Pauper: Reprint Crisis Could End the Format's Downshifts

A recent discussion on social media about the absence of reprints for the rare land cycle from Battlebond shone a spotlight on a Magic change overshadowed by the overload of announcements the card game made during the second half of 2025: in September, Mark Rosewater confirmed on Blogatog that Masters Sets would be discontinued indefinitely.

The reason was player feedback: if Magic was releasing too many sets, something needed to be cut. But just look at the 2026 calendar to see that's not exactly the whole story — Magic will release seven sets. Of those, four are from the Universes Beyond series.

It's the same number of expansions as 2025 with Innistrad Remastered. It feels like Masters Sets were cut because there was no room left for them when the calendar was already too crowded. The decision may have also been influenced by Bank of America's 2022 claims accusing Hasbro of reprinting too many cards in Magic and diluting the brand's long-term value.

The absence of reprint sets is a scale that hurts players far more than the company: every Masters or Remastered expansion was an opportunity to ease the market and expand the availability of cards with high-demand and low supply — the origin of these sets came from Modern Masters, aiming to reprint staples like Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant and lower the format's entry barrier.

Without this product line, players depend on Commander decks and special slots from main sets for important reprints, but there's one format where the absence of these sets is even more alarming: Pauper lost its main source of downshifts.

Masters Sets fulfilled, for over a decade, the role of reprinting important cards from eternal formats without them having to go through a new Standard season. With them out of the picture, this role needs to be filled by other products — and the remaining options are quite limited.

Commander precons are, today, Magic's biggest source of reprints. They work well for this, but the selection is restricted to what makes thematic sense within the deck, and that doesn't always coincide with what formats need.

Additionally, these products follow a logic where the EV (expected value of the product card-by-card when opened) can't be too high. If it is, they'll never reach the hands of the target audience.

Special Guest slots within Standard sets exist, but the pull rate is so low that a reprint doesn't significantly change market availability — if you need four copies of a card, going after the Special Guest version is, in practice, more effort than finding a store selling a set of them from Secret Lair.

There are also precedents for thematic slots like Strixhaven's Mystical Archives or Outlaws of Thunder Junction's Breaking News. These are successful reprints with much more generous pull rates than Special Guests, but all the cards are reprinted as uncommons, rares, and mythics — even when they were originally commons.

All of this converges into a situation where cards that don't naturally fit into Standard products are left without a clear path to reach players' hands. The Battlebond lands, which sparked the discussion, are the most obvious example: the cycle only works in multiplayer formats and, to this day, has never appeared in a Commander precon. In the absence of another "Commander Masters" or similar product, there's no other space for reprinting them except through a product disconnected from the draft environment, like a Secret Lair.

For Pauper, this situation means fewer cards entering the format. After all, Masters Sets were, for years, the main vehicle for reprints and downshifts.

Cast Down came from Double Masters, Monastery Swiftspear came out in Double Masters 2022 and redefined the format's concept of speed to the point of being banned months later, Augur of Bolas and Burning-Tree Emissary were released as commons in Modern Masters 2017. We also got Seeker of the Way in Iconic Masters and Battle Screech in Vintage Masters, plus Cryptic Serpent and the now-banned All That Glitters in Commander Masters — all changed the Metagame in one way or another.

There was also the hype factor and speculation around Pauper's power level. Each announcement of a new Masters Set created expectations in the community about the possibilities of important downshifts for the format, keeping players engaged with the release under the expectation of how they'd be surprised this time.

No one would dare dream that Monastery Swiftspear, a pillar of Modern and Pioneer red decks to this day, would become a common. Other more modest reprints, like Augur of Bolas, became unexpected staples, and the excitement around each old card coming out in a common slot created dozens of speculations and expectations about how they could impact Pauper's Metagame.

This culture was a special trait of the format and gave the sense that it evolved with each reprint set. Discussions around whether a card was acceptable or not to give a necessary push to a declining archetype or to establish a new strategy were part of the appeal of seeing the next reprint set announcement.

In their absence, the format loses the potential to add thousands of cards. Expansions entering Standard are designed with other priorities and Limited experiences that rarely make room for powerful reprints in common slots. Commander decks, the main source of reprints today, always use each card's original rarity.

This doesn't mean downshifts will stop happening. They will, but with much less frequency and in a much less predictable way. Consider a card that's been on my personal wishlist for years, Psychatog.

It's unlikely Psychatog will enter Standard anytime soon if we consider Magic's current game design. Beyond that, its abilities revolve around mechanics with little creative space to fit into a Commander preconstructed deck. Even if it did, it would be an uncommon card.

That leaves two possibilities: for some reason, Wizards makes the unprecedented decision to create common special slots in sets like Secrets of Strixhaven, or the other window that remains open for reprints and downshifts in Magic — Horizons Sets.

Historically, Modern Horizons delivered a considerable volume of new, impactful commons. The problem is that the relationship between Pauper and Horizons sets is notably toxic.

The three Modern Horizons sets released so far created broken Metagames in the format. Arcum's Astrolabe, Chatterstorm, Galvanic Relay, the Bridges, Cranial Ram — banned before it was released — and Basking Broodscale all came from a Modern Horizons set and completely unbalanced the competitive scene, culminating in one or more bannings.

The expectation for a Modern Horizons IV exists. In fact, the arrival of another set in this series is almost a certainty, but their track record hasn't been as reliable when it comes to changing Pauper for the better.

Like almost every decision involving Magic in recent years, there's some ambiguity in this absence, and it's worth considering how they affect the format and the game in different ways.

On one hand, without regular reprints, Pauper's Metagame stays stable for longer. Without major waves of downshifts, the decks that exist today will continue being viable options for a good while, and in a format that was so transformed by Modern Horizons and Commander Legends recently, a period of stability might be the necessary security in the midst of an overall more turbulent Magic.

On the other hand, this same stability can become stagnation and disinterest. Pauper doesn't have a robust card pool from each new expansion like Modern or Legacy — it depends on the arrival of new commons powerful enough to create new archetypes and revitalize strategies that had fallen off the radar.

If the Metagame stays still for too long without an external trigger, the tendency is for players to feel there are no more discoveries to make, and as proven by Pioneer, a Metagame stagnant for too long drives people away from the format. Pauper isn't immune to running the same risk.

Without this path for new downshifts to arrive, the expectations and possibilities they brought to the format ceased to exist, and the format became dependent on a new Standard set offering something relevant to the Metagame — a task the last two releases failed to provide.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!