Wizards of the Coast announced Jumpstart this afternoon, a new supplementary product that melds the combinatorial deckbuilding of draft and sealed deck with the “shuffle up and play” speed of constructed. The set will release on July 3, 2020 and will have a prerelease the weekend of June 20-21.
Jumpstart was “born out of some early ideas we had going back to some early internal brainstorming,” said Mark Heggen, Principal Product Designer for Magic. Though it will come in booster packs, those packs will not be filled with a randomized assortment of cards from throughout the entire set. Instead, each pack will contain 20 cards aligned around a single theme and players will take two of those packs, shuffle them into a 40-card deck, and start playing.
The set is made up of over 500 cards—none of which are foil—including 37 brand-new cards that were designed to help fill out some of the themes, 120 or so cards from Core Set 2021 (which also releases on July 3), and more than 400 reprints from sets before Core Set 2021. The new cards will have similar legality as Commander-specific cards, meaning they will be legal in Vintage, Legacy, and Commander, but will not be legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern.
There are 46 themes that cover a broad range, like tribes (cats, goblins, pirates, unicorns, and Phyrexians), a concept (doctor and spooky), a creature type (walls), or a character (Garruk), with each theme being listed on the front card of each pack. Of those 20 cards, seven or eight will be lands, one of which will have art that matches the pack’s theme, and one in three packs will have two rares. Most themes are mono-color and have multiple variations of cards included in the pack, totaling 121 different possible pack contents. But some themes, like Phyrexians, walls, and unicorns, are included at a lower frequency and have a set list of 20 cards that can be in multiple colors.
Jumpstart will come to MTG Arena, where the cards will be legal in the Historic format, and Heggen said that the Arena team is “cooking up some very cool things” for the set. However, it will not be on Magic Online.
The set won’t have a limited print run and the availability of themes won’t change. As for the future, Heggen acknowledged that Wizards doesn’t “have any plans for Jumpstart 2 but we have a lot of ideas. So if this goes well, if people are interested in it and it’s something that people enjoy playing, we have bunch of ways that we might be able to update it or roll with it or do a sequel.”