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Magic: The Gathering Lord of the Rings Tales of Middle-earth Cards Are Up for Preorder

Here’s some good news for any crossover fans of both Magic: The Gathering and The Lord of the Rings. A new LotR-themed MTG card set is up for preorder. It’s called The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, and you can preorder the cards in a number of configurations, including Commander decks, set boosters, jumpstart boosters, collector boosters, and more (see on Amazon). They’re all set to release June 23. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s take a look at what’s available.

Collector Booster Packs – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Collector Booster packs are pricy, but they come with the best cards of any packs. Each Collector Booster pack includes 15 cards, with 5-7 Rare or higher rarity cards, plus 8-10 Foils.

Set Booster Packs – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Set Booster packs are meant to be fun to open, with a wider variety of cards on offer. Each Set Booster pack comes with 12 cards, including 1 Foil and 1 Art card. These packs also include between 1 and 4 cards of Rare or higher rarity.

Draft Booster Packs – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Draft Booster packs are designed for people who want to play a match with new cards quickly. The idea is that everyone opens 3 packs and passes them around to draft cards for a deck. Then you add some Land cards and play. Each Draft Booster pack comes with at least 1 Rare or Mythic Rare card. You also have a one-in-three chance of getting a Traditional Foil card in a pack.

Jumpstart Booster Packs – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Jumpstart Booster packs are particularly cool for people who just want to hop into a game without any fuss. To do so, just open two Jumpstart packs, shuffle them together, and you have an instant randomized deck you can play with. This includes the proper mix of spells, creatures, and lands for a well balanced deck. Each pack contains one thematic Rare card exclusive to these Jumpstart packs, one Rare or Mythic Rare from the main LotR set, and two shiny foil Land cards.

Commander Decks – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Four new Commander decks are also available to preorder. These are meant to be played in multiplayer free-for-all Commander matches. You can buy them individually or in a 4-pack that gives you all of them at once. Also as usual with MTG preorders, the Commander deck box art is not yet available, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

Each Commander Deck comes with a 2-card Collector Booster Sample pack containing 2 special treatment cards from the main LotR set, including 1 Rare or Mythic Rare, plus 1 Traditional Foil.

Starter Kit – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

I suspect this Lord of the Rings-themed Magic set will bring in lots of new (and long-lapsed) players. If that’s you, this is the bundle to pick up. It comes with two ready-to-play decks of 60 cards each (including 1 foil Mythic Rare card and 4 Rare cards), a How-to-Play guide, two boxes for deck storage, and codes to unlock both decks to play online in MTG Arena.

Bundles – MTG Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

These bundles offer an assortment of items from the Lord of the Rings MTG set. You get 8 Set Booster packs, 4 Traditional Foil alternate-art cards, 40 Land cards (including 20 foils), plus a “spindown” life counter, a card storage box, and two reference cards.

The gift edition of the bundle includes the same as the standard one, plus one Collector Booster. The price difference is less than a Collector Booster pack, so you might as well pick up the gift edition if you’re going for a bundle.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.

What was the first game that really grabbed you and dominated your life?

coming to RPS in 2023, and here we are with our very first edition of Ask RPS! This is a new mailbag feature where RPS supporters get to pose questions to the RPS Treehouse team (mostly video games-related, though not necessarily always), and we then answer those questions in public posts for everyone to get involved with. Easy peasy.

To kick us off, our first question comes courtesy of Old_Man_Gaming, who asked: “What was the first game that really grabbed you and dominated your life?”

Come and find out which games had us trapped in the throes of childhood mania below, and why not tell us about your own gaming obsessions in the comments? You might just find a surprise kindred spirit.

Guide: Splatoon 3: Fresh Season 2023 – Every New Weapon, Stage, And Feature

Fresh by name, fresh by nature.

Kicking off on 1st March, Splatoon 3‘s Fresh Season looks like it has learned from everything that its predecessor, Chill Season 2022, did well and amped up the content even more. Chill Season introduced a whole host of new weapons and stages alongside the headline reveals of Big Run and X Battles, and there are new weapons, new stages, updated features and even a new game mode incoming.

All of this is being gradually sent our way via the @SplatoonNA Twitter account, but with so much information to get through, these reveals can be difficult to keep track of.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

How Demeo is a PS VR2 tabletop RPG for people intimidated of tabletop RPGs

At Resolution Games, we love tabletop roleplaying games just as much as anybody. Maybe even more! After all, you don’t make a game like Demeo without spending a few hundred nights around the kitchen table rolling dice and battling bugbears.

Yet for every tabletop gaming fan out there, dozens of tabletop-curious gamers are keen to try out the hobby but feel overwhelmed by the tomes of text and rules they’d need to parse through. And that’s before even creating a character sheet! Demeo was made for tabletop gamers — but it was made for the tabletop-curious, too.

