Technologies

Someone Help Me — I Also Need These Sonic the Hedgehog Magic: The Gathering Cards

Sega’s superspeedster is getting some genuinely awesome cards in a limited drop next month.

Magic: The Gathering hit a goldmine earlier this month when it released its Final Fantasy set based on one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. Final Fantasy was reportedly the best-selling Magic set before it even released, thanks to extensive preorders. Now Wizards of the Coast is hoping to repeat that success with Secret Lair drops themed around video game icon Sonic the Hedgehog, launching Monday, July 14.

Depending on which century you were born in, you’ll either recognize Sonic as the star of 1991’s Sega Genesis video game Sonic the Hedgehog, or as the star of Paramount Pictures’ Sonic the Hedgehog movies. (Or maybe you know him from Smash Bros. or Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, or any of the countless other places he shows up.) Now he’s joining the storied Magic: The Gathering card game in a year where Magic is aggressively investing in crossovers with other properties.

Those crossovers started years ago with The Walking Dead, which became an official Magic series called Universes Beyond when it released a Secret Lair drop for Stranger Things. We’ve gotten Magic cards for everything from Street Fighter to Lord of the Rings, The Evil Dead, Jurassic Park and even SpongeBob. Lord of the Rings was the first full Universes Beyond set, but it set the table for Final Fantasy last month, and we’re getting full sets for both Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender later this year.

The new Sonic Magic: The Gathering cards are different from the game’s Final Fantasy set because these are Secret Lair products — limited-run drops of a handful of cards, rather than a full set of hundreds of Standard-legal cards. Like many Secret Lair crossover products, they seem aimed at the casual multiplayer Commander format that lets you build decks around your favorite characters and play with a group of friends.

Sonic being a legendary creature with white mana, blue mana and red mana in his color identity, means that a Sonic Commander deck allows you to include his allies Tails, Knuckles and Amy Rose in the deck. Shadow costs red and black mana, which means he doesn’t fit in a Sonic Commander deck, but he would fit in a Dr. Eggman deck.

And, gang, these cards are kinda wild. Whenever Sonic attacks, he puts power-increasing counters on other creatures with flash or haste, which not-so-coincidentally includes all of the aforementioned allies that fit in his deck. And Sonic having the haste ability himself means he can attack the same turn you cast him, virtually guaranteeing one activation. Tails can draw cards when flying vehicles enter — a nice nod to his plane, which first showed up in the late stages of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Knuckles has a lot going on, including the ability to create treasure tokens that can help you cast spells — or just outright win the game if you have enough while he’s on the battlefield.

There’s also some mechanical synergy between these cards and the new Final Fantasy cards. Amy Rose automatically attaches equipment when she attacks and then can buff the power of other creatures, making her a great fit for the Limit Break Commander deck led by Cloud (or Tifa), which cares about equipment and power stats!

Similarly, Dr. Eggman gets to draw cards at the beginning of your end step — if you also control Y’Shtola Rhul, you get an extra end step, allowing you to draw two cards instead of one for the low, low cost of ending your turn.

All of that adds up to mechanically fun Magic cards that feature a lifelong favorite character for me. And it’ll add up financially if I can get my hands on either the foil Sonic: Friends & Foes collection ($40) or the non-foil collection ($30), the cards in which are less likely to warp from the foil treatment.

There are two other Sonic Secret Lair drops announced, including one that focuses on reprinted artifacts like vehicles and equipment and another that rounds up existing cards that synergize with the new cards. Both will be available in $40 foil or $30 non-foil versions. All three Secret Lair sets go on sale Monday, July 14, at noon ET/9 a.m. ET.

When they do, and I cannot stress this enough, you gotta go fast to get ’em.

Technologies

Cloudflare Says Winter Olympics Cybersecurity Is at Risk in Spat With Italian Regulators

But Cloudflare’s global head of policy tells CNET the company is open to an agreement with Italy.

The CEO of the networking company Cloudflare is lashing out at Italy in response to regulatory anti-piracy fines, threatening to withdraw from the country and potentially the 2026 Winter Olympics.

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Italy announced on Jan. 8 that it had issued a fine of 14.2 million euros (approximately $16.5 million) against Cloudflare for failing to block access to pirated content. Soon after that, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince took to X to call out the fines, describing Cloudflare’s decision not to comply as a fight over censorship. Prince said that complying with Italy’s demands under its Piracy Shield policies would affect content globally.

Italy’s Piracy Shield is a program implemented by the country’s telecommunications regulator, AGCOM. In order to cut down on piracy in the country, such as hosting illegal streams of sporting events, the program allows IP holders to report content violations to a rapid-response automated system. However, some have complained that the 30-minute window given is not enough time for ISPs to properly vet complains, and is resulting in legitimate, non-pirated content being blocked as well.

«In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online,» Prince said.

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 9, 2026

In his posts, Prince specifically mentioned the 30-minute timeframe that Italy requires for Cloudflare to disable access to suspected piracy traffic.

«We block pirate streams every time we find one,» he wrote. «We hate them.» But, he said, «we can’t put in place a system where a shadowy cabal can require us to remove GLOBALLY anything they don’t like on the internet within 30 minutes. That’s insane.»

