With Commander Masters coming up soon for Magic: The Gathering, Magic Untapped takes a look at the one Masters set that never came to be: Pioneer Masters.

With Commander Masters coming up soon for Magic: The Gathering, Magic Untapped takes a look at the one Masters set that never came to be: Pioneer Masters.

Pioneer Masters originally had a release date for late 2020 for Magic: The Gathering - Arena. But, just like most things delayed at the beginning of the decade, the COVID pandemic hit hard and, well, plans changed.

The 2020 date kept getting pushed back more and more. And, as it was pushed back, more problems and issues became apparent.

At it's core, Pioneer Masters wasn't all that bad a concept as the set would combine all Pioneer-legal cards available in Arena and put together for Limited and Constructed play. Pioneer wasn't the only iron in the fire, though, as Wizards of the Coast was focusing also focusing more on evolving Arena's Historic format as well. As they continued to work on that, Pioneer started to look like it needed to be reworked.

As a result, it was thrown back into playtesting. By July of 2021, was put on indefinite hold.

When Explorer came out on Arena the very next year, it sort of rekindled an interest in Pioneer as the two formats had some commonalities. To date, however, Pioneer Masters still hasn't really come up as a rekindled project and, as of writing, it still has no set date for the future.

And that brings us back to Commander Masters.

While Pioneer Masters was digital only-planned, Commander Masters is going to be a physical release that (as the name may suggest) will have a focus on the game's Commander format.

So, why did WotC decide to move on to Commander Masters over resuming Pioneer Masters? Well, Commander is simply much more popular a format than Pioneer.

Sometime it's that simple.

Commander Masters releases Aug. 4.  The set is now available for pre-order and will be sold in Collector Boosters, Set Boosters, Draft Boosters, and Commander Decks.