In short, Demeo is a tabletop fantasy game for everybody.

To make the pen-and-paper RPG experience more approachable, we focused on the fundamentals of what makes these games great: challenging monsters, unique class-based abilities, narrative intrigue, and playing with friends. With this as our starting point, we designed Demeo to present these elements in a way that’s easy to understand and keeps the game moving. (Strategy is important, but there’s nothing worse than waiting 15 minutes for the nth-level wizard sitting to your left to finish their turn!)

In an effort to make actions intuitive, available choices for each party member are presented on cards that can be played on their turn. Rather than needing to remember a dozen possible actions a player can take (or memorize spell lists, or recall which perks have been bestowed upon a character by magical weapons), every possible action is presented in a clear, easy-to-understand card that keeps the game moving at a solid pace.

Some of these cards, like the Hunter’s Arrow, are replenished on every turn and act as the standard action for a class. Most, though — from the Sorcerer’s massive Fireball to healing potions and repeating ballistae — are one-time-use cards that add a crucial layer of strategy. Sure, you could use that “Scroll of Charm” to coax an Elven Archer to fight for you right now; but maybe you’d rather save it until you can convince an Ice Elemental to do your bidding in a crowded room full of spiders?

There’s an element of luck to tabletop games too, and Demeo is no different. Rather than a bag full of different-sided dice that determine hits, damage, and more, Demeo’s approach streamlines the rolling experience. A single die with three possible faces determines if a player misses, hits, or crits — and you guessed it: if you’re playing on PlayStation VR2, it feels just as good to roll the die virtually as it would with a real die in your hands.

In fact, thanks to the capabilities of the PS VR2, the Demeo experience is tactile in ways that simply haven’t been possible until now. Haptics in the PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers make it so that picking up your miniature actually feels like picking up your miniature. And if your hero happens to be downed or killed by one of the many monsters, the PS VR2’s headset vibrations will make sure you never forget it.

The social experience of game night is faithfully recreated through gameplay that benefits from table-talk and collaborative strategy — but Demeo is an experience that plays well for solo gamers too. As any TTRPG fan will tell you, sometimes the greatest challenge is just getting everybody’s schedules to line up for game night. Demeo lets players scratch their tabletop itch even when nobody else is around. In fact, one of the biggest compliments we get comes from Game Masters who tell us they’ve turned to Demeo as a replacement game when someone is missing from their group that week. Instead of running a one-shot so that they don’t advance their tabletop campaign without all their regular players in attendance, they run Demeo. And that continues to knock our socks off.

Demeo features a richly detailed world filled with different settings, monsters, and scheming, corrupted villains — but as a player, it’s a world you get to immerse yourself in rather than build out moment-by-moment. There’s no need for a quick-thinking dungeon master to juggle the rules, monsters and everything else that a player could throw at them. And while there are five complete adventures included, Demeo allows players to make the adventuring experience entirely their own. Every session in one of these pre-made adventures is unique, thanks to randomly assembled levels, random monster and treasure distributions, different action cards in play, and the ability to mix different heroes together in any configuration you’d like.

We’ve always loved a good dungeon crawl — that’s why we designed an experience that lets you dive right into it, even if you’ve never rolled a D20 in your life. If that sounds like your kind of fun, we can’t wait for you to join us in the world of Gilmerra! Demeo is available now on PS VR2.

A Fox, a Sword and a Shield: the Only Ingredients you Need to Become a Hero

Do you have what it takes to become the world’s next hero? In Rise of Fox Hero, all you need is a trusty sword and shield combo!

A colorful and fun journey through 32 different platforming levels, featuring beautiful environments and soundtrack. This game by solo developer Josep Monzonís is not the first title under his belt; however, it represents his first entry into the 3D game genre, after almost 13 years developing many 2D titles.

In his own words, his passion resides in “playing and creating fun and addictive games” and with this most recent shift into 3D games, it’s safe to say there’s an entire new set of possibilities to explore and bring to life! To him, game development is a work of craftsmanship, and he loves being deeply involved in all aspects of development in order to give the final product a very personal touch. Although Josep has partnered with 2Awesome Studio as a publisher before, up until this day seeing his games released on consoles is still one of the highlights of his journey and the feeling of excitement never gets old!

Although Rise of Fox Hero is a platformer at its core, Josep also wanted to incorporate combat and puzzle elements to create a more exciting experience for players that fully takes advantage of the three-dimensional POV. In the game, perspective is key, and you will find yourself needing to make use of the fully rotatable camera to really get a good glimpse of all the different angles and corners, as well as solving all the different puzzles.

Challenging yourself and experimenting with new forms of game development can be a scary, yet exciting, experience so I hope you decide to give this game a try and take the role of an adorable fox on its way to herodom. Have fun!

