It’s a funny thing – as Magic embarks into 2025, looking to a calendar full of intriguing new worlds and momentous tie-ins, its first headline attraction will be a celebration of the familiar!
The gothic, brooding plane of Innistrad will be the latest to receive a paper Remastered set alongside fan favorites Ravnica and Dominaria. Drawing on sets from Innistrad’s self-titled debut in 2011 all the way through to the present, the amount of potential behind this premise is positively scary!
LEGENDS NEVER STAY DEAD
Innistrad may have the shortest tenure of the planes which have been Remastered so far, but there’s no doubt it has the popularity – and wealth of iconic cards – to merit the special treatment. But the name Innistrad Remastered doesn’t just create expectations of a lore-friendly reprint set. The Limited gameplay from the early Innistrad sets is famously good, so beloved that it has become a part of the plane’s identity.
How can Wizards hope to design one list of reprints which replicates both the aesthetic and mechanical hallmarks of that block, while still providing thorough representation for both our more recent trips to the plane?
This author wouldn’t have the slightest idea – but popular community member Angelo (a.k.a. “TheJesguy” on socials) might. After all, as the creator and maintainer of Magic’s best-known Innistrad themed Cube Draft format – one also (coincidentally) dubbed “the Innistrad Remastered Cube” – he’s arguably hit that goal already. Of course, Angelo did not embark on his project with the ambition of showing up Wizards’ own design team, or even of leaving them an ideal blueprint for an official Remastered set. He just wanted something to do with some chaff:
“While Magic 2013 was the set where I got my first cards, and Return to Ravnica was my first prerelease – the time in between when I went out and bought all the, y’know, thousand-card-collections-in-a-box type stuff, those were all Innistrad cards, because that’s what people had at the time.
I wasn’t really online doing Magic stuff yet, I didn’t really have many friends to play with, so all the cards that I had to play with were just these ones I was buying… and everyone had all Innistrad cards. I wasn’t around while [the sets] came out, but because everything was out by then – Innistrad, Dark Ascension, and Avacyn Restored – I was able to just dive headfirst into it.”
“So while everyone else was just coming off the tail end of Innistrad, I was steeped in it!
I didn’t… kind of, realize how formative that was for me until Shadows Over Innistrad came out, and I thought oh damn, we’re going back to Innistrad – this is sick! All the memories from me starting out came back when Shadows dropped, and so when Eldritch Moon got released I started making the cube.”
It’s funny to think that someone who has done this much to promote the Innistrad block wasn’t actually drafting those sets during their original release. But learning about those famous formats in hindsight gives Angelo a similar perspective to many of the players who will be excited to experience them through the new Innistrad Remastered. Was the desire to experience that gameplay for itself, to use those cards in their intended context, part of his motivation for making the cube?
“I would say partially it was that, for sure. And then another part was, just practically, I had so many cards! By that point I had dropped out of Standard… and I never really went back. And while I still had EDH, I needed something else to occupy my time, something else to do with Magic. I remember an old Tolarian Community College video called “What is a Cube” came out around that time, and I watched it. The idea was still a little big for my baby Magic brain, but I kind of grasped it. And I said “well I have all these Innistrad cards, and I love Innistrad – what if I do just an Innistrad cube?”
THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES
When Angelo first created his cube, the stakes were very low and the focus was simply on what would feel “right” to Angelo and his close play group based on those first two Innistrad blocks. But over time, maintaining the Innistrad Cube became a more complex challenge as the audience of players giving feedback grew, as did the number of new cards to consider for inclusion.
“It’s something I like about the theme – I don’t have to update it all the time, but it lets me look forward to sets like Foundations like oh, look there’s eleven new Innistrad cards here. My rule is hard and fast though: it needs to be from Innistrad. But at least now with the Omenpaths, you never know… if you’re imagining someone on Innistrad [in a card] then they’re in Innistrad, I can use them. So for example: I can’t include the new Gisa and Geralf, because for that card they’re in Thunder Junction. But if in one set Niv-Mizzet got in an Omenpath and showed up on Innistrad, I could totally use that.
