What's this? Two non-video entries back to back?! Afraid so. As much as I would love to get my hands on some sealed booster packs of Innistrad or Invasion, if I did I wouldn't open them! Maybe Innistrad. As it were, after debating among these two sets, I landed on Invasion. The Invasion block was a period where I was throwing down hard on the game again. Playing frequently amid buying booster boxes and foils.

Invasion centered around multi-colored gold cards. At first allied multi-color, but eventually there was a shift towards enemy multi-colors in the final set of the block, Apocalypse. This was done in-part to represent the storyline presented in the Invasion block, which consisted of an evil race — the Phyrexians, a massive artificial army — invading the plane of Dominaria, forcing its inhabitants to work together.

I'm not entirely sure how closely I followed the storyline at the time. There's a chance they have novels based on this period in the Magic timeline. I do know there were many characters I had come to love within the Magic Universe (or Multiverse) like Urza, Gerrard, Karn, and Yawgmoth.

Invasion brought a handful of new mechanics and card design. These included "Kicker" costs, which were additional costs to pay while casting a card, resulting in an additional ability or function of the card activating, the "Domain" ability (before is was known as such) where various effects happened depending on the number of basic land typs the caster controlled, and the introduction to one of my favorite additions to the game — split cards, where two cards were printed on one and the caster choose which to cast when playing the card (Fire // Ice, from Apocalypse, being my favorite)!

Invasion was also the first block released on Magic Online, a digital representation of Magic: The Gathering. I played and collected this set both physically and digitally. Remember I was going in hard! So needless to say, this set and block as a whole has strong nostalgic, sentimental value to me!

I'll wrap up with some of my favorite cards from the set:

Do you currently play Magic: The Gathering? Are you a fan of Invasion? If so, what's your favorite card and/or ability/mechanic from the set? Did you enjoy the storyline that the Invasion block told? If so, do you have a favorite character? Did you (or do you) play Magic Online? If so, what are your thoughts about it?