Nintendo’s own dock is a non-nonsense device that just works. You slide your console in, crack the Joy-Con off, and boom, you’re off to the races. Given the larger size of Switch 2, though, its dock is a substantial slab of black plastic and various third-party firms have stepped in with offerings that are a little more portable.
Antank is one such company, and the S3 MAX TV Dock Station for Nintendo Switch 2 — also known as the SIWIQU Dock Station in some parts — is certainly smaller than the dock that comes with the console. Weighing in at 109 grams (compared to 383 grams), you’ll barely notice you’re carrying it in your satchel, backpack, or anywhere else you care to secrete your hardware.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! That’s two weeks in a row now, which I’ve decided is enough for me to not have to caveat or lampshade the word ‘regular’, except obviously in this specific instance. We are back 4eva, in the Blakean Infinite sense, which is my favourite reference for making my fecklessness seem profound.
Mattel has already released a whole bunch of Mario Kart vehicles and next up is a “special edition” Pauline release, which was originally revealed at San Diego Comic-Con this year.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Box Art Brawl!
Last week, we looked at WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ for the GBA – a true classic and one of our favourites here at NL Towers. North America and Europe joined forced against Japan and, uh… Oh, poor Japan. The western design won with a whopping 91% of the vote! We quite like the Japanese design, there’s definitely something to it. Though if you said it was boring, we wouldn’t necessarily disagree. Hm.
We’ve rounded up the best deals for Saturday, August 16, below, so don’t miss out on these limited-time offers.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for $27.99
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is an amazing game that ranks among my favorite Nintendo Switch games. This adorable puzzle game challenges your brain, as each stage can be rotated around. Captain Toad cannot jump, so it’s up to you to guide him to find gems, coins, and stars. The Nintendo Switch release packed in a few new levels based on a few Kingdoms found in Super Mario Odyssey, too.
Silent Hill 2 for $29.99
Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 is on sale at Target this weekend for $29.99. Recreating one of Konami’s most beloved titles was never going to be easy, but the Silent Hill 2 remake delivers an immersive horror experience that preserves almost everything that made the original so great. In our 8/10 review, we said the game “smoothly polishes down the rough edges of the original game’s combat while taking a piece of heavy grit sandpaper to scuff up every rust and mold-covered surface of its nightmarish environments, successfully making them appear far more abrasive and menacing to explore.”
Attack on Titan Final Season Steelbook up for Pre-Order
A brand-new Attack on Titan Steelbook is up for pre-order, and this is one you won’t want to miss. This Steelbook contains Part 1 and Part 2 of Attack on Titan Final Season, in addition to the two Attack on Titan Final Season The Final Chapters specials. The front of the Steelbook features the Final Season Part 1 key art, while the back features Part 2’s key art. If you haven’t picked up any of the Final Season on Blu-ray just yet, this is the ultimate bundle, especially considering the price.
Score Raidou Remastered on Switch for $39.99
Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army launched in mid June, and you can save $10 off a Nintendo Switch copy for the first time this weekend at Amazon. This action RPG is a remaster of the 2006 PS2 game, and there are many improvements and new features to discover. For one, UI, visuals, and voice acting have all been tweaked to refine the experience, but you can also discover more than 120 different demons.
Save 20% Off the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Collector’s Edition
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skayer 3 + 4 was a great blast from the past this Summer, and you can now save 20% off the PS5 Collector’s Edition at Amazon. This edition packs in the full game on a physical disc, all digital deluxe content, which includes the Doom Slayer Skater, and a limited edition full-size Birdhouse Wings Design skateboard deck. Time to hit the park.
Doom: The Dark Ages for $44.99
Doom: The Dark Ages is on a major sale for the first time, and you can save $25 off a PlayStation 5 copy at Best Buy this weekend! This game takes the Doom Slayer back to the medieval ages, acting as a prequel to both Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. The latest update was just released last week as well, so really, there has never been a better time to hop in.
Persona 5 Royal PC for $19.91
Persona 5 Royal is still one of the most popular RPGs to this day, but most deals on the game are often for consoles. However, this weekend, you can score a PC copy of the game for $19.91 at Amazon. This physical edition contains three art cards and a Steam code you can redeem for a copy of the game.
In fact, in putting together this top 10, every entry was Final Fantasy themed, from characters to Surge Foils worth hundreds.
With that in mind, we’ve put together the top 10 below, covering Final Fantasy, Edge of Eternities, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Aetherdrift, and Innistrad Remastered.
Here’s the top 10 for each, thanks to data from TCGPlayer.
Final Fantasy
According to TCGPlayer, the top-selling Final Fantasy cards are as follows:
Many of those Borderless Surge Foil variants have been commanding a fair amount of value on the secondary market, but Starting Town popping up near the top is a nice surprise.
Edge of Eternities
The next most popular set at the time of writing (and the most recent), Edge of Eternities shows there’s plenty of appetite for Magic’s own characters and stories.
The set before Final Fantasy might feel as though it’s been swept under the rug, but anyone looking for dragons will find a lot to like. And yet, the top 10 most popular cards include multiple versions of the same four cards.
Magic’s power-sliding set is still proving pretty popular, with the top 10 cards according to TCGPlayer data including lands, sorceries, and that all-important Aetherspark.
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 first months of Switch 2’s life have seen plenty of multiplatform games arrive on Nintendo’s newest console — winners like Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky, Apex Legends, and Yakuza 0 to name a handful — and its extra power affords devs the chance to bring newer, bigger, more ambitious games to the platform where ports simply weren’t viable on the old Switch.
And yes, we’ve got things like Elden Ring, Persona 3 Reload, and Star Wars: Outlaws to look forward to before the year’s out, but we’re an insatiable bunch, always wanting more, more, moaaaaar. Honestly, we thought we’d see a few more big-name ports announced during the July Partner Showcase, and with zero announcements from Microsoft thus far, we’re expecting plenty MORE to come throughout the rest of the year.
