Looking for an aggressive, combat-heavy deck? This is a great choice, albeit one thats not discounted.
What is discounted are both the Food and Fellowship deck and the Elven Council one. The first, which stars Frodo and Sam and has a life gain theme from sacrificing food tokens, is now $48.59.
Finally, Elven Council has Galadriel, Legolas, and Arwen, and is now just $45.87. It has a nice reprint of Heroic Intervention in there, too, while Raise the Palisade still fetches a decent price.
Each pack comes with a couple of cards in a ‘Collector Booster Sample Pack’, too, meaning you can find some nifty foils and borderless treatments, too.
For more on Magic: The Gathering, check out what Wizards of the Coast had to say about rumors that the Spidey set will only see a single print run.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Magic: The Gathering is in a strange spot right now. With so many ‘Universes Beyond’ products, plus Secret Lairs for third-party IP mounting up, it’s becoming the Super Smash Bros. of card games, and that’s leading to some fun synergies.
As spotted by Wargamer, one Tyranid card from the Warhammer 40k Commander Decks has climbed some serious value in recent weeks thanks to a surprise team-up with, uh, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Winged Hive Tyrant, from the 40K Commander deck Tyranid Swarm, is a 4/4 with flying and haste, as well as text for ‘The Will of the Hive Mind’. It reads “Other creatures you control with counters on them have flying and haste.”
Meanwhile, Sonic the Hedgehog from the recent Secret Lair drop is a 2/4 with haste and ‘Gotta Go Fast’.
“Whenever Sonic the Hedgehog attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control with flash or haste,” the text reads, while also creating a Treasure token (tapped) when one of those creatures is dealt damage.”
Put this unlikely (some may say unholy) duo together, and you have Sonic dishing out counters, and then the Winged Hive Tyrant giving everything haste and flying.
The best part? Each of these cards is really pretty affordable, despite the limited printing of Warhammer decks and Secret Lair drops.
So, if you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a Tyranid teams up with a hedgehog, you can find out for less than $10.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
The 007 First Light State of Play is just moments away from giving players a nice, long look at how developer IO Interactive will bring the next James Bond video game to life.
The Hitman studio and Sony have promised that today’s September 2025 State of Play presentation will take the form of a 30-minute gameplay deep dive. It will primarily focus on Bond’s first mission with MI6, with a PlayStation.Blog post teasing “high-speed car chases and on-foot stealth sequences and shootouts” as some of the highlights.
While the bulk of the 007 First Light presentation will put the next James Bond video game under a microscope, IGN will still be here to collect all of the highlights. Whether you can’t watch the broadcast or are tuning in late, you can see everything announced at the 007 First Light State of Play below.
Developing…
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
With the set enjoying a pre-release already, we’re just days away from its full debut, so here’s everything you can find on store shelves and what you should look out for.
Fabled Collection Starter Set
It’s getting harder to find ahead of launch, but the Fabled Collection Starter Set is geared more towards collectors than the starter decks below.
It includes 4 booster packs (a total of 48 cards), a portfolio binder for Mickey Mouse – Brave Little Tailor, a collector’s guide, and a Glimmer Foil variant of Tinker Bell – Giant Fairy.
It’s all over the place, price-wise, at the moment because it’s something we’ve not seen for Lorcana yet, but you can hopefully pick it up for a reasonable price once it’s out.
Preconstructed Starter Decks
Lorcana has been putting out some fun decks you can play right out of the box since it debuted, and this time, there are two being added.
The first, with an Amber & Sapphire archetype, features Ariel and Mulan from The Little Mermaid and, uh, Mulan, respectively. There are 60 cards included, with foil versions of our heroines, as well as damage tokens and a bonus booster pack.
The Emerald & Ruby deck has a Goofy Movie theme, with Max Goof and Powerline as the headliners, both in foil, as well as counters and that additional booster.
Each deck is $16.99 at Amazon.
Gift Set
This Frozen-focused Fabled Gift Set includes a storage box bearing Elsa’s image, as well as five booster packs, dividers for the box, and perhaps most importantly, a Glimmer Foil version of Elsa – The Fifth Spirit, alluding to the events of Frozen 2.
It’s expected to sell for around $40, if you can find it, and given the enduring popularity of Frozen (and Elsa herself), there’s every chance there’s some real resale value here.
Booster Packs
As with previous sets, you can buy individual booster packs or buy a booster box.
Individual packs are available at $5.99 each, and include 12 cards: 6 common, 3 uncommon, 2 cards of higher rarities, and 1 random foil card.
