Magic: The Gathering Foundations on MTGO

Posted on Nov 06, 2024

By The Magic Online Team

We’ve been on quite the journey through the Multiverse this year – cute animals, a nightmare-riddled House, a couple journeys back in time, a heist, and one post-apocalypse. It’s been ... a lot!

2024 closes out with the fantasy pendulum returning to dead center. It’s the start of a new chapter in Standard when Magic: The Gathering Foundations (set code FDN) launches on Magic Online Tuesday, November 12 at 10 a.m. PT (18:00 UTC).

The downtime to add this set to MTGO will happen today, November 6, from 9 a.m. to approximately 12 noon Pacific time (17:00-20:00 UTC). Be sure to follow our social media outlets (Discord, Twitter/X, and more) to keep real-time tabs on this release. As a reminder, our Help site and Forums will also be down during this period.

Building Up from Basics

Features of the upcoming couple months include six weeks of play organized by MTGO Creators (including several short All-Access periods), a long-simmering sore spot gets a fix, plus a bunch of backlogged content coming in December.

MTGO Creator Season is Underway

One of MTGO’s great successes of 2024 has been the launch of our Creator Program. With hundreds of streamers as part of the Program, our game is broadening its reach and growing our community.

Now we’ve kicked off one of our greatest collaborations to date – between now and the Holidays, we have six weeks of events led by prominent members of Magic’s Creator world. Be sure to check out this article to see how you can join in the fun presented by MTGNerdGirl, Anuraag Das, Amaz, AsipiringSpike, and more! Get all the details in this article.

This week we’re kicking things off with Legacy – do very well this week in a Legacy event to earn an invite to Sunday’s Showdown and a chance to score big prizes. One of those Legacy events is our two-day Trophy Race Mini-League – climb the undefeated mountain enough times and you can earn a unique avatar!

Don’t forget that All-Access returns with Creator Season – there are three more chunks of time left this month to be able to play with (almost) all the cards on MTGO! Check out the article link for details.

How to Collect and Play Magic: The Gathering Foundations

Play Boosters

Each FDN Play Booster will sell for $3.99 USD in the MTGO Store starting on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PT and contains 1-3 rare/mythics.

For this set, the composition is:

• 7 regular commons
  • At least 4 of the 5 colors will appear within this group
  • 1 in 64 Play Boosters will have a common replaced by a Special Guest card
• 3 regular uncommons
• 1 regular rare or mythic
• 1 regular wildcard – that is, a non-foil of any rarity
• 1 foil wildcard – a foil in every pack!
• 1 land – standard-frame, tapped-dual, or Showcase, all in either regular or foil

Premium Boosters

Our newest way of getting premium and Booster Fun cards into your Collection is back – the MTGO-exclusive Premium Booster!

The 10-card Foundations Premium Booster will sell for $5.99 USD in the Store starting next Tuesday.

Here’s the layout – each Premium booster contains 5 rares/mythics and at least 8 foils:

• 2 foil uncommons
• 2 foil commons
• 1 foil Showcase land
• 2 foil rare/mythic (regular-frame)
• 2 regular Booster Fun rare/mythic
  • Main Set - can be Borderless or Extended-Art
• 1 foil Booster Fun rare/mythic (Japan Showcase, Special Guest, Borderless, or Extended-Art)
  • Both regular foil and Fracture Foil Japan Showcase can be opened here.

Note: This set does not have Commander decks. MTGO is not bringing in tabletop’s Beginner Box or Starter Collection products. Cards from Jumpstart 2025 that are new to Magic will be added to Treasure Chests during our December 11 downtime.

Booster Fun, Part 1

Here’s a breakdown of where you can find each series of special treatments in this set:

Booster Fun, Part Mystery Booster 2

That’s right – a whole mess of cards that got the futureshifted and/or white-bordered treatments in Mystery Booster 2 will be available in MTGO soon!

However, we want to get the look of the frames exactly right – therefore, one group of these cards (mostly rares and mythics) will be added to Treasure Chests during our December 11 downtime. The other group (mostly commons and uncommons) will be given out as part of Magic Online Player Rewards over the next two months (December 1 & January 1). A sub-set of those cards will be part of the next Cube starting November 27.

Dev Diary: Wall of Roots Fixed Next Week!!

During our latest development cycle, our team got an entire discretionary week to work on whatever they desired. For one Cardset dev, their task was to finish off one of the most elusive fixes in recent MTGO history – the ability to use Wall of Roots for both mana and convoke for Chord of Calling on its way to the graveyard.

Ever since the mana system was refactored with the introduction of colorless mana in Oath of the Gatewatch, this key interaction in Modern and other formats was susceptible to causing a soft-lock – an error which you can’t cancel out of, so you’d lose the match due to inactivity. This most often occurred when players tried to undo a dying Wall of Roots payment causing something else to trigger.

To keep players from hitting this wall, the MTGO team decided a few years ago to make Wall of Roots an instant-speed ability instead of mana-speed. This has obvious gameplay implications and has been a sore spot of metagames for a while.

