Two years have passed since Mark Rosewater's article Metamorphosis, which announced the new rotation rules for the Standard format.

Recently, Wizards walked this change back. The problem was that Standard – ideally the most welcoming format in Magic – became more difficult to keep up with for the average player. Here's the great news adjacent to all of this: Wizards is listening to their customers!

Let's visualize what has happened:

We know why Standard rotation has changed again. But our interest is: "how does this affect my investments?"

First, here's another visualization (yeah, you know I like them!) of how the Standard rotation is going to change. Hint: Focus on how this changes the life of a single set in Standard.

So, What Has Changed?

Players will have an easier time entering Standard now that rotations are back to the pre-2014 model. This new Standard is indeed very similar to the pre-Metamorphosis one: we have more variation in the number of playable sets (from five to eight), and the average Standard life of each set varies a lot.

The final infographic today presents our main concern as investors: some sets (from spring and summer) will stay in Standard for less time than others (from fall and winter).

Generally speaking, we could suppose that sets from the fall-winter block will hold their value longer, making staple cards more solid investments, while the spring-summer block will be more speculative thanks to a shorter life in Standard. Be aware of how these changes might affect you and your investments!