Magic: The Gathering Makes Popular Format Tournament Legal

Wizards of the Coast has announced that Magic: The Gathering is officially bringing support for a popular digital format, Pauper, to the physical side of things. While it had been supported digitally, this marks the first time that Pauper will be an officially recognized and supported format for the physical tabletop game. With that shift, however, comes a few minor changes.

Pauper, for those that might not know, is basically a format that boils down to "commons only." The vast majority of Magic: The Gathering cards are categorized as common, with less common tiers being uncommon, rare, and so on. The official support in the tabletop game brings with it several major changes.

First off, Pauper is now listed as a format on the Magic: The Gathering website. Additionally, Pauper format events can now be officially sanctioned at stores and tournaments. Thirdly, Gatherer will include Pauper legality search support beginning July 9th. Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, Pauper now includes any card with a common printing in any paper or digital set.

This massive addition of legal cards means that, of course, there are new cards being added to the Pauper banned list as well. They include Hymn to Tourach, Sinkhole, and High Tide. There may potentially be changes to the future based on what the metagame shakes out to be given these changes. Magic Online will implement the new format with its Core Set 2020 update, which should provide a significant boost to the number of possibilities being tested in the format, ideally leading to discovering what's potentially too powerful still.

What do you think? Are you excited to be able to officially play in sanctioned Pauper tournaments? How do you like the format overall? Let us know in the comments!

The latest Magic: The Gathering sets, War of the Spark and Modern Horizons, are available now. Core Set 2020 is scheduled to release everywhere on July 12th.