MTG Arena: State of the Game – November 2020
Kaladesh Remastered
Gather your crew, inspect your Aether, and, for your safety, please remain seated inside your Vehicles until scheduled maintenance has come to a complete stop. It's almost time for Kaladesh and Aether Revolt to return to MTG Arena in Kaladesh Remastered, which means it's time for the November State of the Game!
Era of Innovation
First thing's first, if you haven't already, let us direct you over to the Kaladesh Remastered Card Image Gallery so you can see for yourself the cards that will be arriving this Thursday. Keeping our goals of making progress toward Pioneer and being mindful of the power level of Historic, you may have noticed that with one notable exception, we haven't added any additional cards to this set, because
Let's be honest—we felt that Kaladesh Remastered didn't need it. There are some very powerful cards and mechanics in this set, both for Limited and Constructed play, and adding Inventions or other cards from Magic's past felt like it pushed the power level a little too far for our comfort. The exception noted above is Sculpting Steel, which we're considering this set's "Buy-a-Box" promo, similar to how we treated Regal Caracal in Amonkhet Remastered (this means you'll receive a copy when purchasing certain booster bundles, and you can craft it using Wildcards, but it is not available in booster packs).
Speaking of the store, this is also where you'll find the Kaladesh Remastered basic lands—at zero cost to you.
One of the takeaways from the Zendikar Rising renewal gift was yes, there is too much of a good thing and having an automatic grant to all players upon login that involves adding a decent amount of cards to their collection alongside a card set release doesn't always play nicely with our client or our servers. Doing it this way allows you to add the basic lands to your collection at your convenience (they will be available into the foreseeable future) without our servers demanding to know what they did to deserve this.
Once maintenance is complete and you've updated your client, you can also use the code "TryKaladesh" to receive a complimentary Kaladesh Remastered booster pack.
Herald of the Fair
Let's talk events! As we previously discussed, one of the biggest takeaways from Amonkhet Remastered was how players chose to interact with the set and add cards to their collection, with participation in Draft and Sealed events greatly exceeding our expectations. Taking this information to heart, we're adding Traditional Draft (Best-of-Three Player Draft) to the list of Kaladesh Remastered Limited events:
- Sealed: November 12–19
- Traditional Draft: November 12–26*
- Premier Draft: November 12–December 18
- Draft Challenge: November 28–December 1
*Updated November 19: Due to player interest, we have extended the Kaladesh Remastered Traditional Draft event by an additional week.
The Kaladesh Remastered Traditional Draft will follow the same entry fee, record, and rewards as our Standard Traditional Draft events, rewarding Kaladesh Remastered boosters and/or gems based on your match record. Take note! It will be available for shorter when compared to other Draft events, but we wanted to iterate on our Amonkhet Remastered learnings, and offering a Best-of-Three Limited event seemed like a good place to start
For those of you familiar with our Standard Metagame Challenge, it's like that—only as a Best-of-Three Player Draft! This high-stakes competitive Draft event will reward up to 20,000 gold and 40 Kaladesh Remastered booster packs assuming you can earn six wins before two losses. Here are all the details:
Kaladesh Remastered Draft Challenge
Format: Traditional Draft
Event Record: 6 wins or 2 losses (whichever comes first)
Rewards:
- 6 Wins: 20,000 Gold, 40 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 6 Wins: 15,000 Gold, 30 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 4 Wins: 10,000 Gold, 20 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 3 Wins: 7,500 Gold, 12 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 2 Wins: 4,000 Gold, 6 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 1 Win: 2,000 Gold, 3 Kaladesh Remastered boosters
- 0 Wins: No Rewards
Entry Fee: 3,000 Gems or 15,000 Gold
And for those of you looking to test your "metal" in Constructed play, our next Arena Open is scheduled for December 12, and yep, you guessed it—the format will be Historic Constructed, with Day 1 offering both Best-of-One and Best-of-Three events and Day 2 being Best-of-Three. Full details will be arriving in December, but we wanted to give ample time for our folks to brew, build, and test their decks before the event date.
Historic Brawl
Next on our list of topics today—Historic Brawl! To start, we'll be holding a weeklong Historic Brawl Festival starting on November 20. Like our other Festival events, our Inventor's Fair Historic Brawl Festival will have a one-time entry fee (2,500 Gold or 500 Gems) and will allow you to play as many matches as you like for its duration, awarding card styles for your first three wins.
Before you pull out your Implements of Malice, we're also planning to hold another weeklong Historic Brawl event starting in early January, this time as a general play queue (just like the Brawl queue right now, so no entry fee and no additional rewards beyond quest and daily win progress).
We've made some incorrect assumptions about Brawl in the past, so yes, we are being careful with how we approach this. Ultimately, we want to see whether there is enough interest in both formats to support a healthy play environment simultaneously. Nobody wants to end up in a world where both Brawl and Historic Brawl suffer from long queue times and repeated mirror matches because we've split the player base in twain. However, we've also received a lot of feedback from players who really want to play Historic Brawl more often, so we're running these events to help test the waters and hopefully find a happy balance between the two.
We'll leave it up to player interest and behavior to help us make this decision.
Mobile
A small update in this regard, and likely you've already heard it elsewhere, but yes—we're confirming that MTG Arena on mobile has been pushed to early 2021. Our goal to support the full MTG Arena experience on Android and iOS devices remains the same, but we need more time than 2020 is willing to give us to make it happen. Launching on mobile includes a lot of obvious things (changing layout/controls when playing on smaller devices, improvements to gameplay performance and stability, etc.) and a lot of behind-the-scenes work to ensure players have a uniform experience across all our supported platforms. We hope to have an updated timeline come January with the release of Kaldheim.
Odds and Ends
In addition to Kaladesh Remastered, we do want to call out some of the key bug fixes and gameplay improvements that will also be arriving with the November game update. To list off a few: Players should no longer experience a delay when finishing a match, your rank should no longer incorrectly display after unranked matches, the Phyrexian Swamp is once again compleat, we addressed a sizing issue where commander names could appear too large and block cards, Rankle's trigger shows all chosen abilities again (instead of just the one currently in progress), Nimble Trapfinder's ability now properly triggers when a party member enters the battlefield from somewhere other than the hand—and more! Full patch notes will be available once maintenance is complete.
Cleanup Step
Take our energy! The November game update featuring Kaladesh Remastered is scheduled to arrive this Thursday, November 12. Preorders will be available until the start of maintenance, so keep an eye on our status page for the latest information and updates on maintenance times.
