IGN is excited to officially reveal Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, a Magic: The Gathering set coming exclusively to MTG Arena on August 12.

You can flip through the gallery below to see nine cards arriving in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons (including two reprints, one from Modern Horizons), and read on to learn how their new mechanics work and why Wizards of the Coast decided to take Arena this direction:.

Similar to the original Jumpstart, Historic Horizons cards can be added to your collection either by using wildcards or by participating in a timed event (ending September 9) in which you pick two themed packs from a possible 46, combine them into a single deck, and then compete against other players.

While a majority of the cards in Historic Horizons will be reprints – most of which are new to Arena, including many cards from both the first and second Modern Horizons sets – the 31 brand new cards will be exclusive to Arena’s digital platform.

Certain cards (like Manor Guardian, visible in the gallery above) will allow you to seek a card with specific criteria, randomly pulling one from your library that meets that criteria without shuffling afterward – something that couldn’t happen at the tabletop without a player manually looking through their deck.

Speaking with Magic: The Gathering’s Vice President of Design Aaron Forsythe and MTG Arena’s Game Director Jay Parker last week, it became clear to me that WotC is using Jumpstart: Historic Horizons to take some confident but measured first steps toward what’s possible for Magic digitally.

“We’re just adding new stuff for the players that live in this environment and have experience playing other digital card games out there that do things like this.”.

So while they’re intentionally starting slow here, he says they will likely “push the boundaries of the space” as they get more comfortable designing for it, just like they do in paper Magic.

When I suggest the possibility of, say, a quad-faced card (a physical impossibility in the real world), Forsythe says that actually sounds "totally reasonable" as skirting around physical limitations is “exactly the kind of thing digital card games should be trying to do.” Forsythe jokingly provides his own example of a crazy effect that would actually be going too far – playing a game of Space Invaders to determine a creature’s toughness when it enters the battlefield.

Parker says one of the main goals of Historic Horizons was “trying to get a whole lot of cool fun stuff from Modern Horizons into the format,” but that the higher power level of Modern meant they had to be careful while doing so?

There are still hundreds of cards in Historic Horizons yet to be revealed, but I jokingly ask if we can assume Modern Horizons 2’s now notorious monkey Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer won’t be among them