We're one month away from Aetherdrift, the first Standard-legal set of 2025, which will be released everywhere starting February 14. Even though the spoiler season hasn’t started yet (we only know four cards at the moment), we can already take a first look at what awaits us: where the set is located, what the plot is, who the characters are, and what the ten color pairs are based on. So, let's dive right in! Aetherdrift Storyline

These days we're enjoying the latest newcomer, Pioneer Masters, which added nearly 400 cards to MTG Arena and finally brought competitive Explorer to the same level as Pioneer. As we dig deeper into the set, however, we are increasingly noticing cards that were missing and that we expected to be there. It’s true; fortunately, they are no longer key pieces for the best decks that we can now safely netdeck, but often they are still iconic cards that have seen play in the past and that many would like to see on the platform. From the perhaps hundreds of missing cards, I have selected some of the most requested and those I believe are the most important in order to improve variance and give birth to or strengthen new archetypes.

Anticipated since the beginning of the year, Pioneer Masters has finally landed on MTG Arena, and it's now possible to overlap the Explorer and Pioneer formats from a highly competitive perspective. Yes, because this set did not bring all the missing cards, which would have been too many, but a good part of them, prioritizing all those present in the most competitive lists, so as to make the transition from paper to digital possible without having to give up anything. From this point of view, Explorer has therefore reached the Pioneer, also filling the last holes of the missing cards, but above all by unlocking the decklists that until yesterday were not buildable on MTG Arena due to the lack of one or more key pieces for the archetype.

Naya Convoke was definitely one of the most dominant decks in Alchemy Best-of-One last season, which ended not too many months ago with the arrival of Bloomburrow! This date, in fact, marked the rotation of the format the beginning of a new metagame, where Convoke could no longer be present, having lost too many important cards to remain competitive. Aside from some potentially replaceable 1-drops, the biggest losses were definitely Resolute Reinforcements and Knight-Errant of Eos, along with most of the untapped lands: BRO's painlands and ONE's fastlands, which made the mana base solid and aggressive, despite the Naya tricolor.

I know, it's been longer than expected since I last talked to you about our beloved Goblins, but, despite having a couple of updated brews, I preferred to wait for the arrival of Foundations for the possibility that they would add new ones... And so it was! On top of that, Masters has been confirmed for next month, so there’s a lot going on for Goblins as it becomes buildable in more and more versions! An example of this is the one we are about to see today, which wasn't among those planned and which I put together just a few days ago, being impressed by one card in particular during the Foundations spoilers.

Now that Magic: The Gathering Foundations is fully revealed, we can begin to look at limited, getting familiar with the cards and focusing on the color pairs and what they have in store for us. The paper prerelease will be playable starting this Friday, November 8th, while the digital prerelease on MTG Arena will be available as soon as the new set is imported, scheduled for November 12th. The first thing you need to know to understand the Foundations limited is that this set will exceptionally be legal in Standard for at least the next 5 years, and this obviously affects the quality of the cards. It can't be too high to avoid them monopolizing the format and making it stagnant for years.

While the Foundations spoiler is still ongoing (even though it's almost over), there is another one that has already ended, or rather never started, because Foundations Jumpstart (J25) was revealed in its entirety from the very first moment, without any spoiler session. This is because it's not actually a Magic set but rather an appendix to Foundations, which is the main set and to which all the hype is dedicated, being legal in Standard and with a higher concentration of relevant cards. Jumpstart, in fact, will not be legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern but will be playable only in Legacy and Vintage on paper and in Historic and Timeless on MTG Arena.

Last week Alchemy: Duskmourn arrived on MTG Arena and we tried to predict which cards would be the best and have the highest chance of seeing competitive play. Although it's still been a short time, today we already have some initial feedback on those that have actually been included in the decks, since obviously many are trying them and several lists have already been published with a fair amount of success in the ranked ladder of the format. Will the cards that we rated as the best prove to be up to expectations? Let's find out right away, analyzing the strongest and most interesting decks that contain the new cards from Alchemy: Duskmourn!