Welcome Magic lovers!
A new era of Magic: the Gathering is dawning, as some absolutely planes-shattering bombshells were dropped by Wizards of the Coast during the Magic World Championships that just concluded in Las Vegas last week. It's currently all the Magic community is talking about, so today let's cover exactly which changes are coming down the pipe and how they will affect the competitive landscape going forward.
Six Standard-legal Sets a Year
The biggest news by far was the announcement that starting in 2025, there will be six full sets printed and released into the Standard format each year, with one dropping approximately every two months. By extension, these cards will of course also be legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage, as well as all the non-sanctioned formats such as Pauper and Commander in paper Magic, plus digital formats like Historic, Timeless, etc. on Magic Arena. This doesn't even include the new Foundations set, which will be legal for at least five years in Standard, or any Pioneer Masters or Modern Horizons sets that are in the works.
Suffice it to say, the community is mostly aghast at the cadence of releases. The move to release this many sets so quickly after one another will certainly place a much larger financial burden on competitive players of all stripes, as keeping up with the latest innovations and powerhouse cards from each new set every couple of months is going to add up very quickly. On Magic Arena, it's going to be just as costly, as rare and mythic wildcards are already at a premium for most constructed players.
To put this change into perspective, the old, two-year Standard rotation had four large sets per year and had a card pool of approximately twenty-four hundred cards. The previous Standard format, which rotated at the beginning of September with the release of Bloomburrow, consisted of more than thirty-five hundred cards. The current Standard format has about twenty-six hundred cards in it, but we're only two sets into the current rotation. Once we get to the third year of rotation, with six, large, two-hundred-and-sixty-card sets, plus the three-hundred-and-fifty-card Foundations set, the Standard format we're currently in will contain over five thousand cards.
That's a massive change to sanctioned, competitive Magic's smallest format, since, as we know, the power level of any given format is directly proportional to the size of its card pool. This is going to turbocharge Standard, which, in terms of deck strength, will bring it much closer to Pioneer, a format already dominated by cards printed in the last few years. It almost begs the question, why have Pioneer at all?
Another natural byproduct of significantly increasing the volume of Standard-legal sets produced each year is that the quality of the sets will inevitably suffer. Most sanctioned, competitive formats are balanced on a knife's edge; one too many powerful enablers, or perhaps just one legendary creature destined for Commander that has been pushed too far, and suddenly the whole format becomes warped, which typically leads to bans and deep dissatisfaction among players.
What will happen when sets are being designed, researched, produced, and released at a much higher clip? Will Wizards of the Coast commit the appropriate time and resources to testing and tweaking each and every one to ensure they don't upset the delicate balance of the sanctioned competitive formats? Many find that difficult to believe, while many others argue (rightly so) that Wizards of the Coast often fails to do a sufficient job balancing things with the current set release cadence, and pushing additional sets out the door is almost certainly going to lead to further degradation in design and testing. Ultimately, many fear this will lead to an increasing number of bans and format instability, especially in a small format like Standard.
No matter how one looks at it, there isn't much to be positive about regarding this change, unless you're a Hasbro shareholder.
Universes Beyond Sets Are Now Standard Legal
Going hand-in-hand with the previous announcement of six, full sets a year being released into Standard was the news that fully half of those annual sets will be from the various upcoming Universes Beyond intellectual properties being developed, including Final Fantasy and Marvel's Spider-Man, in addition to an as-yet unannounced IP that will all release next year.
That's right, the wild and wacky cards we previously saw released only in Secret Lairs and Commander pre-constructed decks will now be legal in all the sanctioned, competitive formats, including Standard.
While many players are rejoicing at the news that their beloved characters and locations from outside the Magic: the Gathering universe will now be available to be collected and played with in any format they wish, many others are lamenting the final, labored breaths of Magic's very soul as it finally fades away completely, to be usurped and subsumed by people and places wholly alien to the game. It turns out the Eldrazi weren't the biggest existential threat to the multiverse after all.
While Universes Beyond cards may simply seem like mostly a cosmetic alteration, since the rules and framework surrounding the cards themselves and the way the game is played won't change much even as the identity of Magic evolves and mutates into an amalgamation of different intellectual properties, there will almost certainly be an impact felt at the competitive constructed level due to an expected increase in the power level of these sets.
For example, when dealing with external intellectual properties, it will almost certainly be a requirement for Wizards of the Coast to push the power level of the flagship characters of said properties in order to convey an appropriate sense of gravitas and strength. Ergo, the namesake card of a set such as Spider-Man, for example, will almost certainly see its power level pushed to dangerous levels, and perhaps beyond. We saw this happen with Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth and the creation of The One Ring, which immediately became the single, most played card in the Modern format, a title which it retains to this very day.
