Magic: The Gathering, one of the most popular tabletop games out there, celebrated its 30th anniversary last Saturday. With this, fans of the trading card game got a major look into the game’s next three years of design. This information mostly covered sets going into 2025, but explored a few concepts for 2026.
Magic: The Gathering Goes (Universes) Beyond
To begin, Wizards of the Coast gave players a look at the Universes Beyond initiative for Magic for the foreseeable future. After the great acclaim around Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth, it seems that Universes Beyond releases will only become more and more the norm. Licensed properties such as Jurassic World, Final Fantasy, and Assassin’s Creed all feature in 2025. Additionally, the Fallout series of video games will have four Commander decks based around various wasteland factions. While we can’t share an image of the Fallout release, we know it will come out in March of next year.
Topping these Universes Beyond releases off is a tie-in similar to the Transformers tie-in for The Brothers’ War. Lost Caverns of Ixalan will feature cards in Set and Collector Boosters that feature Jurassic World-licensed cards. Whether this will give us cards like Dr. Ian Malcolm or John Hammond remains to be seen, but you can bet there’ll be many Dinosaur creatures included. Lost Caverns of Ixalan releases near the end of this year.
Magic‘s Standard-legal Sets
Wizards of the Coast also gave us information about Standard-legal sets for the next few years. Most of this info pertains to 2024, but some codenamed sets and their concepts are also now public knowledge.
In Q1 of 2024, Magic: The Gathering will release Murders at Karlov Manor, a set based in Ravnica as a whodunnit-style mystery. The guilds of the plane will take a back seat to the events of this set. Furthermore, a special spin-off to the set will release; called Ravnica: Clue Edition, it is a new way to play Magic than a way to play Clue.
In Q2 of the same year, we will be getting Outlaws of Thunder Junction, a set based on the all-American mythos of the Wild West. Whether this set includes certain tropes is unclear. Since this is a real-world mythos-inspired set, however, it’s likely that Wizards of the Coast got a culturally-sensitive team to advise on it. In the meantime, the featured image of this article shows key art from the set, depicting a few characters in silhouette, and one character who is not. However, that last character looks pretty tricky to make out properly.
In Q3, we get a set called Bloomburrow, which is being touted as a set devoid of humanoids, setting the stage for only anthropomorphized forest creatures. This includes Rats, Squirrels, Frogs, and Rabbits, but it is probable that quite a few other creature types will feature here. Many have already noted the similarities to the Redwall book series with this set.
In Q4, we return to a sort-of murder-house aesthetic with Duskmourn, a set taking place in an expansive mansion. This set will feature modern horror tropes and will probably be distinct enough from the gothic horror of Innistrad in this way to still appeal to fans of that setting.
Supplemental Releases For Magic: The Gathering
Before we look at the concepts for 2025 onward, let’s go over the supplemental releases for Magic: The Gathering in the next year. In 2024 we get a new Horizons-level set in Modern Horizons III, as well as two Remastered sets in Ravnica Remastered and Innistrad Remastered.
Ravnica Remastered will release at the top of 2024 and feature cards from along the entire setting of one of Magic‘s most popular settings. There will be retro-frame cards as shown in the likes of Hallowed Fountain and Krenko, Mob Boss. We don’t know a ton beyond that about this release, nor with Innistrad Remastered (which comes out at the start of 2025), but that’s a good start regardless.
But there’s more: Modern Horizons III releases at some point in 2024, breathing even more life into the Modern format as well as others. Featuring some double-faced cards, Planeswalkers, and a few fan-favorite characters as well, Modern Horizons III is sure to be a hit when it comes out.
The Conceptual Future Of Magic: The Gathering
Finally, Wizards of the Coast treated fans to some concepts and designs from their 2025 releases for Magic. These things are all fairly subject to change and are also only using codenames for now, but it’s clear that something might come of at least a few of these ideas.
“Tennis”, the codename for the Q1 2025 set, explores a “death race” theme as figures conduct a race across the Multiverse via the Omenpaths. The Omenpaths are rifts in the Multiverse that connect planes of existence to each other, a side-effect of the multiversal Phyrexian War.
After Q1, the time frame of releases gets wonky, but in order of announcements, the following themes are also included:
- “Ultimate”, a return to the setting of Tarkir, based on both the Khans and Dragons of the setting
- “Volleyball”, an immersive science-fiction styled “space opera” in a setting new to the game
- “Wrestling”, a much-anticipated return to Lorwyn, a setting based on the folklore of the British Isles
- “Yachting”, a return to Strixhaven, the academy on the plane of Arcavios which provided its name to the original setting’s expansion
- “Ziplining”, the conclusion of the Omenpaths story arc, which will have spanned three years by its end. This set will release in 2026.
Magic: The Gathering‘s Birthday Is Hardly The End
Are you excited for this slew of new releases for Magic: The Gathering? We sure are. So here’s to this game and all it entails, as well as even more time spent playing it!
