Paper Magic Aetherdrift's global release falls on February 14, 2025, while for MTG Arena and Magic Online, the set will be available on February 11. The previews started on January 21 and will end just 10 days later on January 31, when the full set will be completely displayed. Aetherdrift will be a standard legal set, and for the first time, Play Boosters Boxes will contain only 30 Play Boosters instead of the usual 36. The official reason for that is that since the release of Karlov Manor, Wizards of the Coast received feedback from both retailers and storeowners asking for smaller boxes to sell faster and easily.

In recent years, magic has undergone profound changes that have inevitably had an effect on card prices. Even a format like Standard is now accessible to very few people because of crazy and increasingly high prices. Approaching paper magic becomes very difficult for many people who might want to give it a try. There is however a very high barrier to entry as spending several hundred euros for one of the best decks of the format is not something affordable for everyone.  That’s why I wanted to focus on the cards currently in the format, giving my perspective on possible deals to buy  before it is too late.  

Standard format is experiencing one of the most varied moments of recent years and there are always surprises. Today we are going to talk about a new entry in the format, namely Esper Aggro, which has managed to get 5 times in a row a score of 5-0 in the Standard League of MTGO.   The Deck

Last 11th of November, we saw some bans/nerfs/buffs concerning the Alchemy format whose aim was definitely to nerf decks like Mono Red Aggro, Boros Aggro, and Grixis Heist. While these tweaks have had the desired effect, as in the case of the two Aggro decks just mentioned, in the case of Grixis Heist, things did not go quite like this. In fact, some of the buffs have had a much greater relevance than the single nerf of Grenzo, Crooked Jailer. Alchemy has therefore undergone a major change that has given the opportunity for new archetypes to emerge. In the last period, there were no control decks and the meta was dominated by Aggro or Midrange decks. Now the aggro decks are struggling more than before and from here I had the idea to build a control list that had the goal of surviving against any other types of aggro. The archetype we will talk about today is, in fact, Esper Control.

Smuggler's Surprise has completely disappeared from the radar of the Standard format for many months now. The card has not been played at all since the rotation. The strength of aggressive decks like Mono Red or Boros Aggro has definitely contributed to pushing this archetype out of the metagame. Today, however, we are not talking about Standard but about Alchemy and the reasons are many: In the format the card pool is small compared to the standard one and strategies of this type (almost comparable to an otk) could benefit greatly from this;

State of Standard Standard currently is experiencing one of the healthiest and brightest moments of the latest years as well as being definitely (and by detachment) the most intriguing and diversified format available on MTG Arena at the moment. The diversity of decks we are seeing in recent months (and more markedly from the release of Duskmourn onwards) is making the format appealing and very balanced.

Magic: The Gathering Foundations will be released on MTG Arena on November 12, 2024, while the paper release date is November 15, 2024. In the previous article we took a look at some of the revealed cards. If you have missed it, you must absolutely retrieve it as it contains general information about the Foundations set as well. In today's article's article we will evaluate other revealed cards. Now the set is fully revealed so we have a clearer idea of what its impact on Standard will be.

Magic: The Gathering Foundations will be released on MTG Arena on November 12, 2024, while the paper release date is November 15, 2024. The spoilers of the set have already started a while ago, and now most of the cards of the set have been revealed. In today's article, we will talk about some of the revealed cards already available on Arena and try to understand if they fit well into the current standard or if their time is now past. In essence, will there be room for these cards in standard in the coming months? What is Foundations? Before we start talking about cards, I think it's worth mentioning what Foundations represents and will represent for Magic players.