Blake is the content manager for DailyMTG.com, making him the one you should email if you have thoughts on the website, good or less good (or not good). He's a longtime coverage reporter and hasn't turned down a game of Magic in any format ever.

December is all about familiar endings and new beginnings. One year passes, another gets underway. New resolutions are made, old ones are completely forgotten about because the gym is way too far away to actually go there regularly. Seriously, it's a hassle.

At Wizards of the Coast, we're doing a little bit of saying goodbye to the old while saying hello to something new, yet familiar.

Duel Decks: Elves vs. Inventors

Let's start with a goodbye—on April 6, 2018, we will be releasing the final entry in the Duel Decks series. Ten years ago we released the first Duel Decks, Elves vs. Goblins, and lo, it was good. Now, as we turn our attention to the future, we've decided to retire Duel Decks and move on to other products.

But, for one last hurrah, we'll be releasing Duel Decks: Elves vs. Inventors. After Goblins just got their second turn at the Duel Decks wheel, we figured the second of our original dueling tribes should get a second go-round as well. So the nature-loving, bone-crushing Elves will be duking it out with agents of the antithesis of their very being—artifice.

Like previous Duel Decks releases, you'll get two ready-to-play decks, ten tokens, two deck boxes, a strategy insert, a quick reference guide, and two Spindown life counters. These will be available in English and Japanese, and will have an MSRP of $19.99 (only applies to the United States).

Challenger Decks

Challenger Decks are your on-ramp to Standard. These four individual 75-card decks are geared toward Standard play for the Friday Night Magic player, and forged out of some of the most powerful strategies in Standard.

Each Challenger Deck comes with a complete 60-card main deck and a 15-card sideboard, and is intended to be playable and competitive at a local level right out of the box. All cards will have been previously printed in Standard and are Standard-legal. Additionally, each Challenger Deck will contain the following:

A box capable of holding 75 sleeved cards.

A Spindown life counter

A quick reference guide

Challenger Decks will be available April 6, 2018, and will have an MSRP of $29.99 (only applies to the United States). These decks will be available worldwide in English, with Japanese available in Japan.

Watch for the full decklists in February!

Hey everybody! Gavin Verhey here, the product architect of Challenger Decks. With Challenger Decks, R&D is bringing the top strategies of Standard right to your local game store shelf. Our Play Design team, full of seasoned pros, built these decks by looking at popular and successful Pro Tour and Grand Prix Standard decks, and we didn't pull many punches. These decks are intended to be very strong and feature many rares, as well as at least two mythic rares.

Traditionally with fixed deck products, we've built them so far in advance that the decks wouldn't look like what players were playing by the time they released. But with Challenger Decks, we changed our entire process so that we could build them much, much closer to release. I think you're going to be very excited by what you see inside Challenger Decks—and I'll be back to tell you a lot more about them in just a couple months.