What is MTG Heritage?

An MtG format that allows cards only from sets that have been legal in the Standard format. This includes Core sets (ABUR, 5th, 6th… Magic 2020, 2021, etc.) and Expansion sets. Supplemental sets will NOT be recognized by the Heritage format (Horizons sets, Commander sets, Universes Beyond, Un- sets, etc.). See the Legal Set List here.

What’s the Vision for the format?

Heritage is a Magic: the Gathering format which aims to provide a gradually-evolving metagame with a diverse array of unique strategies, with an appreciation for the rich history of the card pool.

Why the name “Heritage”?

The format intends to preserve the historical intent and feel of Eternal formats, whereby cards “graduated” into them rather than being injected directly, thus their original tradition or Heritage.

Why was this format created?

There are many in the community of Eternal formats who feel that supplemental sets are not good for the formats, for multiple reasons:

• They introduce inordinate power creep (e.g. Modern Horizons sets)
• They introduce unnecessary redundancy by intending to solve problems for other formats (e.g. Force of Negation from Modern Horizons)
• They introduce mechanics that are not intuitive or fun in a heads up format (Monarch, Will of the Council, TNN…)
• They introduce card flavor and themes that do not jive with the MtG lore (Universes Beyond/Rick, Unfinity, etc.)
• They are being released too frequently and can be a headache to keep up with and buy into

How might bannings and unbannings work?

The below is preliminary thinking only, and is subject to change as we learn more about the format and forming community!…

Decisions will be made with a 60-70% (TBD) community affirmative vote, no earlier than 2 months after a card is released.

Cards will become candidates for banning/unbanning based on sentiment in the Heritage Discord. The Mod team will monitor sentiment and propose contested cards to be voted on by the community. Votings will occur no more than once per month.

What’s the current banned list?

The current banned list can be found here.

Will my Legacy deck work in Heritage?

Most of today’s (and yesterday’s!) Legacy decks and archetypes will still “work” in Heritage. 

Notables include: Delver, Lands, Loam, Elves, ANT/TEST, Doomsday, Aluren, Reanimator, Stompy, Most Control variants, and many more

Decks that take a hit are DnT (Recruiter), Painter (Goblin Engineer), MadVine (blazing rootwalla), others?

Decks that are unplayable include: Urza decks, Ninjas, others?

See below list of cards for an indication.

What notable Legacy cards will not be in Heritage (from supplemental sets)?

Refer to our dedicated page: Cards You WON’T See

Where can I play Heritage?

For now, games can primarily take place on the MTG Heritage Discord Server, where you’ll be able to play via webcam / cockatrice. 

MTGO remains an option as long as players agree not to use supplemental cards in their lists.

In store play is an option if locales get excited about Heritage and the LGS allows proxies. Though we acknowledge that getting Legacy to fire is often hard enough to begin with, for many LGS’s today.

Can I query scryfall.com for Heritage legal cards?

(st:core OR st:expansion) AND format:legacy

As of Oct ‘22, this returns 20,897 cards. format:legacy returns 23,784, so 2,887 cards (about 12%) have been excluded.

Are proxies allowed?

Yes please! This will be a casual, community-run format. We only request that proxies are high-quality prints and not Crayola on a Swamp.

Hasn’t this been attempted before?

This concept has been discussed in threads on Reddit and Discord in the past. Ultimately, players seemed interested but nobody was willing to organize. Well, here’s the first real attempt. Furthermore, the rate of supplemental sets has accelerated, so the hypothesis is that so might the appetite for this new format.