All in all, MTG Foundations has had an incredibly positive reception from the community. Players are loving this new, more advanced take on a Magic core set. In fact, they’re loving it so much that supply is scarce right now, owing to retailers not pre-ordering enough product. Sadly, it seems Wizards wasn’t content with making a clean sweep, however. It has slipped in a questionable last-minute move that may sour the set for many. Unlike past sets, players won’t be able to use the set redemption feature on MTGO to grab a full physical MTG Foundations set. This may look like a single step backward, but it could herald more changes in the years to come.
No Road To Redemption
To dial things back a bit, let’s quickly go over what set redemption actually is. This is a service offered to players on the MTGO platform. Through it, they can convert a full digital set of cards into a full physical one. For regular MTGO players, this was an excellent feature to have. Drafting regularly would get you a full set eventually, at which point you could ‘cash out’ and grab the set in paper for use at in-person events.
For much of MTGO’s history this option has existed, and been widely enjoyed by players. Granted it only applied to Standard legal sets and not supplemental ones like Modern Horizons, but it was still a great feature. Unfortunately, as announced in an article from the MTGO team, it’s not a feature that will apply to Foundations.
“Magic: The Gathering Foundations is an atypical set, especially for the Magic Online audience. As a ‘slow-rotating’ core set designed to be the best place for new Magic players to start, we don’t expect it to be a focal point for the MTGO player base, and we are not treating it like a typical Standard release. While it will be available to play and collect on Magic Online, it will not be eligible for physical set redemption, and there are no prestige avatars for it.”
Daybreak Games
As a justification, this feels flimsy at best. Sure Foundations is a set aimed at new players, but it’s clearly the most advanced “new player set” we’ve ever seen. Its cards have potential in multiple formats, not just Standard. Additionally, this logic was never applied to core sets past, which were all eligible for redemption.
It’s true that Foundations is considerably larger than those sets. This may have created logistical problems with redemption this time around. That wasn’t cited as a reason in the announcement, however. Excluding Foundations, perhaps the definitive Standard set of our time, from the list of Standard sets based on expectations alone seems like an odd move.
MTGO is certainly a platform used mainly by experienced players. Even with that in mind, it seems very unlikely that MTGO players won’t want to engage with MTG Foundations, and potentially use the set redemption feature for it as well.
A Worrying Omen?
This change is baffling in a vacuum, but the wider context is even more worrying. This isn’t the first recent change to the set redemption feature, after all. Back in 2022, MTGO fully transferred from Wizards’ servers to Daybreak’s. As a result, the set redemption feature took two serious hits.
Firstly, set redemptions were now only offered on a while-supplies-last basis, rather than the full shelf life of the set in question. Second, the costs to both redeem sets and have them shipped were increased significantly.
In June of this year, another double blow fell on the feature. Not only were foil set redemptions removed entirely, but the price of regular redemptions was increased yet again. Daybreak cited growing manufacturing costs as the explanation for these changes. This makes sense given the current state of global economic affairs, but it also makes the future of set redemption look tenuous at best.
“The ability to convert digital collectibles into physical collectibles is a unique feature in modern digital gaming and one we would like to preserve. However, while it has never been a significant source of revenue for Magic Online, we can’t justify taking an ongoing loss to maintain it.”
Daybreak Games
With these cutbacks in June, followed by bowing out of MTG Foundations set redemption now, it very much looks like the feature is on its last legs. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a complete end to the system early next year. Clearly, the costs of keeping it around are getting too much for Daybreak.
The increased popularity of MTG Arena can hardly be helping matters. MTGO got a lot of love in the past for being the only game in town as far as digital versions of Magic went. Arena now offers a much more user-friendly experience, however, and has supplanted MTGO in many respects. This undoubtedly means fewer resources for MTGO, and therefore more cutbacks like this. Hopefully set redemption makes a triumphant return at some point in the future, but for now the future looks bleak indeed.