MTG Formats
MTG Arena's non-rotating format: everything the client has ever had, in the versions Arena currently uses. Nothing leaves, which is exactly why some cards get rewritten instead.
Historic is MTG Arena's non-rotating constructed format. Standard construction rules (60 cards, four copies, fifteen-card sideboard, 20 life) applied to nearly every card the client has ever held.
It exists because Arena needed somewhere for cards to go. Standard rotates, and a digital client where your collection silently stops being usable is a client people quit. Historic is the answer: whatever you own stays playable somewhere, forever.
A paper format can only ban a card. Arena can also change it, which is why Historic has both a banned list and a set of cards that read differently here than they do on cardboard.
the trade a digital-only format can make
Five streams feed Historic, and knowing which is which explains most of the format's surprises.
Arena's Standard sets, past and present. Everything that has been Standard-legal on Arena since it launched, whether or not it is still Standard-legal now.
Anthologies. Curated batches of older paper cards added to Arena specifically for this format, which is how cards printed long before Arena existed end up legal here.
Remastered sets and bonus sheets. Amonkhet, Kaladesh and Shadows over Innistrad Remastered, plus bonus sheets like the Strixhaven Mystical Archive.
Alchemy releases. Every digital-only card from Alchemy is Historic-legal, including cards that make their own tokens on the fly, seek cards from your library, or use mechanics no paper card could have.
Rebalanced versions. When Alchemy changes a card, Historic uses the changed version. See the next section, because this is the part that catches people out.
A digital game can edit a card rather than ban it, and Arena does. A rebalanced card keeps its name and art and gets new numbers or new text, and that version is what Historic plays with.
The upside is that a format-warping card can be tuned down to fair rather than removed, which keeps the decks built around it alive. The cost is that a card's text on Arena is not necessarily its text in paper, and a decklist copied from a paper source can behave differently to how you expect.
Arena shows me the real card, so what I read is what the card does everywhere.
In Historic and Alchemy, a rebalanced card is marked as such and uses its Arena wording. The same card in paper, in Timeless, or on any other client uses the printed wording. Timeless exists precisely so there is one Arena format that never does this.
Rebalancing runs alongside a banned list rather than replacing it. Some cards get changed, some get banned outright, and occasionally a previously banned card comes back once something else has been adjusted.
One way to hold the three in your head: Alchemy is Standard with a patch cycle, Timeless is everything at its printed power, and Historic sits between them, everything Arena has in the version Arena currently prefers. The format overview puts all three beside the paper formats.
Check the Arena wording before you craft. The single most expensive mistake in this format is spending wildcards on a card whose Arena version does something narrower than the paper one you remembered. Read the card in the client, not on a search site.
Expect a fast format with real interaction. The pool has years of Standard power, Anthology staples and digital-only value engines in it, so the fair decks are genuinely fair and the unfair ones are genuinely unfair. Eight to twelve pieces of interaction is the floor.
Sideboards matter more than in Standard. A non-rotating pool means more distinct strategies exist at once, including graveyard decks and artifact decks that a maindeck cannot profitably answer.
Wildcards are the real currency. A deck that leans on cards from Anthologies and older sets costs rare wildcards you cannot open in current packs, so build toward one deck rather than sampling three.
Arena's original non-rotating constructed format. It is built from nearly everything on the client: the Standard sets that have come and gone, Historic and Explorer Anthologies, remastered sets like Kaladesh and Amonkhet Remastered, bonus sheets such as the Strixhaven Mystical Archive, and the digital-only Alchemy cards. Sixty-card decks, four copies, fifteen-card sideboard, exactly as in paper constructed.
No. Once a card is in Historic it stays there. The only way out is the banned list, which Wizards of the Coast updates as the format needs it, sometimes alongside a rebalance rather than instead of one.
Card versions and how problems are handled. Historic uses the rebalanced version of any card Alchemy has changed, and bans cards that get out of hand. Timeless uses the original printed wording of every card and has no banned list at all, restricting a handful of cards to one copy instead. Timeless is therefore the more powerful of the two.
No, though they overlap. Pioneer is a paper format that starts at Return to Ravnica and contains no digital-only cards. Historic is Arena-only, reaches back to Arena's own launch-era sets plus everything since added by Anthologies, and includes Alchemy cards that have no paper printing. Arena's Explorer is the mode that approximates Pioneer.
Not as it stands. Alchemy cards have never been printed, and the rebalanced versions of paper cards exist only in Arena's rules engine. A Historic deck built entirely from paper-legal cards in their original form is usually a legal Modern deck, but that is a coincidence of what you chose rather than a property of the format.
TurnZero HQ keeps deck records and win rates whether the game happened on a table or on a screen.
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