As 2024 comes to a close, Kristen takes stock of the year’s sets. Was Foundations the best Magic set of the year?
It was a big year for Magic in 2024, and we experienced a slew of products, whether Standard-legal, or legal for Modern or Commander.
In total, we saw five sets enter Standard:
There were also five more “major” releases, if you ignore one-off Secret Lair drops and event-exclusives:
- Ravnica Remastered
- Universes Beyond: Fallout
- Modern Horizons 3
- Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed
- Foundations Jumpstart
If you do the math, on average, that’s one major release every 5 weeks. Whew!
THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF 2024
In order to look at what got people excited this year, it’s probably easier to first look at what fell flat. If we pull up a list of “misses”, we probably get the following:
The first two Standard sets of the year were basically both “beach episodes”, and fans of traditional MTG weren’t best pleased. The common refrain now is to ask what kind of hat the next set will involve, and after stetsons and fedoras, it’s easy to see why people are burned out. In fact, I asked recently if Universes Beyond in Standard is Actually a Good Move? It’s a good read, but in short: my answer was a yes*, with the asterisk being mainly that contextually, a well-executed vision of an outside IP would feel more cohesive than “the Magic gang cosplays as detectives”.
Considering that, would I say that Fallout and Assassin’s Creed were good sets? I think they were, and I think people will look back fondly on them offering some really unique and interesting card designs. In the case of ACR specifically, the power level of the set felt really good for a Modern set – if a little underbaked, which is always the preferential option.
Looking at the other supplemental sets, Ravnica Remastered was a fun product to draft if that was your bag, but ultimately a set that didn’t have much for anyone who wasn’t a hardcore Ravnica fan. It came at a time when people were both burned out on reprints and frame treatments, and on serial cards. The double-whammy of having the lackluster MKM release basically alongside it probably didn’t help.
Modern Horizons 3 is a set that could go either way for y’all reading this. While it did have many cool card designs, frame treatments, and reprints – and even some cool Commander decks – the ongoing issue of having MH sets artificially rotate Modern and even Legacy has people really burned out on them. Couple that with the regretful printing of – and protracted legal window – of Nadu, and you have a set that is ultimately a bit of a stinker unless you’re a Commander nerd.
That leaves us the three remaining Standard sets. Bloomburrow was a set with real vision, and the finished product actually came out really great. It was a self-contained adventure, and I think if it had have avoided the “Planeswalkers in hats” trope (turning well known characters into chibi/animal versions) then it probably would have ranked even higher for me at least. That said, the draft environment was fun – partially due to lower complexity – and it felt cohesive, which is more than can be said for many of the other in-universe sets this year.
Duskmourn, likewise, had such a great vision and concept, but it fell short of Bloomburrow because of the shoe-horning in of 1980s tropes and characters. The foreboding terror and inescapable dread of the haunted-house plane was somewhat lessened by…Cheerleaders…and Haunted TVs. Whatever way you slice it, this level of technology is anachronistic to Magic. Magic is and has been a fantasy card game, and whether that fantasy is knights and wizards or even mecha and cyberpunk, that fantasy/sci-fi element is what makes the game what it is. Current era technology breaks the immersion.
Looking back on the year, what was missing from 2024’s lineup? Well, the only two things I haven’t mentioned.
FOUNDATIONS, BASICALLY
If the question was “What was missing in 2024”, or even “what did long-time Magic players want in 2024”, then the answer is basically Foundations, and by extension, Foundations Jumpstart.
When the sets in a year are bolstered by Universes Beyond – and that is going to account for 50% of releases next year! – the “OG” Magic vibe is relegated to fewer Standard sets. The problem is that in 2024, the sets that could have grabbed that vibe and ran with it kinda fell way short of the finish line. Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction felt like, as discussed previously, beach episodes. They were Magic characters (too many of them, too!) all donning whatever the seasonal theme was.
Bloomburrow, while excellent, was a capsule story, and felt like a fun little exploration of something in the Magic universe, certainly, but not really of the universe we’ve come to know and love. Duskmourn could have come the closest, but it fell flat on its face when you consider the anachronistic real-world vibe of the setting. That same real-world is (regretfully) easier to forgive when it comes to Universes Beyond, but in a year where Assassin’s Creed felt the closest to hitting that indescribable flavor of Magic, we were really grasping at straws.
Enter Foundations.
FOUNDATIONS IS THE SET OF THE YEAR
Foundations is traditional, honest, fantastic MTG.
You look at the set, and it has Knights, it has Angels, and Demons, and Goblins. It has Soldiers, and Elves, and Sea Monsters. It has iconic creature types. It has reprints of the iconic creatures in those types, too: Llanowar Elves, Mentor of the Meek, Krenko, Ghalta… even the flappiest slappiest dino birb, Zetalpa. The vibe is that of a core set, but with the set being so large – and because of the reprints – it feels like a Core Set 2.0, which is probably exactly what they were aiming at considering it’s Standard legal for the next 5 years.
Sure, it throws bones to Commander players, by reprinting cards like Swiftfoot Boots, Solemn Simulacrum, and Rise of the Dark Realms – but those are iconic cards in their own right now, format be damned. And Jumpstart 25 is way more for Commander players, anyways.
FOUNDATIONS LIMITED SLAPS
The other thing that makes Foundations such a home run is the Limited environment. FDN limited, whether sealed or draft, is good, clean Magic. It has all the trappings of a Core Set – which is usually a return to fundamentals – but builds on it by including plenty of interesting build-arounds and bombs that keep things interesting. Somehow, it does this without feeling as awkward as a set like March of the Machine or Outlaws, sets with huge card pools and bonus sheets. In some sets, bonus sheets can really swing a draft environment, but in Foundations, the environment feels cohesive.
Bombs are swingy, sure, but they don’t often feel unbeatable. You can drop a game to someone being lucky and drawing their Embercleave early, but you can play around or sideboard against many of the bombs in this set, and removal feels plentiful. Check out our Draft Guide for more on the format.
Is some of the love for the draft format colored by comparison? Sure, in the sense that a return to a less complex or pushed set (without a huge and impactful bonus sheet) means that the drafts feel like classic Magic, something we haven’t had for a while.
ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER
Is the departure from classic Magic the main draw of FDN? I mean, yes and no. I will acknowledge that getting to visit classic archetypes while getting exciting new cards for them is right up mine and many others’ streets; and, I think that instead of pushed Universes Beyond cards, having a set where the cards most likely to be pushed or “warp” formats are classic, older cards or their newer incarnations is overall really refreshing.
But is Foundations only a nostalgia trap? No, not at all. It’s a blast to play with, and the new card designs are exciting. And I haven’t even covered J25 here, which thankfully houses a lot of the Legendary Creatures of the overall release, meaning Commander players needs aren’t bearing down on another set release.
END STEP
Foundations was the best set of the year, and it wasn’t close. Will it help soothe the jaded among us, or is it a diamond in the rough, putting pressure on in-universe Magic sets to scratch that same itch, or forever be consigned to being “meh”? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, consider playing some Magic with this set if you can. It’ll melt even the coldest of hearts this holiday season.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.