The Illumineer’s Trove is back, with a storage box that comes with themed, ink-colored dice inside, a life counter, 8 booster packs, and half a dozen card dividers.
Given that it should sell for around $50, you’re not paying that much more than you’d be spending for just the packs on their own.
Ahead of launch, however, it’s around $70, which diminishes its appeal somewhat.
Fabled Portfolio Binders and Deck Boxes
Built your collection? You’ll no doubt want somewhere to display them, or to keep your decks.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
We’ve got another surprise for those enjoying the Year of the Ninja, because September’s IGN First is Team Ninja’s own Nioh 3. Join us all month long for exclusive reveals, new gameplay videos, interviews, impressions and more, all stemming for our trip to Koei Tecmo’s office to play about five or so hours worth of the upcoming sequel.
We kick things off with a boss battle featuring the The Tiger of Kai, Takeda Shingen, which you can watch below.
Keep checking back on IGN all throughout the month for much more on Nioh 3.
Fresh from serving up a smalltown, psychological scare-a-thon in the form of 2024’s superb Silent Hill 2 remake, developer Bloober Team has since focussed its energy on birthing a snarling, spiritual successor to the Dead Space series in the form of Cronos: The New Dawn. Silent Hill 2 is a tough act to follow, though, so even though Cronos is a respectable creep show it’s hard not to be a little disappointed it didn’t knock my socks off in the same way. This survival-horror shooter takes place amidst the ruined, futuristic hellscape of a plague-riddled Polish city, a fascinating and foreboding expanse to set its slaughter in, but its fairly uninspired combat doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the necromorph-dismembering series it clearly draws so much inspiration from. Cronos still manages to deliver a solid slab of spooky mutant-slaying action, but a new dawn for survival horror it most certainly is not.
We step into the space suit of the Traveler, an investigator searching the desolate ruins of the city of New Dawn after her comrade goes missing. It quickly becomes clear that almost every remaining local – aside from the curious abundance of friendly stray cats – is a hostile mutant out for blood rather than conversation. Thankfully, the Traveler has an interesting trick up her sleeve: the ability to temporarily travel back through rifts in time in order to harvest the essence of New Dawn residents before they succumbed to the plague and interrogate them for clues about the fate of her fellow Traveler. It proves to be a compelling mystery presented in a fairly novel way, one that seems to take as much inspiration from Netflix’s Dark as it does Alone in the Dark.
The Traveler herself is a bit like a slightly more murderous Mandalorian: she’s short on words, never takes off her helmet, and signs off on each communication with the same solemn mantra – in this instance, “Such is our calling” in place of “This is the way.” However, despite her initial lack of personality I found myself growing more and more interested in her plight, since each essence she harvests seems to have adverse effects on her mental state. This manifests in an increasingly unsettling state of psychosis (not unlike that suffered by Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke) that injects nightmarish hallucinations into the already-volatile world around her.
Although many of Cronos’ haunted houses are straight out of the survival-horror playbook, from decaying apartment blocks to the obligatory menacing hospital, each area feels distinct and dreamlike thanks to hauntingly fractured architecture that seems trapped in some sort of limbo between time and space. However, connecting these interesting major areas is a noticeable amount of padding that adds unnecessary bloat to its 14-hour runtime. Even the Traveler herself gave voice to my exasperation the second time I had to put story progress on hold for upwards of an hour in order to gradually bring a trainline power generator back online, and I lost count of the times I had to slowly inch my way through boil-covered corridors of biomass that felt like squeezing through Satan’s lower intestines. It certainly looks and sounds revolting, but it’s the sort of thing that becomes mundane pretty quickly, and the tortured torsos waiting in the walls to ambush you in these areas only grow easier to anticipate over time.
In fact, although Cronos’ atmosphere is consistently moody and sinister, it never quite intensifies into the full-on frightfests that developer Bloober Team itself so expertly conjured up in last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Sure, there are plenty of cheap jump scares from monsters crashing through walls like they’re the Ghoul-Aid Man, but nothing terrifying enough to compel me to nervously turn on an extra light and check the shadows behind my couch midway through each play session. That said, there is some creepy environmental storytelling to be found here, from bloodstained interrogation rooms to hallways lined with the severed limbs and scattered shields of riot police. In tandem with the many interesting notes and audio recordings that give welcome context to how its society crumbled, Cronos consistently presents an intriguing world that feels at once both lived in and plagued by death.
