June 30th is the close of the fiscal year, which means my personal calendar is at odds with my occupational calendar. By the time May rolls around, I’m working on new vendor contracts, marketing strategies, and deep in the analytics looking at the past year’s performance. This is preferable than doing all of this labor at the actual end of the year (that is, January 31st), as having it done mid-year makes the holidays more chill and conducive to taking vacation time, but it does put me in a wrapping-up and introspective mood right as summer is kicking in.
So, from that perspective, let’s take a look at how Magic: The Gathering performed from July 2025 to June 2026. Those twelve months included the release of the wildest range of sets in Magic’s history: Edge of Eternities, Marvel’s Spider-Man/Through the Omenpaths, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lorwyn Eclipsed, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Secrets of Strixhaven. In that same release window, we also saw a dozen preconstructed Commander decks, more than 75 Secret Lairs, and a variety of promotional cards and variants of in-booster cards, totaling more than 2,000 cards.
My distaste for most Universe Beyond sets is well-documented, so we won’t belabor it, but even as the game experiences massive player growth and design shifts, there are plenty of decisions to celebrate and revisit as we head into summer blockbusters and aesthetic shifts. I may not love the renewed focus on pizza and bagels and Infinity Stones, but there are more Pests, Elder Dragons, and Dellian Fels than there were a year ago, and so I’m offering praises in this year’s employee performance review.
Most Important Interaction:
I’m a midrange player at heart, and so the speediest deck archetypes leave me cold. Mono-Red—particularly the model that wins with a battery of spells in the mode of Heartfire Hero and Monstrous Rage—and mono-Green Landfall are not decks I’ve ever been drawn to. Still, I respect an apex predator, and the printing of Planar Engineering in Secrets of Strixhaven turned mono-Green Landfall from a reasonable deck to a ridiculous one. Mossborn Hydra and Tifa don’t present especially quick clocks on their own, but when you’re ramping out multiple lands per turn—and protecting your 32/32 Hydra with a Royal Role or Snakeskin Veil—it becomes a combo deck instead of an aggro deck.
It’s a deck that you can pretty readily disrupt, but if you miss the crucial window to hit their Tifa or Hydra with a removal spell or if they have the double Snakeskin Veil, it doesn’t feel beatable. Whether that’s desirable in a given metagame is not my call to make, but the interlocking series of interactions in the stock Landfall list is fascinating to watch in action (at least once or twice). Add the absurdity of Badgermole Cub, and you have a deck that’s essentially rolling a die and seeing if you can seal the deal. Again, this may not be the best deck in any format, but the way it came together was fascinating to watch from the sidelines.
Most Crucial Ban:
In November of 2025, three cards bit the dust in Standard: Vivi Ornitier, Screaming Nemesis, and Proft’s Eidetic Memory. This trio is the sort of ban that looks absurd years later to people who weren’t playing when they were legal and suggests a warped metagame where a 3/3 with Haste for 3R or a cantripping Enchantment are too good, but I don’t expect anyone to have questions about Vivi getting their red card. So much of what’s wrong with Magic design in 2025 is encapsulated in Vivi Ornitier, who does everything for nothing and serves as its own engine. Every Consider becomes a Coin Flick and eventually a Seething Song. I’m glad Vivi exists, and I’m glad he’s banned.
Best Secret Lair
I can name three or four Iron Maiden songs, exclusively because of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and the extremely good Iron Maiden pinball machine at one of my favorite local bars. I have no affinity for the band’s music, but the completely over-the-top and macabre aesthetic of their art appeals to me. It’s puerile and pointlessly gruesome, but the pairing of album covers with the Iron Maiden: Album Art Secret Lair in October of 2025 deserves praise. The Unearth is perfect, the Lignify pops as a Green card, and the Burnt Offering art could be an original work of Magic art. Temporal Trespass is one of the worst pieces of art to grace a Magic card, but it’s audacious in its tackiness. It’s my impression that Iron Maiden is a proudly and profoundly stupid band, and I find that laudable in its way. Why do I dislike the mercenary crossoverism of the Bob Ross Secret Lair but find the Iron Maiden Lair so appealing? There’s an honesty to the crassness of punk and metal bands cashing in and becoming media merchandising empires that makes me roll my eyes with a cynical cheerfulness instead of exasperation. This is Secret Lair silliness done right.
