Wizards of the Coast announced today that Kaladesh Remastered will be the next remastered set, and that it is scheduled to arrive on Magic: the Gathering Arena by the end of 2020.
Kaladesh Remastered will follow August’s Amonkhet Remastered, which was the second iteration of a “remastered” set after 2015’s Tempest Remastered on Magic Online. Wizards has also announced the forthcoming Time Spiral Remastered, which is expected to be released for tabletop and Magic Online sometime in the first half of 2021.
“We learned a lot from Amonkhet Remastered that we want to build on sooner rather than later,” Wizards said. Combined with the fact that they “have a better idea of the power level of Historic in a post-Jumpstart, Amonkhet Remastered, and Mythic Invitational world, and we felt this was a good time to reintroduce Kaladesh and Aether Revolt to MTG Arena.”
Wizards expected Amonkhet Remastered—and remastered sets on Arena in general—to be mostly of interest to those who wanted to build their collections to play Historic. However, “one of the biggest takeaways from Amonkhet Remastered was how players chose to interact with the set and add cards to their collection,” Wizards said. “What surprised us was how many players participated in Amonkhet Remastered Draft and Sealed events, which greatly exceeded our expectations and blurred the line between Historic and Standard players.”
Remastered sets are intended as a way for Wizards to add sets from Magic’s history in order expand Arena’s Historic format and work towards fully supporting the new Pioneer format. When Arena was officially released in 2019, it only included sets from 2017’s Ixalan forward, whereas Pioneer includes sets all the way back to 2012’s Return to Ravnica. The Kaladesh and Amonkhet blocks—the first two remastered sets on Arena—were the the two blocks added to the game during its 2017-18 Closed Beta and were removed from the game when it transitioned to its Open Beta.
To that end, Wizards said that “the Kaladesh block was known for its fast, fun Limited environment as well as its powerful cards for Constructed play, so it readily builds off the foundation of Historic that we’ve built throughout the year.”
Wizards did not reveal the planned size of Kaladesh Remastered—Amonkhet Remastered pared 459 unique cards down to 340—or if the set will include cards from outside of the Kaladesh block similar to how Amonkhet Remastered included cards from outside of the Amonkhet block like Thoughtseize and Wrath of God.
Unfortunately, Kaladesh Remastered will take Pioneer Masters’ place on the 2020 schedule, bumping the latter into 2021. But Wizards said that adding the Kaladesh block is “still a step toward Pioneer” support.