“Modern Horizons” Set Announced for Magic: The Gathering and OMG Is That a Serra Planeswalker Card?

Yesterday, there was a big announcement in the Magic: The Gathering world when, during the weekly MTG Twitch stream, super fan and NFL defensive end Cassius Marsh, Magic Pro League competitor Matt Nass, and Magic principal designer Mark Heggen announced Modern Horizons.

Due to release on June 14th of this year, the Modern Horizons set will contain “249 new-to-Modern cards (254 total), with a mix of reprints not yet legal in Modern, and new cards that celebrate both Modern and Magic‘s rich history. Modern Horizons will release on Magic Online June 13.” It will not be coming to Magic Arena because Modern doesn’t exist on Area.

According to the official site, Modern Horizons boosters on Magic Online will be priced at $6.99, and there will also be Modern Horizons local prerelease events at game stores June 8–9!

For those who don’t know, there are multiple different formats in which you can play Magic, with two of the most common being Standard and Modern. Standard allows you to play and build decks with only the more recently released Magic sets, which is a great way for beginners to play without getting overwhelmed by older cards and mechanics they might be unfamiliar with. It’s a more fair, but still very competitive way of playing. In Modern, you have a much larger pool to play with, ranging from the most recent sets to as far back as Mirrodin, which was released back in 2003.

Modern Horizons is intended to skip Standard legality and aim straight for the Modern format. Heggen says this was something they’d been thinking about for a long time, and this way, they can avoid putting cards that are too “broken” into Standard and can jump right into the more competitive format. It has fewer restrictions in terms of card design, and therefore, this set has the potential to be really exciting, especially for Modern and Commander players, like myself.

We will also get access to some Vintage and Legacy level cards that are older than the 8th edition, which is the cut off for Modern.

Two of the cards shared on the stream are Serra the Benevolent and Cabal Therapist:

Serra the Benevolent

(Illustrated by Magali Villeneuve)

Legendary Planeswalker — Serra
+2: Creatures you control with flying get +1/+1 until end of turn.
-3: Create a 4/4 white Angel creature token with flying and vigilance.
-6: You get an emblem with “If you control a creature, damage that would reduce your life total to less than 1 reduces it to 1 instead.”

Cabal Therapist

(Illustrated by Mitchell Malloy)

Creature — Horror
Menace
At the beginning of your precombat main phase, you may sacrifice a creature. When you do, choose a nonland card name, then target player reveals their hand and discards all cards with that name.

I, for one, am really excited for all of this, but mostly for Serra to finally get her own Planeswalker card! As someone with an Angel tribal deck, I’m preparing to buy this myself and playing it so when I have it on the field with my Gisela, Blade of Goldnight, I’ll be sending massive flying angels to eviscerate my enemies.

Fellow MTG players, what do you think of this new set idea to skip Standard and go straight to Modern?

(via Magic: The Gathering, image: Screengrab/MTG/WotC)

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