Bend fire and lightning with Avatar's Azula in Magic: The Gathering

The Avatar Awakens in Magic | Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ Debut - YouTube The Avatar Awakens in Magic | Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ Debut - YouTube
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Princess Azula is introduced in a flashback in which she's watching her brother receive his disfiguring scar while pumping her first in the air with glee. But even more tellingly, when her brother and uncle are torn between turning for help to the Earth people who might kill them, or the Fire people who might turn them over to Azula, they immediately settle on the Earth people. Her enemies fear her, but her family fear her more, which makes her a perfect fit for a Magic card with an unpredictable effect.

Azula, Flame of Ember Island

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

This card, Azula, Flame of Ember Island, is a reskin of Diaochan, Artful Beauty, a card originally from the Portal Three Kingdoms set. That set's a rare one, released in Asia, but only available in English in Australia and New Zealand. It's a thematic card to build a deck around, especially a Commander deck—Diaochan, Artful Beauty was even reprinted in Commander's Arsenal back in 2012.

This set's headliner card is a borderless raised foil version of Avatar Aang that's illustrated by series co-creator Bryan Konietzko. The set also includes battle pose cards inspired by the four benders shown in the opening credits, and scene cards that combine to recreate the climax of each of the show's three seasons. My favorite thing about the set though is Sokka's Haiku, a card whose text has the structure of a haiku:

Counter target spell.
Draw a card, then mill three cards.
Untap target land.

Now that's poetry. Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender will be available in Arena from November 18, and on tabletops from November 21.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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