When was Double Masters released?

Double Masters (2XM) was released on 7 August 2020. It's a standalone reprint set with no block membership, available in both regular booster packs and a premium VIP Edition.

How many rares are in a Double Masters booster pack?

Every Double Masters booster pack contains two rare or mythic rare cards, plus two foil cards of any rarity. This double-rare structure was a first for a Magic set at this scale and is the origin of the 'Double' in the set's name.

What are the most valuable cards in Double Masters?

Some of the most significant reprints in Double Masters include Mana Crypt, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Force of Will, Snapcaster Mage, Dark Confidant, Doubling Season, Noble Hierarch, and Atraxa, Praetors' Voice. These cards were chosen partly because of their historically high secondary market prices.

Is Double Masters good for drafting?

Yes, though it plays differently from a Standard-legal Draft set. The format is built around an artifacts-matter theme, with aggressive artifact-based Blue-Red or White-Blue decks as the backbone. Because every pack has two rares, the power level is higher than most Draft formats — your deck will likely include several cards that would be rare-drafted elsewhere.

What is the Double Masters VIP Edition?

The VIP Edition is a premium booster product containing 33 cards per pack, including borderless showcase foil rares or mythics, foil commons and uncommons, and sketch-art cards — a treatment showing pencil-stage artwork beneath the finished illustration. It's primarily a collector's product and was priced significantly higher than standard booster packs.

Double Masters (2XM): Set Guide & Card List

Q: Does Double Masters change what formats its reprinted cards are legal in?

No. Reprinting a card in Double Masters doesn't change its format legality. Cards are legal in whatever formats they were already legal in before the reprint — and banned cards remain banned. 2XM affects availability and price, not legality.

Some sets exist to push Magic's story forward. Double Masters exists to put powerful cards back into players' hands - and it does that job with real generosity. Released in August 2020, Double Masters (2XM) is a reprint-focused set that takes the Masters set formula and doubles down on almost every element of it. Two rare slots per pack instead of one. Two foil cards per pack instead of one. A 384-card set built almost entirely from reprints, with an emphasis on Commander staples, competitive format workhorses, and some of the most iconic cards in the game's history.

If you've ever looked at a card you wanted and winced at the secondary market price, 2XM was designed with you in mind.

What is Double Masters?

Double Masters is a reprint set released on 7 August 2020, with a booster draft version running as a tabletop release and a VIP edition offering premium foils and alternate-art cards. It has no block membership - like all Masters sets, it stands alone, pulling cards from across Magic's 27-year history at the time of printing.

The set contains 332 cards in its main set plus additional cards in the booster fun variants, totalling the 384-card count across the full product range. Every booster pack includes two rare or mythic rare cards and two foil cards, which was a first for a Magic set at that scale and represented a meaningful step up from the single-rare structure of previous Masters releases.

There is no Standard or Pioneer legality for Double Masters reprints - the cards are legal in whatever formats they were already legal in before the reprint. The set doesn't change format legality; it just changes availability.

Format check: If a card was banned in Modern before 2XM, it remains banned after. The reprint doesn't rehabilitate anything.

Themes and mechanics

Double Masters doesn't introduce new mechanics - that's not what reprint sets are for. Instead, it gathers cards that share mechanical identities and clusters them into a coherent draft format. The themes that run through 2XM are ones that have defined competitive and casual Magic for years:

Artifacts matter - a through-line connecting Affinity creatures, equipment, and artifact synergy cards across multiple colours
Token generation and go-wide strategies - White and Green support building wide boards
Big mana and ramp - Green acceleration into top-end threats
Graveyard recursion - Black and Green both reward filling and replaying from the graveyard
Control and card advantage - Blue's classic tools for drawing cards and countering threats

Because the set is built from existing cards rather than newly designed ones, its mechanical identity is more of a curated anthology than a designed system. The draft format works because Wizards deliberately selected cards that interact well within a limited environment - not because the mechanics were engineered to slot together from scratch.

Keywords that appear frequently across the set include affinity (for artifacts), modular, flying, lifelink, and various enters-the-battlefield (ETB) triggers that reward careful sequencing in Draft and Sealed.

Limited and Draft

Drafting Double Masters is a different experience from drafting a Standard-legal set. Because the card pool is drawn from decades of Magic, power levels vary significantly - the gap between a premium rare and a filler common is wider than you'd find in a purpose-built Draft set.

The artifact theme is the backbone of the format. Aggressive artifact-based strategies can come together quickly, especially in Blue-Red or White-Blue, where cheap artifacts and creatures with affinity or synergy payoffs reward early commitment to the theme. If you see the signals early in a draft, leaning into artifacts tends to produce consistent, coherent decks.

