In their annual State of the Game address, Wizards of the Coast announced some exciting new prospects for MTG: Arena. Two of these announcements were that Arena would be getting two new sets to increase the card pool on the client. Amonkhet was on Arena in Beta, but isn’t in the full release. That all changes in August.
The Historic format on Arena is basically an “eternal” format for the client, that’s exclusive for right now. If you’re confused, Historic is basically all the sets that have been released on Arena, plus some cards that Wizards has decided to add to the format. It’s an exciting format that is going to be the centerpiece of the Mythic Invitational coming up later this summer. Amonkhet Remastered is adding over 300 cards from Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation. We don’t know what cards are going to be excluded, but I imagine that it won’t be too many.
This is great news for the format because it means that we’ll be even closer to a non-rotating special format on Arena. Amonkhet isn’t my favorite block, but it definitely has some powerful cards in it. My next guess would be that they go back to Kaladesh block and stop there for Historic. That would form a solid base for a non-rotating format that Wizards can build for.
Let’s Not Forget About Pioneer Remasters
The other big news is that Wizards of the Coast is bringing Pioneer Remasters to Arena. This is from a previous State of the Game. This could signal a change for the client for the better. We wrote about Pioneer extensively late last year, and earlier this year. The format quickly grew into one of the most popular in Magic. People flocked to play the format in huge numbers. While that format has only been on Magic Online, this news means that it’ll finally be heading to Arena sometime. It’s tentatively scheduled for a quarter four release of this year.
Hopefully it’s more than just an Arena release and sees a paper release as well. I’d love to play Pioneer on the Arena client. For MTG: Arena to survive and thrive, people need more options to play than just standard, draft, and historic. This is a great step in that direction.
Don’t forget that the release of Magic Core Set 2021 and JumpStart are just around the corner, so there’s going to be plenty of new Magic cards to be played.
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Source: Wizards of the Coast
