Wizards of the Coast has announced Magic: The Gathering- Magic Origins for release in July.

The 272-card set will be released on July 17th, with pre-release events held on July 11-12. The official Game Day is set for August 8th, and the Magic Online release is slated for July 27th.

Magic Origins will be available in Booster Packs, Intro Packs, Fat Packs and Clash Packs.  Shawn Main led a team including Mark Gottlieb, Ari Levitch, Nik Davidson and Ian Duke that was responsible for the initial concept and design of the set, while Sam Stoddard led the final game design and development team that also included Dave Humpherys, Ian Duke, Dan Emmons, Ethan Fleischer, Ari Levitch and contributions from Matt Tabak.

Magic Origins is a new core set that reveals the origin stories of five iconic Planeswalkers: Gideon Jura, Jace Beleren, Liliana Vess, Chandra Nalaar, and Nissa Revane.  Last summer, WotC announced changes coming to the structure of Magic releases beginning this fall (see "Major Changes to 'Magic: The Gathering'").

Art by Chase Stone
"Magic Origins is a different kind of core set than we've ever done before, one with ambitious story goals and deep creative impact," Magic's senior creative designer Doug Beyer explained.  "All core sets in recent years have had Planeswalker cards, but Magic Origins doesn't just contain five Planeswalkers--it's also about those Planeswalker characters.  It's about certain points in time in those Planeswalkers' lives-the events that led them to become Planeswalkers-and is meant to set up a lot of our plans for Magic's future story.  We'll see these characters' home worlds, learn about the joys and crises of their early lives, and discover how they became the Multiverse-traveling Planeswalkers we know today."