New Magic: The Gathering Arena Update Brings Core 2021 And Jumpstart

Magic: The Gathering Arena recently published its latest State of the Game article, and it’s chock full of updates and brand new content set to be released over the next two months. There’s a lot to cover from their announcement, so here’s everything you need to know about what’s coming to Arena in June and July.

First up, Arena players had better mark June 25th on their calendars, because this is a huge day for content. We previously reported that Arena is finally set to release on MacOS on Thursday and Apple users will be able to access Arena via the Epic Games Store in a matter of days without resorting to workarounds.

June 25th is also the online release date for Core 2021, Magic: The Gathering’s latest Standard-legal booster set. Players who bought Prerelease Bundles will receive their boosters, cosmetics and most importantly, the adorable new Pack Leader Pet. The article also notes that the Planeswalker-themed Showcase card styles will also be available to collect online.

One thing that dampened the player base’s excitement for Core 2021 somewhat was the reprinting of the ten Rare two-color Scry Lands and Fabled Passage in the set. Reprinting a large number of Rares so soon after their original appearances meant that players with full collections would be opening essentially useless cards in their Core 2021 packs. Fortunately, Wizards of the Coast listened and announced a new reprint protection policy. Starting with Core 2021, players with complete sets of reprinted Rares and Mythics will only open the reprinted versions once they’ve completed the rest of the set’s higher-rarity cards.

This means that players with all 40 copies of the Temples will only open them once they have playsets of every other Rare and Mythic in Core 2021. Notably, this policy only applies to Store Boosters, so Limited players will still be able to add crucial mana fixing to their Draft and Sealed decks.

The article also announced some important news about the release of Jumpstart on Arena on July 16th. While more details will be available closer to the release date, here’s what we know so far.

Jumpstart cards will be available both in Limited event booster packs and as wildcard for crafting. This is important, because the new set will add over 300 new cards to Arena’s Historic format. The set will also contain 37 brand new cards. Interestingly, Arena’s dev team chose to leave out 20 cards from the set due to power or gameplay reasons and you can find the list of cards they swapped out and the cards they replaced them with here.

Magic art fans, meanwhile, will be happy to know that the weird and wonderful Basics from Jumpstart are also coming to Arena. And finally, Magic: The Gathering Arena‘s next update will debut some quality of life changes. These include the ability to expand the deckbuilding menu and more advanced card search options.