IGN is excited to officially reveal Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, a Magic: The Gathering set coming exclusively to MTG Arena on August 12. Historic Horizons will contain 782 cards legal in the Historic format, including 31 entirely new cards unique to Arena – many of which will have mechanics that only work digitally.
You can flip through the gallery below to see nine cards arriving in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons (including two reprints, one from Modern Horizons), and read on to learn how their new mechanics work and why Wizards of the Coast decided to take Arena this direction:
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Similar to the original Jumpstart, Historic Horizons cards can be added to your collection either by using wildcards or by participating in a timed event (ending September 9) in which you pick two themed packs from a possible 46, combine them into a single deck, and then compete against other players.
While a majority of the cards in Historic Horizons will be reprints – most of which are new to Arena, including many cards from both the first and second Modern Horizons sets – the 31 brand new cards will be exclusive to Arena’s digital platform. These cards will include three new mechanics with “digital-first” designs that cannot not be replicated in paper Magic.
Jumpstart: Historic Horizons’ Digital-First Mechanics Explained
The first of these mechanics is called “Seek,” which is a digital twist on a tutor effect. Certain cards (like Manor Guardian, visible in the gallery above) will allow you to seek a card with specific criteria, randomly pulling one from your library that meets that criteria without shuffling afterward – something that couldn’t happen at the tabletop without a player manually looking through their deck.
The next mechanic is called “Perpetually,” which modifies a specific card permanently, even as it enters other zones of play. That could be a card like Davriel’s Withering, which perpetually gives a creature -1/-2 – if that card reduces a creature to 0 toughness or less and sends it to the graveyard, for example, the debuff will remain in effect even if a player is able to bring it back to battlefield (causing it to immediately die again).
Alternatively, Lumbering Lightshield can perpetually increase the casting cost of a card in your opponent’s hand by one colorless mana – the affected card then maintains that increase whether it’s cast from hand or somewhere else, like from the graveyard with Flashback or from exile with Foretell. While this is an effect that can more reasonably be tracked with paper cards, it becomes substantially simpler in a digital space.
The third digital-only mechanic is called “Conjure,” which creates a card for you to use out of nowhere – not a token or a copy, but an actual card that can sit in your hand until you are ready to use it. This can include cards that aren’t otherwise in a set or format, with a few examples of this in the gallery above being Ponder, Stormfront Pegasus, and Tropical Island (none of which are collectible in Historic Horizons on their own).
Historic Horizons utilizes its digital-only nature beyond these three recurring mechanics as well, with WotC saying it makes it possible to print cards with rules that wouldn’t fit in a paper frame. That includes the planeswalker Davriel, Soul Broker, who has an otherwise cryptic -2 ability: “Accept one of Davriel’s offers, then accept one of Davriel’s conditions.” In practice, this has you pick one of three randomly selected positive effects from a whopping possible list of eight before doing the same for a negative effect.
In a digital-only environment, there isn’t the usual requirement of spelling out every single detail on the card itself, which WotC says will open up new design possibilities or even allowing it to modify Davriel’s lists substantially post-release. Davriel also uses the perpetually and conjure mechanics, further solidifying him as a planeswalker not meant for paper – in fact, Historic Horizons will have a “digital-first” Planeswalker for every color, each with a themed pack of their own.
The Jumpstart format has also been unbound from its paper roots – where the original would simply give you a random selection of themed packs to pick from, WotC tells me it can better collate Historic Horizons’ packs to offer a greater variety of options and synergies each time, or even keep track of which packs you’ve picked previously to provide fresh options on your next run. Packs can have more variance within them too, with certain cards having a set chance to be swapped for another of similar mana value and your mana base adjusting to the combined deck you end up with.
Why Wizards of the Coast Is Making Digital-Only Magic Cards
Speaking with Magic: The Gathering’s Vice President of Design Aaron Forsythe and MTG Arena’s Game Director Jay Parker last week, it became clear to me that WotC is using Jumpstart: Historic Horizons to take some confident but measured first steps toward what’s possible for Magic digitally.
“We didn’t want to overwhelm people,” Forsythe says, clearly aware that this is a significant choice for a game nearly three decades old and acknowledging that it’s going to be “uncharted waters” for a lot of Magic players. “We could have easily come out with a dozen wacky digital mechanics, but we felt like the way to make this feel like a card set is to pick a small number and show the breadth that that small number of mechanics can execute on.”
