Magic: The Gathering Year In Review 2021

This year has been absolutely incredible for Magic the Gathering. Every set has been a banger, with lots of powerful new toys to play with, fascinating worlds to visit, and some of the best sets the game has ever seen.  

This year has been absolutely incredible for Magic the Gathering. Every set has been a banger, with lots of powerful new toys to play with, fascinating worlds to visit, and some of the best sets the game has ever seen.
We kicked off the year with the Viking-centric Kaldheim, which managed to tell a story spanning ten different realms while also giving us some fantastic cards like Tergrid, God of Fright, Niko Aris, and Esika's Chariot. It also introduced the brilliant Foretell mechanic, which lets you play cards for cheaper by putting them into exile earlier in the game.

Next, we had Time Spiral Remastered, the first time a set has been remastered for tabletop play. Collecting Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight into one draft experience, the best bit about it were easily the Timeshifted cards. These took new cards and reprinted them with the original frames for a blast of pure nostalgia. It was also nice to revisit an earlier, arguably simpler time of Magic, and see for myself why people loved the Time Spiral block too much.

We then headed to school with Strixhaven: School of Mages! This set became an immediate classic with its five colleges (Quandrix for life, my friends!), but the Mystical Archive really stole the show by reprinting instants and sorceries from across Magic's history with stunning new art. Buying a couple of draft packs and pulling a Teferi's Protection and a Time Warp is still one of my highlights of the year! Strixhaven was so popular that, only a few months later, Dungeons & Dragons players got to explore the setting for themselves in the sourcebook Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

Modern Horizons 2 was by far the best set to release this year, and is up there alongside the likes of Commander Legends as being one of my most favourite sets of all time. In a year of overall lower-powered sets to recalibrate after the infamous Throne of Eldraine, Modern Horizons 2 was a refreshing blast of raw power. It went wide with its mechanics, bringing back everything from Spectacle to Living Weapons in one of the most strategically rich, high-powered sets we've had in a very, very long time. It also had the enemy-colour fetch lands and the return of the original borders last seen in Time Spiral Remastered to sweeten the deal even further. Even when I'm buying a booster box of the newest set, I'll still pick up a couple of packs of Modern Horizons 2, just because of how amazing it was.

The event of the year came in the summer when Magic the Gathering finally hosted Wizards of the Coast's other property in the full crossover set Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. This may have been slightly low on the power scale, but it was full of cool references that D&D veterans loved, and also brought fun mechanics like Dungeons and Dice Rolling to the game. This isn't the last time we'll see D&D in Magic, either, as next year we'll be heading back for Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate!

The last two sets of the year were a double act that took us to one of Magic's most beloved worlds, the dark and spooky Innistrad. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt revamped Werewolves with the new Daybound and Nightbound mechanic, while Crimson Vow put the Vampires in the spotlight with a vampiric wedding the world will never forget. Disturb was a surprise highlight of both sets, which allowed you to transform a card and cast it from your graveyard – who can look at Mourning Patrol and Morning Apparition and not absolutely adore the Disturb mechanic?

Let's not forget the Commander pre-constructed decks, either! We had more precons this year than ever before, thanks in no small part to the Strixhaven tie-in Commander 2021 bringing us format-defining new cards like Archaeomancer's Map and Veyran, Voice of Duality. The next month we had another collection of four decks with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (I made a deck from Wulfgar of Icewind Dale from these and absolutely love it). 2020 may have been the year of Commander, but 2021 didn't slack on the treats it gave Magic's most popular format!

Despite all the amazing cards we’ve seen this year, my favourite is probably a small, overlooked common from Modern Horizons 2: Late to Dinner. The story that card tells is so charming, and a rare, sentimental reminder from Wizards that one day we'll crawl out of the pandemic and get to play with our friends in person again. Is it a big, format-defining heavy hitter? No, but I love it nonetheless.

2022 is already gearing up to be just as great as 2021, with Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty kicking things off in February. It, Unfinity, and Streets of New Capenna are only months away now, and I'm so excited.