Does anyone really believe that iconic characters like Cloud Strife or Wolverine won't be pushed to the breaking point? When one considers that there will be three full Universes Beyond sets released into Standard each year, all containing flagship characters that demand a level of power commensurate with their status in the respective universes from which they hail, it's not difficult to imagine a sanctioned format overrun with dangerously pushed cards. The inevitable next question must be: will Wizards of the Coast be willing to ban a namesake card like Iron Man or Captain America if it becomes apparent that they're badly warping the format?
Will the joy at being able to play with cards from another IP that one loves be overshadowed by the devastating impact they have on sanctioned Magic? Only time will tell.
Format Rotation and Rules Changes
Another interesting bit of news was a change to the regular Standard rotation, which will coincide with the start of the calendar year beginning in January 2027. This seems like a fine change, though it will mean that between January and whenever the first set of the year drops, there will be a lull where rotation has occurred but a new set hasn't yet been released. We'll see how this plays out, but overall, it won't be a massive difference.
The last change WOTC made was to the rules regarding the assigning of combat damage to multiple blockers. Currently, when playing a game of Magic where one player assigns multiple blockers to stop an opposing attacker, the attacking player must choose the order in which the blocking creatures will take damage. Then, once getting to the damage step, damage will be assigned to the first blocker, then the second, and so on until there is no more damage to assign or all the blocking creatures have taken lethal damage.
Beginning with the release of Foundations this month, the damage assignment order will be abolished, and damage from an attacking creature will be distributed by the attacking player as they choose. To illustrate this new rule with an example, let's say that I attack my opponent with a 5/5 creature and they block with a 3/3 and a 4/4. Previously, I would have to choose which creature I want to assign damage to first, then second. I would choose the 4/4 as the first blocker and the 3/3 as the second, then priority would pass back to my opponent before we go to the damage step. Now that my opponent knows which creature I'm going to hit first, they can then play a Giant Growth on the 4/4, saving both it and the 3/3, as my 5/5 wouldn't deal enough damage to get through the suddenly gargantuan first blocker.
With the new rules in place, my opponent would double-block with the 4/4 and 3/3, and priority would pass to them. They would then play their Giant Growth on the 4/4, however, rather than be forced to assign damage to the now-pumped-up 4/4, followed by the 3/3, I can now assign damage how I wish, and would put it all into the 3/3 instead. Alternatively, I could assign part of the damage to the 4/4 and part of it to the 3/3 in order to play a direct damage spell and kill both. In short, the power of deciding where and how much damage to assign is now solely in the hands of the attacking player, making it much more difficult for the defending player to come out on top in combat.
This is a mostly welcome rules change, as the assigning of blockers and damage was needlessly confusing, especially for new players. This led to a lot of feel-bad moments for players who felt like they were getting 'rules lawyered' out of the game sometimes.
While not an earth-shattering change to the power dynamics in a given game of Magic, this change does put more power in the hands of the attacker, and is another small nudge toward giving the aggressor the upper hand. Attacking is less risky than it used to be, making aggressive creatures and the decks built around them a bit more potent.
This will be felt most keenly in Limited Magic, like draft and sealed, where creatures tend to butt up against one another far more frequently, since decks contain far less instant-speed removal and therefore players are much more willing to double-block. Limited is also where combat tricks are much more prevalent, and often the blocking order could be turned to the advantage of an astute defending player.
Conclusion
Well, that's quite a few changes announced in a very short time, and much of the Magic: the Gathering community is still reeling from the initial shock of hearing it. As players begin to speculate and break down exactly what sort of impact these changes will have on competitive sanctioned tournaments, up to and including Pro Tours and World Championships, it's making more than a few of us uneasy.
As someone who has played this incredible game for over thirty years, I've experienced several watershed moments when the community cried out that the sky was falling and that this was a death knell for Magic. From the release of Chronicles and subsequent establishment of the reserved list, all the way up to the release of the infamous Magic 30 set, there have been many crises of faith for the Magic community. I often look at the state of contemporary, competitive Magic and increasingly feel like we're riding on a minecart with no brakes, unable to steer, careening at breakneck speed toward an uncertain future. There's so much being added to the game every day, with every announcement seeming to pile on even more, that it's becoming increasingly hard to believe the people at the helm are capable of wresting control of the ship from the forces of capitalism that are propelling it forward with such velocity.
Will six or more sets a year finally be the straw that breaks the camel's back? For many of the players I'm hearing from, it seems like the answer is yes.