Fighting Orphan Power Ragers
Cronos’ bloodsmeared hallways might look like they were decorated by a butcher, but the monsters stalking within them have clearly been inspired by a carpenter. Specifically, John Carpenter. The iconic horror director’s influence has reared its disturbingly ugly head in a survival-horror adventure once again, and Cronos is filled to the pus-oozing gills with twisted freaks that look like wax figures that have been left out in the sun too long. These mutated humans – known as “orphans” – come in a handful of forms, from stretched-out fiends with whipping tentacles for arms to towering, tank-like toughs that absorb multiple shotgun blasts before they drop, to the spider-like messes of body parts that scurry erratically along walls and ceilings, making it a challenge to keep them in your ironsights. Later, almost every enemy type is reintroduced in acid-spitting forms, putting greater emphasis on the importance of staying mobile.
Your main weapon to dispatch them with is a fairly rudimentary yet reliable pistol that can fire either standard shots or charged-up blasts, should you opt to deal extra damage on delay at the risk of leaving yourself open to a lunging attack. Extra ammunition can be crafted on the fly using chemicals and scrap scoured from the environment, but there’s clearly some intelligent balancing going on behind the scenes to only ever present just the right amount of resources to make you feel like you’ve barely got enough to survive rather than ever having the luxury of a surplus. That kept my paranoia levels at a consistent peak and meant that I stayed switched on as I entered each new hallway of horrors.
Cronos is filled to the pus-oozing gills with twisted freaks that look like wax figures that have been left out in the sun too long.
Over the course of the journey gun mods can be found, both as part of the main story’s path and also by sniffing out secrets behind locked doors, but for the most part these are fairly subtle variations on the same pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle types. One shotgun variant can fire high-powered charged-up blasts, while the double-barreled version can fire two blasts in quick succession, for example. It doesn’t seem to make a drastic difference one way or the other in terms of power, so it’s more a matter of letting you fight how you want to rather than upgrading from one to the next.
I did manage to get my hands on a high-powered railgun of sorts, but I mostly kept it locked up in the safe house storage chest because I could never make enough room in my inventory to be able to carry it. Speaking of which, it strikes me as odd that despite the fact the Traveler’s gun appears to shapeshift between weapon types while held in her hand, not unlike the all-in-one firearm found in Remedy’s Control, each gun variant takes up its own individual slot in her heavily restricted inventory space. How does that make sense? It would be like using an entire cutlery drawer to hold a single Swiss Army Knife.
At any rate, the bigger problem here is that because Cronos wears its Dead Space influence so plainly on its sleeve – from the messages written in blood on the walls, to the Isaac Clarke-style fashion the Traveler stomps through item crates, to the zero-gravity stretches that have you zipping between drifting chunks of terra firma – it practically begs for comparisons to that seminal survival-horror classic (and its excellent 2023 remake). Unfortunately, going toe to toe it comes up shorter than a zombie after a shotgun round to the head. Where the combat in Dead Space is wonderfully dynamic, enhancing the already-flexible gunplay with stasis powers to slow the charge of fast-moving monsters and telekinesis to turn their own detachable limbs into projectiles, Cronos is disappointingly one-note by comparison. You can shoot the legs out of certain enemy types to trip them up if you want, but generally your best option is almost always to aim for the head or a conveniently placed explosive barrel. It never really inspires much more improvisation or creative killing than that.
There’s no telekinesis, but there is the ability to target orb-like “oddities” found in the world and reverse their trajectories through space and time, introducing some light environmental puzzle solving in between enemy encounters that challenge you to rewind collapsed bridges and tunnels to clear the path forward. But this time-manipulating ability sadly has no application for elevating the fairly stock-standard combat, aside from occasionally allowing you to rebuild explosive barrels for repeat blasts during boss fights. It would have been interesting if you could perhaps reassemble one of the suicide-bombing acid monsters and set them as some sort of time bomb to trip up other attackers, or rewind one of the rushing ghouls back a few steps to buy yourself the breathing space to chamber your next shotgun round, but sadly you can’t do anything of the sort.
Instead, Cronos’ main combat idea is that some of its enemies will attempt to absorb the power of any corpses found in their vicinity, evolving them into stronger mutations that deal greater damage and withstand more of your limited ammunition should you fail to disrupt them in the process. This again, is not too far removed from the Infector necromorphs in Dead Space that reanimated human corpses if you didn’t kill them quick enough, and although it did create some added urgency to prioritise specific foes anytime the telltale swirl of corpse-sapping tentacles sprouted out of them, it never really made a huge difference to my general approach to each encounter.