Green-based midrange and ramp strategies offer an alternative path, using acceleration to deploy large threats ahead of schedule. These decks tend to be more forgiving in terms of card quality because the mana advantage covers a lot of sins.

Black-Green graveyard strategies are a real archetype but require more careful card selection - the payoffs are powerful, but the enablers need to be there to make the engine work. In a chaotic draft pod where multiple players are fighting for the same cards, this archetype is the most fragile of the main three.

The double-rare pack structure matters for draft. Because every pack has two rares, you're going to see more high-power cards per draft than in a normal set. This raises the overall power level of the format and means your deck will likely contain multiple cards that would be rare-drafted in other formats. It also means your opponents' decks are similarly stocked, so don't underestimate what's across the table.

The format plays at a moderate speed - not as fast as some aggressive Limited formats, but not a slow grind either. Early interaction matters, and leaving mana open for instants is often correct given how much raw power is floating around.

Notable cards and impact

The point of Double Masters is the reprints, and the card selection here is genuinely impressive. Rather than leaning entirely on Commander staples (though those are well represented), the set includes key cards from competitive formats that had drifted out of reach financially.

Some of the most significant reprints in the set include:

Mana Crypt - one of the most powerful mana acceleration cards ever printed, and historically one of the most expensive singles in Commander
Jace, the Mind Sculptor - a card banned in Standard, once banned in Modern, and a defining Legacy and Vintage piece
Blightsteel Colossus and Sundering Titan - massive artifacts with enormous Commander presence
Doubling Season - a Green enchantment beloved by planeswalker and counter-based Commander decks, with a price tag that had climbed steadily before this reprint
Snapcaster Mage - a Modern and Legacy staple that gives instants and sorceries flashback when it enters the battlefield
Dark Confidant - one of the most famous card-advantage creatures in the game's history, a Pro Tour Hall of Famer in card form (Lore aside: the card's art depicts Bob Maher, Jr., winner of the 2004 Magic Invitational, as a reward for that victory - one of Magic's most beloved card design traditions)
Force of Will - Legacy's definitive free counterspell, legal in Legacy and Vintage and essentially nowhere else
Exploration and Enchantress's Presence - Commander and Legacy pieces with real price histories
Noble Hierarch - Green's premium one-mana accelerant in Modern and Legacy
Atraxa, Praetors' Voice - at the time, one of the most-played commanders in EDH history

This isn't an exhaustive list. The set is dense with reprints that matter across Commander, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage simultaneously, which is what gives 2XM a broader appeal than sets that focus on a single format.

The VIP Edition deserves a separate mention. These premium booster packs (sold at a significantly higher price point) contained 33 cards each, including 2 borderless showcase foil rares or mythics, 8 foil commons and uncommons, and sketch-art versions of cards - an alternate treatment showing the pencil-stage artwork beneath the finished illustration. This was a new collector treatment for Magic at the time and has since influenced how Wizards approaches premium product design.

Lore and setting

Double Masters doesn't have a story of its own. As a reprint set, it doesn't advance Magic's narrative or introduce new characters, planes, or events. The flavour text on reprinted cards is drawn from their original printings, and the set's identity is mechanical and nostalgic rather than narrative.

The showcase and alternate-art treatments in the VIP Edition do offer some beautiful reimaginings of iconic cards - and the sketch variants give a genuinely interesting window into the artistic process - but these are aesthetic choices, not lore beats.

If you're looking for story content connected to the cards in 2XM, the lore lives in the original sets where those cards were printed: Mirrodin for the Affinity-era artifacts, Ravnica for cards like Dark Confidant, the Commander precons for Atraxa, and so on.

Set legacy

Double Masters landed at an unusual moment - August 2020, deep into the COVID-19 pandemic, when most players were buying cards online and paper play had largely moved to remote formats. Despite that context, the set had a meaningful impact on card prices for many of the reprints, at least in the short term.

More importantly, 2XM established a template that Wizards has returned to. The double-rare, double-foil pack structure influenced how subsequent premium sets were designed. The mix of competitive-format staples and Commander powerhouses became the standard approach for Masters-tier products going forward. And the sketch-art treatment pioneered here became a recurring collector variant in later sets.

In terms of how it's remembered: honestly, 2XM is thought of warmly by most players. It didn't try to do anything other than what it said on the box - reprint powerful cards in an accessible format, with a functional draft environment on top. For a reprint set, that's a clean success.

The set isn't without criticism. Pack prices were high relative to earlier Masters sets, and the VIP Edition was expensive enough that it was largely a collector's product rather than a practical way to acquire singles. Secondary market prices on some reprints recovered faster than expected, which is always the tension with reprint sets - supply additions are temporary, demand for eternal-format staples is structural.

But as a snapshot of what Magic's most powerful cards looked like in 2020, and as a love letter to the game's history, Double Masters holds up well.