Mark Rosewater, lead designer at Wizards of the Coast, announced sweeping changes to the block structure and rotation schedule of Magic: The Gathering.
Hot on the heals of launching the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the Coast announced some big news for their other major property, Magic: The Gathering. Lead designer Mark Rosewater detailed in a long post how the block structure and rotation of Magic’s most popular format, Standard, are going to be changing over the coming year.
Fair warning, if you’re more of a kitchen table or casual player not invested in competitive Magic, this is largely going to be meaningless at best and confusing at worst.
The announcements starts off by identifying some of the lingering issues that have been plaguing Magic’s structure recently. Namely, the third set of each block has been wearing out its welcome and likewise the core set has consistently had an identity crisis. The third set just wasn’t holding interest since most of the good design ideas were getting eaten up in the first two sets, and core set’s yearly release of a set designed for new players was simply at odds with itself. If core sets were designed for new players then why were they released every year? When these are coupled with a desire to make the Standard metagame more dynamics, the change became obvious that something needed to change.
The long and short of it is that core set is going away and blocks will be restructured to only be two sets. This is also going to change how the Standard format rotates. Currently, when the new Fall set comes out, the whole of the previous block and core set rotated out. Now it will rotate more quickly, as each first set of a new block will usher out the previous block. The goal is to have more tightly designed blocks, that don’t wear out their welcome, with the higher concentrated designs and faster turn over contributing to a more dynamic Standard metagame.
Obviously this is going to have a bunch of implications on Magic: The Gathering which we’ll be covering later today on Hexproof.
Soure: Wizards of the Coast
