Welcome to a new year, and with Ravnica Remastered arriving in a week, Murders at Karlov Manor on February 8, then Universes Beyond: Fallout exactly one month after that on March 8! Yes, the timeline is jam-packed full of releases, but there is helpful information in each release that’s coming up this year.

We can do a lot, even with limited information, and one example is Doubling Season. With Ravnica Remastered on the horizon, I stayed the heck away from Doubling Season and other Ravnica-themed cards. Doubling Season ended up being printed twice in a row in other bonus sheets, but it worked anyway.

So with that in mind, let’s go through the calendar, and see what we should do or not do coming into the coming year.

First off, let’s get the layout for the year, and if you want to watch the whole Wizards panel with the teasers, here’s the link: 

One caveat about the whole dang thing: There’s a lot of places for reprints to happen outside of the themes of a set. We know that Special Guests are now a thing in Play Boosters, which will premier in Murders at Karlov Manor, and the List will now be 40 cards plus the ten Guests. No more Draft Boosters, which means that more of these packs are opened and a List inclusion will probably mean the price takes a hit.

Special Guests are supposed to be “highly desired reprints with creative that adapts it to the world,” according to Mark Rosewater. We will see about the first WTF inclusions as the year goes on.

Plus, Secret Lairs are still a thing, and the recent announcement regarding the print runs and faster shipping won’t make much of a difference if your spec gets caught in the web of reprints.  So there’s a lot of potholes that are invisible by nature, and best of luck to us all in avoiding those.

Right now, we have the whole list for Ravnica Remastered, and that topic is now blessedly done. All that remains is to see how much a couple of Serialized Foil Dragons are going to cost me, since it takes 6400 packs to get one specific Dragon. I’m also interested to see how under-opened the set is, as we know demand is soft but they printed 3.2 million of the Collector Boosters, and that could lead to either fire-sale distributor pricing or just massive amounts of product being destroyed.

Murders at Karlov Manor is about to get previews, and while we’re told that the set won’t be guild-themed or -focused as a regular Ravnica set would be, one of the banner mythics is an Azorius investigator and one of the Clue special cards is a Boros Soldier commander. I have my doubts about the color pairs not mattering too much, but with the set so close, I’d prefer to hold back on anything related to that theme anyway.

Fallout being a set of Commander decks in the style of Warhammer 40K means that I’m not super-worried about reprints, since those decks were mostly new cards mixed with known lands. We know some of the Commanders for the set, and those point at themes that encourage speculative buying. I promise, I’ll have more for you on that topic before long, I already wrote about (and built!) Mr. House’s deck.

Outlaws of Thunder Junction is confirmed to be about villains from Magic worlds coming together to do bad things. From this key art, a whole lot of crazy theories have popped up:

Depending on who you believe, and if you think dead means dead or ‘mostly dead’ in previous sets, those characters can be a lot of different folks. Big baddie with wings and horns? Rakdos and Ob Nixilis come to mind. Half-sized? Could be Squee, Tinybones, Krenko, or someone else. The medusa is heavily favored to be Vraska, but my favorite speculation is that Oko makes a triumphant return to the stage. We’ll see.

The year’s biggest release will come around the start of summer: Modern Horizons 3. 

I expect great things from this set, and I’ll likely write a couple of different times about what to do when we get a little information, but I feel confident about a couple of big points for this set.

First, I think we get the original Eldrazi Titans. The prices for Ulamog and Kozilek are above $35 even for the basic versions, and Emrakul would be up there if not for the Commander ban. (I’m not advocating for the unban, just saying why she’s $15.) It’s possible that they mix-and-match, and give us Emrakul, the Promised End, which has a bigger price tag, but I think that it’s been so long since Double Masters 2022 that people are ready for more. 

Second, allied fetchlands are in MH3. MH2 gave us the enemy shocks, which hadn’t had an appearance at regular rare since Modern Masters 2017. The allied lands were last in Khans of Tarkir, ten years ago! Polluted Delta is roughly twice the price of Scalding Tarn. Wooded Foothills is too! 

I expect these lands to be in the set and I expect their price to go very, very low. There will be a lot of these packs out there, just as with Modern Horizons 2, and so the time will be right to load up your decks with cheap fetches.

I used to be certain that we’d get the cycle of pitch Elementals as reprints here, as having the cycle all be at least $20 would be good anchors for the mythics, but I’m not sure what the banning of Fury means for all this. It’s possible that the set hadn’t gone to print when the card was banned, and perhaps we get a ‘fixed’ Fury who does 3 damage and doesn’t have double strike. It’s hard to predict or foresee given these conditions.

The other sets this year are pretty damn nebulous, but keep in mind that details are inevitably going to leak and we’ll do our best to keep you informed.

Innistrad Remastered is due the very beginning of 2025, and that’s a very important detail. That could be where we get the Emrakul, the Promised End reprint, as well as one for Edgar Markov. Snapcaster Mage and Parallel Lives should be on the agenda, in addition to Cryptolith Rite, Meathook Massacre, Toxrill, the Corrosive, and the slowlands of both Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow. Anything associated with Innistrad should be viewed as untouchable until that set arrives.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.