In an unprecedented moved, Wizards of the Coast has changed the release date for Streets of New Capena. Now it’s not a full blown release date change, but rather they are changing the cadence of when digital gets released versus paper.
Typically, Magic Arena and Magic Online get sets released a week ahead of the paper release, typically in the same week as paper prerelease. Well in an announcement from Wizards and in WeeklyMTG, the team has decided to change it up. For Streets of New Capena only, digital and paper releases will be on the same day. Wizards has not disclosed exactly why they went with this move. The official date for Streets of New Capena will be April 28 for Digital and April 29 for paper.
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Wizards also gave us the release date for another upcoming set, Commander Legends: Battle for Bauldur’s Gate. This is the next installment of the wildly popular set Commander Legends. This one is set in the world of D&D. The release date for that set is June 10th.
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As for the reasoning behind this, some ideas could be that there’s a very cool event happening for release that will be translate across between digital and paper. The other reason that I can think of is that maybe data is showing that by putting the digital release schedule before paper prerelease lowers the attendance rates of Pre-release overall, so they want to give game stores more support in that way.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you like this change, or would you rather still have digital get the cards early? Let us know in the comments