Gifts for fantasy fans: magic, dragons and more

At Ollivander's in Diagon Alley the narrow boxes are stacked all the way to the ceiling, and the old man says the line that explains half the wizar...

Magic does surprisingly little against British drizzle when you are hurrying across the grounds to the greenhouses with your arms full. The rain co...

Four students with far too much talent and far too little respect for the school rules once squeezed every corridor, every staircase and every hidd...

The Hogwarts school uniform means a robe, a crest and above all one thing: a striped tie in the colours of your own house. For many first years the...

Between platform 9 and platform 10 at London King's Cross stands a perfectly ordinary brick pillar. Anyone who takes a run-up through it on 1 Septe...

Potions at Hogwarts is a science all of its own: wrong order, too much heat, and the cauldron boils over while Professor Snape is already standing ...

Frodo does not wear the One Ring on his finger but on a plain chain around his neck, and for good reason. On the finger it turns you invisible and ...

In the Hogwarts common room, nobody spends all evening on homework. Wizard's Chess sits on the shelf, and right next to it Exploding Snap, a card g...

A hobbit only reluctantly leaves his cosy hole, and certainly not without a handkerchief. But when Thorin Oakenshield and his dwarves want to hire ...

After an icy trip to the Shrieking Shack, there's only one way to go in Hogsmeade: straight into the Three Broomsticks, where a frothy Butterbeer a...

In the wizarding world, the post doesn't arrive with a doorbell but on silent wings: Hedwig, Harry Potter's snow-white owl, loves to appear at dusk...

"Turning off the light" – what seems like a simple action to most people was an art form for Albus Dumbledore. With his silver cigar-tip-like inven...

If you flinch at the sound of lightning rather than going on the offensive yourself - then you understand Zenitsu Agatsuma only too well. But behin...

The world and characters that J. R. R. Tolkien created in his Lord of the Rings trilogy are unique in their level of detail. Peter Jackson has brou...

Commander, also known as EDH, is for many the most social format in Magic: The Gathering: 100 cards, one legendary commander and a table full of fr...

In Aetherdrift, the 2025 Magic set, spells aren't cast to rule but to win: drivers from different worlds compete in an insane race across the Multi...

Anyone who has ever fished a valuable card off a kitchen table that was covered in jam a moment ago knows: a trading card game deserves a better st...

Long before Aang learned to master all four elements, Avatar Kuruk of the Water Tribe watched over the balance of the world and hunted dangerous sp...

Every planeswalker has an unmistakable face: Liliana with her glowing violet gaze, Jace under his blue hood, Tezzeret with his shock of white hair....

Every collector knows the moment when a favourite card slips out of the pile, glides under the table and turns up again with a crease. Only one thi...

If you play Commander, you know the problem: a hundred-card deck doesn't fit in a normal deck box, and as soon as the second deck, the dice and the...

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, benders each master one of the four elements, and only the Avatar can control all four. Magic players know the princ...

Trading cards don't just tell their stories through rules text, they tell them above all through their art. In Magic, every expansion gets a world ...

Tournament night with your local gaming group: your deck is in one trouser pocket, your dice are rattling in the other, and your life counter has v...

Sixty cards, fifteen in the sideboard, plus a handful of dice and counters: that is all a classic tournament deck needs. A huge box for a hundred c...

On Ravnica, the city plane of Magic: The Gathering, ten guilds hold sway, each with its own colour pair and its own leader: the law-keepers of the ...

Every collector knows the shoebox under the bed: somewhere in there lies the one card everyone is asking about right now, and of course it's right ...

When Magic brought the first planeswalkers to the table in 2007 with the set Lorwyn, a young mind mage with his hood pulled low over his face insta...

At the Strixhaven academy of magic, you don't simply pick your classes, you end up in one of five colleges. Silverquill swears by the power of word...

Friday night at the game store, Friday Night Magic is on, and between rounds the trading begins. Turn up with a heavy binder under your arm and you...

Every new Magic set is a little adventure: rip open the boosters, sort them, and sooner or later the question lands on the table of where all those...

The rattlesnake this box is named after moves sideways across the desert sand, and its namesake opens exactly the same way: to the side instead of ...

A Commander night at a friend's place is logistically a small house move: everyone brings at least one deck of 100 cards, plus a playmat, dice for ...

Magic: The Gathering reinvents itself several times a year. Every set takes players to a different world, sometimes to a race across the Multiverse...

Magic thrives on its worlds. With Edge of Eternities, the game moved into the vastness of space, to the edge of a star system full of secrets, wher...

In Magic you can put no more than four copies of any card in your deck. The community calls those four a playset, and anyone who builds decks serio...