Some of the proponents of Italy’s piracy rules are soccer teams that want to prevent the illegal streaming of their matches.

Prince went on to list steps his company might take, including pulling its cybersecurity service from the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, removing Cloudflare servers from Italian cities and holding off on any plans to invest in the country. Prince also suggested he would get US government leaders involved, tagging Vice President JD Vance in his post. Prince also reposted a message addressed to the Italian prime minister, along with an article about Italy’s actions.

The Winter Olympics, scheduled to take place between Feb. 6 and Feb. 22 at sites across Lombardy and Northeast Italy, are a sensitive subject when it comes to cybersecurity, considering the potential that many may use VPN technology to view broadcasts of the event.

Door is open to an agreement, Cloudflare says

In an interview with CNET, a Cloudflare representative said that while the fine from Italy represents more than the company’s total revenue from the country, Cloudflare is still open to an agreement to avoid saying arrivederci to the country.

«We’re still evaluating, and we’re still open to working something out,» said Alyssa Starzak, Cloudflare’s deputy chief legal officer and global head of policy. «That would be a better solution. The hope is we can have some discussions for a more reasonable result.»

Starzak said the company has posted information and conducted outreach to Italian stakeholders about the ways Cloudflare is working to combat unauthorized streaming. But Italy’s law, she said, leaves no room for negotiation or nuance.

«It’s been very much a ‘You must do what we say’ » situation, she said.

Technologies

Transport Your Dungeons & Dragons Hero Off the Page With This Tabletop Gadget

At CES 2026, I found a couple ways that players and dungeon masters can use tech to upgrade their gameplaying experience.

As I walked around CES 2026, my eyes drifted over a poster awash with fantasy heroes, dastardly monsters and rolling dice — and I failed my saving throw to look away. If you’re a fellow tabletop gaming nerd, you might want to follow this pair of gadgets due out later this year.

Tabletop gaming continues to appeal to players with its deliberately analog gameplay, using miniatures, maps, dice and other physical trinkets to keep the focus on real-world play. The niche has grown in popularity over the decades, and a supporting industry has risen around it, offering third-party materials and accessories to enhance the experience. Digital gadgets and software have been added to this mix in recent years, and a new company, Arcalink, has its own supporting products for the avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

The first of Arcalink’s upcoming tabletop augmentations is a gadget that’s small but mighty. About the size of a film canister, the Arcalink One is a rectangular display around 2 to 3 inches long that’s covered in fantasy decorations. These can be swapped out, with one looking like a doorway in stone ruins and another appearing like a blue wizard’s portal (a third, not present but described to me, would look like a Mimic, the classic D&D monster that appears as a treasure chest to trick adventurers).

The Arcalink One’s screen shows a player’s avatar, and since it was built with the fantasy roleplaying game D&D in mind, animations for popular spells that can be triggered by voice commands. Tabletop RPGs encourage the theater of the mind, with players envisioning their characters through vocal descriptions, but the Arcalink One seems like a neat way for them to accessorize with a digital version of their hero (uploaded in JPG or MP4 file formats) that’s neither essential to play nor large enough to be obtrusive — a totemic treat to take from one game to another, swapping out character portraits by using the paired app.

The basilisk in the room is the price tag: the Arcalink One is expected to cost between $100 and $150, Arcalink founder Lizheng Liu told me. While the company hasn’t hashed out the final numbers, that first number is the device itself, and the high end of the range will bundle more of those clip-on decorations along with it.

Over $100 for an optional device is prohibitive for most tabletop players, but I imagine this would appeal to adventurers with deeper pockets who want a neat little plug-and-play gadget to bring more flair to the game table. Also, let’s not pretend tabletop fans aren’t already spending a good amount of money on accessories, dice and miniatures (looking at you, wargamers).

The company plans to let a select group of supporters start backing the Arcalink One in March or April, with a full Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launching around June.

The second product, Arca Studio, is entirely digital: AI-powered software to help dungeon masters, the thankless gameplay managers who tell the story and give voice to their world’s denizens for their characters to experience. No, it’s not using generative AI to spit out campaign ideas — this AI software records your game sessions and will make it easy to go back and search for characters and plot events while planning ahead of your next game day.

Yes, this is a sort of gaming version of the AI summaries that productivity apps offer when, say, you’ve finished a video chat, but there are a few unique features tailored to tabletop gaming. One makes a word cloud grouping together recurring names and concepts in your campaign recordings to visualize the themes and frequent elements — great for dungeon masters to see which plot lines and adventure types they might be overusing to switch them up.

Arca Studio will launch around May or June and will be a subscription service, though Arcalink hasn’t decided on an expected monthly cost yet. It’s worth pointing out that anything could change in pricing or product features before these two products reach the market — and just like a good tabletop campaign, there might be some last-minute twists that change everything.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Jan. 13

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 13.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It features one of those annoying elements, where the puzzlemakers tie two clues together. In this case, you can’t really solve 4-Across and 7-Across separately, so you need to fill in the other answers to see these answers develop. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.