Remastered Magic the Gathering cards can actually be pretty cool, and they seem to do a pretty good job when remastering sets.
While some of the recent MTG releases haven’t been a huge hit, these sets are pretty cool and if you want them, get them now as sets like these don’t sit around long.
Below is what Mark Rosewater had to say about remastering Dominaria.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Our story begins back in 2014. Magic Online was looking for more content, but they were trying to do so without making new cards. Was there a way to make new content out of existing cards? That’s when the idea of a remastered set was first thought up. When Magic premiered in 1993, Limited play wasn’t something that was thought about when building a set. Yes, there was some Limited play (mostly Sealed in the early days), but it was an afterthought, and the sets weren’t designed with Limited in mind. This meant that most Limited play was not the greatest play experience.
Take Legends as an example. There was one red common creature in Legends capable of attacking for any amount of damage (Raging Bull was a 2/2), and the only way to destroy an opponent’s non-world enchantment required you to bounce all your enchantments to your hand. Ice Age had a different problem where you could open all your boosters and not have enough creatures to fill out your deck. I had numerous Ice Age games where I opened my boosters and said, “I don’t think I can make a deck capable of dealing 20 damage to my opponent.”
Starting with Mirage, R&D began thinking about Limited, but it was a steep learning curve and it took many years to figure out much of the staples of modern-day design in regards to Limited play. This meant there were a lot of early sets that didn’t play up to modern standards for Limited. Was there a way to use an old card pool but apply modern design techniques to it? That was the idea behind a remastered set. You would take a pool of cards larger than a normal set and craft from them a draft environment. This was done by handpicking which cards you wanted, sometimes changing rarity. The initial idea was that you would pick a single block because you would get three sets all in the same locale using the same mechanics and themes. With three sets to choose from, you could fine-tune your themes and reconfigure the set to have a more modern approach.
The first set to get a remastered treatment was Tempest. (Tempest is near and dear to my heart as it was the first set I ever led and the one that helped me become a Magic designer.) The design team took all three sets from the Tempest block (Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus) and from them crafted a single set. This was released on Magic Online in 2015. The response was quite positive. Magic: The Gathering Arena would then do remastered versions of both the Kaladesh and Amonkhet blocks in 2020. (The cards had already been coded for the beta playtest, so it didn’t require any new coding.) Finally, in 2021, the first remastered set was made for tabletop with Time Spiral Remastered. Time Spiral, as a block, was more adventuresome than most and had access to a lot of mechanics. (No seriously, there were more mechanics in the block than had preexisted in all of Magic before the block.)
Which brings us to Mark Globus. Mark came in fourth in the first Great Designer Search. That led to a job in R&D. Mark would eventually become a producer and ended up overseeing several products, including the development of the first Commander product and co-leading the design and development of the first Modern Horizons. For regular readers of this column, you might recognize him as part of the Council of Marks that helped to get Unstable made. Today’s story begins shortly after Mark left Wizards of the Coast after working for many years in R&D to pursue other interests. On his way out, he expressed a desire to do some freelance design work.
Mark was given the following freelance assignment. R&D wanted to do more remastered sets. Which ones did he think were most viable? Mark went through all of Magic‘s sets and made a list of all the possible remastered sets he could foresee, from most viable to least viable. Some of these sets took existing blocks like the past remastered sets had done, but he also looked at other themes that might allow us to approach a remastered set in different ways. Three potential remastered sets were chosen from that list (I assume from the top of the list) for Mark to work on. Dominaria Remastered is the first of the three to see print. Mark was aided in his design by Ben Lundquist, a play designer in Studio X.
