Category: Games

While Magic: The Gathering‘s upcoming collaboration with The Walking Dead features some cool cards, it hasn’t been well received by a large number of Magic fans. In a Twitch stream, Wizards of the Coast has addressed community concerns over the Secret Lair drop, as reported by Dot Esports.

While Magic: The Gathering has done limited crossover sets before, such as the Ponies: The Galloping collaboration with My Little Pony, the sets are usually silver-bordered cards featuring only unique art. The Walking Dead set has been revealed as black-bordered cards that are legal in Eternal formats, with mechanically unique cards that’ll open up new options for play.

Fans aren’t happy that such cards have been released in a limited run set–like other Secret Lair drops, the Walking Dead cards will be printed to demand and then never released again. Other MTG players don’t like the idea of mixing Walking Dead lore with Magic’s already rich and distinct world.

On Magic’s official Twitch channel, Wizards of the Coast’s senior communications Manager Blake Rasmussen was joined by product architect Mark Heggen and director of Magic R&D Aaron Forsythe to talk about the new set, and what Wizards was doing to address fan concerns.

Forsythe talked about the origin of the set, and how it was inspired by internal discussions at WOTC about peeling the world of Magic away from the core mechanics of the game. “There are tons and tons of partners who would make awesome, fun Magic cards, and the Walking Dead was the first one we decided to try this out with.”

“The world is kind of Magic adjacent,” Heggen added. “It’s a world full of zombies and combat. It wasn’t a stretch for us to imagine ‘oh, what would a card would look like?'”

When asked why the Walking Dead set wasn’t silver-bordered like other crossovers, Forsythe said that it just didn’t fit this new set. “[Silver-bordered sets] are typically designed to be things that just do not work in black-bordered Magic sets,” he said. “With this Walking Dead set, it seemed very easy to make Magic cards that did work well within the Magic rules.” The final decision really came down to making sure people could actually play with the cards that they had bought, he explained.

This doesn’t mean the Walking Dead is officially part of Magic canon, though. Forsythe explained that the Walking Dead cards have a unique foil stamp at the bottom denoting them as part of a different canon.

While nothing has been confirmed, the Wizards team indicated that Magic-specific versions of the Walking Dead cards could be reprinted with new art, if there happened to be high demand for the mechanics of those cards in a competitive context.

Pre-orders for Walking Dead sets are available now on Secret Lair, with the limited sale running until October 12.

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As the TV shows and/or episodes that got delayed months ago due to COVID start debuting, it’s key to avoid asking “well, was this worth the wait?” since it’s not as if these shows purposefully sat around on a shelf so as to heighten our anticipation.

The Walking Dead’s Season 10 finale (which is technically no longer the finale, now that AMC has added six more episodes to Season 10), was supposed to air in April, and is finally premiering in October, in the spot where, traditionally, a new season of Dead is starting up. Instead, it’s serving as a lead-in to a new spinoff series, Walking Dead: World Beyond.

And, as the penultimate Season 10 episode all but promised with its set up, “A Certain Doom” delivered a dozen minutes or so of intense thrills. It also, sadly, failed to follow through on other crucial elements, so the end result, at the end of the Whisperer War, was a modest exhibit of “schmedium” bravado.

Firstly, before we dig any further into the goings-on of “A Certain Doom,” it must be said that Daryl, Carol, and their entire Pied Piper caravan was a freakin’ blast. The series provides us so few moments of genuine levity – especially anything this absurd – that to hear Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” blaring out into the wasteland on repeat, as Beta’s entire plan to swarm our heroes with a herd came unraveled, was legitimately funny. Previously, it had only been Negan who was able to undercut the Whisperers’ doleful, morbid seriousness. Here, it was the delight of David Byrne and one banger of an ’80s song. It was a very fun moment.

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Now that we know the news of The Walking Dead’s official ending — after six more “Season 10” episodes early next year and then a supersized final season, split into two parts — “A Certain Doom” makes more sense. Because the show’s end is near(ish), this finale hardly changed the board at all. It wrapped up the Whisperer arc with precious few losses on the heroes’ side. Sure, it teased a sacrificial death by Carol, but the news of the Carol/Daryl spinoff inadvertently robbed the moment of much of its tension. In the end, Oceanside’s Beatrice was the only notable face to fall and the writers even let viewers off the hook with that one by having her be utterly s***ty to Lydia just minutes earlier.

