Magic: The Gatheringwill be retiring Draft and Set boosters next year in an attempt to streamline its product lineup, with a new ‘Play booster’ set to debut in its place.
Intended to combine the made-for-limited-play function of Draft boosters with the fancy art treatments and List reprints of a Set booster, Play boosters will radically change how people collect, play, and most importantly purchase MTG.
Play boosters will come with 14 cards which, while being two more cards than a Set booster, is one less than a draft. Like Set boosters, they will include a higher number of ‘booster fun’ cards like alternate art treatments and reprints from the rotating pool of older cards known as The List. However, like Draft boosters, they are designed with limited play in mind, and will have a better spread of rarities and colours.
These new Play boosters will be made of 15 different slots:
Perhaps the most controversial part of this change is that Play boosters contain one card less than a Draft. According to head designer Mark Rosewater, the shift to Play boosters gave the team a chance to “rethink how [they] put together a booster”, such as making fewer ‘draft chaff’ cards to fill up the common slots in a booster, and ensuring that there are more answers to the increased number of rare ‘bomb’ cards. Wizards stressed that every set that includes Play boosters has had their limited environment designed with 14 cards in mind, starting right from Murders at Karlov Manor.
According to Wizards, this decision was made primarily for three reasons. The first is that, following their debut in Zendikar Rising, Set boosters quickly “eclipsed” Draft as the most popular MTG product. This meant that Draft packs were seen as the cheaper, “less desirable” form of pack for all but limited afficionados, and people were less likely to buy them outside of events.
The second is that, for new players, explaining the difference between Set and Draft boosters was too complicated, and frequently caused confusion. The example given was that someone wanting to buy a pack of Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth as a new player would be confronted by having to learn about booster fun and limited environments just to pick the product they wanted.
Finally, and most importantly, by combining the two, retailers only have to stock Play and Collector boosters, instead of the three or four different kinds. It is an attempt to solve the long-standing problem of retailers finding themselves unable to shift sealed product because they’d misjudged which product their customers wanted out of numerous slightly different types.
As mentioned, The List is continuing from Set boosters, although it is being retooled for Play boosters by becoming a much smaller 40-card pool, rather than the original 300 cards most people didn’t care about. These cards will be legal in the set’s limited environment, too, effectively making it a permanent bonus sheet, like Strixhaven’s Mystical Archive or Wilds of Eldraine’s Enchanting Tales. The rarity of The List is being doubled to one in eight packs rather than one in four.
Two things that won’t be making the jump to Play boosters, though, are made-for-Commander and Jumpstart exclusives. These were previously found in Set and Jumpstart boosters, but will not be included in Play boosters.
While Wizards has always said it doesn’t set the MSRP for its products, it has confirmed that, internally, it has set the price for Play boosters to be the same as Set boosters, which were slightly more expensive than Draft. That has a knock-on effect, with prereleases and limited events both also being more expensive with the launch of Murders at Karlov Manor. Booster boxes will also get a price increase, as they contain the 36 packs of an old Draft box, which is six more packs than a Set box. Rosewater pointed out that “your rare/mythic rare card ratio per dollar spent will be staying the same.”
As this change is rolling out with Murders at Karlov Manor, we still have two sets left under the current Draft/Set system: The Lost Cavenrs of Ixalan and Ravnica Remastered. The change also doesn’t rule out future sets have other kinds of booster packs – for instance, next year’s Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed will still include a new Beyond booster.
