It’s 2014 and Magic! is on the radio. You walk into your local comic, game, miniature and card shop. We’re in the height of Marvel Madness, every movie is another celebrated step leading toward Thanos, a familiar villain thanks to those dog-eared compendiums loaned from the library. You can only imagine which heroes will be added to the roster next. Would a fully gold Adam Warlock look goofy?

Amidst the comics, there are other new releases stacked on shelves. Crowding the cash are towers of Magic: The Gathering’s latest set. You recognize Chandra, the fiery planeswalker who hadn’t yet debuted last time you shuffled up a deck, though your proximal knowledge of the game through friends has rooted the names Jace, Gideon, Liliana and Chandra in your mind. You could always pick up a couple packs, brush up on the rules and get back into the game — Magic couldn’t have changed much in ten years — it’s a core set after all.

There must be a catchy agreed upon term for sets that capture the breadth of the multiverse without being tied to a specific plane. They borrow aesthetics from a range of settings, introducing players to what the Blind Eternities have to offer, often dialing down on narrative for aesthetic scope. Think Core sets, Foundations, Horizons and the like. Admittedly these are my favourite kind of Magic release.

My Magic triptych of interests adore the mechanical callbacks and smorgasbord of characters and planes; despite often the lack of a strong story to carry players through the set. I’m content with the current blockless structure of design but given the intention to funnel all designs through Standard, I wonder when we’ll get another set hopscotching through the multiverse.

Like all core sets, M14 allowed players to survey a swath of planes though with specific focus on Chandra Nalaar to provide some anchor to ground the direction of the release. Another incredible character and design, Chandra feels like she’s taken a bit of a backseat after her underwhelming appearance in the equally underwhelming Aetherdrift — but with the recent reshuffling of planeswalker, I hope she’ll rise to prominence again. Doubly so because of the incredibly cool refocus of her character design that speaks more to her Avishkari roots. Back in 2014 though, she was one of the most recognizable characters even if all you understood of Magic was the iconography. Most comic shops endeavour to offer space for hundreds of different fandoms vying for a patron’s interest. For a slice of Magic’s potential player base, this is why Universes Beyond will continue to make sense until every recognizable, desirable IP has found a way into the colour pie. But for anyone looking to become immersed in familiar, but undiscovered fantasy world of goblins, elves, demons and flying machines; core sets are a boon.

Revisiting the list of new designs for M14 is an embarrassment of playable cards, putting the ethos of Signs of Wear to the test. There are, conservatively, a dozen cards that still see play to delve into, but most are all too familiar to players, thanks to a healthy amount of reprints in subsequent sets.

If you’re a spell-forward player, M14 provided both Young Pyromancer and Ajani’s Chosen to round out your creatures, depending on your playstyle. I’ve dabbled in storm and enchantment lists before, and I’m currently clawing my way up the Arena brackets with a Jeskai storm list, and this pair helped to give players an actual board presence and bodies to protect them from being run over by a stompy deck. Enchantments and storm are remarkable at playing scary; building impressive spell counts and engines that can occasionally struggle or falter thanks to a well-placed fog or silence effect. I’d argue token producers remain undervalued outside of token-based strategies.

Warden of Evos Isle is my niche, off-focus pick from the set. A flying cost reducer won’t fit in every deck — but probably most of mine — though it can be a reliable manner dork in colours that struggle to find options. The bird wizard has remained in my first Commander deck since its conception back in the mid-2010s.

An age of battlecruiser play and gradual acceleration, I remember early turns were often devoted to ramps and slowly assembling your engine before slamming bombs as the turn count continued to climb. I’ve played games over the past year that lasted half as long, though the recent Prismari Artistry and Multiverse Reforged precons harken back to this era of flashy spells superseding typical value accrual.

In this spirit, it’s only natural to unearth Rise of the Dark Realms. I remain an advocate, if only because there’s nothing more quintessentially Commander than resurrecting a complicated board state and working through a litany of triggers while sheepishly apologizing to your former friends for resolving the card. Rise also serves as a reminder that no creature is only a body anymore; everything carries an effect, everything needs to be resolved.

For my playgroup, Rise of the Dark Realms carries a mathematical formula for victory. After it reaches that threshold, a critical mass of value that can only be conquered but a board wipe, we congratulate the caster before scooping and shuffling up for another game.

Not every swing in M14 was met with the same appreciation from players, but the designers took them, nonetheless. This isn’t an impassioned defense of the staves cycle, which are almost too bland to warrant a mention, but the sustained uproar about the redesign of one of the beacons of typal play: Slivers.

When we’re late in the night and feeling a little punchy, playing with decks brewed in salt and ire, my friend brings out his sliver deck. It’s a miserable pile of value that does exactly what a sliver deck should do, overwhelm the opponent if they can’t cull the horde early enough.

My mental image of slivers never shifted from early encounters with the archetype. They were hook-handed little weirdos that swelled to an impressive force if left unchecked. A Prosper player once told me to never leave a Sliver on the board, and though he ran us over with a treasure-stoked crackle with power, I think he had a point. But for some, the true horror of slivers came with their evolution in the wake of M14.

Slivers are far from the only creature type to receive an aesthetic reinvention when introduced to another plane. Only the backlash from cephalad aficionados, one of the more minor crimes levelled against New Capenna, approached the backlash to the M14 Sliver design.

I’d credit this to Wizard’s ability to maintaining identifiable characteristics of creature types through planar permutations. Mercadian goblins and Ixalan brethren are distinct from one another, but recognizably Globliny all the same. There’s no way you’d mistake an elf of Kaldheim for an elemental or dog. This allows for each plane to maintain their visual identity without splintering all types out into neighbouring kindreds and tribes.

And not to Sheeran myself — thereby successfully timestamping this article to September 2026 — but I understand both sides of the argument for the Great M14 Sliver reinvention. There are members of Wizard’s staff who no doubt want Magic to have a cornucopia of characters and creatures that players can identify with, gravitate toward and become invested in. Thanks to longstanding principles of character design — going back to the early days of animation and investigated in Scott McCloud’s totemic Understanding Comics — artists are taught to bring humanoid attributes to their illustrations as a way for viewers to make a more meaningful connection. The insectoid Slivers were some of the least anthropomorphised types in Magic, and reintroducing them as chitinous aliens could close that gap.

On the other hand, Magic: The Gathering is a game where you can fling weird little guys at other players.

I appreciate the attempt, if only for players and designers to both better understand that a break in design cohesion can be good for the lifeblood of the game. Since M14, slivers have popped up sporadically, returning to their hooky prior design in recent sets, and I hope this is a sign that WOTC is willing to let the game be a little weird. The familiar tropes of fantasy are integral to the lore and world of Magic, but I would never want to give up the weird little creatures populating the planes.