Let me tell you a story about a Legacy tournament: Palace Jailer showed up and apparently it’s a real card in that format.

Okay, sure, that’s not much of a story.

But it did cause some challenges for us on Magic Online. See, we made the determination when reviewing Conspiracy: Take the Crown that there weren’t any Monarch cards that would be important to Constructed, and since we weren’t implementing the draft environment, we could safely avoid implementing the mechanic in its entirety without any loss to our Constructed community. When it hit, we were as surprised as anyone else.

One of our mandates is to match paper as closely as possible, and the absence of a relevant Constructed card skews the digital metagame in ways that we’re not happy with. And we follow the Internet, and we know many of you aren’t happy about this either. So we took the next opportunity we had – remember that we work quite far in advance – and allocated some resources to put the mechanic and some of the relevant cards into the game.

What you folks can expect, then, is that treasure chests starting with the release of Modern Masters 2017 Edition, you’ll be able to open many of the cards from Conspiracy: Take the Crown that can make you the monarch. They’re going to show up with the other Treasure Chest-exclusive cards (the PZ2 set), with adjusted rarities such that cards with this mechanic will be much more common than the existing cards from that set. Palace Jailer is of course on that list, and we even made sure to include Queen Marchesa herself.

Specifics on Treasure Chest collation changes and drop rates will come closer to the release date, but I thought you guys would appreciate a little more of a heads-up.

-Alli Medwin

Magic Online Design Team, Magic R&D