Magic: The Gathering, the king of card games, announced yesterday a new kind of card pack for its upcoming set, Zendikar Rising: the Set Booster. Set boosters contain different combinations and rarities of cards than regular card packs. Set boosters contain 14 cards, but only 12 are guaranteed to be Magic cards, as opposed to the 15 cards in draft boosters. To compensate, those 12 cards contain rare and mythic rare cards at a higher rate than usual.

The other two cards in the set booster are art print cards and advertising token cards, or a 25% chance of ...... The cards are from a "list." A list is a spare pile of favorite reprints from past Magic sets. Examples given by Mark Rosewater, Magic's lead designer, are "Muscle Sliver," "Cloud Goat Ranger," and "Covenant of Denial. These are cards that are "everywhere in Magic's 27-year history." These cards will be marked with a special mark to indicate that they were printed from the "List" and not from the original set.

Unfortunately, digital players of Magic: The Gathering Arena will not have access to cards from The List. I'll tell you why directly from Rosewater: in tabletop Magic, "The List" does not affect the legality of the format, but in MTG Arena, these cards will be added to the historicals. While some cards from The List may eventually be added to Historic, we want to be a little more purposeful when adding new cards in MTG Arena.

This is disappointing to say the least. However, this does not mean that cards from the "list" will not appear in MTG Arena in the future. Magic's latest set, Zendikar Rising, will be released digitally on September 17 and physically on September 25. Magic's next sets, Double Masters, will be released on August 6 and 7, respectively.