Everyone else scraped by, and a ton of things that could have felt cool and meaningful — like Maggie’s big return, Aaron and Aiden being surrounded by the Whisperers in the previous episode, and Negan and Daryl’s inevitable team up to kill Beta — felt short-sheeted. There were seeds of great things here but the episode didn’t water them. It didn’t push things far enough.

That being said, the episode’s middle moments, during our heroes’ guts-covered trek through the herd, where actual Whisperers were also waiting to kill them, and an archer on standby in the window above, felt appropriately tense and dangerous. “A Certain Doom” felt big, and possibly contained more walkers than we’ve ever seen, but it lacked the smaller moments many fans look for in a show that’s been on for a decade. We’ve seen zombie action in all shapes and forms so it’s really the story elements that keep a show alive when it’s this long in the tooth. And this finale was light on big story beats.

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Yes, it was big on redemption, and getting characters up off the bench — like Negan and Lydia, who were still the two outcasts of the bunch — but even here it didn’t exactly catch fire. Negan’s big move was to distract Beta and then almost immediately get killed by him. Maggie, who fans were excited to see return, didn’t really do much except return (though she came with a really cool Snake Eyes-style ninja warrior carrying giant boline blades). And then, when it seemed like Negan was about to say who Beta was, as a former Before Times celebrity singer, the show let it drop. Understandably, you want to play it cool sometimes and not spell everything out for viewers. Other times though, it’s actually more satisfying to address a thing head-on. This was a moment where the series should have just said who he was.

The Eugene leg of the journey ended with the full arrival of Commonwealth soldiers, whose very sci-fi “look” is a welcome jolt to the series. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the Commonwealth angle unfolds on the series given that the Three Rings operation, which is also a network of cooperating advanced communities, is supposedly a separate entity operating within the same regions. I guess you can chalk them both existing up to the sheer vastness of the wasteland, and the rampant communication challenges, but it’s still odd to slowly introduce a new group to the show, over the past two years, that might undermine the awe factor of the Commonwealth.

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Oh, and Virgil, from Michonne’s final episode “What We Become,” has meandered out of his hermit state and joined the ranks of our heroes. With him folding into the group, more people will learn about the Rick clues and the Three Rings and all that. What the series will do with that, and whether or not the Three Rings will ever circle back into this series, is anyone’s guess. At the very least, Daryl will probably find out Michonne is doing more than “helping some people.”

One more thing: Connie’s still alive, returned to us after having been gone since Season 10’s midseason finale. And of course, it’s only been a couple days since then in show time, even though it sure feels like longer. That’s a mildly odd element of Season 10, that it sort of all took place over a week. A work week, even.

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The eighth episode of Lovecraft Country opens on a scene of real-life horror. It’s a sweltering hot day in Chicago, as a mass of parishioners gather from across the city to pay respects to a boy whom many of them never knew in life, but to his close friends simply went by the name “Bobo.” Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” can be heard playing over the scene, and what a cruel summer it is, as people can be seen filing out of the building, visibly weeping and some even vomiting from what they’ve just witnessed. The stench of sweat and death chokes the air. “Jig-A-Bobo” is a story about loss and grief, horror and hatred, hope and reconciliation. It’s a story about the ways people come together and how they break apart. It’s an episode cast in the long shadow of Emmett Till’s murder, a murder which continues to loom over the collective conscience of America through the many reincarnations of it we see in our present day.

It’s been a week since Hippolyta’s fateful trip to Mayfield and subsequent disappearance at the end of last week’s episode, and the series’ attention naturally turns to her daughter Diana, Atticus’ cousin, to serve as this week’s point-of-view protagonist. While for the most part relegated to the sidelines for the majority of Lovecraft Country’s most pivotal moments, Jada Harris’ performance as Diana— “Dee”— has always been a bright spot whenever her character has made an appearance: Talented, sensitive, intuitive— the spitting image of her father and mother. And that’s precisely what makes this week’s episode in particular so devastating, for how it dispenses, albeit only momentarily, with its pulp horror fiction trappings to lay attention to the brand of intimate horror that has the power to shape a young person for the rest of their life.

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Dee has suffered and lost more than most of the rest of Lovecraft Country’s main cast have ever, and endured more than what any young woman her age ought to. Her father, dead; her mother, vanished; and now her dear friend Bobo, lynched in such a way so heinous as to deny him any semblance of dignity or humanity in death. “Ain’t no getting around this,” Montrose tells Ruby as they wait in line to view Till’s body. “[It’s] every negro’s rite of passage in this country, child or not.” Harris is heartbreaking in this episode, convincingly portraying the struggles of a girl saddled with both an unspeakable amount of grief, but assailed by predatory forces both mundane and supernatural that would just as soon claim her own life as they would the lives of everyone she knows and loves.