The awesome news – starting with the patch just before FDN’s release next Tuesday, November 12, Wall of Roots will work as intended again!

Our hero in this quest is one of our newest Cardset devs, Josh Melnick – who specifically had a goal of fixing this interaction prior to even working on the MTGO team! Building on other team members’ changes to various parts of the game in the last few years, Josh was in field goal range to finally slay MTGO’s great green whale ... here’s Josh to explain:

“The key to understanding why Wall of Roots was so difficult to solve for so long is that the set of symptoms that were visible to players (not being able to activate + convoke, having to remember to activate before starting to cast spells, etc.) is distinct from the set of problems that were prohibitively difficult to solve for us – namely, avoiding soft-lock.

Magic’s rules, by and large, function like a computer. A player takes a game action, that game action is interpreted by the black box of the system, causes some stuff to happen, then spits out a new game state with new choices for players to make. This is nice and easy to manage. We’re happy to sit there with our black box of Comprehensive Rules and turn input into output all day.

The problems come up when things need to happen that aren’t neatly compatible with this causal input-output relationship - specifically, undoing mana abilities. When a Wall of Roots was set to 0 toughness, the system would flag certain triggered abilities to be placed on the stack, locking out the ability to Undo. Luckily, the hard work of my colleagues over the course of the last half decade has put us in a place where we no longer flag those triggered abilities until we are ready to handle them, after all the costs have been paid.

The final consequence of all this is that WoR works a lot like how we handle “sacrifice as a cost for a mana ability.” Wall of Roots can now be used at mana ability speed and can always be undone EXCEPT for cases where both of two conditions are true:

1. It is activated at instant speed rather than mana ability speed, and
2. Putting the -0/-1 counter on Wall of Roots causes a triggered ability to be placed on the stack (typically because the Wall has moved to the graveyard due to having zero toughness).

As a longtime Cube grinder and Yawgmoth enthusiast, I’m happy to have been able to help get this change in. It’s only a small change from the outside, but it represents how much the underlying system is improving month over month and our ability to get even the most notorious and long-suffered specters cleared up.”

Event Updates

Alternate Play Schedule

Here’s a look at the schedule of events coming up between now and Innistrad Remastered. Each description mentions if the Draft is Phantom – cards won’t be added to players’ collections in Phantom events. All transitions take place at 10:00 a.m. PT (18:00 UTC) unless otherwise noted.

• November 12-20 – FDN is center stage for this week.
• November 20-27 – Our first Creator Season offering is from Amaz, who returns to the Cube Spotlight for the second time. The Amaz Cube focuses on creature-type synergies and more! (Phantom)
• November 27-December 4 – We'll celebrate Thanksgiving with the long-awaited Power Max Vintage Cube – the variant with no holds barred. (Phantom)
• December 4-11 & December 11-18 – we're still thinking over what to present during these two weeks ...
• December 18-January 22 – The Vintage Cube returns to its regular time slot as part of the Holiday Season and as support for the next MOCS Showcase in January. We’ll provide more details closer to the holidays. (Phantom)

Commander Corner

Commander Backlog

We have made more progress against the Commander backlog during this development cycle. As with previous releases, the cards added this time were basically free to us while coding cards for this set. The Extended-Art versions of these (if available) will appear in the TC-Only slot starting next Tuesday (* indicates card is common/uncommon)

We are planning to have a much larger set of Commander Backlog cards released during our December 11 downtime, including some number of completed decks – more details closer to that date.

Magic Online Players Rewards (MOPR) Update

The Player Rewards grant on December 1 covers November play and spending. It will feature select common and uncommon Mystery Booster 2 cards in foil – this includes bangers such as Brainstorm, Basalt Monolith. and Sol Ring.

Then we’ll run it back on January 1 to cover December play and spending.

For more information on earning Player Rewards, click here.

Treasure Chest Update

Treasure Chests will update when FND goes on sale next Tuesday – be sure to watch our Twitter/X (@MagicOnline) and our Discord channel to confirm this before opening Chests.

For full details on the changes to come, check out the information page next Monday afternoon PT. Many of your Booster Fun favorites will be available via the Treasure Chest –see the chart above.

In addition, the six cards in Duskmourn’s Nightmare Bundle will appear in the Curated slot.

After next Tuesday, the next Treasure Chest update will occur on Wednesday, December 11 during downtime. As a reminder, Mystery Booster 2 and Jumpstart cards will be added at that time.

Avatars & Redemption

We will grant Prestige avatars from Duskmourn: House of Horror shortly after the end of that season on November 12.

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.

Odds and Ends

• Constructed and Limited events will rotate to FDN versions of the same event on release day, so make sure you complete any Leagues before the set launches.
• Reprints in FDN that are entering a format won’t become legal until the new Leagues kick off next Tuesday.
• The Account Upgrade Kit will include 1 copy of each reprinted card from tabletop’s Starter Collection box – 103 extra cards in all.
  • The New Account Starter Kit, Collection Upgrade Kit, and Commander Workshop will not be updated with this set.

It’s an exciting time on Magic Online and we’re glad you’re here – we'll see you on the battlefield!