This week was all about the Dragons. The impact of Dragons of Tarkir is still being felt across Standard, Modern, and even Legacy, and the summer sets of Modern Masters and Magic Origins are right around the corner. That's not the only excitement going on. This week, join Team Gathering Magic as we share the high points of our weeks. From playoffs and Legos to Control and camels, these are our picks of the week.

Picks of the Week: April 25, 2015

Adam Styborski is Content Manager for Gathering Magic, writer of Command Tower for magicthegathering.com, text coverage reporter at Grand Prix and Pro Tours for Wizards, a Pauper Cube developer, and known curmudgeon.You can find him sharing things on Twitter as @the_stybs.

The Other Playoffs

While it’s no secret many of Magic’s big names are basketball fans, there’s another contingent that follows the other professional sport that just entered its playoff season: Hockey.

That’s it. Playoff hockey is the best hockey, so find your nearest fan and watch a game!

Market Forces

If I told you that the Internet had revolutionized the way we can track down and purchase specific, unique, collectible pieces from the world over, you wouldn’t bat an eye. The Magic secondary market has a huge digital presence, with hundreds of online-focused retails with thousands of smaller stores and individual buyer/sellers beyond.

It’s not the only pricy, nostalgia-fueled collectible that I’ve gotten into.

My oldest has discovered how much fun Legos are; our friends and family have noticed too.

What really blows me mind is how different finding Magic cards are from Lego pieces. BrickLink is an amazing site that opens up into both a repository of Lego information – sets, pieces, and other details about nearly every Lego release in history – and access to stores from around the world. I’ve bought replacement pieces from all over the US and Europe, and tracked down two of my all-time favorite (now “vintage”) sets from a wonderful seller in Romania.

It’s just like tracking down the version of power you need to play Vintage.

What strikes me how many similarities, and differences, there are between the two markets. The BrickLink store itself feels like something right out of 1996. It’s a hybrid information/forum portal that provides a database structure for independent sellers to itemize Lego pieces in searchable inventories. However, each seller sets their own polices (international shipping; purchase requirements, payment methods, and more) as BrickLink provides order tracking and feedback mechanisms. If you’ve ever traded on MOTL you know how important – and helpful – good feedback from other users can be.

Like Magic, some pieces are highly coveted and valuable. There are new, limited releases of premium-priced sets from the Lego Group themselves. Vintage sets are priced by completeness, condition of pieces, and insured when shipped. It’s eerily familiar.

The more I dive into the world of custom building – from a healthy distance of watching YouTube videos and reading articles rather than trying to build my own city in my limited time – the more I feel like every passionate Magic collector that focused on finding 300 cards from a specific set, and cube designer that’s building up 600 cards to play with, doesn’t truly know the pain, tenacity, and expense in building a superstructure of buildings with 100,000 pieces or more.

Because that’s a thing.

The Changing Face of Vorthos

It’s no secret I’m a flavor goober that loves signed cards and original Magic art. I identify as a Vorthos – the flavor-loving, art-appreciating-and-chasing, creative text reader – and I love what Ant was saying about it.

He basically went Vorthos on Vorthos.

Original Art of “Vorthos” by Sam Keiser

Going into the bits and pieces that make Vorthos so nuances and varied, he ended by putting a fresh face on what Vorthos looks like: A figure of masks that can assume any identity as needed. I’d like to think that if Vorthos has a ‘spirit animal’ it’s Sakashima, the Imposter.

I do enjoy Sakashima decks.

Carlos Gutierrez is an Associate Editor for Gathering Magic, an engineer-in-training, and a Commander and Pauper enthusiast. By day, he works as a STEM educator, but he spends his weekends hitting all his land drops and trying new board games, puzzles, and video games. You can find all of him sharing Commander craziness, baked goods on Twitter, and complaints about graduate school at @cag5383.

Control from the Ground Up

I'm a control player at heart. I try to build aggressive and midrangey decks, like Grimgrin, Corpse-Born and Kemba, Kha Regent in Commander. They always end up playing like an attrition-y control deck that grinds out resources and just happens to get in the red zone while doing so. Pristine Talisman is one of my favorite cards in every Limited and Constructed format it's playable in. You mean to tell me that every turn the game goes on without anything happening I get to put it further out of reach? Sign me up.

Consequently, it's no surprise that I loved the Constructed Resources breakdown of all things Controlling. What are the principles behind building a strong Control deck? How do you balance the various types of effects and identify which are the most powerful in the metagame you expect to face? These are important questions and lessons that we all need to keep in mind, whether you're learning them for the first time or exploring new subtleties.

What's the Play

I enjoy Magic video content. It's a fun way to experience a draft or constructed format that I don't have time to fully explore or don't want to invest money into. It's a fun, entertaining experience and something that I enjoy listening to while I work on day-to-day things. Some people purport that it's a great way to learn how to play a particular deck or get a feel for a format. I don't know if I agree.

I find that it's really easy to just go along for the ride in a Magic Online video - to just watch what's happening without really doing any analysis or developing any fundamental understanding of what's happening in the game. What's important? How should you attack? What's the correct sequence? These are questions that I don't really find myself asking when I watch most Magic content. It's really easy to experience the games passively rather than actively.

That's part of why I'm really excited for Luis Scott-Vargas's new series: What's the Play? In it, LSV presents an interesting decision from a recent game. You're provided with life totals, board state, hand sizes, and everything else you could need to make an appropriate decision. That's it. No commentary. No hints. No bias. There's not a player better than you immediately showing you the correct decision. There's no one telling you what matters or what cards you should play around. Just you and a game state you need to puzzle out.

Thats how I like to learn. I want to be presented with a problem, make my decision, and commit to it. I've written down my answer to this week's What's the Play in the same notebook I build my Commander decks in. When Luis posts his analysis, decision, and the results, I get the chance to learn why my choice was right or wrong, which is much more valuable to me than just being shown the right answer immediately.

Five Tribes

My family recently picked up this gem of a game upon the recommendation of one of our friends. It looked super complicated, took forever to set up, and required a cheat sheet to be able to track all the different things that were going on. By the time we thought we were ready to start playing, I'd never been more ready to hate a game.

I didn't.

It seems much more complicated than it is, and once you get going, the game is very intuitive. This is a game about moving meeples across the desert to find their buddies of the same color. When you match certain colors, you get to take various actions that allow you to collect resources, gold, and djinn. Your goal is to accrue as many points as possible but there are many, many different ways to do it. Djinn are worth points and have bonus effects. Some meeples are worth lots of points at the end of the game, but don't do anything during the gameplay. Emptying tiles allows you to collect real estate and gain bonus effects. Resources could be worth a lot, but if everyone goes for them you won't be able to collect enough.

This game is a really interesting kind of resource management where you try to identify what other people are undervaluing and get all the points you can out of it. The problem is that you have to do that while making sure you don't give other people easy access to high point plays when you lead your trail of meeples across the desert. There's a lot to think about, once you get started it's a dynamic and relatively fast-paced game with a lot of depth and replayability. I'm hooked, and I can't recommend this game enough.