Rivals of Ixalan (RIX): Set Guide & Card Overview

The race is over. The Golden City has been found. Rivals of Ixalan is the second and final set in the Ixalan block, released in January 2018, and it delivers on the promise of its predecessor by bringing all four warring factions to the shores of Orazca - and then letting them fight over it.

Where Ixalan (XLN, 2017) was about the journey, RIX is about the destination. It's a smaller set - 205 cards - and that focused size gives it a tight mechanical identity and a draft format with real teeth.

What is Rivals of Ixalan?

Rivals of Ixalan is a 205-card expansion set released on January 19, 2018. It forms the second half of the Ixalan block alongside Ixalan (September 2017), and together the two sets tell a complete story on the plane of Ixalan - a world of dinosaurs, pirates, merfolk, and vampire conquistadors, all hunting for a legendary city of gold.

As a small second set in a two-set block, RIX is designed to complete cycles begun in XLN, push the four tribal themes to their conclusions, and introduce a handful of new mechanics that reflect the escalating conflict.

Format check: Both Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan rotated out of Standard in October 2019. The sets are legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. Many individual cards remain relevant in various formats.

Themes and mechanics

The mechanical heart of RIX is the same four-faction tribal war that defined XLN - Dinosaurs, Pirates, Merfolk, and Vampires - but the set adds new tools and escalates the stakes for each.

New mechanics

Ascend is the headline mechanic of Rivals of Ixalan. Once you control ten or more permanents, you ascend and gain the city's blessing - a special designation that persists for the rest of the game even if your permanent count drops back below ten. A number of RIX cards have abilities that only work, or work better, once you have the city's blessing. It's a clever way to reward board development and give late-game-oriented decks a meaningful payoff threshold.

Raid returns from XLN, rewarding you for having attacked that turn. It fits naturally into the Pirate and Dinosaur themes, which both want to be aggressive.

Enrage also returns - Dinosaurs with enrage trigger whenever they take damage, making them surprisingly good in combat and creating interesting synergies with your own damage-dealing spells.

Explore comes back too, the mechanic where creatures reveal the top card of your library and either put a land into play or put a +1/+1 counter on themselves. It's a flexible, value-generating ability that fits Merfolk and the Sultai-flavoured shell around them.

The returning mechanics aren't just filler - they've been developed and deepened in RIX, with more payoffs and more synergy density than XLN offered.

The city's blessing as a design anchor

Ascend does something smart: it gives every player at the table a shared threshold to race toward or deny. In Limited especially, the question of whether your opponent has the city's blessing becomes a real tactical consideration. Do you trade creatures to keep them off ten permanents? Do you go wide to hit ascend yourself? It's a mechanic that generates decisions, which is the best thing a mechanic can do.

Limited and Draft

RIX Draft is typically played with one RIX pack and two XLN packs (in the traditional Ixalan block draft format), though RIX-only drafts are also common. The format rewards tribal commitment - you generally want to pick a faction early and stick with it, since the payoffs are tribal-specific enough that mixing rarely works cleanly.

The four draft archetypes

• White-Black Vampires - a life-gain and token-based strategy that rewards going wide and ascending quickly. White-Black is one of the more synergy-dense colour combinations in the format.
• Blue-Green Merfolk - an explore-heavy value strategy that wants to develop its board steadily, hit the city's blessing, and grind out advantage. Slower than the other tribes but resilient.
• Red-Green Dinosaurs - the format's most aggressive big-creature strategy, with enrage triggers making combat math a genuine puzzle. Ramping into huge creatures and crashing in is the game plan.
• Blue-Black Pirates - a tempo-oriented strategy built around raid triggers and evasive creatures. Pirates want to attack every turn and punish opponents who stumble.

The format has a reputation for being reasonably well-balanced between these four archetypes, though in my experience Blue-Black Pirates can be tricky to navigate in a pod where everyone understands the signals.

Ascend matters a lot in Limited. Hitting ten permanents is more achievable than it sounds when you're playing a go-wide token strategy, and the city's blessing cards can swing races decisively. Drafting with an eye toward enabling or denying ascend adds a layer of strategy that makes RIX drafts feel different from a typical small-set format.

Notable cards and impact

I want to be upfront here: the source material for this article doesn't include a detailed breakdown of individual RIX cards and their competitive results, so I'm not going to speculate on specific tier-list placements or invent format data. What I can say confidently is that RIX contributed meaningfully to Standard during its two years of legality, and several cards from the set have found homes in Pioneer and other non-rotating formats.

Planeswalker Decks

Rivals of Ixalan launched with two planeswalker decks - preconstructed products aimed at newer players, each built around a planeswalker version exclusive to that product:

| Deck Name | Colours | Planeswalker | |---|---|---| | Vraska | White/Black | Vraska, Scheming Gorgon | | Angrath | Black/Red | Angrath, Minotaur Pirate |

These decks are specifically designed as entry points, not competitive products. The planeswalkers in them are deliberately underpowered compared to booster-pack rares - that's intentional, not a flaw.

Lore aside: Vraska and Angrath are both significant figures in the Ixalan story. Vraska's planeswalker deck represents her Gorgon identity in the context of the plane's conflict, while Angrath - a Minotaur pirate stranded on Ixalan and desperately trying to get back to his family - is one of the more emotionally compelling characters in the block's narrative.

Lore and setting

Xlixalan is a plane defined by its four civilisations, each chasing the legend of Orazca, the Golden City. By the time Rivals of Ixalan begins, all four factions have converged on the city's location, and the set's story is about the final confrontation.

The four factions are:

• The Sun Empire - Dinosaur-riding warriors who believe Orazca is their divine birthright
• The River Heralds - Merfolk guardians who have protected the city's secrets for generations
• The Brazen Coalition - a loose alliance of Pirates seeking the city's treasure
• The Legion of Dusk - Vampire conquistadors from a distant empire who want the city's power for their own immortal aristocracy

The Ixalan story also involves two planeswalkers central to Magic's larger narrative at the time: Jace Beleren, who washed up on Ixalan with his memory erased, and Vraska, who was secretly working for Nicol Bolas. Their storyline in Ixalan and RIX feeds directly into the events of Dominaria and eventually War of the Spark - so if you care about Magic's ongoing story, this block is more important than its tropical-adventure aesthetic might suggest.

Angrath's arc is worth highlighting on its own. He's a planeswalker who was trapped on Ixalan - the plane has a unique property that suppresses planeswalker sparks and prevents planeswalking away - and his driving motivation is getting home to his daughters. It's a surprisingly grounded emotional story for a game about giant dragons and world-ending threats. 😄

Set legacy

Rivals of Ixalan occupies an interesting place in Magic history. It came at the end of the two-set block era - Wizards of the Coast moved away from blocks entirely after this cycle, shifting to a model of mostly standalone sets. So RIX is, in a meaningful sense, one of the last sets designed explicitly as "part two of a story block."

The Ixalan block as a whole is remembered fondly for its flavour - the world of dinosaurs and pirates is genuinely fun, and the tribal theme gave Limited and early Standard a clear identity. Ascend was a well-received mechanic that rewarded long-game planning without being oppressive.

In terms of competitive impact, the Ixalan block sets had a mixed legacy in Standard - strong tribal synergies led to some powerful strategies, but the format during this period was often dominated by cards from other sets. That said, several RIX cards have shown longevity in Pioneer and beyond, which is a better test of a set's design quality than its Standard win rate in any single week.

If you're looking to draft Ixalan block, the combination of RIX and XLN holds up well - the four-faction structure gives drafts a clear shape, and ascend adds just enough complexity to make games feel different from one another.