Initially, Cronos encourages you to use single-use flamethrower bursts to burn any carcasses you come across lest they become energy-dispensing ATMs for the other orphans still standing, but I typically used the scrap parts required to craft flamethrower rounds for shotgun shells instead and never really ran into any major hurdles as a result. (The post-game stats screen indicates that I allowed just 20 enemies to merge with fallen foes, which is a pretty small percentage of the sizable number of disfigured demons I dispatched over the course of the campaign.)
Cronos is capable of creating survival horror at its stressful best, at least in short bursts.
However, I did enjoy Cronos’ half a dozen or so boss fights. Although in practise they rarely require much more strategic complexity than to shoot the standard three glowing weak spots, they’re each nonetheless intimidating in size and the arenas you face them in are intensely claustrophobic, from the swirling mass of blackened tendrils that assembles into a towering golem to stalk you through a ruptured apartment, to the disgusting conjoined twins that crash through the walls of the steelworks’ basement. Each climactic clash had me desperately scrambling for ammo and panicking over each pistol shot, sometimes just barely making it through with my heart monitor redlining and only a couple of rounds left in the chamber. The handful of moments like these prove that Cronos is capable of creating survival horror at its stressful best, at least in short bursts.
Harvester of Sorrow
Aside from the corpse-merging mechanic mentioned earlier, the only other notable point of difference that Cronos’ combat presents is the essence system. As the Traveler harvests the essence of specific story characters and other fallen comrades you find along the way, they each give you an attribute buff, like increasing the damage you deal to enemies that are on fire, or reducing the amount of resources required to craft ammo and medkits. In a system reminiscent of the equipable status effects typically found in roguelikes such as Dead Cells, you can only have three of these essences active at once, and you can only add a new one by sacrificing one of your existing buffs – once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. That presented me with some interesting choices to shape my character with, even though it wasn’t always totally clear how much benefit I was getting. In one extreme case, the description of an essence was just a random string of numbers and letters like a suggested password from Google Chrome – I equipped it out of curiosity, but I have no idea what effect it had or indeed if it had any effect at all.
Elsewhere there are a few too many unwanted nasties that creep into the campaign on PlayStation 5, and I’m not talking about the tortured ghouls with second jaws for necks that stalk you at every turn. Oftentimes I’d have to stomp an item crate repeatedly before my hits would register, which became annoying particularly during the many horde mode-style arena fights when enemies were swarming from all angles. At other times I’d waste precious pistol rounds because the gas canister or explosive barrel just failed to rupture at first shot, which is not ideal when ammunition is at such a premium.
Most egregious, though, were the handful of times that the Traveler would get stuck on scenery. At one point, after surviving a particularly brutish late-game boss, I was heading back to save my game at the nearest safehouse when I got trapped in a room full of infinitely respawning acid bombers because the Traveler just straight-up refused to walk through a wide-open exit. That forced me to reload my save and fight that same boss all over again, which was more deflating than a punctured spacesuit.
Forsaken 64 is the surprise next N64 game coming to the Nintendo 64 – Nintendo Classics: Mature app for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members.
Some N64 games on Switch and Switch 2 via the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription are only available via the separate Mature app. The list includes Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, Shadow Man and Perfect Dark. Now, add Forsaken 64, which launches September 4, to the list.
Forsaken 64 launched in 1998 courtesy of developer Iguana UK, which handled the port, and publisher Acclaim. It’s a 3D first-person shooter similar to 1995’s influential Descent, with a whiff of Quake. You navigate through a series of tunnels while blasting enemies in a sci-fi setting.
You are a ruthless mercenary, sent to the condemned remains of Earth as part of a covert operation codenamed “Forsaken.” Your mission is to infiltrate and destroy the last bastions of the mechanized terror that wiped out all life on the planet. Earth is a death trap riddled with merciless mechanoid adversaries and gangs of rival bounty hunters, and you’ll have to brave them all astride your anti-grav pioncycle to make your fortune…or meet your doom. Choose between different modes in this first-person shooter title released for the Nintendo 64 system in 1998, and enter the fight in Single Player Mode or Multi-Player Mode. Then, select your bike. Each bike has different attributes, each biker a different attitude. Pick one that suits your style, then dive into your mission. The availability of weapons, enemies, and powerups changes depending on the level you play, so stay sharp!
