Wizards of the Coast has big plans in motion for the next year, as they revealed in the Wizards Presents 2022 livestream today.
The architects behind Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering will shake the earths of their games with a slate of new products. Players were given a look at the company’s ambitious plans during today’s Wizards Presents livestream.
The Magic: The Gathering multiverse will never be the same after the upcoming Phyrexian story arc, which starts with Dominaria United next month. Names were given for the encompassing sets during Wizards Presents: The Brothers’ War, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, and March of the Machine, with March of the Machine: The Aftermath serving as the arc’s epilogue in spring 2023. The Brothers’ War will be a trip back in time to the events of the titular war, a major event in Magic‘s early years, to get context on the present-day conflict that will unfurl in Phyrexia: All Will Be One.
After that the game will seemingly return to roaming familiar planes in fall and winter 2023 with Wilds of Eldraine and The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Exploring a fairy tale wilderness, spelunking, and potentially scrapping with dinosaurs will cap the game’s 30th anniversary celebrations. However, the fun on the game’s original locale will continue in early 2023 with Dominaria Remastered, a limited run set of cards that originally featured the iconic plane.
One of the biggest bombshells of this year’s Wizards Presents stream, however, was the next instalment in the Universes Beyond line, which gives other IPs like Warhammer 40, 000, The Walking Dead, and Fortnite the Magic: The Gathering treatment. The next property to be featured is none other than Doctor Who. Arriving in Q3 2023—at the end of Magic‘s 30th anniversary and the start of the BBC classic’s 60th—the collaboration with Doctor Who will include four commander decks that span the show’s history, including material from the new series currently in production.
The Warhammer 40, 000 commander decks will arrive in October. Each focuses on a major faction from Games Workshops’ grimdark flagship: the Imperium, Chaos, Tyrannids, and Necrons. Better still, each deck includes a variant of the classic commander staple Sol Ring designed specifically to reflect that faction.
After that, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is also on the Universes Beyond itinerary. Lord of the Rings: Tales From Middle-Earth will be a Modern-legal, fully draftable booster set, “designed with the care of a Core set.” Naturally, many familiar faces, items, and locations from the beloved books and movies will be present, and some with the epic treatment that the source material demands—as certain new borderless scene treatments can be combined to form massive murals. The Battle of Pellenor Fields, for example, consists of a staggering 18-card mural.
As part of the game’s 30th anniversary, Wizards will be releasing a series of promo cards from the game’s history, one for each year starting with Serra Angel from 1993. These will be available at your friendly local game stores at upcoming prerelease events.
On the Dungeons & Dragons side of Wizards Presents, we got a huge update on this fall’s adventure and returning campaign setting, Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. This full-fledged campaign brings the Dungeons & Dragons‘ setting for war and massive conflict—or at least a few regions of it—back to Fifth Edition. Players will find themselves at the forefront of the battle against the forces of Takhisis (the iteration of Tiamat on Krynn, Dragonlance‘s world) early in the War of the Lance, as Lord Soth invades Solamnia.
While Shadow of the Dragon Queen will include some Gazeteer content for Krynn, it will not be a full-fledged campaign setting guide. However, it will be accompanied by Warriors of Krynn, a standalone battle game also set in Dragonlance. The games were co-developed so that conflicts from the Dungeons & Dragons adventure can be played out in the board game, and the outcome of the board game can be then translated back into the adventure. You won’t need to own both games to play one of them on their own, but for those who want the extra immersion, this will be a boon.
If this sounds appealing, a bevy of options were presented during Wizards Presents. The adventure book will be available with a standard or independent game store-exclusive versions as usual. You can also purchase the Deluxe Edition, containing both a third unique cover for Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen and Warriors of Krynn. The true bombshell, however, is that the new book will, for the first time, be bundled with a digital version of the content for the D&D Beyond service. Digital/Physical Bundles will be available in standard and Deluxe iterations, with two weeks of early access digitally.
This week saw the release of another book set, Pathfinder: Adventures in Space, but Wizards of the Coast shadow-dropped a companion album on music platforms. Overseen by Chris Funk of The Decemberists, Spelljams features 19 tracks designed to correspond to individual chapters of the new adventure, or just serve as an atmospheric soundtrack. The truly devout can pre-order the unique Vinyl Artifact Edition as well.
Another bombshell dropped during Wizards Presents was the announcement of One D&D, the next version of the game…of sorts. Wizards of the Coast is happy with the game as it is and wants to shift away from thinking about the game in terms of editions, cultivating what players have enjoyed about the current iteration since its launch in 2014. One D&D will focus on three initiatives: revisiting the core rules and the products that present them; integrating the D&D Beyond toolset, which Wizards now owns properly; and also introducing a new digital play-space, an immersive tabletop simulation that gives Dungeon Masters the tools to bring their adventures to life.
As they did with Fifth Edition, the development team is releasing playtest packets so that fans can try out some new tweaks and provide feedback. The first, focused on Character Origins, was released immediately following the Wizards Presents stream.
Before One D&D launches in 2024, there’s still a packed slate of new material being published in the interim. Dungeons & Dragons has a busy 2023 lined up: Keys From the Golden Vault, an anthology of short heist adventures; Bigby Presents: Glory Of the Giants, a giant-themed sourcebook akin to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons; The Book of Many Things, a collection of player-facing content revolving around the legendary item the Deck of Many Things; and a full campaign branching off of The Lost Mines of Phandelver, the now-famous adventure included in the D&D Starter Set.
Rounding out the 2023 lineup is a Planescape box set; just like the new Spelljammer set, this slipcased trio of books will introduce the Planescape setting to the modern ruleset. Like the rest of the current generation, all of this new content will still be compatible with One D&D moving forward, and surely Wizards has even more tricks up their sleeve for us between these tentpoles.
If the Wizards Presents livestream is any indication, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering fans have a lot to be hyped about for the foreseeable future.