Greetings, MTG Arena players! Since the last State of the Formats article in 2024, MTG Arena's formats have continued to evolve. "Explorer" was renamed Pioneer when we achieved parity with competitive tabletop Pioneer. We now have a third distinct Brawl format with its own banned card list and metagame. On the Limited side of things, we now regularly offer five different kinds of drafts with each release, in addition to the always popular, always powerful Arena Powered Cube! That is a lot of change over a short period of time, so let's break it all down. Before diving in, I have one larger change to announce that will shape the future of formats on MTG Arena.

With the next Standard rotation in early 2027, we're retiring the Alchemy format.

Saying Goodbye to Alchemy

To understand this decision, we need to go back to 2021 when we were designing Alchemy for MTG Arena. The Alchemy format was created to help solve the following problems MTG Arena was facing at that time:

  • Non-Standard Content Needed a Home: In 2021, we were looking ahead at a schedule that included several sets that wouldn't be legal in Standard that we still wanted to bring to MTG Arena, similar to how we added The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ to the game. We had Historic as a home for these cards, but the power level of that format meant only the strongest of those cards would see play. Brawl was not as popular as it is today, so we wanted to create a format that was a good fit for these cards that weren't legal in Standard but weren't up to Historic's power level.
  • Desire for Additional Card Content: In 2021, players asked us to release more cards on MTG Arena. This was during a time when we only had four or so releases per year. Internally, we also wanted more content, and an additional 30-card, digital-only release alongside each Magic Multiverse set fit our schedule perfectly. These cards could also be used in a limited-time, Limited format following the main set's release. For example, cards from Alchemy: New Capenna could be drafted as part of Streets of New Capenna.
  • Constructed Formats Change Slowly: Metagames evolve quickly in the digital space, so we wanted to experiment with a format that could match that speed. This meant regularly rebalancing cards, a different banned card list, and a shorter rotation interval of two years.

After five more years of development, the issues Alchemy was created to address are simply not as much of a factor anymore. MTG Arena has various nonrotating formats for cards outside of Standard. We release more sets per year than in 2021, and our growing number of formats offers significant variety for Constructed players. With these problems no longer pressing, Alchemy's role has become less clear. So, we want to focus our attention on delivering new sets and our growing formats like Brawl.

How Will This Work?

Digital Cards

Digital-only Alchemy cards will remain on MTG Arena and legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl, and Competitive Brawl. Several of these cards have become staples in their respective formats, and some have even been printed as physical cards in Mystery Booster releases. We like these cards, and I am proud of our work on those sets and think they are a fun and important part of Magic's history.

We may choose to ban or rebalance digital-only Alchemy cards in the future as we manage the formats they are a part of. We have found this to be an effective tool for these digital sets.

Alchemy: Reality Fracture is the last Alchemy release planned for MTG Arena.

Rebalanced Cards

On September 22, over 200 rebalanced versions of tabletop Magic cards will be reverted to their original printings across all formats. Those cards will match their tabletop versions in all formats where they are legal. This means we will update the banned card list for various MTG Arena formats, as many of these cards are significantly more powerful after being reverted. I'll discuss these more later in this article, but here are the relevant changes to those banned card lists:

Historic

  • Galvanic Discharge is banned.
  • Guide of Souls is banned.
  • Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.
  • Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord is banned.
  • The One Ring is banned.

Timeless

  • No changes

Brawl

  • Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.

Competitive Brawl

  • No changes

Timeline

  • September 22, 2026: All rebalanced cards with tabletop printings will be reverted to their original printings across all formats. The new banned card list changes for Historic and Brawl will take effect.
  • October 13, 2026: Alchemy: Reality Fracture will be released. Additional sendoff events are scheduled to celebrate the Alchemy format, including a massive preconstructed deck event featuring all Into the Future decks from the past.
  • February 2, 2027: The Alchemy format will be removed from MTG Arena with 2027's rotation alongside Nauctis: The Sunken Realm Prerelease events. This includes Alchemy Play, Alchemy Ladder, Alchemy Constructed, Alchemy Direct Challenge, and the Best-of-Three versions of these events.

Now with the context of that major announcement, we are ready to discuss the state of MTG Arena formats and their trajectory.

Constructed Format Overview

The following chart represents the relative play rates of the major MTG Arena formats from 2025 to today. This encompasses Aetherdrift's release through the first few weeks of Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™. The data combines Best-of-One and Best-of-Three.

