By Ryan Carroll
In the last year, Magic has spent a lot of time where it’s been before.
I mean this cheekily, but also literally. After Magic visited three new planes in 2024 (Thunder Junction, Bloomburrow, and Duskmourn), three of the four in-universe sets in 2025 returned to existing planes, and (depending on what Reality Fracture looks like), the same looks to be true of 2026.
This pattern isn’t a radically new thing, to be clear. In 2023, four out of four sets returned to existing worlds; in 2022 and 2021, it was two returns and two new worlds; and in 2020, it was two returns and one new world.
The point, in any case, is that even as Magic is expanding into new, interesting, living worlds (Bloomburrow and Edge of Eternities, I should add, number among my favorite sets), it’s also grown fascinated with its own past--evident in the fact that our two most recent return sets, Tarkir: Dragonstorm and Lorwyn Eclipsed, bridge some of the longest gaps between sets on the same plane (10 years and 18 years, respectively).
The result is that return sets can resort to playing the hits rather than doing something new. As Sam from Rhystic Studies has recently remarked, this approach means serving up only what players are expecting: Tarkir as a flavor, not Tarkir as a living world. Although I’ve personally enjoyed our recent returns to existing planes, it’s also true that media supersaturation makes any work calcify much more quickly--become a known quantity rather than an encounter with the unknown.
But these issues are buried deeper in Magic than we might think. In 2006, one small, middling expansion set pioneered the method of returning to a plane after a long time away--and it models in microcosmic form all the tangled challenges in revisiting an existing world. That set is Coldsnap, the only retroactive block addition in Magic’s history.