Stricken with anguish, Dee escapes from the crowd of parishioners and the attention of her elders to be alone with her grief. Fuming and helpless with impotent rage, Dee walks down the same street we last saw in episode five, “Strange Case,” before promptly being cornered and interrogated by Police Captain Lancaster (Mac Brandt) as to the whereabouts of her mother. Frustrated and seeking retribution for the destruction of Hiram’s machine, Lancaster hexes Dee— cursing her to be hounded by two malevolent, homicidal apparitions patterned after “pickaninny” caricatures who are invisible to everyone else around her until her dying breath.

The image of the pickaninny and its adjacent cousin, the “Jim Crow” character invented by minstrel performer Thomas “Dartmouth” Rice, was created in part out of retaliation for the Confederacy’s defeat at the American Civil War, an aesthetic designed to stigmatize and infantilize an entire race of people as a means of reassuring white audiences of their own assumptions of superiority. Lovecraft Country’s take on the stereotype is the most explicitly Jordan Peele-esque creative decision of the series thus far, transforming the caricature into a pair of antagonists that feel like a hellacious mash-up of the Grady twins from The Shining, Freddy Kruger, the creature from David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 horror film It Follows, and the Tethered from 2019’s Us. The result is deeply unsettling, with Dee scrambling to find a solution for her curse all while being stalked by two leering, Chelsea smiling murderers maniacally dancing and gyrating in step to a warped version of A. F. Winnemore’s 1847 minstrel song “Stop Dat Knocking.” It’s an intense, episode-spanning cat-and-mouse game whose conclusion is sure to stay with viewers long after the credits roll.

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We, the audience, never see Emmett Till’s body. But Ruby does. The experience of witnessing Bobo’s body shakes her so thoroughly to her core that, at a loss for what to do, she returns to the last place where she knew some semblance of comfort and freedom: Christina’s home. Imbibing the serum that endows her with whiteness, Ruby and Christina— in the form of William— embrace one another in an act of carnal passion whose subsequent climax rivals that of American Gods’ Bilquis love scene for the ghastliest literal depiction of the expression “La petite mort” ever put to television.

Sex and death are two of the most powerful motivating forces of human life and, as a black woman occupying the form of a white woman, Ruby throws herself desperately into an embrace of the former as a means of escaping her grief and fear of the latter. It’s a powerful scene, one made all the more so for the tense post-coitus confrontation between the two where Ruby pointedly asks Christina if she at all cares, or even feels a semblance of the pain and anger Ruby feels for what happened to Emmett Till. Christina’s answer is as predictable as it is bracing, not only how openly she flaunts her callous indifference for Till’s death, but for how it surgically pierces the veil of Ruby’s preconceptions about herself and her own desires like a serrated knife through tissue paper. In the end, Ruby is once again left alone with no-one but herself, speechless with frustration and fuming sorrow.

Last week, we saw a collection of the many lies Lovecraft Country’s characters tell each other, and themselves, in order to esca[e the pain that comes with truth. In this week’s episode, we finally see those lies laid bare, starting with Atticus and Leti. It was only a matter of time before Leti learned about Atticus and Ji-ah’s relationship, but the way in which she does leaves little to no room for Atticus to come out the other side looking like an honest partner. Leti knows love when she sees it from across the table, Ji-ah attempts to relate the premonition of Atticus’ death she experienced the last time they were together. The subsequent barrage of character beats that follows, from Atticus callously rebuffing Ji-ah’s act of love, to Leti and him shouting each other down, to Atticus stubbornly storming off to “fix” the situation on his own in spite of Leti’s wishes, is as heartbreaking as it is a much-needed moment of transparency between all three of the characters present. When Atticus tells Leti through tears that they are surrounded by monsters, and that he has no choice but to do what he is doing in the interest of securing their future together, you can tell he’s that he’s not really talking about Christina Braithwaite, or even the Order of the Ancient Dawn— he’s talking about a world that would just as soon as take the life of a black boy from his family and loved ones as it would then attempt to convince those who would mourn his death that his life never mattered to begin with.