Rise of Fox Hero

2Awesome Partners

☆☆☆☆☆
14

★★★★★

$4.99

$3.99

Get it now

Rise of Fox Hero is a colorful 3D platformer with fun combat and puzzle elements.

Armed with a sword and a shield, you will help our fox jump, fight and solve puzzles throughout 4 different chapters and 32 different levels.

Explore colorful and beautiful environments and find all the collectibles while battling tons of different enemies. And beware, by the end of each chapter, an epic boss fight awaits!

In Rise of Fox Hero, perspective is key — so make use of the rotatable camera and look in every angle to find your way through obstacles, or even hidden secrets.

New World Switching to Seasonal Model, Free and Premium Season Pass Announced

Amazon Games has announced that its MMORPG New World is switching to a seasonal model and will be getting a free and premium Season Pass as a result.

The seasonal model will come into effect on March 28 and Amazon has promised it will allow for more frequent content drops with the likes of new features, gameplay experiences, and more. Seasons will last three months and Amazon said players can expect further unique additions to New World as each one rolls in.

The Season Pass will work more like a Battle Pass from the likes of Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone, in which players will gain levels and rewards by completing certain tasks in-game. Players can stay on the free track if they like, but upgrading to the premium version will grant more rewards per level including cosmetics, Marks of Fortune, Boost Tokens, and more.

This premium track can be purchased using New World’s in-game credit and will cost 20,000 Marks of Fortune, with $19.99 getting players 23,000 Marks of Fortune in the shop. Amazon made clear that all of the premium track content can be earned through normal gameplay except for the cosmetics, meaning this won’t be a pay-to-win feature.

As for what’s coming in Season 1 overall, which is called Fellowship and Fire, players can enjoy new story content, a new Expedition, a new Heartgem Ability called Fire Storm, the addition of Gear Set Storage, and a new server region.

The story will focus on The Silver Crows, an elite group of mercenaries tasked with helping Skye the Speardaughter confront a powerful warlock and the Varangian horde. The Expedition, meanwhile, is called the Empyrean Forge and is a new Level 60+ mission set in the Great Cleave.

In our 6/10 review of the base game, IGN said: “New World is a very pretty survival-MMORPG hybrid that saves its best moments for the endgame – but you have to be willing to grind like hell to get to them.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

No Man’s Sky’ 4.1 Fractal Update adds an Expedition and accessibility options

No Man’s Sky is releasing its 4.1 Fractal Update today, bringing along a new Expedition, tons of accessibility options, a VR overhaul, and much more. Developers Hello Games have updated the game so consistently their launch woes are a distant memory, sent to a faraway galaxy. Since then, No Man’s Sky has become a not just a space exploration game, but a city management sim and a generally nice place to chill with your odd alien pets, all in one package.

Magic Week, I wrote about Team Lazerbeam’s upcoming dating sim Wrestling With Emotions: New Kid On The Block (WWE) and how you’re able to romance a beefcake composed entirely of green ooze. There is, of course, far more to it than that. I asked Team Lazerbeam’s Ben Rausch about how it tackles themes of queer identity and diversity in a kickass way, which I highlighted in my post, but wanted to highlight even more here. Their answers were too good not to share.

Elden Ring Sells 20 Million Units

Elden Ring has officially sold over 20 million copies in less than a year according to Bandai Namco and developer FromSoftware.

The announcement came just days before Elden Ring’s one year launch anniversary on February 25 in a tweet from the game’s official account (below), and an accompanying statement on Bandai Namco’s website. “Our heartfelt thanks for your support and companionship on this journey,” the post said.

We last heard of Elden Ring sales figures in June last year when it had sold 16.6 million units, but the holiday push and perhaps the slew of Game of the Year awards pushed it over the 20 million figure.

Our heartfelt thanks for your support and companionship on this journey.#ELDENRING pic.twitter.com/S8eqiNk0Uv

— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) February 22, 2023

The figure also comes without any major expansion as no story DLC has yet been announced for Elden Ring, though the game’s creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has hinted that more content could make its way to the Lands Between, teasing that “we have several more things we want to do”.

In the meantime, Souls fans have been flexing their skill by completing no hit playthroughs, impressive speedruns, and even by beating two Malenias at once using a dance pad and a controller at the same time.

IGN awarded it a 10/10, stating that Elden Ring was FromSoftware’s “largest and most ambitious game yet” whose visually and mechanically impressive boss fights and satisfying exploration and combat made it a title that truly moved the genre forward.

Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer

RGG Studio debut a docuseries delving into Like A Dragon 8’s development

Yakuza (or Like A Dragon) docuseries that just debuted on YouTube.

Category: Video Games