Wizards of the Coast announced today that Magic: The Gathering Arena will be receiving a new expansion called Jumpstart: Historic Horizons. MTG Arena is the digital platform that allows players to engage with the company's immensely popular tabletop card game, and has become increasingly important to the game's overall development as it hosts many of the property's most prestigious professional tournaments.
Magic: The Gathering's tabletop and Magic: The Gathering Online platforms recently received an expansion called Modern Horizons 2, a set developed with the Modern format in mind that has been well-received for how its reinvigorated several archetypes while spawning others. MTG Arena's non-rotating format of choice at the moment is Historic, which collates cards from Ixalan onwards and has periodically added other powerful cards like the recently suspended Brainstorm to shake things up and make it feel distinct.
Now, Jumpstart: Historic Horizons will go a long way in ensuring Historic feels distinct from any other format in Magic: The Gathering. Arriving on August 12 to MTG Arena, Historic Horizons adds "hundreds of cards from Modern Horizons, Modern Horizons 2, and beyond" and will also bring with it 31 new cards that will introduce mechanics that have never been implemented before. The mechanics are digital exclusives that would be impossible or too clunky to implement into physical play, such as Perpetually, a mechanic that permanently changes the characteristics of a card regardless of where it is.
To celebrate the release of Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, MTG Arena will be hosting events from August 12 to September 9 that allow players to open packets of cards and build decks from them. Like the original Jumpstart, these packets each have distinct themes, and will include cards at varying rates that tie into that theme. Those who don't participate in Historic Horizons events will have the option to craft cards introduced to the format just like they would a normal set release.
It's an interesting move from Wizards of the Coast that raises a few questions about both the MTG Arena platform and the future of the Historic format in general. Pioneer was a fledgling format before tabletop play was suspended because of the pandemic, and Historic's new mechanics being impossible to implement into real-life play suggests that there may be a split in how people experience the game depending on the method they use to engage it. That being said, the mechanics discussed in the announcement are riffs on some of Hearthstone's best card design elements - Conjure as a version of Discover is especially exciting - and adds another layer of strategy to the already complex Magic: The Gathering.
Ultimately, it's no surprise to see Wizards of the Coast focusing heavily on Historic after MTG Arena has enjoyed so much player engagement over the last year. That it's now offering exclusive mechanics does suggest there may be further splintering between the digital and physical methods of playing Magic: The Gathering, but for now, it's an exciting event that immediately establishes an identity for Historic that the format has perhaps been lacking with its mishmash of Standard, Modern, and Legacy cards thus far.
Jumpstart: Historic Horizons releases digitally on August 12 exclusively on MTG Arena.
https://ift.tt/3zEVRGU
July 27, 2021 at 12:30AM