Best Reprint(s):
The Strixhaven Mystical Archive returned in Secrets of Strixhaven with a drastically reduced drop rate for Rares and Mythics. That cavil aside, though, it was a fantastic source of reprints. Eternally useful cards like Feed the Swarm, Reprieve, and Prismatic Ending got gorgeous new art, while chase cards like Force of Will and Vampiric Tutor are exciting, albeit rare, cards to find at the back of the pack. The real winner of the set was Stock Up, which went from over $10 a copy to about a buck. Paying $40 for a playset of card selection spells was a big ask, even if they were one of the best to be printed since Fact or Fiction. 2025-2026 was a generous year for reprints all around, with the Edge of Eternities/Lorwyn Eclipsed shocklands and Secrets of Strixhaven duals (Dreamroot Cascade, etc.) welcome additions for both Standard players and frugal Commander players. Special Guests continue to inject limited but appreciated copies of desirable cards into the ecosystem and spotlight outré artists—they’re don’t reduce the price of cards noticeably, but it is exciting to open a pack and see a Painter’s Servant tucked back behind a Hallowed Fountain.
Best Overall Set:
Final Fantasy is just outside of the fiscal year line, so I can’t give it the laurels it perhaps deserves. Secrets of Strixhaven made me excited to play Lorehold and Lorwyn Eclipsed gave me more Goblins and -1/-1 counters, but the gestalt of both sets didn’t quite land with me, unlike the best set of the last twelve months: Edge of Eternities. Magic has always had a tinge of science fiction, from the continent-ravaging war engines of Antiquities to the “soul bombs” and cloned metathran of Invasion block, but it’s a very fantastic kind of science fiction, the sort where you explain it all on crystals and leylines. Edge of Eternities brought in harder science fiction concepts and iconography and did so incredibly well both aesthetically and in play structures. Lander tokens are a great innovation in the Clue/Food space and Warp was planned extremely well for a format full of Vehicles and Spacecraft. Neither Vehicles nor Spacecraft have seen much adoption, but that’s not the fault of the design team. Edge’s brilliance lay in referencing Magic’s once-alien but now familiar species, like Slivers and Eldrazi, and in linking new concepts to familiar play patterns (e.g., Station being a modified Vehicle or Level Up mechanic, Warp being a combination of Kicker and Evoke).
Tezzeret, Cruel Captain is a Mox-tutoring machine in Cube, Codecracker Hound was a high pick in the tradition of Organ Hoarder and Inspiring Overseer, and Quantum Riddler and Ouroboroid immediately became the best things you could tap out for in Standard, Pioneer, and beyond. The set will age exceptionally well: Icetill Explorer is the best supplemental Crucible of Worlds/Exploration ever printed, the land cycle with Station are great pickups for Commander for years to come, and the bonus Stellar Sights sheet injected new supplies of casual favorite cards with futuristic imagery.
While I wouldn’t classify Edge as an all-timer of a Limited format, it did have a ton of charm—I wearied of the Blue-White pseudo-Flurry archetype and the Red artifact decks, but drafting one-drops plus Hylderblade stayed fresh, and Glacier Godmaw, the uncommon Craterhoof Behemoth, was always fun to pick up early on, as was all-star Elegy Acolyte.
We don’t have an Edge of Eternities waiting in the wings. Instead, In the back half of 2026, we have the imminent release of Marvel Superheroes, followed by the launch of The Hobbit, Reality Fracture, and Star Trek. We’ll have superheroes, Smaug, Stingcaster Mages, and Spock to see us through the rest of the year, and all of it Standard-legal. I expect next year’s stock-taking to look different, as my favorite sets are horror-adjacent (New Phyrexia, Duskmourn) and nostalgia-infused (Time Spiral, Modern Horizons 2), and nothing projected for the next six months looks to have those targets in their sights. But even as the game turns more towards Captain American than Captain Sisay, it still keeps coming out with hits—Elegy Acolyte, Ouroboroid, Abigale, Eloquent First-Year, even Casey Jones, Vigilante are among my favorite cards printed in Magic’s history, and that’s quite a gift to get more than thirty years in.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into [mtg_card]Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.