Matt Bassil

Matt Bassil covers trading card games and tabletop strategy for Wargamer, with a particular focus on Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon cards. He is a staff writer on the masthead and has been part of the team since May 2021. His work treats card games as living ecosystems, following how new sets, crossover products, and player behavior reshape both the metagame and the value of individual cards. Alongside trading card coverage, he writes about board games, miniatures, and PC strategy titles, often where they intersect with complex systems and long-form campaigns. He also brings experience from earlier games writing for outlets including RPS, Dicebreaker, and Syfy Wire, and a year editing photography articles for Canon.

Magic: The Gathering prices, products, and Secret Lair stories

Bassil’s most distinctive strand of coverage follows the financial and product side of Magic: The Gathering, especially sudden price movements and limited-run releases. He reports on cards that spike dramatically in value, such as a sphinx card that rose by around 1,100% after Reality Fracture spoilers, explaining the in-game interactions and market dynamics that sit behind the jump. He also tracks commander staples reacting to pop culture crossovers, including a snake commander whose price climbs after a new Marvel villain appears, linking card performance to broader entertainment trends.

He regularly covers Secret Lair drops and special sets, breaking down what is in each release, how much it costs, and what that means for collectors and players, as seen in his Fallout Rad Superdrop and Fallout Secret Lair pricing stories. When Wizards of the Coast missteps, he documents the impact clearly, from a Zeta Set sale the company itself calls “a disaster” to instances where large numbers of Secret Lair cards are destroyed, highlighting communication issues, supply problems, and the effect on buyers.

Human interest pieces, such as the account of Magic’s head designer becoming a card artist for a token fee, round out this beat by showing the personalities behind the products he covers.

Commander deckbuilding, combos, and evergreen guides

Beyond news on card prices and products, Bassil writes practical pieces for Commander players, focusing on deckbuilding, preconstructed decks, and notable combos. His Commander precon guides lay out the best preconstructed decks available in a given year, explaining what each offers, what kind of player it suits, and how they might be upgraded.

He digs into specific interactions as well, such as an infinite combo built around Reality Fracture and dragons, using clear examples to show how the sequence works in play.

Across these articles he combines rules knowledge with a consumer lens, weighing whether particular decks, reprints, or synergies are worth the money and effort for different types of Magic players. This strand of work reflects the “resident trading card games obsessive” and “deck-builder” descriptors attached to his role, with articles that move smoothly between theory, metagame context, and practical recommendations.

Pokémon cards and trading card spending habits

Bassil extends his trading card reporting to Pokémon, with a strong focus on how collectors and fans spend on new products. In coverage of the Pokémon Trading Card Game 30th Celebration, he highlights how much money fans are committing to pre-orders, drawing attention to the scale of pre-sales and the risks of overcommitting to speculative purchases. His Pokémon pieces approach the game as both a nostalgic hobby and a market, looking at how anniversary sets and special releases shape demand and behavior rather than only listing card details.

Taken together with his Magic price spike and Secret Lair reporting, these articles show a coherent interest in the economics of trading card games and the pressures they place on dedicated players.

Board games, adaptations, and strategy curiosities

While trading card games are his core beat, Bassil also writes about board games and strategy titles, often picking projects with demanding systems or distinctive themes.

His review of the Darkest Dungeon board game focuses on tense dungeon dives and the stress-driven design that made the original digital game stand out, assessing how well that experience translates to the tabletop format. He covers announcements like the board game adaptation of roguelike city-builder Against the Storm, outlining how its mechanics and atmosphere might carry over into a boxed game and what that means for existing fans. On PC, he writes about sprawling strategy experiences such as a Total War: Warhammer 3 campaign left entirely to the AI for hundreds of turns, using these pieces to explore how complex simulations behave when left uncontrolled.

Broader roundups, like his guide to the best 4X games on PC, show an interest in grand strategy and long-form planning, complementing his trading card work with coverage of other systems-heavy games. Across these stories he draws on his own engagement with Paradox-style grand strategy titles and miniature painting, bringing a consistent eye for depth, replayability, and rules-driven drama to non-card-game coverage.