Magic The Gathering Arena: Everything You Need To Know About The Explorer Format
Explorer is Magic The Gathering Arena’s latest format, offering players a ‘true-to-tabletop’ experience that has been absent from the game since the launch of Alchemy in December 2021. Based on the popular tabletop Pioneer format, Explorer allows you to play with your old decks long after they may have rotated out of Standard.
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But what makes Explorer different from other Arena formats, like Historic? And what exactly is its relationship to Pioneer? Here is everything you need to know about Arena’s Explorer format.
Introduced in April 2022, Explorer is a nonrotating, nondigital format exclusively found in Magic The Gathering Arena.
A nonrotating format is a ruleset for Magic that doesn’t remove cards from legality after a few years. This is in contrast to rotating formats like Standard, Alchemy, and Brawl, which all push cards out of the format approximately two years after they launched. In other words, unless a card is specifically banned, it will never fall out of Explorer.
Meanwhile, a nondigital format is one that doesn’t use the digitally-exclusive mechanics and rebalances that were introduced with Historic Horizons and the Alchemy format later last year. Cards in Explorer will only use cards they are printed in the tabletop game, and it won’t ever see mechanics like conjure, seek, or peptuality.
Other than these two properties, Explorer plays the same way as most other formats on Arena. It is a competitive (one-versus-one) format with 60-card decks and either seven or 15-card sideboards, depending on whether you’re playing best-of-one or best-of-three rounds. It’s available in ranked and unranked modes as well.
Pioneer is a popular
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