That’s one thing I’m very excited for about this new set, is they’re re-skinning old cards to be on Innistrad… There’s been cards I’d like to include in the cube, like, I would kill for Uro. I remember there was a Secret Lair drop for Kaldheim which had Uro in it, like Uro on Kaldheim – and I was like, come onnnn – you couldn’t just do an Innistrad Secret Lair with Uro in it?!? But maybe he’ll be in Innistrad Remastered.”
When I asked if there were any other potential “special guest” cards on Angelo’s wishlist for this set, he cut me off before I could even finish stating the question: “Life from the Loam. Because green-blue self-mill is kind of weak, but you give it Life from the Loam? It gets a lot better.”
A cube curator like Angelo might have the most riding on these decisions, but the chance to get reprints of staple cards with new art or treatment is the kind of incentive that drives excitement around a set and helps people financially justify buying booster boxes, or grinding drafts.
In a funny way, what looks like a treat for Commander players blinging out their decks is key to giving more players a chance to experience the Remastered Limited gameplay its designers worked so hard on.
But while Angelo may be dreaming about which staple creatures from other planes would be cool to feature in his cube, it’s already a hard enough balancing act trying to make sure the cube makes room for all the most iconic Innistrad spells people demand to see from the existing sets. How does he resolve the tension between novel, interesting design and heartwarming nostalgia?
“The thing to me is, I’m providing an experience for everyone to enjoy. When I sit people down for a cube, I see myself kind of like a host at a dinner party. Here, I am serving you Spirits, I am serving you Werewolves, I am serving you UR Spells. But it’s up to you to take whatever you want… and I want to make sure that the things that I am offering you are the best that they can be. And sometimes that means killing your favorites.
Because what I’m striving for is to make the best Innistrad Limited format that I can… it is my own passion project, but I want to do a service to my drafters, and I want to do a service to Innistrad as a whole. And I will separate myself from the equation if I think it will do a service to the cube as a whole.”
“There are just some cards: like Huntmaster of the Fells, like Lingering Souls, like Spider Spawning – where if they aren’t in there, people will keep asking: why not! Like I used to have Olivia, Crimson Bride in here – it was the RB way of reanimating Griselbrand, it was some top-end for RB Vampires. It’s just fun, I think, and that was my Olivia card. But then there is Olivia Voldaren… and if Olivia Voldaren is not in the cube, people question it.”
WELL IT’S NOT CALLED INNISTRAD *REPRINTED*
It’s worth asking the question – why do we need to choose between including this card or that one in a Remastered set, if they’re both strong candidates? Well, even with a sizable cardlist to fill, you simply can’t have everything from every Innistrad set – that would be an impractical pool to draft from, and the cards are as likely to clash as to work together!
Innistrad does benefit a little here because its horror identity aligns so consistently with graveyard-centric mechanics and DFCs, but the themes for each color pair have been all over the place since day one. Angelo broke it down thus:
“I think that when you’re looking at Innistrad – and this might be my favorite thing about it – you need to separate the ally and enemy colors into two distinct categories. You have the allied color kindred themes: you have Humans, and your Spirits, and your Zombies, and your Werewolves, and your Vampires. But then for the enemy colors, those are all “themes”. So you’re not going to have your problem like Lorwyn where everything is creature-type-based and everything is on-rails and super locked-in – same thing with Ixalan.
But throughout all these Innistrad sets, you’ve had this creature type stuff, but it doesn’t feel nearly as on-rails, and I think the reason is that the flip-side, the enemy colors are just themes. So you can have a lot of cards where like, it’s a creature type that’s relevant but also fits a theme.”
“The most important thing for me in Cube design is to make sure your themes are strong – and I don’t just mean make sure they’re prominent, I mean strong as in powerful. I think you should always overtune instead of undertune, because then when you test it’s easier to tell when you get the outcome you want to see.
For RG I think in every set they’ve tried to do werewolves, and it has just never really worked. Part of the problem is that you’re always coming from behind, and when they’re bad they’re bad – because a lot of the frontsides are basically vanilla creatures – but if your opponent stumbles and they all flip then you’re gonna end up murdering someone. So then in Cube especially you have this very polarizing archetype and it has to be able to compete with something very consistent like Spirits.
