Gaming, Hands-On

Unboxing MTG March of the Machine Set Boosters & Commander Deck – Final Battle!

Magic: The Gathering’s newest set, March of the Machine, is now available for tabletop. It is the fourth and final instalment in MTG’s four-part Phyrexian storyline, and it features a new card type: Battle. This is the first new card type to be introduced since the debut of Planeswalkers back in 2007.

To celebrate the launch of March of the Machine, Wizards of the Coast sent us a box of Set Boosters and a Commander Deck (Growing Threat) of the set to check out. If you’re interested to pick up either one of these products, here’s our unboxing of the new expansion’s Set Boosters and Commander deck!

Let’s start with the Set Boosters. Unlike Draft Boosters, Set Boosters are meant to be more “exciting” to crack open. This is probably why it is popular among folks who just enjoy opening booster packs instead of using them for Limited play, such as Draft or Sealed.

What makes an MTG Set Booster more exciting to open is the structure of the 14-card pack for March of the Machines. 12 of them are guaranteed Magic cards, while the other two are an art card and a token/ad card; the latter has a chance to be replaced with a card from “The List.”

Typically, when you crack open a Set Booster, the first card you’ll see is an art card followed by a land card. But this have changed since the introduction of the previous set (Phyrexia: All Will Be One) right before March of the Machine. Depending on how you open a pack of Set Booster now, you may see the art card first, but the cards now face the other side with some changes to the order. Technically, the art card is now the “last” card in the pack.

So the order of a March of the Machine Set Booster now looks like this: a token/ad card; a guaranteed foil card; the main set’s rare or mythic rare card; two wildcards, which can be a Multiverse Legends card with a Booster Fun treatment of its respective plane; an uncommon double-faced Battle card; a common or uncommon card double-faced Phyrexian card; two uncommon and two common cards with a connection to each other; a basic or full-art harbinger basic land; and an art card.

There are a few interesting things to take note of. The guaranteed foil card, for example, can be of any rarity with a chance to be a Multiverse Legends card. On top of that, the two wildcard slots can be of any rarity as well, so it’s possible you can get as many as five rare or mythic rare cards in a March of the Machine Set Booster.

We’ve cracked open a fair number of Set Boosters from this set, and two of our packs had three rare cards, which has a 14% chance of happening. Pretty good odds, in our opinion, considering that opening a pack with four or five rare/mythic rare cards are 2% and <1% respectively.

Next, we have March of the Machine’s Commander deck, a 100-card deck that’s ready to play out of the box. We received the Growing Threat White-Black deck with Brimaz, Blight of Oreskos as the main Commander. Included in every March of the Machine Commander deck is a Collector Booster Sample Pack, which contains two cards. One of them is a rare or mythic rare card from the set (non-foil or traditional foil), while the other one is a traditional foil uncommon Multiverse Legends card.

Also found inside every March of the Machine Commander deck are a number of neat items, including ten oversized Planechase cards unique to each deck, a life counter, and 10 double-sided tokens. While the Commander format can be quite complicated – especially to newcomers – it can definitely be fun to play with friends.

And that’s our unboxing of the Set Boosters and Commander Deck of Magic: The Gathering’s new March of the Machine set. If you’re keen to check out this new set, give your nearest game store a visit.

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