MTG Arena-Exclusive Jumpstart Horizons Announced

Wizards of the Coast revealed MTG Arena: Jumpstart Horizons yesterday, and it’s an exciting proposal. The last Jumpstart set was genuinely interesting. It added several cards that are still used as staples for the Historic meta in MTG Arena. Yes, I’m looking at you, Muxus. This set drops on August 12th and will stay around until September 9th. Like the previous set, there are pre-built packs with powerful, fun cards in them. There are also three new mechanics that were built exclusively for MTG Arena in Jumpstart Horizons: Seek, Perpetually, and Conjure.
We’re here to tell you what these new powers do, what sorts of cards you can expect, and how long this event will go on.
Jumpstart Horizons: Powerful Cards, Fun Features
This card set is absolutely gigantic. 782 cards in the Jumpstart: Historic Horizons set. 372 of these are new cards to MTG Arena to boot. There are 13 Mythic Rares, 56 Rares, 123 Uncommons, and 180 Commons that are brand-new to MTG Arena. That is huge! How do you actually get the cards though? There’s the Jumpstart: Historic Horizons event, that will run through August 12th – September 9th. As of August 12th, all cards in this set will be legal in Historic. You can spend 2,000 Gold or 400 Gems to play in the event.
You receive two packets (out of three options) and play Best-of-One matches, for as long as you want. Each of your first two wins award a Rare or Mythic ICR from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons for MTG Arena. You can resign from this event, pay again, and play again as many times as you want to boot. That might not sound great until you realize that cards in the chosen packets will be added to your collection. So you can farm out some amazing cards without too much effort.
What about those new mechanics though? There are three to go over:
- Seek: Cards with Seek are Tutors. Tutors let you fetch a card from your deck. These Seek cards grab a random from your deck that matches specific criteria. No picking, choosing, shuffling your deck. It grabs a card from your deck that fits the requirements and puts you back in the game. A good example of this is Faceless Agent. A 3-cost Shapeshifter, when it enters play, Seek a creature card of the most prevalent creature type in your library. So you draw a creature of the type you have the most of, which is great.
- Perpetually: This permanently changes the characteristics of a card, no matter where it goes. Exiled? Stays the same. Graveyard? Same deal. It alters the card no matter what, and since it’s digital, it’s very easy to do. Lumbering Lightshield is one of these cards. A 2-cost Illusion in White, an opponent reveals a non-land card from their hand. That card perpetually gains “This spell costs 1 colorless more to cast.”
- Conjure: Conjure cards create cards out of thin air! Cards that don’t exist in the game already, for example. A good example is the Tome of the Infinite. It has a list of cards in its “spellbook”. It conjures a random card from this list, and that card perpetually gains “You may spend mana as though it were any color to cast this spell.”
With Conjure, some of the cards will list exactly what they can create. Tome of the Infinite is a bit different. Speaking of the Tome of the Infinite, it’s not in the Jumpstart: Historic Horizons Animated pack. The reason is that each pack also has some variance. Each pack has a bit of variance, where a few cards can be replaced. You can find more on that here.
You can also see the Pack Lists as well as the variance for them right here. There are quite a few cards being revealed for it, so at the end of the week, we will probably come back and look at some of our favorite, most powerful cards and discuss them.
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