Though it may feel like the ‘quirky’ branch of indie JRPGs has become a played out trope by now, it wasn’t too long ago that a confusing, humorous, and parodying take on the standard template was seen as a novel concept. One of the most significant examples of this was OFF, a simple freeware RPG Maker project that caught fire on Tumblr in the late 2000s and inspired the development of games like OMORI, Yume Nikki, and Undertale.
Now, developer Mortis Ghost (along with Fangamer) has put out a modestly tweaked remaster of the game for Switch and PC, introducing the classic to a new generation while also polishing up some of its rougher edges. I’m pleased to say that this remaster has largely stuck the landing—the original game feels like it’s barely aged a day, while the few additions genuinely enhance the overall experience.
Magic: The Gathering has been running for literal decades, and while reprints will always keep making harder-to-find cards a little easier to collect, there are some cards so rare that they become almost like urban legend.
There are cards worth thousands, for example, but there are also cards worth millions, from wild serialized, one-of-a-kind prints like The One Ring (famously purchased by Post Malone) to cards like Time Walk, which were so powerful they’ve been banned.
Below, you’ll find some of the priciest cards around, marking some of the rarest in the game’s history.
Magic: The Gathering’s Rarest Cards Of All Time
10 – Time Walk (Alpha)
A card from the game’s Alpha Edition, Time Walk has sold for around $25,000 and offered an extra turn for a measly two mana, meaning it was banned pretty swiftly.
It’s not legal in any format, but for collectors it’s a piece of Magic history regardless, forming part of the ‘Power 9’ (more on those shortly).
9 – Euroakus
A card so rare that TCGPlayer doesn’t have it, Euroakus was a Heroes of the Realm card awarded to Wizards’ European Team in 2020.
Heroes of the Realm cards are given to Wizards employees, with their name printed. As Wargamer explains, one of these Euroakus cards was sold for $25,200 in 2022, but the name was blurred out.
8 – Phoenix Heart
Phoenix Heart might not be legal (it doesn’t actually have an effect), but it’s very sweet. Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering, has the card printed to celebrate his wedding to Koni Kim and send it out among the wedding invites.
It’s previously sold for $27,500, which is even better than an open bar at a wedding if you ask us.
7 – Splendid Genesis
Richard Garfield commemorated the birth of his first child with this neat card. Splendid Genesis reads, “Shuffle all cards in the game together and deal them into three decks. The game continues with a new player.”
Naturally, it serves no gameplay purpose, but it’s a wholesome card that still fetched around $72,000 at auction in 2022. Only 110 were printed.
6 – Timetwister
Remember when we mentioned the ‘Power 9’ earlier? Here’s another, and yes, it’s banned.
Timetwister puts your hand, library, and graveyard together and lets you draw another hand of seven cards. Essentially resetting your deck (and your opponents) while leaving the board state as it is – a neat trick, and one that someone paid $84,000 for.
5 – Lord of the Pit
Demon decks are all the rage these days, but Lord of the Pit was one of the first. It’s a 7/7 with Flying and Trample that does damage to its owner unless they sacrifice a creature.
There are five ‘Moxes’ included in the ‘Power 9’ (scroll down for the full list), and while the effect of adding a single mana may seem a little tame, it’s a powerful ramp in the early turns.
It’s been sold for $108,000 in the past, but we can’t find it on TCGPlayer. Instead, a newer version (which taps for any color but requires multiple artifacts be in play) is available instead. It’ll cost you $160, mind.
3 – Autographed Black Lotus
The iconic Black Lotus pops up on this list twice, with an autographed version signed by its illustrator, Christopher Rush, going for around $511k.
And yet, Post Malone claims to have bought a similarly signed one for $800k, and that brings us nicely to…
2 – One of One Ring
While some purists felt the chase of a single ‘one of one’ version of The One Ring made the game of Magic more of a sideshow to a Willy Wonka-esque spectacle, it’s become legendary.
The card was found and sold to Post Malone for around $2 million, although there have been suggestions it was higher than $2.5 million. You can buy one of the more commonly available ones for your collection for around $70 if you’re keen.
1 – Black Lotus
The only card that’s sold for more than the ‘One of One Ring’ is a Black Lotus card in pristine condition, sans autograph.
A private buyer snapped up a Pristine 10 graded version of the iconic card for $3 million in 2024, making this the most expensive Magic: The Gathering card. You can buy a ‘moderately played’ version right now for $79k.
Can You Still Pack The Rarest Magic: The Gathering Cards?
Sure, you could, but your chances are astronomically low. Many of the cards on this list haven’t been printed for years, and while there are still valuable cards to find in packs (we’ve got a rundown of the most valuable ones in Edge of Eternities), you’d have to find a super dusty old pack to get some of the cards on this page.
That makes the secondary market the only option for collectors.
Magic: The Gathering’s Power 9 Explained
We’ve referred to the ‘Power 9’ in this list a few times, so here’s every entry, and their effects.
Black Lotus
Adds 3 mana of any single color of your choice to your mana pool, then is discarded. Tapping this artifact can be played as an interrupt.
The Mox: Emerald, Jet, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire
Add 1 [color] mana to your mana pool. Tapping this artifact can be played as an interrupt.
Ancestral Recall
Draw 3 cards or force opponent to draw 3 cards.
Timetwister
Set Timetwister aside in a new graveyard pile. Shuffle your hand, library, and graveyard together into a new library and draw a new hand of seven cards, leaving all cards in play where they are; opponent must do the same.
Time Walk
Take an extra turn after this one.
The Power 9 were found in the Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited sets of Magic: The Gathering.
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.