Jump In! Is Magic The Gathering Arena's Most Underrated Format
I fell off Magic The Gathering Arena around the launch of Strixhaven: School of Mages last year. Despite collecting the Zendikar Rising and Kaldheim sets in their entirety and happily playing up to 30 games a day at my peak, by the time of Strixhaven I had found myself drawn to Commander more and more. The time I'd spent playing Arena was replaced with playing tabletop games instead, and my Arena collection fell behind.
Fast-forward to the release of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt late last year, and I'd barely touched Arena for at least three sets. Standard had rotated out the older cards I owned, and catching up with the sets I'd not played Arena for felt like too much of a commitment. Then Wizards introduced a new format, Jump In!, and it's easily the most underrated, overlooked thing Arena has to offer.
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Borrowing its ideas from 2020's delightful Jumpstart set, Jump In! is a limited format focused on opening two specially-made booster packs. Each contains half of a random deck archetype each, and you jam them together and get playing.
While Jumpstart featured cards from right across Magic's history, Jump In! focuses down to just the current Standard environment of Zendikar Rising to Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. For instance, one booster could be based on the Disturb mechanic from the two Innistrad sets last year, and another could be focused on the dungeons from Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty saw Wizards add loads of new packs to the mix to fit the set, and we can assume that older themes will be taken out of it as those sets rotate out of Standard.
These days, Jump In! is easily my favourite way of playing MTG Arena, and it's down to two
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