Gavin Verhey’s Friday announcement of Mystery Booster 2 — the follow-up to one of 2019’s most sought-after products in the world of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) — came as a welcome surprise.

But what are Mystery Boosters, why are they so popular and are they coming to Magic Online or MTG Arena?

What are MTG Mystery Boosters

The original Mystery Booster was released in 2019 as a way of playing purely random Magic. Each pack contains 15 cards from a pool of 1694 cards of equal rarity.

That means you had equal chance to open a Mana Crypt or Rhystic Study as you did an Earth Elemental or Dead Reveller. Two of those cards are incredibly powerful (and expensive). Two of them are not.

But if you’re opening Mystery Booster, you’re not doing it for the monetary value — you’re either doing it to play purely random Magic or you’re doing it get your hands on one of those all new, sweet-looking Playtest Cards.

What are MTG Playtest Cards?

The brains behind Magic the Gathering test cards as they design them. Sometimes things get powered up or powered down. Sometimes they never see the light of day — they could be too powerful, too difficult to make work within the game’s rules or simply they’re just too silly.

The Mystery Booster Playtest Cards take this idea and brings it to the public to enjoy.

Stack of Paperwork, for example, changes the rules of the game to ‘put damage on the stack’ — a rule that was removed in 2010 to simplify the game and make certain decisions a lot more meaningful. Obviously, while this card will make the old guard laugh and look back with nostalgia, reintroducing that rule now would makes things a lot more difficult. As such, each Playtest Card comes with the following disclaimer at the bottom: “Test card — not for constructed play”.

But not all Playtest cards add wonky rules. One with Death simply kills you and Slivdrazi Monstrosity is so powerful it would simply get immediately banned. Personal Decoy would just be annoying to play against.

This theme continues in Mystery Booster 2, which bring a whole bunch of meme-y Playtest Cards for fans to enjoy. One new card even changes the rules on the spot so that you’re no longer playing best of three, but best of one.

Here's a card I think @bbrode might marvel at the potential of:#wotcstaff #mtgmystery pic.twitter.com/LhtkAu2Vaf

— Gavin Verhey (@GavinVerhey) August 3, 2024

It also brings white-border cards back and occasionally uses the Future Sight frame — treatments that different parts of the community will love.

Will Mystery Booster be on MTGO or MTG Arena?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is that there are a couple of issues holding Mystery Boosters back. First and foremost are the Playtest Cards. While they are great fun, their rule-bending nature means that while they’re perfectly intuitive to play in real life, the amount of coding required to get them to work properly on MTGO or Arena is probably just not worth the effort, as far as Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is concerned.

This is why we’ve never had the jokey ‘Un’ sets on either client. They’re great fun, but they fundamentally break the rules in ways that the game engine cannot cope with.

Since Playtest Cards are a big part of Mystery Boosters, putting everything expect those online would probably have people kicking off. But that’s not the only issue.

The second — and possibly bigger — issue is that WotC simply doesn’t want to put Mystery Boosters online.

WotC could conceivably add the boosters to MTGO without the Playtest Cards — since the set is all reprints, these cards are already all on the client. The issue is that these boosters were designed as convention-edition packs, to play in real life. They’re not even going to be available to buy in your local game store.

MB2 is meant to be a special experience for players at conventions. These will be at cons of all types (MagicCon and more!) long term, like MB1. There will be lots of it!

As an extension of the con experience, they'll also be in Festival in a Box, available online. #wotcstaff

— Gavin Verhey (@GavinVerhey) August 3, 2024

So while WotC could easily bring the cut-down booster to MTGO, it seems they just don’t want to.

As for Arena — a client with a much smaller, more controlled card pool — the idea of getting any sort of Mystery Booster is sadly a bridge too far.