It's not all about Bloomburrow.

The rabbits , mice, squirrels, rats, birds from the adorable little plane have arrived, bringing with them the first Standard rotation in two years. Once the landmark highlight of the Magic calendar, Standard rotation looks a little different these days—the format has evolved to a three-year window of legality instead of two. That meant that there was no rotation last year—things simply stayed legal for another year.

But Bloomburrow is in, and a quartet of sets are out: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Crimson Vow, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and Streets of New Capenna. Gone are previous staples of the format like the triomes from Capenna and with them the previous top decks, and what will take their place is a question millions of Magic players across the world are trying to figure out right now. How to get ahead of the rotation metagame is a challenge as old as... well, not Magic itself, but a challenge as old as 1995, when the idea of a rotating card pool was introduced to competitive play. Today, it's a race among players across the globe to get their name featured on the earliest online results or tabletop tournaments, and those who have perfected the practice are looked at as a beacon for the direction of the new format.

It all begins with Bloomburrow—but it doesn't end there.

"I think it's important to look at the holes the rotated cards create. Were there powerful cards that couldn't stand up to the top cards that are now able to roam free? The new set only has 200-300 cards, but there are 1,000 cards already in the format that may be able to make moves under these new conditions," explained pro player, content creator, and qualifier for Magic World Championship 30 Jim Davis. "It's just great to see the churn, which is what Standard is all about. The constant format sway is a good thing and keeps the format more alive.

"Standard was awesome before rotation, but the three most polarizing decks, Domain, Legends, and Temur Analyst all presented unique challenges that required specific answers, so I'm happy to see them move on."

Rotation season makes Standard feel more alive than ever. When I picked up Magic in 2008, Standard rotation was the highlight of the year that made everything possible. That silly deck idea you were nurturing? You're telling me there's a chance. That combo that just needed one or two more pieces? With rotation, everything new is at your disposal—and as Davis said everything old is new again.

With so many sets legal in Standard and so many key cards leaving—Davis pointed to the Triomes, the Channel lands like Boseiju, Who Endures and the fetch land cycle of Cabaretti Courtyard as important pieces rotating—it's a brewer's paradise, as the saying goes.

Davis is a longtime Pro Tour player, content creator, and streamer who is an expert on cutting edge strategies. He's been an advocate of playing Standard and has shown flexibility in adapting to the shifting metagames he spoke of; Davis is one of only 20 or so competitors to make Day Two of every tabletop Pro Tour since its return. He's got World Championship 30 circled on his calendar at the end of October, and until then has spent some time digging into Standard—and reflecting on some of the lessons he's learned along the way.

"A lot of players assume that just because a deck lost a key piece or two that it is dead. We're seeing this with Domain," he explained, "the general consensus was that the loss of triomes would be far too much to overcome, but that hasn't been the case at all. Sure, it's more work, but it's also a format that's three sets smaller so there's more wriggle room.

"It's fun to brew with the new cards from scratch," he continued. "But if your goal is to win, you'll usually find the most success with updating old archetypes or revisiting things that weren't quite there in the old format that may now have room to shine.

If that sounds like homework, it's because it's real work to adapt with a format that in the opening salvo of rotation changes in hours, not days or weeks. Davis's advice for how to mentally approach these early changes was echoed by Claudio Miranda, Pro Tour and Magic Online Champion Showcase competitor, who is sad to see his beloved Azorius Control lose The Wandering Emperor and Memory Deluge but already digging into the most recent rounds of decklists to pick up the pieces—and stay up to date with the leading tech in the process.

"Exploring new decks is always my favorite thing to do, and after that I look to how to update old strategies. Approaching a fresh format is always very fun; new cards get to shine and hidden gems from the previous sets also get their time in the sun," he explained. "It's essential to have an open mind early on, the context that the cards exist in is different from the previous Standard. They won't be under the same constraints so something that was not viable previously could be great now.

"My first thought always goes to what are the strongest cards and strategies that remained in some form after rotation. This time around, I think Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse are the strongest individual cards and Convoke as a deck."

To understand what was a recurring theme this was, think of a basic example likeThalia, Guardian of Thraben, If Thalia is in the best deck in the format, playing an all-instants and sorceries storm deck would be a bad idea. But if Thalia rotated—even if the other 71 cards in the deck and its sideboard remained legal—the pressure that was keeping your pet Storm deck away from the top tables is gone.

That's why it's not enough to simply look at archetypes and call it a day; so much can change under the hood in Standard, even from week to week, in a way that keeps it dynamic. As Davis said, alive individual cards can shape how decks must be built—for another obvious example consider how every deck needed to be built with instant-speed interaction for Splinter Twin once upon a time—and the next step to solving Standard comes in determining these throughlines across archetypes and strategies.

Sometimes that's addition by subtraction. Because there's one other secret benefit to rotation we don't talk about much: the chance to finally say goodbye to those cards we just can't stand to see anymore.

"I'm happy to see Raffine, Scheming Seer go. Its creature type was demon for a reason," said Daniel Goetschel, two-time Top Finisher and regular breaker of decks. "I also missed getting to play new decks; I had been playing Domain for a year straight and thought the last Standard was pretty solved.

"The first thing I do is look at the decklists from the first post-rotation events to see what is doing well; there's too many cards to remember them all but scrolling through lists you can see what looks enticing. I prefer to look at the existing lists from those decks and try what looks most powerful. The most important thing is to stay open minded and don't rush to conclusions; in hindsight it's often obvious how we were wrong about something, but in the present we can often attach ourselves to our opinions."

(Interested in what's doing well in this first week of Standard? Frank Karsten has you covered).

There's plenty of Standard to be played over the next few months. With the release of Bloomburrow comes a new slate of online and in-store events, and the countdown is on to MagicCon: Las Vegas and Magic World Championship 30, where Standard will be the format on feature alongside Duskmourn Limited.

The Road to the World Championship

Until we get there, Frank and I are recounting every past World Championship that brought us here. There's 29 years of the game's history to look at, and I've really enjoyed leaning into the one unmatched asset Magic has: its history.

This week takes us back to 2013, the second year after the World Championship format moved to a smaller field. In this case it was just 16 of the game's top players, more than half of whom were or would be members of the Pro Tour Hall of Fame. The event was hosted in Amsterdam, and it saw a Top 4 that was synonymous with the best in the world at the time: Reid Duke, Josh Utter-Leyton, Ben Stark, and Shahar Shenhar.

Somehow from those it was the 19-year-old Shenhar who would emerge. He defeated Stark in four games in the semifinals before squaring off against Duke in a very memorable World Championship final, where he ultimately prevailed as the underdog against the legendary Duke and the Bogles deck the Hall of Famer had rolled through the tournament with.

Shenhar became the second World Champion from Israel, after Uri Peleg's 2007 victory. And it was just the beginning for Shenhar—more than on that next week.