How To Play The Pioneer Format In MTG

There are tons of different ways to play Magic: The Gathering. The game has several formats that follow different rules. Some take advantage of the multiplayer aspects, while others keep the traditional one-on-one gameplay. One of these many formats is A pioneer.

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Pioneer is one of the game’s eternal formats, meaning there is no rotation in the format. Its power is somewhere between Standard and Modern and is one of the most popular ways to play the game. The barrier to entry is generally lower compared to other formats and many standard sets can be converted to get you into Pioneer.

What is Pioneer?

It’s a pioneer eternal format which features every card released in the premiere set from the 2012 set The return to Ravnica and beyond is legal. Since Premier decks are the ones that were legal in Standard at launch, decks like Jumpstart and Modern Horizons are not legal to play in Pioneer.

Additionally, additional cards such as Mystical Archives from Strixhaven and Multiverse Legends from Phyrexia: March Of The Machine are also not legal for use in Pioneer unless the card in question was already legal in it.

It’s a pioneer played one on one with an opponent. Games are played best-of-three (meaning the first to two wins is the winner) and start at 20 lives. Each player has a deck of at least 60 cards and a sideboard of 15 cards to put into their decks between the second and third games.

The only rule for the sideboard is that it can never exceed 15 cards – so you can’t remove more cards from your deck than you started with.

Which cards are banned in Pioneer?

Like any format, Pioneer has its own ban list. Eternal formats tend to have many more active banlists as the card pool is wider, and new cards can sometimes drastically increase the power of old cards to the point where they are unworthy of bans.

Despite its perennial format status, Pioneer’s banned list is actually quite small. Most of the cards that were banned happened in the first few weeks of the format’s existence. Most of the banned cards were combo pieces that proved too strong, or cards that completely disabled other strategies due to their power. The most important banned cards are fetch lands, as they were pre-emptively banned to give Pioneer more of an identity away from Modern.

How to get to Pioneer

The best way to get started with the Pioneer format is to find the deck that interests you. Thanks to it being a timeless format, there are strong decks for almost every playstyle. Pioneer is one of the most open formats in Magic: The Gathering, allowing you to pick a powerful deck to win games with that favors your preferred playstyle.

If you don’t want to jump into building your own deck, Wizards Of The Coast also offers it Challenger Decks for a format based on metarelevant sets. These are all solid starter kits that are meant to be played right out of the box. The decklists are solid and, while they’re usually weaker versions of the meta deck, they’re great to build on and add to until you have a fully-powered version.

RELATED: Magic: The Gathering – Build Your First Pioneer Deck

Where to play Pioneer

Pioneer is a popular format and there are several places where you can play the format. The most obvious is playing with physical cards. You can take these to your local game store – many of them hold Pioneer events. Alternatively, if that’s not an option and you still want to play with cards in your hand, then Spelltable is a great choice. It’s a site that monitors everything for you as you play, using webcams pointed down at your board.

You can also play Pioneer digitally. The only current way to digitally play all legal Pioneer cards is via Magic: The Gathering online. You have to pay for the cards just like you would for a paper set. The benefit of this is that many clips on Magic: The Gathering Online are cheaper compared to buying physical cards. There are also rental services that allow you to pay a flat monthly fee to rent cards from them to build sets without shelling out a ton of money.

You can finally play researcher on Magic: The Gathering Arena. Explorer is a format where all Pioneer-legal cards on the client are legal. Although it is currently its own format, Explorer’s ultimate goal is to become Pioneer, making Magic: The Gathering Arena another way to play Pioneer digitally.

While the metagames are currently very similar, there are still a handful of key cards missing from the format that make them different, even though they are similar until they are added.

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