It’s really amazing how Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) just keeps chugging along, releasing more and more and more cards without ever getting old. There was a time when Wizards of the Coast (WotC) bragged that M:TG had more than 1,000 cards you could use (and I had most of them). Now it’s closer to 10,000, and I can’t even recognize the majority of them by name.

There have been dozens, if not hundreds of collectible card games (CCGs), but none have come close to Magic: The Gathering (M:TG). A long running distant second has been the Pokemon Trading Card game, which is more popular with the younger, 10 and under, crowd. M:TG has had a successful online version for years, so it was only a matter of time before Pokemon was also playable via the internet. That time has come.

The Magic: The Gathering 2012 Core Set is now available in stores.

Core sets represent the ‘base cards’ for Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) for the coming year. They’re officially tournament legal but tournament players usually don’t buy many core cards.

In the coming months these cards will quickly be replaced in tournament decks by often more powerful and more interesting cards from upcoming expansions.

I can’t help but be a little confused at the name of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, the next planned version of the Duels of the Planeswalkers software which lets players play Magic: The Gathering online with virtual cards. It’ll be available on Xbox Live Arcade, Windows and PlayStation Network this summer, which would still be squarely in 2011 as near as I can tell. I guess the reasoning for the name is the software will include cards from the newest M:TG core set, which won’t finish with expansions until 2012…

Apparently Gamma World cards are a hit and WotC now plans to release Fortune Cards for D&D and I can’t help but hear ghostly echoes of the warnings from a decade ago.

On November 23, 2010, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) announced the release of Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers for the Playstation 3 (PS3), along with three expansion packs.

The online version is already fairly popular on the PC (through Steam) and Xbox Live, so it really it’s about time they spread it to other platforms.

To pull in collectors who might already play the game, WotC has included a special

Interested in trying out the world’s most popular collectible card game (CCG) without leaving the comfort of your home? Lucky you as Duels of the Planeswalkers allows you to play Magic: The Gathering on PC.

The third expansion for the best-selling game lands on Steam November 3, 2010, for $4.99. The primary boss in this expansion is Magic‘s unstable planeswalker Sarkhan The Mad. See, you can tell he’s crazy because he’s got “The Mad” right there in his name. Sarkhan The Friendly and Well-Adjusted is not the sort of character that sells virtual cards.

Disney’s animated feature, The Black Cauldron, is finally available in the US in a restored version on DVD. For this 25th anniversary edition (as in years from its theatrical release), there isn’t much more than the movie on board but, those of you looking for a darker side of the house of mouse that might be missing from Epic Mickey, this is certainly an interesting movie to check out.

Fantasy Flight Games just released the second deluxe expansion for Invasion, March of the Damned. $30 gets you 155 more cards, expanding the other factions and introducing lizard men and vampires, as well as new card mechanics…

Dear Wizards of the Coast,

With all of the franchises that have had Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) of various sorts, there is a lot of promise to get new interest into older franchises. There’s the Conan, Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer Fantasy, soon-to-be Warhammer 40,000, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons and a whole host of other long running gaming franchises whether they are pay to play, free to play, graphics or text based, so on and so forth.

There is one thing that has yet to get the true MMO-treatment: Magic the Gathering (MTG).