Forsaken 64 is infamous for its U.S. box art, which leaned on the game’s Mature rating by showing a random woman’s face with a solitary tear and tattooed cheek. The woman did not appear in the game, with some fans accusing the image of being misleading. The PAL box art, on the other hand, simply displayed the Forsaken 64 logo on an image of Earth.
Every now and then Forsaken 64’s box art comes up in online conversation around the N64 console, with some fondly remembering how out of place it looked. “Without any previous knowledge or looking at screenshots, would you be able to guess Forsaken 64’s genre based on the boxart alone?” asked redditor Drowsy_Drowzee in a post eight months ago.
“I remember picking up Forsaken 64 as a loose cart back in the early 2000s and thinking it would be a cool horror/survival horror based on the name, cover art, and age rating. To my surprise, it was a vehicular action game.”
“Forsaken irritated me as a kid,” added InfiniteRespond4064. “I rented it not knowing what it was and found the gameplay really obtuse and boring. Cover art misleading.”
“It certainly stands out in a sea of fancy but bad CG renders,” said branewalker.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
The 10 episodes are split across a trio of discs, there’s a storyboard booklet from director Hiroyuki Imaishi, another booklet, and three animation cel sheets alongside a poster.
Preorders are open now, with shipping expected from October 23, 2025. That date isn’t guaranteed, though.
In our glowing review from Matt Kim, we said, “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners doesn’t overtake Cyberpunk 2077 so much as it expands upon it.”
“But for the best version of Night City this side of the 21st century, consider diving into Studio Trigger’s madcap vision of the famous tabletop RPG. It’s a wild ride, but worth every blistering second, choom.”
If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077 since the 2.1 update, you may have missed some references to the Edgerunners anime, like a new prominence for the song “I Really Want to Stay At Your House”, and equipment for V inspired by Edgerunners protagonist David.
A sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is in the works, with the game shedding its ‘Codename Orion’ beginnings and now being called just “Cyberpunk 2”, at least for now.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
The Initiative, the studio behind Perfect Dark, was shuttered earlier this year in a mass Microsoft layoffs, with its project apparently canceled. However, Perfect Dark apparently remained in development at Crystal Dynamics until just last week, while leadership from both studios struggled to find new funding from a surprising source: Take-Two.
In a report from Bloomberg, which IGN can corroborate from its own sources, it is revealed that Perfect Dark was not “fully abandoned” when The Initiative shuttered earlier this year. Leadership from both Crystal and The Initiative spent the following two months looking for a new publisher and funding source. While multiple parties expressed interest, the most likely candidate turned out to be Take-Two interactive. However, the two groups couldn’t come to an agreement, at least in part due to disagreements over long-term ownership of the property.
As a result, the deal fell through, resulting in last week’s layoffs at Crystal Dynamics as all hope of the project being reinstated vanished.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Call of Duty players have a welcome surprise today after Activision handed out a whopping 20 free battle pass tier skips to Warzone and Black Ops 6 players.
In a social media post, below, Activision said the free handout was “in celebration” of the Black Ops 7 reveal. But Call of Duty fans are entirely more sceptical, based on the replies to the social media announcement.
Comments include everything from the typical “dead game” accusations having sparked the generous offer to convince lapsed players to return to the game, to pressure from Battlefield 6 forcing Activision into more pro-consumer behavior.
There’s also a degree of frustration from some who had just spent money to unlock tier skips before this announcement. And there are of course plenty of fans who are just happy to get free stuff.
Has the player retention been THAT bad this season 😭🙏
In truth, Activision has handed out free tier skips and XP tokens before. Indeed, around this time last year it gave 10 tier skips and 20 XP tokens to players who downloaded last year’s Season 5 Reloaded update.
Whatever the case, this year’s Season 05 Reloaded launches on September 4. It adds a new Multiplayer map, new and returning modes, new armaments, events, Reckoning Directed Mode in Zombies, and more.
In a blog post, Activision warned that the Season 5 Reloaded download will be larger on some platforms, and blamed it on “reorganizing” Call of Duty content to prepare for the Black Ops 7 beta on October 2. Does that mean Call of Duty’s infamous file size will shrink for this year’s game?
As a “thank you” for downloading the update (how big is it going to be?!), Activision is gifting players a pack of 2XP Tokens across all platforms. Players who complete the download and log into Call of Duty from 10am PT on September 4 until October 1 will receive:
Five 1-Hour Double Player XP Tokens (5 hours total)
Five 1-Hour Double Weapon XP Tokens (5 hours total)
Five 1-Hour Double Battle Pass XP Tokens (5 hours total)
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
