Iconic Masters (IMA): Set Guide & Card List

Some sets are remembered for pushing the game forward. Iconic Masters, released on November 17, 2017, was designed to look backward - a lovingly assembled tour through over 23 years of Magic history, built specifically to be drafted. It sits alongside Modern Masters and Eternal Masters in the Masters series lineage, but with a different ambition: not format staples, not Legacy fuel, but iconic Magic. Angels, Sphinxes, Demons, Dragons, Hydras - the creatures that defined what Magic felt like to a generation of players.

Whether it fully lived up to that promise is, honestly, a matter of some debate.

What is Iconic Masters?

Iconic Masters is a booster-based compilation set released on November 17, 2017, as part of Magic's Masters series. It was designed to celebrate Magic's 25th Anniversary and give players a chance to draft some of the most memorable cards from across the game's history - many of which had never appeared in a draft environment together before.

The set contains 249 cards broken down as follows:

| Rarity | Count | |---|---| | Common | 101 | | Uncommon | 80 | | Rare | 53 | | Mythic Rare | 15 | | Total | 249 |

Every booster pack contains fifteen randomly inserted game cards, with one premium (foil) card guaranteed per pack. Booster boxes contain 24 packs. The MSRP at launch was $9.99 per booster - standard for the Masters series at the time.

Format check: Unlike Modern Masters or Eternal Masters, Iconic Masters wasn't designed to target any specific constructed format. It's a Limited-first product, built around the draft experience rather than supplying staples to Modern or Legacy.

One small piece of trivia: the set's name was accidentally revealed in a WPN email sent to retailers back in April 2017 - months before its official announcement. The cards themselves were first shown publicly at HASCON, September 8-10, 2017, with no traditional preview season beforehand.

Themes and mechanics

The mechanical identity of Iconic Masters leans into its creature-focused fantasy. The set's marquee creature types - Angels, Sphinxes, Demons, Dragons, and Hydras - aren't just flavour dressing. They anchor the draft format's major archetypes and give the set a genuinely distinct feel from other Masters products.

Because this isn't a format-geared release, the mechanics are drawn from across Magic's history rather than being tuned around a single era. What unifies them is the Limited environment they create together.

Draft archetypes

Iconic Masters supports ten two-colour draft archetypes, each with a named build-around identity:

| Colours | Archetype | Signpost Uncommon | |---|---|---| | White/Blue | Tempo Skies / Prowess | Azorius Charm | | Blue/Black | Midrange Skies / Control / Mill | Blizzard Specter | | Black/Red | Dragons | Bladewing the Risen | | Red/Green | Ramp / X-Spells / ChannelFireball | Rosheen Meanderer | | Green/White | +1/+1 Counters | Chronicler of Heroes | | White/Black | Lifegain | Vizkopa Guildmage | | Blue/Red | Spell Aggro | Electrolyze | | Black/Green | +1/+1 Counters | Corpsejack Menace | | Red/White | Aggro / Go Wide | Lightning Helix | | Green/Blue | Defenders | Jungle Barrier |

The range here is genuinely wide. You've got aggressive creature strategies (Red/White go-wide), synergy-driven combo-ish builds (Red/Green ramp into X-spells with Rosheen Meanderer enabling ChannelFireball lines), midrange grind (Blue/Black), and a Defenders archetype in Green/Blue that's unusual enough to raise an eyebrow - in a good way.

The two +1/+1 counter archetypes in Green/White and Black/Green suggest those themes were threaded through multiple colour pairs, which is a classic Limited design technique for keeping the counters theme open rather than locking it into a single lane.

Lore aside: Bladewing the Risen as the Black/Red Dragons signpost is a nice callback - Bladewing has been animating draconic graveyards since Scourge (2003), so it fits the "iconic" brief well.

Notable cards and set impact

Iconic Masters features new artwork on many of its reprints, which was one of its major selling points for collectors. The booster packs themselves were fronted by art from Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, Heroes' Bane, and Firemane Angel - three of which fit squarely into the iconic creature-type brief.

The set wasn't designed to answer a specific format's needs, so its impact on constructed play was modest compared to something like Eternal Masters. The value proposition at the $9.99 price point was a frequent source of criticism at launch - the absence of some genuinely iconic cards led to disappointed reactions from players who expected more.

Mark Rosewater himself acknowledged the naming tension, noting that the set's title felt misleading given how many truly iconic cards didn't make the cut. That's a candid admission, and it reflects the genuine difficulty of curating "iconic" from 23 years of Magic: everyone's list looks different.

Lore and setting

Iconic Masters doesn't tell a single story or take place on one plane - it's a compilation by nature, drawing from across the Multiverse. The connective tissue is the creature types themselves: Angels, Sphinxes, Demons, Dragons, and Hydras are Magic's most mythic archetypes, present in the game almost from the beginning.

Think of it less as a story set and more as a museum exhibition. Each card is an artefact from somewhere in Magic's history, brought together not by narrative but by the weight they carry in the game's memory.

Set legacy

Iconic Masters occupies an interesting and slightly awkward place in the Masters series. It arrived as the second Masters set of 2017 - Modern Masters 2017 had released earlier that same year - which may have contributed to the muted reception. Draft fatigue with the premium booster format was already setting in among some players.

The honest assessment is that it's a competent and sometimes genuinely fun draft format, with a wider archetype range than it might initially appear. But the gap between the name's promise and the card selection's delivery was real, and the community noticed. For a set called Iconic Masters, the absence of certain obvious inclusions stung.

What it did succeed at - and what I think deserves credit - is creating a draft experience that felt different from the format-grinding of other Masters products. Drafting massive Dragons and Hydras alongside Sphinxes and Angels, in archetypes that had never been assembled this way before, is a specific kind of Magic joy. It's just not quite the joy the name promised.

As a piece of the 25th Anniversary celebration, it's a snapshot of how Wizards was thinking about Magic's history in 2017 - and that alone gives it a kind of documentary value, even if the execution left some players wanting more.