What’s more, the cards that are good in Expanded and the cards that are good in Standard may not be the same.

Here’s my usual reminder on the topic: the Expanded format benefits less from any newer set than Standard, because there are far more cards in Expanded, so a new set is a smaller change to the card pool, relatively speaking.

That’s why today, I will review Astral Radiance from a purely Expanded point of view. I’m part of this community: if you’ve read me for a long time, you may remember that prior to Brilliant Stars, I was far more focused on Expanded than Standard. While it’s currently neglected when it comes to IRL competitions, there are many players who play Expanded online – more than Standard players, in fact! Many of these players are simply casual players who just use whatever cards they happen to have, and if they’ve been playing for a while, some of these cards are Expanded, so they play Expanded but there’s also a community that cares about that format. I’ll leave these cards to my co-writers here at CFB, because as often, I want to turn my attention to the Expanded format. I wrote about Palkia VSTAR because that was the obvious place to start, but there are plenty of other cards, including Hisuian Samurott VSTAR, Radiant Hawlucha and Miltank, which will have an important impact on Standard. As I mentioned last week, Astral Radiance is approaching, and while I’m still too busy with the current format to start testing in-depth for the next one, many players’ eyes are on it.

Astral tournament registration key