Standard is still the most popular format on MTG Arena, accounting for around 50% of play. The larger spike in Standard play seen toward the middle of this chart is from an increase in players coming to MTG Arena following the release of Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™. Smaller spikes happen around larger metagame shakeups from events like Standard bans and Standard rotation.

Brawl has continued to grow over the last few years and passed Historic's play rate in early 2025. This shifted with the release of Competitive Brawl, which drew in a small percentage of unranked Brawl and Historic players but was mostly additive to the overall player base. This is exactly what we hoped to see by adding the new format to MTG Arena and suggests Competitive Brawl created a new audience of engaged players.

Pioneer, Timeless, and Standard Brawl's play rates have remained constant over the last two years, with each format sporting smaller but passionate player bases.

Standard

Making up nearly 50% of all Constructed queue play, Standard is MTG Arena's largest and oldest format. Since the release of Magic: The Gathering Foundations, new players are now directed to begin their journey by playing Standard, as the set created the perfect starting point for building up new collections due to its longer relevance to the format.

Like every format on MTG Arena, most Standard games are Best-of-One. For example, 93% of Standard ranked games are Best-of-One! Players have consistently shown us that this is their preferred method to engage with formats on MTG Arena, likely due to the speed of games and variety of opponents.

When comparing Standard to Traditional Standard on MTG Arena, they almost look like two different formats. The competitive spread of decks looks very different between Best-of-One and Best-of-Three, as adding sideboarding changes the win rate of many matchups. This is why you might see us sparingly ban a card only in Best-of-One, like we did when Leyline of Resonance was a problem in late 2024. We are cautious to use this tool, as we value Standard in MTG Arena being in lockstep with tabletop Magic.

Pioneer

As our only nonrotating, true-to-tabletop-Magic format, Pioneer has built a small but stable community over the last few years. In May of 2025, I announced that we would change the name of "Explorer" to Pioneer on MTG Arena. Since then, we have followed the evolving Pioneer metagame, particularly in Magic Online and competitive, organized tabletop Magic events, for additional cards that may be missing from competitive Pioneer. We previously added Crumbling Vestige and Goblin Piledriver as both saw a small amount of play. Likewise, we are looking to add Breaking // Entering after a deck leveraged it to take 6th place in a Magic Online Pioneer Challenge. This is a perfect example of how we expect more cards to come to MTG Arena and maintain the competitive authenticity of its formats.

As we have grown more confident in our card pool for Pioneer on MTG Arena, we would now like to increase the competitive pressure on the format. In 2027, we plan to run one Arena Championship and a few Arena Championship Qualifiers featuring Pioneer.

Pauper on MTG Arena

You might be surprised to see Pauper being discussed at all in this MTG Arena update, but the format has always had its place on MTG Arena. We feature Historic Pauper through Midweek Magic events on a regular cadence, but we recently gave the format a bit more attention by updating its banned card list based on play data and community feedback. While we are nowhere close to having parity with tabletop Pauper, we are excited about the response to Pauper events on MTG Arena. We want to showcase the format more, so we have recently started scheduling week-long Constructed events with considerable prizing to offer players a chance to compete for stakes. This is a good example of where you will see Pauper on MTG Arena over the next year. We're focusing on limited-time events as the format's audience has not yet grown to the size needed to support a permanent queue.

Historic

With the release of Timeless, Historic's purpose on MTG Arena shifted from being the place you can play any card on MTG Arena to the format where nearly any deck is viable. Historic remains by far the most diverse format on MTG Arena, often with no deck making up more than two to three percent of the metagame. From our player data, we see a big difference from the decks in ranks below Platinum to those played at Mythic. As a nonrotating format, we take care to maintain each deck's viability in the metagame by pre-banning powerful cards as they come to the game from newer set releases. In this way, Historic is also MTG Arena's most curated format.

Over the last two years, we have been gradually shifting Historic to be a more responsive format. After the release of Modern Horizons 3, threats in Historic far outpaced the answers to them. This caused us to update our philosophy around Historic's cards, unbanning cards like Counterspell and Force of Negation to offer more efficient counterplay against combo decks. Meanwhile, we tried to slow the format down by banning key cards that created ubiquitous decks, especially Eldrazi and Boros Energy.