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The fear of bringing a life into this world is what ultimately brings Atticus and Montrose back together. After last week’s episode, it’d have been entirely reasonable to believe that the emotional gulf between Atticus and his father was irreconcilable. Too much has been said between the two, two much pain has been transacted. Atticus can’t even stand to accept a small conciliatory gesture from his father in the form of a cup of water on a hot summer day. It’s not the bond between a father and son that brings the two together. It’s a bond between a father and a father-to-be. We finally learn that the copy of “Lovecraft Country” that Atticus was holding after he fell out of the rift generated by Hiram’s machine is from the future, and that the person who wrote that book was not Atticus’s uncle, but his son: George Freeman, named for the uncle who loved Atticus like his own son.

Every adaptation in some form or another exists in conversation with its source material. What makes Lovecraft Country’s particular example significant in this case is that it contextualizes the actual text itself as a material artifact in the series’ narrative. “It’s our family story,” Atticus tells Montrose back at his apartment. “Some of the details are different; Christina’s a man, Uncle George survives Ardham, and Dee’s a boy— named Horace.” It’s an moment of textual, existential, and emotional reflexivity, both for the characters on-screen and the audience watching it, one that not only convinces Montrose to help his son cast a spell to protect him and their family from the threats soon to come, but convinces Atticus in turn to accept that help.

While the spell itself appears unsuccessful, the scene of Atticus and Montrose attempting to conjure it together is an endearing and intimate one, made all the more so for its mention of Montrose’s dyslexia— a character detail that was introduced fairly early on in the original novel, but only now revealed in the HBO series. Atticus asks if Montrose is keeping any other secrets from him, and for a moment we can see Montrose pause to search his feelings, as if deliberating whether or not to tell his son the truth about his “uncle” George, only to decide against it. Even with all that’s already transpired between them, there are still some things that are just better left unsaid. For now, at least.

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The penultimate scene of “Jig-A-Bobo” is one of the most harrowing in the entire episode. Christina Braithwhite has proven herself to be a devious, deliberate, and acutely decisive antagonist throughout the entirety of Lovecraft Country so far. As she tells Atticus earlier in the episode, magic isn’t just about the words, it’s about the intention behind them. It’s a discipline she’s honed over the course of a lifetime. So what exactly was her intention in recreating the murder of Emmett Till? We watch as Christina, standing on a pier dock, is subjected to a rough equivalent of the type of barbarity Till was subjected to in the final moments of his life: beaten, shot to death, lynched with barbed wire tied to a cotton gin fan and dragged into a lake— before promptly being resurrected by her Mark of Cain, crawling back onto the pier and gasping for breath amid fits of weeping.

Why did she do this, when a couple hours ago she told Ruby to her face that she couldn’t have cared less about Emmett’s life or death? For that matter, why did Captain Lancaster go to the trouble of cursing Dee, when he could have just as easily killed her himself and disposed of her body right there on the spot? The answer to both questions is likely the same reason why Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam lynched Emmett Till on little more than the baseless accusation of having whistled at a white woman— which is simply: because they could. Christina is an insatiable seeker of knowledge, be it forbidden or carnal, believing that no earthly or unearthly experience should be denied to her. “Most men with God complexes want to live in heaven and not hell,” she tells Leti earlier on in the episode. “Failing to understand that God is both.” Christina’s ambition and drive is what makes her the most immediate threat to the continued safety of Atticus and his family, and if what we’ve seen and learned throughout this episode is true, her ultimate aim is now finally within reach.

The shootout at Leti’s house is an appropriately explosive finale to an emotional powderkeg of an episode. Having earlier been endowed with her own Mark of Cain by Christina in exchange for the photos of Titus’ pages from the Book of Names, Leti is shielded from the bullets fired by Lancaster and his men, watching helplessly through tears as the home she worked so tirelessly to build is ventilated in a hail of gunfire. Atticus, however, is not so fortunate. Happening upon the scene of the raid and helpless to stop it, an officer spots him and fires his gun prematurely. Just as the bullet reaches striking distance of Atticus, a Shoggoth erupts from the depths of the asphalt, shielding its master with a guttural roar. It’s an impressive action sequence and one of the series’ most thrilling capstones, as the creature proceeds to ferociously lay waste to the entire squad of police officers, flinging their battered bodies and squad cars to and fro with reckless abandon. The spell worked, Atticus and his family are safe for now; but at what cost? Whether he intended to or not, Atticus has just declared open war on the Chicago branch of the Order of the Ancient Dawn. The wolves are at the door; there is no turning back now.