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“Lots of people love to play magic in a lot of different ways, and we want to keep providing for all of that,” Parker explains. “When we add these new elements, we really want these to be an ‘and’, not an ‘or’.” Parker says they want to keep expanding the different types of Magic experiences they can offer, but reiterates that they “want to keep the core as well.”
Forsythe similarly emphasizes that they wanted to make sure this new chapter of Historic still feels like Magic, just with more design possibilities. “We don’t want to necessarily be designing the lowest common denominator version of Magic that has to work exactly the same on every platform,” he explains. Just as WotC makes products specifically targeted toward Modern players, Commander players, collectors, etc., Forsythe sees the digital player as “that obvious next frontier” that can be catered to with something unique.
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But this shift will no doubt be concerning for some players too, with Forsythe even admitting it could “spook some of the purists out there” who see Arena as a direct translation of the paper game. To that end, he confirmed that they are going to ensure Standard, booster drafts, and other tabletop formats remain intact the way they are now, without the digital-only mechanics available in Historic. “We’re just adding new stuff for the players that live in this environment and have experience playing other digital card games out there that do things like this.”
“If you’ve seen our release calendar, the tabletop players should fear nothing as far as not getting enough stuff,” Forsythe says. “We are giving them new, cool things more regularly and more often than we ever have before.” And as for digital players, Arena actually tested these waters with a recent timed event called Mirror, Mirror. In it, powerful banned cards from other formats were rebalanced, and WotC says the response from players who had only ever played digitally was very positive – albeit, entirely new digital cards are certainly a step further than temporary rebalances.
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But in terms of what digital-only cards could do, Seek, Perpetually, and Conjure actually seem like they fall on the tame end of the spectrum to my eyes. Forsythe explains that Magic’s R&D team has decades of rejected ideas to pull from, designs that were fun but weren’t suited for paper because they were too tough to track or couldn’t easily be adjudicated, for instance. So while they’re intentionally starting slow here, he says they will likely “push the boundaries of the space” as they get more comfortable designing for it, just like they do in paper Magic.
Unshackling a Magic card from the need to work physically blows the design doors wide open too, so I wanted to gauge just how crazy they might be willing to get. When I suggest the possibility of, say, a quad-faced card (a physical impossibility in the real world), Forsythe says that actually sounds “totally reasonable” as skirting around physical limitations is “exactly the kind of thing digital card games should be trying to do.” Forsythe jokingly provides his own example of a crazy effect that would actually be going too far – playing a game of Space Invaders to determine a creature’s toughness when it enters the battlefield.
Once again, they tell me the goal isn’t to make Arena an unrecognizable version of Magic, just one that leans into what it can do best in the same way that Commander-specific cards do for Commander. “We can make a whole new game that uses a lot of Magic’s rules, but I don’t think that’s what people want,” Forsythe says. “I do think they want to slide back and forth through different expressions and play the one that suits their needs at that given time.”
Of course the Historic format was already unique to Arena as well, if technically playable with paper cards. This new path changes it from essentially being Arena’s (much smaller) stand-in for older formats like Modern or Legacy to something wholly digital. “We’re really excited to be able to use Historic in a way that gives it its own identity as a format,” Parker says, explaining that he’s glad it’s now able to leverage the unique position it occupies.
On the surface, 31 digital-only cards may not seem like a huge amount given they’re arriving in a pool with 751 others, but it doesn’t take many to potentially warp a format in unexpected ways – and such a large influx overall will undoubtedly bring shifts in the Historic metagame. Parker says one of the main goals of Historic Horizons was “trying to get a whole lot of cool fun stuff from Modern Horizons into the format,” but that the higher power level of Modern meant they had to be careful while doing so.
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“With the Mystical Archive, we learned a lot about how [Historic] responds to an infusion of new high power level cards,” Parker explains, referring to the set of iconic instants and sorceries added alongside the Strixhaven set earlier this year. With a few of those cards quickly becoming staples of the format (one was banned in June, and another was suspended just last week), Parker notes that “getting a little more creature heavy with these [Historic Horizons] reprints and additions is a healthy note to strike for the balance of the format.”
Still, Parker and Forsythe both reiterate that the first goal of this set is to add a bunch of cool new cards, digital or otherwise – without ballooning the power level out of control too quickly, that is. There are still hundreds of cards in Historic Horizons yet to be revealed, but I jokingly ask if we can assume Modern Horizons 2’s now notorious monkey Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer won’t be among them. Forsythe chuckles.
“That’s a pretty safe bet.”
