess League Championship. The crucial win in that contest came on the fourth board when 12 year-old Akira Nakada defeated Nicholas Rosenthal.

Though he didn’t have an easy time of it, World Champion Magnus Carlsen won the London Chess Classic and therefore also the Grand Chess Tour.

A Chess game of a different sort took place in Lake Sartash in Russia. Yes, I do mean “in the lake“, which by the way, was frozen over at the time.

At the River Hill Fall event in Maryland, first Keaton Ellis beat the 3×3 Rubik’s Cube single-solve world record with a 5.09 second performance, then Lucas Etter topped that with a single-solve in 4.90 seconds.

Meanwhile, at the MPEI Open in Moscow, Roman Strakhov solved a 5×5 blindfolded in a world record 5 minutes, 4.81 seconds.

Zhao Jian of China won the World Series of Mahjong in Macau. His prize was HK$406,000 and a 24 karat gold Mahjong neclace.

The winner of the Magic: The Gathering 2015 World Cup was team Italy.

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The 2015 Perudo World Champion is Ian Smith of Scotland. He earned his silver cup for the game also known as Liar’s Dice at a tournament held in London and sponsored by Paul Lamond Games.

The Showdown in St. Louis Chess tournament paired Hikaru Nakamura with Fabiano Caruana and Hou Yifan with Parimarjan Negi in a series of matches including Basque Chess (where opponents play two games against each other simultaneously), Fischer Random (where the starting positions of pieces in the first rank are selected randomly), Rapid (with a time control of 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move), and Blitz (3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move). The big surprise came in Blitz, where Caruana took down Nakamura, the top-ranked player in that variation, 4.5-3.5. With that, Caruana was able to claim the $60,000 top prize. Between the women, Negi took both sides of the Basque but otherwise it was Yifan who dominated and claimed $30,000.

Tom Martell won his third Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix in Atlanta with an unexpected green deck.

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We all know about Magic Duel Decks by now. Each set contains tw0 60 card decks with a specific theme and are meant to go well against each other. Blessed vs Cursed sees Holy Warriors against the undead…and each deck contains 6 cards from the Shadows over Innistrad set. The set will be $19.99, and should hit shelves on February 26th.

Will you side with the Light, or the Dark?

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Hasbro’s annual Investor Day event is an opportunity for the company to promote its strategic “Brand Blueprint” among investors. For those readers with an interest in corporate strategy, toy marketing, or even just a better understanding of the major drivers in the mass-market toy and game business, I highly recommend listening to the recorded presentation (which runs about an hour).

From that presentation, however, I’d like to call gamers special attention to CEO Brian Goldner’s description of the Magic: The Gathering brand blueprint (see his presentation slides below). Using Magic as an example for how digital products are essential to the development Hasbro’s “franchise brands” (its biggest and most important properties), Goldner revealed plans for a product he referred to as “Magic Digital Next“.

Our stories are told to foster the personal connection audiences demand. These stories are curated by fans, personalized around brands, and told through a variety of mediums…

In a world where stories create personal connections with consumers, the role of digital is omnipresent in franchise brand development. This connection requires creating a digital ecosystem that spans from ideation and development to learning about a brand through engagement and stories to purchasing and ultimately interacting and playing with that brand. At Hasbro, the digital ecosystem is developed and celebrated throughout our organization…

I want to speak briefly to how our investments in digital for one of our franchise brands, Magic: The Gathering, will expand the opportunity and audience for this global franchise. At the core of the Magic blueprint is storytelling. We activate Magic stories on every platform, analog and digital. The story we’re telling today is around the Battle for Zendikar set, which is resonating very strongly with gamers around the world. In the past few years, we have doubled the number of play events and stores running these events. By the end of 2015, over 800,000 official events will have run in over 6,000 store locations around the world, this year alone. And we expect this trend to continue and the brand to continue growing. Perhaps our biggest opportunity to keep expanding Magic is to improve the digital Magic ecosystem. We know Magic players want to play in person at events and also play similar level competitions online. Right now we have digital offerings at both ends of the knowledge and engagement spectrum. Magic Online is for the highest level players and we have Duels as an entry experience. The greatest opportunity for Magic is to create a new digital experience leveraging contemporary technology to create a seamless digital experience that meets all the players needs from new players to pro players. This is what we are investing in and we have a team in place to deliver the first new Magic Digital Next product in the next few years. In the meantime, we will optimize the Duels and Magic: The Gathering Online experiences to continue driving the overall Magic business.

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