Spoiler alert, Werewolves do end up being very good in my cube. I do merge the old and the new werewolves to help the curve, because there’s no one-drop Daybound/Nightbound guys. But the most important thing was to fit in all the powerful cards I could… flash wolves like Nightpack Ambusher, activated abilities as mana sinks so you aren’t losing tempo… and just make them a more of a midrange deck.”
To be fair, it’s still easier to incorporate these short-lived Shadows block themes than to figure out the blocks and color pairs which seemingly have no strong identity on Innistrad at all!
“Blue and green were struggling [in the cube] for quite some time after Crimson Vow. In the original Innistrad they kind of did self-mill… kind of. Then with Shadows you had Investigage, which doesn’t gel with the rest of what you’re doing unfortunately. Luckily we went back to the self-mill in Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow.
The real problem was two-fold. First, the aggressive decks were too aggressive. So on CubeCobra if you were to check out the Innistrad Cube… if you go through my blogs, any time I make changes I go in-depth about why I’m making these changes and what I’m doing. And if you go back, there were two or three big changes where I needed to slow the cube down – white and red were way too fast, white specifically. When you have things being too fast, with blue, your counterspells don’t matter because people just get underneath you and now you have these dead cards in hand.
I ended up changing 19 cards, which is quite a bit, and then I changed another five cards. And then Modern Horizons 3 came out, and I got to do some fun stuff with Six.
The second problem with blue and green is they just needed more power – not even the color combo, but like blue and green separately. And this folds back into doing what’s right for the cube, regardless of if I want or don’t want it: when I first saw Avabruck Caretaker, I was like – if this thing goes anywhere near my cube, someone has kidnapped me and put it in the cube themselves. Then the second runner up there was Hullbreaker horror… that card is absolutely absurd.
As for red-white, let me ask you a question – what does RW do in the original Innistrad? Nothing! Because in the original Innistrad they didn’t really support the enemy-color pairs very well. And so when you go to Shadows over Innistrad, what does RW do there? Nothing! Same for Eldritch Moon. Well they did do 10 gold uncommons for those sets, but your uncommon for RW is like, Ride Down. That’s the joke for me in the cube – the RW archetype is just “aggro”, because there’s nothing else there to do!”
The more you look at the task of welding together these sets, the more of these difficulties reveal themselves from beneath the veneer of similar artwork and creature types. Even if you could find space to include every memorable or interesting card from across these sets, you’d be inviting a constant clash between cards designed with different themes, different ideas of efficiency, of the color pie, even ones designed for literally different rules in a different era of Magic.
To juxtapose a few of those differences using their most iconic representatives is part of the excitement of a Remastered set, but to juxtapose all of them would create an unsatisfying mess. That’s why the authorial discretion implied by the Remastered name is so important, and perhaps why both Angelo and Wizards reached for it. To show that these projects are meant to revive the spirit and the ideal of Innistrad sets, not the blessed dead themselves.
INNISTRAD: DISSECTOR’S CUT
We may be in a high-volume era for new sets compared to Magic’s history, but objectively they’re still a scarce commodity. Especially when a larger share of those release windows are being reserved for Universes Beyond crossover products, the opportunity to revisit the game’s past successes with a set like this one feels special indeed.
Innistrad Remastered might feel like a niche nostalgia set for those who aren’t enticed by the legend of those early Draft sets, and who don’t feel an affinity to the spooky plane like Angelo. But I’d urge every Magic player to give it a chance. Take the time to enjoy the blend of mechanics and flavor which have made Innistrad such a memorable setting, the cards which have become iconic staples of the game, and the countless hours of effort which have been distilled down to produce this delightful – if oddly crimson – vintage.
Huge thanks to Angelo for contributing his time and thoughts to this piece. Make sure you follow him on X or Bluesky for some excellent MtG musings. You can also check out his articles on EDHRec, and say hi to him on the EDHRECast community discord, which he moderates.
Tom’s fate was sealed in 7th grade when his friend lent him a pile of commons to play Magic. He quickly picked up Boros and Orzhov decks in Ravnica block and has remained a staunch white magician ever since. A fan of all Constructed formats, he enjoys studying the history of the tournament meta. He specializes in midrange decks, especially Death & Taxes and Martyr Proc. One day, he swears he will win an MCQ with Evershrike. Ask him how at @AWanderingBard, or watch him stream Magic at twitch.tv/TheWanderingBard.