Our First Look into Avatar: The Last Airbender

Grab your glider and fly over to twitch.tv/magic, the #MTGxATLA First Look starts in 1 hour!

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— Magic: The Gathering (@magic.wizards.com) August 12, 2025 at 12:00 PM

Following a handful of teases over the past few weeks, we finally received our first look into Magic: The Gathering - Avatar: the Last Airbender! This showed us tons of new cards and finally revealed exactly what each of the four bending mechanics does.

If you'd like the full rundown over the First Look, be sure to check out these links!

• First Look stream VOD
• First Look article (Collecting Magic: the Gathering - Avatar: the Last Airbender)
• My breakdown of the show from Wednesday

But wait, there's more!

I got an exclusive hands-on with Magic: The Gathering's Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box!

This is by far the biggest reveal I've ever done in terms of card quantity (over 100 new ones!) but the article itself is more of a preview for curious Avatar fans.

www.ign.com/articles/ava...

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— Tom Marks (@tomrmarks.bsky.social) August 14, 2025 at 12:04 PM

In an unexpected move, IGN also got a chance to show off the upcoming Beginner Box that will be released as part of the set! Much like the Beginner Box for Foundations, this box contains several hand-selected Jumpstart boosters aimed at introducing new players to the game. With over 100 new cards revealed this way, there's no shortage of all-new cards this week, so be sure to check them all out now!

Magic's State of Design 2025

Today's #MakingMagic column is this year's "State of Design" column where I walk through the design of last year's sets:

magic.wizards.com/en/news/maki... #mtg #WotCStaff

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— maro254.bsky.social (@maro254.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 3:28 PM

As has become a time-honored tradition, Mark Rosewater has released his State of Design article for 2025, taking a look back at the last year of Magic releases. Generally, the outlook was positive, with the majority of releases performing well and hitting most of their marks strongly. A few outliers were noted like Aetherdrift being a lower point for many and Duskmourn: House of Horror having some flavoring issues. Mark also was unable to fit in a write-up on Universes Beyond: Assassin's Creed due to article length, but that omission should tell you where it likely stands compared to the rest of the year.

These articles are a treasure to the Magic community and with this being his 21st time doing it, it's essential reading for all enfranchised players. Check it out and see how well the past year performed as well as takeaways for the future!

MagicCon Atlanta Festival in a Box Revealed

Bring the Magic of #MCAtlanta to a gathering near you with Festival in a Box: Atlanta 2025! This bundle of MagicCon joy will be available on the Secret Lair website August 18th.

Sign up for details: magicsecretlair.com

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— Secret Lair (@mtgsecretlair.com) August 11, 2025 at 12:00 PM

The Festival in a Box product for MagicCon Atlanta was also announced this week! For those unable to attend the event, you can get your hands on this sweet new product that includes the usual box of Mystery Booster 2, a special Secret Lair, and some promos. The Secret Lair is themed around the MagicCon experience while the promos includes high quality Future Sight frame copies of Lightning Bolt and The Ur-Dragon, a retro frame Scourge of Valkas, and a new test print card Spaghetti Junction.

This Festival in a Box goes on sale this upcoming Monday, August 18th! Check out the Festival in a Box page for all the details!

Decklist of the Week

Izzet Cauldron | EOE Standard | Raffaele Mazza, 1st Place Arena Championship 9

• Creatures (18)
• 1 Steamcore Scholar
• 2 Draconautics Engineer
• 3 Tersa Lightshatter
• 4 Fear of Missing Out
• 4 Marauding Mako
• 4 Vivi Ornitier

• Instants (8)
• 2 Abrade
• 3 Into the Flood Maw
• 3 Torch the Tower

• Sorceries (4)
• 4 Winternight Stories

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Proft's Eidetic Memory

• Artifacts (26)
• 4 Agatha's Soul Cauldron
• 3 Island
• 5 Mountain
• 2 Soulstone Sanctuary
• 2 Starting Town
• 2 Thundering Falls
• 4 Riverpyre Verge
• 4 Spirebluff Canal

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Disdainful Stroke
• 1 Obliterating Bolt
• 1 Torch the Tower
• 1 Twinmaw Stormbrood
• 2 Annul
• 2 Broadside Barrage
• 2 Fire Magic
• 2 Ral, Crackling Wit
• 2 Spell Pierce

Buy This Deck Export text Export Arena

MTG Arena Championship 9 happened this weekend and wow was it Vivi Ornitier and Agatha's Soul Cauldron all the way down. A whopping 54% of the metagame made up the meta and even though that's not saying much in such a small field, 14 of the 19 day two players were on the Izzet Cauldron deck. This has continued to bear out with Magic Online Challenge events and has had players, content creators, and everyone else saying the same thing: play the best deck in the format or accept you're playing something second-rate.

Given the deck's dominance, many players are hoping for an emergency ban because otherwise it'll require players to endure the deck for several months. The next true ban window is in November - over three months out. While it's true that there is still another set to be released before then, many players are deeply skeptical that anything will come close to matching the power of Izzet Cauldron.

This warped meta should not take away from the achievement that is taking down an Arena Champs, however. Congratulations Raffaele on the victory!

Paige Smith

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/themaverickgirl.bsky.social

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal