A new month brought with it a summer’s worth of news updates. In fact, that’s an excellent place to start. Last Thursday Wizards of the Coast announced their Summer of Legend. The announcement contained information on two upcoming releases in Modern Horizons 2 and Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. ChannelFireball’s summary of the announcement can be found at this link but here are some highlights from that post.
First off, Modern Horizons 2 will be bringing 42 reprints from Magic‘s history into the Modern format. Two of these cards were revealed on stream in Sanctum Prelate (the Buy-a-Box promo, in the old border/Retro Frame) and Counterspell. Both of these cards will be legal in Modern later this year. The enemy fetch lands from Zendikar will also appear in the set at rare but will come with three frame treatments: regular, borderless, and the Retro Frame. Modern Horizons 2 spoiler season will start on May 24 with the entire set being revealed on June 2.
Second, Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms spoiler season starts on June 29. This set borrows from the fan favorite Dungeons & Dragons setting and will be taking the place of the traditional Core Set release. This set will have Showcase Frames that resemble pages from old RPG source books and looks to bring Dungeons & Dragons icons like Tiamat and the Vorpal Sword to the realms of Magic.
The Summer of Legends announcement also detailed the return of in-store play for the United States. Wizards will start to sanction in-store play in the United States again starting May 28, provided that it is safe to do so in accordance with local public health guidance. As an incentive to get players back to their local game store, Wizards of the Coast is sending out Mystery Booster: Convention Edition product to select WPN locations and is running a series of promotions for people who spend $50 or more on sealed product.
The last section of the announcement dealt with Arena. Historic Anthology V is coming later this month and we learned about two of the 25 inclusions: Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger and Whirler Rogue. The “Mirror, Mirror” event was also announced which will see certain banned cards have their stats adjusted for play in specific events for a limited time. This event has sparked conversation about the potential transition to power level errata for tabletop play, something that Wizards of the Coast has not entertained to this point.
Speaking of Arena, the upcoming Strixhaven League Weekend will have a special set of bans for Historic play. Due to an error in the way some Double Faced Cards interact with the devotion mechanic, the following cards will be banned from play for the League players from June 4-6 (these cards will not be banned in client however):
- Arguel’s Blood Fast
- Growing Rites of Itlimoc
- Search for Azcanta
- Legion’s Landing
- Vance’s Blasting Cannons
- Hadana’s Climb
- Journey to Eternity
- Path of Mettle
- Profane Procession
- Storm the Vault
- Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
