Classic Characters Will Have a HUGE Return Thanks to Foundations’ Shifting Timeline

Last updated on October 25, 2024

Chandra, Flame's Catalyst | Illustration by Grzegorz Rutkowski

Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater confirmed yesterday that Foundations cards can be from any point in Magic's timeline.

“Foundations is time agnostic,” Rosewater wrote in his personal blog, “meaning the cards come from across Magic’s timeline, so it doesn’t speak to any one point in time.”

This was in reply to a question on whether the three Foundations planeswalkers revealed yesterday on an official announcement for MTG Arena – where we learned that Liliana, Dreadhorde General, Ajani, Caller of the Pride, and Vivien Reid will be included in this upcoming MTG set – had kept their planeswalker spark.

Rosewater's reply clarifies that Foundations, which pre-releases on November 8-10, won't have a cohesive storyline and likely won't advance the Omenpath arc. However, it does mean we might see characters who have been long dead or missing from Magic's story, like the Eldrazi Titans or Urza.

New Foundations Planeswalkers

When announcing Foundations back in June this year on MTG's official X/Twitter, WotC revealed that this Standard Magic set will contain five planeswalkers:

Mark Rosewater later confirmed that these five FDN planeswalkers would be a mix of new cards and reprints.

Foundations‘ promotional material is not too subtle about who those five planeswalkers are…

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… but now that we know that Ajani, Vivien, and Liliana get reprints, which of the other two gets a new version?

Savvy redditors are betting on Chandra being one of them, and MaRo confirmed this speculation in a Tumblr post this morning.

It may seem like a counterintuitive wager at first, given that she is by far the planeswalker with most versions – Magic has thus far twenty flavors of Chandra, putting even Jace to shame, who only has fifteen. But most versions of Magic's iconic red planeswalker are either very bad or probably a tad too strong for a Magic set that will be Standard's foundation for at least the next five years.

It's a very safe bet that Kaito will get a new card, too: As an introductory set, all five planeswalkers are expected to be mono-colored, and all Kaito's previous incarnations are Dimir (), so he'll need a brand-new Magic card as a blue planeswalker.

Current Power Level: Mild

From the confirmed reprints, and Rosewater's teasers about power level, it's clear that Magic's designers are aiming for a low-medium power level, which should come as no surprise since Foundations is described as basically a new take on Core sets.

After all, miscalibrating Nadu, Winged Wisdom in a Modern Horizons product is one thing… pulling an Oko, Thief of Crowns  on a Core set would be a comically huge blunder.

Of the planeswalkers revealed yesterday, Ajani, Caller of the Pride is a tad too weak to have a big impact in Standard and too small to matter in any other MTG format, and Vivien Reid was never too impactful when she was Standard-playable. Which, as noted by redditors, is probably the perfect power level for this set. Not to mention the amazing art.

Liliana, Dreadhorde General is just too expensive a play for the current speed of the Standard format, but she is a Commander powerhouse: existing copies sell for $13-$16 given how popular the card is. Having such a well-known Commander staple be one of Foundations‘ main faces is probably no coincidence.

But, on the other hand, some of Foundations confirmed reprints are not to be scoffed at: Llanowar Elves and Omniscience return to Standard after two years (they were both featured in Core Set 2019), WotC has notified aggro enjoyers that, for the next five years, they'll have about 3-4 turns to do their thing before the Fun Police knocks at their door with a Day of Judgment.

That's one white sorcery every board-based deck in Standard will have to respect going forward, and that hasn't been seen in the format for more than a decade. In fact, Day of Judgment‘s old enough not to be Pioneer-legal, but Foundations will make it so.

Foundations will have a lot of reprints. Ajani, Caller of the Pride has card number #134, so it seems clear that FDN will follow the Modern Horizons trend of numbering the new cards first, and the reprints next. As a white card that starts with the letter “A”, Ajani is often among the first cards numbered for whatever subset he's in – so we'll have roughly around 130 new cards for a 270-card set.

Then again, we're not getting just one set…

Let's Not Forget About Jumpstart and Special Guests

In typical WotC fashion, they couldn't keep things simple even in a set designed and marketed for beginners. While Foundations itself will be Standard-legal, there will be Special Guests… and a full Jumpstart set!

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And, to make things even more complicated (thanks, Wizards!), some of the bundles will mix things up even further.

In particular, according to the official A First Look at Magic: The Gathering Foundations article:

• Select Foundations cards included in the Starter Collection to support Commander gameplay will not be legal in Standard.
• Foundations Jumpstart (J25) and Special Guests (SPG) are Commander-, Legacy-, and Vintage-legal sets and individual cards are also legal where already available in other formats.

All bets are off about the power level of these non-Standard cards – Path to Exile, Rhystic Study, and Reanimate were all reprinted in the original Jumpstart!