We played the new set for Magic the Gathering. Allegiance is the second set of the third block taking place in the plane of Ravnica. I had some friends come over for a small booster draft to explore the new creatures, characters, and keywords introduced in this set.
The first Ravnica block is to this day one of my most favorite eras of Magic the Gathering. I enjoyed the new concept of guilds. The pairing of colors and new keyword mechanics specific to each guild served well in gameplay but also filled out the storytelling just within the collecting of cards. I was in a lull at the time the second Ravnica block was on shelves so, I missed out on that at the time and haven’t had a chance to explore those sets.
Now, my friend Devon and I briefly reviewed Guilds of Ravnica on our twitch channel. And we enjoyed it much. I found that the new keyword mechanic I used. OST in our game was ‘Spectacle’ which is the new Rakdos mechanic. It was useful and worked well in my deck. Although, I think my favorite mechanic in this set is the Gruul keyword, ‘Riot’. When you caste a creature spell with ‘Riot’ you can give either a +1/+1 or haste. In seventeen years of playing Magic I can’t think of nor imagine any instance where you can’t find a use for one of those options. Beside that, I pulled Domri, Chaos Bringer and I’m super excited to build a deck for that one card.
So far Allegiance is shaping up to my favorite Ravnica set. It’ll take a little more for it to be my favorite set utterly but I’m not ruling it out.
