Today at MagicFest Richmond, Wizards of the Coast revealed the Mystery Boosters that they teased last month. The packs contain reprints of cards throughout Magic: the Gathering’s history (all the way back to Mirage), with their original set symbols and borders, as well as one playtest card per pack.
“[Mystery Boosters] are probably the strangest non-silver bordered thing we’ve ever done,” said Gavin Verhey, the lead designer for the product, to the nearly 450 who attended the first Mystery Booster Sealed event. He also said that the Mystery Boosters contain “all freshly printed cards” and that players should wait “to see the full set list assembled before drawing any conclusions.”
The Mystery Booster product contains “curated list” of 1,694 reprints (not including the playtest or foil cards) making it “easily the largest set ever,” he added.
Update (11/11/19): Wizards revealed the full set list (and more).
The Full Pack Breadown
On Weekly MTG, Verhey revealed the structure of the Mystery Booster:
- 1 playtest card (only in the Convention Edition) or 1 of 121 foil cards (only in the LGS version)
- 2 commons/uncommons of each color
- 1 common/uncommon multicolored card
- 1 common/uncommon artifact or land
- 1 pre-M15 card in Magic’s original frame (can be a rare)
- 1 rare or mythic from M15 forward
The full set is made up of 1,694 reprints from Magic sets all the way back to Mirage, plus playtest cards and 121 as yet unknown foils. You can find the full list of cards here.
Playtest Cards
At the front of each Mystery Booster is a playtest card that is modeled after the rough drafts of cards Wizards makes for their internal playtests when designing a set. To make playtest cards, R&D members take existing Magic cards and place a sticker on the front of the card with the information for the new card, including mana cost, playtest name, types, text, etc.
A playtest cards from Wizards R&D.
The playtest cards in the Mystery Boosters look very similar to those from Wizards R&D, with a white rectangle on the front of an existing card to represent the sticker, a funny placeholder name and art, as well as the all-important “TEST CARD—Not for constructed play” text at the very bottom.
Mystery Booster playtest cards, courtesy of ChannelFireball and @BonafideVonafyd on Twitter.
There are plenty of awesome playtest cards from the Mystery Boosters—check out a bunch of them below.
UPDATE: Mark Rosewater revealed that the playtest cards are only in the Convention Edition of Mystery Boosters.
Reprints Galore
The Mystery Boosters contain plenty of reprints aside from the playtest cards. There is no full list available yet, but the cards span across Magic’s history and include many new cards as well as older cards like Chatter of the Squirrel from Odyssey, which was released in 2001.
The reprints feature their original set symbol and use their original frame, so cards like Chatter of the Squirrel is reprinted in Mystery Boosters with Magic’s original frame. Each card has a planeswalker symbol in the lower left-hand corner to represent that it is part of the Mystery Booster product.
Courtesy of Marshall Sutcliffe
Some packs even seem to have two rares in them.
When Wizards teased “Mystery Boosters” last month, the only thing they revealed was that you would be able to play with them for the first time at MagicFest Richmond. They will also be available next month at PAX Unplugged as well as future MagicFests through April 2020 while supplies last, and will come to local game stores on March 13, 2020.
This story is developing. We will update it when further information becomes available.