Welcome to our preview article for the Dominaria competitive season! The 11 weeks between the release of Dominaria and the prerelease events for Core Set 2019 will be full of high-level competitive Magic including exciting events for fans of Limited, Standard, Modern, and Legacy!
Below we’ve broken the season down into four parts to help you better understand what to expect and how to clear your schedule for the events you want to check in on. If you do want to watch an event, check out the official coverage schedule, though that’s only updated through Pro Tour Dominaria (mid-season).
Fans of Legacy and Modern won’t be disappointed as they have plenty of action this season. There are also two super Grand Prix events including the highly-anticipated return of Grand Prix Las Vegas as an annual occurrence.
Dominaria Season Part One – Introducing the Limited Environment
We kick things off with back-to-back limited weekends with the release of Dominaria. It’s fair to say that Dominaria is the most-hyped expansion for Magic since, perhaps, Magic Origins. That’s going to set the bar very high for the limited format and if Wizards fails to meet expectations, Dominaria may go down in history as a major failure.
The celebrations kick off on release weekend with two team limited Grand Prix events held in Bologna and Columbus. Team events are usually very well received but team limited with a set full of Legendary shenanigans could lead to a whole lot of shenanigans. The following weekend will return to the individual format as Grand Prix events in Bejing and Dallas highlight Dominaria limited as well.
Dominaria Season Part Two – Legacies
I’ll cheat a bit on this one as Eternal Weekend in Europe is being held simultaneously as Grand Prix Beijing and Dallas. Legacy and Vintage were spared from any changes in the most recent Banned and Restricted list update so we’ll see if any of the new cards from Dominaria have any impact on either format. Damping Sphere has potential to impact eternal formats as it shuts down cards like Mishra’s Workshop while also hindering decks built around the Storm mechanic.
The third week of the season brings us to Birmingham for a double Grand Prix event featuring Legacy and Standard. For those of you who are fans of the Legacy format (which I know are many of you) make sure your weekends in May are free! We’ll also get our first look at Standard post-Dominaria in Birmingham.
Wrapping up the Legacy portion of the Dominaria season is a Team Trio event in Toronto which will of course feature Legacy alongside Modern and Standard. This will be the last chance to check out coverage of high-level Legacy competition in the season so don’t miss out on it.
Dominaria Season Part Three – The Pro Tour
Weeks five, six, and seven will obviously be dominated by Pro Tour Dominaria which takes place in the sixth week of the season. To whet our appetite we’ll stopover in Washington DC for a team limited Grand Prix the weekend prior to the Pro Tour.
PT Dominaria will feature Standard, which we will have caught a glimpse of at Grand Prix Birmingham as well as Grand Prix Toronto. Obviously everything could change after the Pro Tour and we won’t have to wait long to find out as the tour heads back across the Atlantic to Copenhagen for the next Standard Grand Prix of the season in the week immediately following the Pro Tour.
Dominaria Season Part Four – Modern (and Standard) Times
We close out the season with the four weeks leading up to the prerelease weekend for Magic Core Set 2019. The celebration will predominantly feature the most popular format in the world: Modern. We kick things off in June in Las Vegas where fans will hopefully be able to not only play some Modern and Limited but also help the Las Vegas Golden Knights celebrate their first Stanley Cup championship (I wrote this line for you, Eric and Athena Froehlich).
After festivities in Vegas come to a close we’ll have the final Standard Grand Prix weekend of the season with events in Singapore and Pittsburgh. Then, we head back to Modern to close out weeks 10 and 11 with Grand Prix events in Barcelona and Sao Paulo respectively.
So for those of you who love Modern, you’ll be getting almost a full month of Modern action and while we don’t yet know which events will be given live coverage we can only hope the answer is all of them!
Rich Stein is a retired Magic player, an amateur content creator, and a Level 2 Social Justice Sorcerer. He hopes to eventually become a professional content creator and a Level 20 dual class Social Justice Sorcerer/Bard but he’s more than content to remain a retired Magic player. You can follow his musings on Twitter @RichStein13