Spoiler season is fun and thrilling, but what’s even more exciting is trying to find out in advance what could be in the upcoming set. So since spoilers won’t start until the day after tomorrow, let’s dissect Mark Rosewater’s (head designer of Magic) latest blog article filled with Core Set 2021 teasers and see what we’re able to infer from it.
New cards
A +1/+1 tribal lord for a creature type that’s never had one. (A creature type with over fifty cards already in print.)
Please let it be bears! But I could imagine something like artificers, orcs, or even elephants.
A character with a Vanguard card and a legendary creature card gets a second of the latter.
I’m betting on Barrin (vanguard, legend), teacher at the Tolarian Academy, where the famous and infamous Teferi was his scholar. And that guy is the poster child of this set, sooo…
An aura inspired from a cycle from Urza’s Saga block.
After consulting the MTG Wiki as a great source to quickly check what cycles were in the named set, I’m going with a new embrace, more precisely with Barrin’s Embrace after what we’ve just considered above.
A card with thirty-one different options.
That’s exactly the amount of possible colour combinations: 10 guilds, 10 clans, 5 four color options, 5 mono colors, 1 rainbow. So you’d have to choose any one combination of colors with this card. But to do what exactly? It might just give protection from your selected colors, obviously. We’ll see.
A card that gains all activated abilities of a certain subset of cards in a place it’s never done it before.
A Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God-ish effect that can use loyalty abilities of planeswalkers in your graveyard? Might not even necessarily be a planeswalker itself, imagine an artifact similar to the newly printed Manascape Refractor but – like I said – for planeswalkers in the graveyard instead for lands on the battlefield. Totally unrelated question: Where’s the Immortal Sun currently hanging around?
A card that uses a nonevergreen named ability over twenty years old.
Ok, that’s the point where we have to talk about the elephant in the room. There’s a Reddit post from about a week ago about M21 rumors that has been quite accurate so far (e.g. it predicted today’s Standard bannings almost entirely correctly). So this post might more or less have the quality of a leak. If you just like to read about best guesses and not about educated guesses based on potential leaks, you might want to skip the next paragraph.
!Leak talk! The reddit post lists a number of cards to be in the set, one of which is a new Teferi planeswalker. One of its abilities would be to make an opponent’s creature phase out. And because it’s Teferi, it can be used at instant speed. Of course it can.
A card with the words “battlefield”, “cast”, “creature”, “converted mana cost”, “end of turn”, “exile”, “graveyard” and “mana cost”.
Let’s try this, shall we?
„When THIS CARD enters the battlefield, you may cast a creature spell with converted mana cost less than X from exile or from your graveyard until end of turn without paying its mana cost.“
A nonevergreen enchantment subtype returns.
I’m always gonna root for more Sagas here, but given that the already existing Hondens just have been randomly thrown into Arena (with the Historic Anthology III), we might see Shrines more likely than Sagas yet again. Maybe we’re about to get a two-coloured Shrine cycle?
Reprints
A popular character first introduced in flavor text.
We don’t have to go too far back with this one. I’m not too deeply invested into the lore, but even I noticed some love in the fanbase for a supposed badass called Mileva, depicted in Tenth District Legionnaire. She cought the Devkarin Dissident and wasn’t too impressed by those ridiculous Amonkhetian „invaders“ of her home town either. Try harder next time, Bolas. Mileva is here to protect Ravnica. And the legendary status she deserves might finally be acknowledged.
A French Vanilla mythic rare.
There are some candidates, more obscure ones like Baneslayer Angel, but please just make it Carnage Tyrant. I want my teeth back!
Two cards played in tournaments that have been reprinted over twenty times with at least five different pieces of art.
Please don’t just bait us with Negate or Shock or something boring like that. Let us finally Bolt the Bird again!
!Leak talk! The aforementioned Reddit post brings up the „BoP“ as well.
A card that’s never previously appeared in a premier set.
!Leak talk! According to the Reddit post, we could see a reprint of Grim Tutor in M21. That might seem a bit far-fetched, but I’d be down.
A Human Monk.
„Mentor or Swiftspear?“, that’s the question. Might even be Azusa, Lost but Seeking, but Wizards would never push Simic ramp even further, would they?
A card from the Time Spiral timeshifted sheet.
I’d be highly surprised if it wouldn’t be just Teferi’s Moat. It has to be it, right?
Now that’s all for now. I simply skipped the hints where I just had no clue at all. So I hope that’s been fun and interesting to read for y’all. I’m looking forward to come back to this in a few weeks and see what’s been confirmed and what turned out as completely wrong.
Should I just not mention at all that this is my first attempt at writing a longer text in English publicly? Yeah, I guess everything will be fine and noone will even notice …
Auch ein aggressives rot-grünes Deck lässt sich mit den passenden Planeswalker-Decks aus M19 plus korrespondierender Welcome-Decks (und bis zu fünf zusätzlicher Karten) zusammenschustern.