MTG Foundations monetizes decades-old Magic: The Gathering on-ramps
The free thing was good, but what if it cost money?
Magic: The Gathering’s Modern Horizons 3 released on June 14th, a little over a month ago at the time of writing this. Despite the fact that this is a premium set, we started getting spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Universes Beyond just four days later, on June 18th. You might think that doesn’t give the set a chance to breathe, and you’d be 100% right. But guess what? Even though the Assassin’s Creed set had yet to release, Wizards of the Coast was already serving us spoilers for not just August’s Bloomburrow and October’s Duskmourn, but a brand-new one coming in November called MTG Foundations.
Good gravy, there’s no way this barrage of cards can continue right? Wizards of the Coast is human-centipeding its own sets at this point, with no end or beginning to any of it—just a constant slew of hype and excitement they expect us all to gobble down with no break. People need to breathe when they eat, and the exhaustion from just trying to keep on top of everything that MTG brings out these days is simply never going away.
Anyway.
MTG Foundations is a brand-new concept that brings Core Sets back into MTG and makes them Standard-legal for five years. Actually, the Tweet states that the set will be legal through “at least 2029,” which is really interesting phrasing. Does that mean they could choose to extend the window of legal playability if they wanted to? That’s a fun little play space for spicing up MTG’s non-Commander formats, but then why not just make it the actual foundation of Standard forever? The idea that someone could pick this set up, craft a competent and semi-competitive deck with it, get burned out from MTG for a few years, and then come back to the same deck is an amazing concept.
