Dominaria United (DMU): Set Guide & Card List
Magic's return to its most storied plane couldn't have come at a better moment. Dominaria United launched on September 9, 2022, as the ninety-third Magic: The Gathering expansion - and the set that officially kicked off the game's 30th-anniversary celebration. If you're going to throw a birthday party for thirty years of Magic, there's no more fitting venue than Dominaria itself.
What is Dominaria United?
Dominaria United (set code: DMU) is a 436-card expansion released on September 9, 2022. It sits at the opening of a new story arc set on Dominaria - Magic's original home plane and arguably the most history-soaked location in the entire Multiverse. As the first set in the Dominaria United block, it launched the 30th-anniversary product cycle and comes with the full modern product suite: booster packs, a Welcome Booster, a Jumpstart product, Box Toppers, an Art Series, and two Commander preconstructed decks.
Format check: DMU is no longer legal in Standard (it rotated out after its two-year window), but its cards remain legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and Commander.
Themes and mechanics
Domain - the set's mechanical centrepiece
The central mechanic of Dominaria United is domain, and it's a returning keyword ability that rewards you for playing as many basic land types as possible. The more of the five basic land types - Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest - you control, the more powerful your domain cards become.
Think of it as a dial that goes from one to five. A card like Sunbathing Rootwalla starts modest but scales up as your mana base diversifies. The design philosophy here is elegant: domain naturally pushes players toward multicolour, multi-basic-land-type strategies, which in turn creates interesting deckbuilding tension between consistency and power ceiling.
Rules note: Domain counts the number of different basic land types among lands you control, not the number of lands. A single Triome with Forest, Island, and Plains subtypes counts as three toward your domain total.
Other themes
Beyond domain, the set leans hard into Dominaria's legendary history. Legends matter as a theme - appropriate for a plane that has produced more Legendary creatures than arguably anywhere else in the Multiverse. The set also features kicker (a Dominarian mechanic staple since Invasion), enlist (a new mechanic introduced in DMU that lets attacking creatures tap other creatures to give them a bonus), and read ahead on Sagas.
Read ahead is a newer twist on the Saga frame: rather than always entering on chapter I and advancing each turn, read ahead Sagas let you choose which chapter to start on. It's a surprisingly flexible design - sometimes you want chapter III immediately, even if it means skipping the earlier payoffs.
Limited and Draft
Dominaria United drafts are built around the domain mechanic, which means fixing your mana base early is a real priority - more so than in most sets. Tri-lands and dual lands matter in a Draft format in a way they usually don't.
The format rewards players who commit to a multicolour strategy and can assemble the right land base to power up their domain payoffs. That said, aggressive two-colour strategies remain viable. The tension between "draft good fixing and scale up" and "draft a tight two-colour curve" is one of the more interesting decisions the format presents.
Control and go-wide strategies both have homes here. Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight is a good example of a card that supports a wide-board, aerial plan, and the set contains enough removal - including Lightning Strike and Ertai's Scorn - to support controlling builds that want to answer threats and then close with a scaled-up domain threat.
Notable cards and impact
A few cards are worth highlighting from what the set presents in its Welcome Booster and product packaging as representative of its identity:
- Lightning Strike ({1}{R}) continues its long history as an efficient, accessible burn spell - three damage for two mana keeps it a Limited and casual staple.
- Ertai's Scorn is a story spotlight card, tying directly into the Dominaria narrative and representing the set's control tools.
- Blackblade Reforged returns as an Equipment with deep roots in Dominarian lore, appearing here through the Commander product.
- Sengir Connoisseur connects to one of Dominaria's oldest vampire lineages, a nice nod to the plane's history.
The set also introduced two Commander preconstructed decks, which brought additional Legendary creatures and support cards into the pool.
Commander preconstructed decks
Dominaria United shipped with two Commander decks as part of the standard product lineup:
| Deck Name | Colour Identity | Commander | |---|---|---| | Painbow | {W}{U}{B}{R}{G} | Jared Carthalion | | Legends' Legacy | {W}{B}{R} | Dihada, Binder of Wills |
Painbow is a five-colour deck built around domain and multicolour synergies - exactly what you'd expect from the set's central mechanic at full extension. Jared Carthalion is a callback to an obscure piece of early Magic lore, which feels very on-brand for a 30th-anniversary set.
Legends' Legacy leans into the Dominarian theme of legendary permanents. Dihada, Binder of Wills is a fascinating commander choice - she's a villain with deep ties to the plane's history, and the Mardu ({W}{B}{R}) colour identity gives the deck a flavourful mix of aggressive and controlling tools.
Lore and setting
Dominaria is Magic's oldest and most narratively dense plane - the location of the Brothers' War, the Ice Age, the Phyrexian Invasion, and dozens of other pivotal events across three decades of story. Returning to it in 2022 was a deliberate choice to ground the 30th-anniversary period in familiar soil before heading into major new story territory.
The Dominaria United story deals with a renewed Phyrexian threat, with several familiar characters caught up in the conflict. Ertai's Scorn as a story spotlight card is suggestive - Ertai is a Dominarian mage with a complicated history, and his appearance as a named card tied to a control effect says something about where his allegiances lie in this chapter of the story.
Ajani, the Greathearted appears in the Welcome Booster specifically labelled as "Ajani before Compleation" - a deliberate narrative signpost pointing to events in the set's story. That framing alone tells you something significant happens to Ajani in or around this set.
Lore aside: Dominaria was the setting for the very first Magic sets in 1993, making it the plane most Magic players have the deepest history with. Returning here for the 30th anniversary wasn't just nostalgia - it was a statement about where Magic's roots lie.
Set legacy
Dominaria United holds a particular place in Magic history simply by virtue of its timing. Opening the 30th-anniversary celebration on the plane where it all began was a meaningful creative decision, and the set's mechanical focus on domain - a mechanic that literally rewards you for having all five basic land types - reads as a kind of metaphor for the game itself: everything coming together.
The two Commander decks, particularly Legends' Legacy, reinforced the theme of Magic's deep bench of legendary history. And the read ahead Saga mechanic offered a genuinely interesting new design space that gave players more agency over how they interacted with one of Magic's most distinctive card types.
In my opinion, DMU succeeds most as a set that feels like Dominaria - grounded, historical, with mechanics that reward understanding the whole game rather than just one corner of it. Whether it's remembered as a landmark set will depend partly on how the larger story arc it opened plays out, but as an anniversary statement, it earns its place. ✨
