Phyrexia: All Will Be One to Change Prerelease Legality

In a somewhat timely announcement by WotC, starting Phrexia: All Will Be One card legality will no longer be restricted to their official release date. As the official blog states, when you have em’, play em’!

Originally, Magic: The Gathering traditionally will hold special physical events, where you can get promo cards and prerelease packs of an upcoming set very shortly before its original release date. But, during that brief transitional period between pre-release and official release, the cards will not be legal to play just yet. Therefore, they cannot be used in sanctioned tournaments, or even at your local game store events until the actual release date has passed.

With this new development, the upcoming set will be legal to play as soon as you can officially get your hands on them. So if you get them at a Sealed Draft event a week before release, you can now immediately add them to your current decks for all available Legal Formats.

Aside from the potential frustration confusion, another reason why the transitional restriction was removed was also because prerelease legality is never observed in digital formats, particularly in MTG Arena. Like, once the cards are implemented there, you can immediately use them, regardless of what is happening in paper MTG at that same time.

This relatively minor change in the acceptance of card legality for new sets was met with ambivalence by the community. On the one hand, people appreciate the clarity it provides, while others state that it is pretty much redundant at this point, since” prerelease” as a functional word hasn’t really been a thing since WotC ramped its set release schedule a few years prior.

To be fair, Mark Rosewater did state later that "prerelease" will still be a technical term nonetheless. He briefly explained in a Blogatog post that while using the cards is legal as you get them, selling them as regular packs prior to the official appointed date isn't. So term still counts.

In any case, even if the official release of Phyrexia: All Will Be One was pushed back one week further, this effectively means that the set is still ready and legal to play as early as February 3rd!

As for Phyrexia: All Will Be One itself, you can find its set information here.