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Magic: The Gathering Designers Explain Why Pioneer Diverged From Magic Arena's Historic Format


One of the most common questions asked about Magic: The Gathering's new format is why the newly-announced Pioneer format ended up diverging from Magic Arena's nonrotating format called Historic. Why not just add Pioneer on Magic Arena? It would be more convenient to play Pioneer across multiple platforms. That question was brought up during a recent episode of DailyMTG, and Senior Designer Aaron Forsythe explained why Pioneer ended up diverging from Magic Arena's Historic format.

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"The platforms require very different things as ways to play Magic," Forsythe said. "We want to provide ways for people to use the cards they've already purchased. That is just an important part of the Magic ecosystem, and why this game is fun and has lasted for such a long time. You can get years and years and years of enjoyment out of what you purchased. So, tabletop has decades of material that it needs to figure out homes for, and uses for, that could keep people engaged, and so Pioneer just made a lot of sense there. The scope of Arena is still such that it doesn't have that Pioneer's cardpool or anything like that, so it has a much smaller problem to solve to what do with your older cards there, which is just the Ixlan year, so they announced their own format that solves that problem."

Forsythe went on to explain that they had more freedom to create the Pioneer format because tabletop already has the years of material available while "Arena has plenty of stuff it's trying to get done right now."

This seems to confirm that there's a huge division in Wizards of the Coast between the tabletop designers and the team working on Magic Arena.

Another MTG fan asked MTG Head Designer Mark Rosewater on his Blogatog if the paper and digital teams coordinate with each other about creating the nonrotating formats, to which he replied, "The MTG Arena team and the Tabletop Magic team are two different teams. We work in conjunction with one another, but we are each focused on making our product the best it can be."

Of course, players want to play Pioneer on Magic Arena but it will probably take years for them to program the cards from older Pioneer-legal sets. If they will have Pioneer Grand Prix events in MagicFests next year, it would be helpful if they can test their Pioneer brews on Magic Arena instead of the outdated client of Magic Online, where Pioneer is currently exclusively available.

Here's an idea:

If you're interested in the new MTG format, we're inviting you to join our Pioneer Facebook group.

Magic: The Gathering Pioneer Players Private group · 1,884 members Join Group A group for Magic: The Gathering Pioneer Format discussion, news, deck tips, strategy, rules help, memes and more! For general MTG discussion, post he...

Related: MTG Willing To Ban Cards in Pioneer Before The End of The Year

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