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Wizards of the Coast announced during MagicCon Vegas that the legality of cards from future releases of the Universes Beyond series will be expanded to all formats, therefore passing through Standard and Pioneer and being part of rotation.
On its official website, the company explained that this decision aims to bring new players to the competitive scene while reducing the problems that expansions inserted directly into Modern have caused, in addition to giving more creative freedom to its design team. The company also reiterates that Final Fantasy and Spider Man were made with this decision in mind.
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Check out the full announcement below:
We recently announced our 2025 release calendar, and it features a whopping three Universes Beyond sets to go along with three in-world Magic sets.
Yikes!, you may be thinking, That's too many direct-to-Modern sets …!
You would be correct, if that's what we were doing. To avoid that problem—as well as solve a couple others—we changed how we design Universes Beyond sets, making them appropriate for all our major Constructed formats. So, starting in 2025, new Universes Beyond booster sets will be legal in all Constructed formats, just like what you'd consider "normal" Magic sets like Bloomburrow. That's six new booster sets in 2025, all with identical legality.
Why Bring Universes Beyond to All Formats?
We achieve several goals with this change:
Expounding on these points further:
We know that Universes Beyond has brought many new players into the game by bringing their favorite stories and characters to life through Magic. While the Commander format does a good job of providing a soft landing spot for those who enjoy social play (albeit couched in a massive card pool), any players with an itch to try 60-card Constructed Magic with their new cards would have to go right to Modern—with over 20 years of card sets—or Legacy, which is even bigger. Standard and, to a slightly lesser degree, Pioneer are much friendlier formats to decks built from mostly a single set, and the new player is both more likely to see other players playing cards of "their" set and to see other cards and mechanics that could augment their strategy.
With Modern Horizons 3 still fresh in veteran players' minds, it's worth stating that our ideal rollout for straight-to-Modern content is just that: the occasional Modern Horizons set. Trying to make many such sets is difficult, and the landing strip is narrow, as you can see by the format dominance of The One Ring from The Lords of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ side by side with the near-complete lack of impact in the format from Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin's Creed® cards. So, from now on, Universes Beyond sets will go through the more typical lifecycle of booster sets, with a lot of Limited play at release and contributions to each Constructed format in ratios appropriate to the size of the format, thus reducing the churn of the larger nonrotating formats.
As for the design teams here at Wizards, these are exactly the kinds of products we are staffed to produce well. We get to apply our normal power-level heuristics and leverage our Future Future League for Constructed testing. The cool part about doing this right after our switch to three-year Standard is that the format becomes large enough now that players will have a lot of freedom about what cards and what styles of decks appeal to them.
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The initial shock of Universes Beyond is well behind us at this point. I like to think the care we've put into designing these sets is evident and that playing with them has proven fun for fans of both Magic and our partners alike. For those reasons, I'm pleased to fully treat them like "real" Magic sets going forward and letting them be fun for everyone, everywhere.
Details and Clarifications
This change is purely forward facing and pertains to sets releasing in 2025 and later. The format legality of existing sets, such as The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth and Assassin's Creed, is not changing.
This change was anticipated, and all products were developed with these targets in mind.
Although the main content of these booster releases will be legal in all formats, they will contain products (like Commander decks) and cards (like Special Guests) that are not part of the main sets and will be Eternal legal (i.e., legal only in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage for new Commander and/or Jumpstart content) or wherever the cards are otherwise legal (for reprint content). This matches the structure of recent sets like Duskmourn: House of Horror and Bloomburrow.
Standard rotation in 2025 will occur with the release of Edge of Eternities.
Standard Rotation Changes in 2027
Allow me to clarify one other recent announcement that is unrelated to Universes Beyond. While 2025 Standard rotation will happen at the expected time as mentioned above, we've recently stated that we'll be moving the time of the annual Standard rotation to coincide with the first set of the calendar year starting in 2027. There will be no rotation in 2026 as we gear up for this change. Standard will continue to encompass three years' worth of sets in this new model.
The impetus for this change is purely for ease of communication. For example, as of the first release of 2027, card sets released in 2025, 2026, and 2027 will be legal in Standard, and that pattern continues seamlessly into the future. The days of the "large fall set" being the reset point for the format are behind us; that pattern began back in 1995 as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as we've been releasing similarly sized sets throughout the year for a while now, we've found there's nothing special about the fall. So, we're opting for a more logical system overall. Note that this means Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror will both be legal for slightly shorter than originally anticipated.
Source: DailyMTG
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