Anticipating the New Standard

When Zendikar Rising comes out in September, we'll be into a whole new standard rotation, with 2018/19's sets rotating out. This means that we'll no longer have (I believe) Core Set 2020, Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, and War of the Spark anymore.

As someone who just started playing Arena about a month ago, I've born this in mind, focusing my pack purchases on more recent sets - though given how comfortable I was with the guilds, I built my first decks around their basic archetypes.

I think it's possible that the Shock Lands will rotate out, which is a little scary given how nice they are to have (I think I now have 2 of each one, with maybe one or two exceptions.) Still, we do have the Ikoria Triomes to tide us over, which can serve as dual lands if you don't find the access to another color of mana that you aren't using frustrating.

Naturally, with War of the Spark rotating out we'll be losing a ton of uncommon planeswalkers. I'd guess the most relevant will be Nissa, Who Shakes the World, which has proven to be a very useful one, especially given how powerful big monogreen decks have been of late.

I don't pretend to have my eye on every relevant card in today's metagame (I've never been that good at following it) but I'd imagine that Green Stompy is likely to survive mostly intact, given that many of its most effective components will remain in standard (Questing Beast, Lovestruck Beast, Primal Might... if I'm remembering the right name, Barkhide Troll, etc.)

Naturally, the recent ban on Growth Spiral was intended to undercut Simic decks, though Uro's not going anywhere for a while.

Obviously the big thing to anticipate will be what the new set brings to the table. I don't believe any cards have been previewed so far, but I think we can likely expect a lot of land-based effects given Zendikar as a setting.

I've noticed with this year's sets that there are some sort of "mild themes" that are shared between sets. Eldraine and Theros both have a subtle monocolor theme, given things like Adamant and Devotion, and both Eldraine and Ikoria seem to care about humans versus non-humans (especially given the mutate ability - which is funny given that in a setting where humans are the only humanoids, it sort of makes sense, but as soon as you show up in Ravnica and have Vedalken, Elves, Goblins, etc. turning into massive monsters it's a little crazy.)

I imagine that they have some similar mild themes planned out for next year's sets, though I also don't know if we know for sure any new sets beyond Zendikar Rising. If this year was any indication, we might get two new settings, though as someone who missed Innistrad twice, I'd love to see them return to gothic-horror land.