Wizards Announces Plan to Reprint Reserved List

Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2020
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In an announcement that stunned players and collectors everywhere, Wizards of the Coast officially announced today that they will be reprinting the Reserved List. Previous policy at Wizards has been to never even consider reprinting the list, but Mark Rosewater explained that dwindling copies of the list has forced their hand. “There’s just not enough to go around. We need the list to be available both internally at Wizards and to players at eternal events for formats like Legacy and Vintage. The list has been especially important to collectors and we want to make sure future collectors will have full access to it.”

paper stack

The Reserved List.

The Reserved List is a list of Magic: the Gathering cards that Wizards of the Coast has promised never to reprint. The list was revised in 2010, and so all extant copies are over a decade old. Players of formats like Legacy have become increasingly concerned as available copies become harder and harder to find, while prices for early editions are often far out of reach for new gamers looking to collect a piece of Magic history.

The Wizards legal team almost never comments on matters like this, however I was granted limited access to the Pit of Eternal Torment at the company’s Renton, Washington headquarters to meet with company lawyers. “We do not anticipate any legal trouble as a result of reprinting the Reserved List, even at the quantities modern needs will force us to produce. The value of the list is actually quite low on the whole, so even collectors who currently own multiple full sets of the reserved list won’t stand to lose much money when we reprint it. And of course, there’s no secondary market concerns to speak of.”

When I began to ask what he meant by this, he vanished into a cloud of sulfurous vapor and a horrible tittering laughter drove me back out into the energy-saving LED lights of the cafeteria.

While plans have not been finalized, it’s likely that the entire list will be reprinted in black and white on standard 9×11 printer paper so that it can easily be added to trade binders and stapled to office documents as necessary.