Magic Jumpstart

It appears WOTC has looked at the popularity of AEG's Smash Up and decided to put out its own version, Jumpstart. From what I can tell, each booster pack of 20 cards will have a theme such as "cats", "Garruk" or "doctor". Players will decide what two themes they want to combine, buy boosters with those themes, and shuffle them together to make a 40 card deck, to which they add land. The set reprints about 500 cards and adds 37 new cards, only legal in Jumpstart or in Eternal format tournaments (Vintage, Legacy and Commander). Interesting idea but I do not see the player based embracing Jumpstart as a regular format. It will likely go the way of Conspiracy and Battlebond within a year.

Why Aryel, Knight of Windgrace Should be in Your Deck

Aryel, Knight of Windgrace is in Dominaria and with the standard rotation coming up, knights are going to be super popular. This Legendary Human Knight costs 4 mana and is a 4/4 with vigilance. It uses black and white mana so any black/white could benefit from it. For less than its mana cost you can create a 2/2 knight token, then tap any number of knights to destroy a target creature of that value or less.
Aryel makes it easy to build a small army quickly. I hope you check out this underrated card and enjoy it!
-Jay

Aettherworks Marvel Banned

WOTC announced today that Aetherworks Marvel is banned in Standard play. You can read the full column here but the gist is that, while the card is not fundamentally broken, and the prime deck running it, Temur Aetherworks, is not dominant in terms of wins, but in tournament play, 10% of the time its user has a Turn 4 win. Since the deck also factors into a large number of unbeatable draws, WOTC decided it needed to go.