With the removal of rebalanced tabletop cards, Historic is going to see a large shakeup with over 200 cards being adjusted. Many of the changes were originally made with Historic in mind, so we knew we would need to make some adjustments with this change. Boros Energy has been a power outlier in the format since its inception. Given its prominence in Timeless, we don't want it to be as prevalent in Historic. We are taking a harder stance on the archetype today by banning Galvanic Discharge and Guide of Souls.

We are also banning a few combo-enabling cards. Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord is an efficient method to cheat out large Vampires without paying their mana costs. Instead of acting on Vein Ripper, Saint Elenda, or the next powerful Vampire, we are kicking Sorin out of the format.

Without its rebalanced version, The One Ring would likely become an auto-include card in most Historic decks due to its powerful card-draw and damage-prevention abilities. As mentioned before, we want to maintain the diversity we see in Historic, so we believe it's time for this card to leave the format.

Finally, I think it's worth calling out that we are choosing not to ban the tabletop-accurate version of Orcish Bowmasters at this time. This card adds a powerful, responsive option against card-draw effects and limits the speed of aggressive, low-toughness creatures in the format. In time, this card might prove to be too much for Historic, but we wanted to give it a chance before taking any action.

Timeless

"A home for MTG Arena's most powerful cards" continues to be the motto for Timeless as it serves as an important pressure-relief valve for our other formats. Necropotence joined the restricted list, bringing the total number of restricted cards up to a mere four cards. With a small but dedicated community, the Timeless metagame has stabilized over the last two years as players have dialed in the most effective and powerful decks. Games are fast and responsive, with much of the battle taking place with the cards in players' hands as opposed to creatures on the battlefield.

New cards continue to shake up the format, with highlights like Daze, Doomsday, Snuff Out, Preordain, and Survival of the Fittest. The pace at which new cards are affecting Timeless is starting to slow down as the format reaches a significantly high power level; even with Cube Prize Packs adding an additional source for Timeless-worthy cards. This was an expected outcome for a format with such a large card pool, as it matches what we see in high-power, nonrotating tabletop Magic formats like Vintage and Legacy.

Brawl

Over the last two years, Brawl has undergone the most change of all of MTG Arena's formats. It has become more popular among players each year. This meant our team wanted to spend more time thinking about the health of the format, listening to the community, and diving deeply into the play data.

Brawl is a unique and challenging format to manage. Our goal is to support as many viable commander options as possible by curating cards in the 99 and leveraging matchmaking to find appropriate opponents. This led us to ban very few commanders and more heavily curate the cards in the 99. For cards in the deck, our philosophy is to ban cards that homogenize the format, are too efficient, or are simply polarizing to the community and have proven to be unfun. The creation of Competitive Brawl empowered our team to more aggressively curate Brawl than we previously could, since the cards that were banned in Brawl had a new format in which they could still see play.

We heard consistent feedback that a few powerful cards were overrunning the format and pushing out viable decks, with players citing cards like Mana Drain, Paradox Engine, Chrome Mox, and Strip Mine. We examined our data in just about every way we could think of, trying to see this pattern. We took various factors into account, including the individual win rates and play rates of cards, the win rate when a card was in a player's opening hand, concession rates against cards, and win rates for cards with specific commanders. We never managed to find a singular, unifying reason for why all of these cards were problematic, which led the team to rethink how we were evaluating the format. We came to the following conclusion: Brawl is a tinkerer's playground, and the play pattern of some cards is just unfun for the majority of players.

This led us to ban some of these cards, but it also helped us justify keeping others. Paradox Engine is an example of a card we think has a place in Brawl. It is key to an iconic combo that is fun to assemble. Given that the win rate of including Paradox Engine in your deck is below 50% and the card makes up a tiny fraction of the overall metagame, we think Brawl is more fun overall while the combo card is an option for players.

Improving Brawl matchmaking continues to be another focus for the team. We tried several experiments this year to increase the number of matches where players are aiming for the same level of competition. Our current system considers the power of each player's deck, mostly weighted by commander choice, and each player's skill rating across Constructed formats. Our latest efforts increased the rate at which players found similarly skilled opponents that were using commanders at a fair power level, but at the cost of slightly longer queue times. We think this tradeoff is worth it, but we will continue iterating as we believe matchmaking is key to Brawl's long-term success.

Since we are reverting all rebalanced tabletop Magic cards, Brawl is likely going to see a fair amount of shakeup as hundreds of cards revert to their original printings. With this in mind, we decided to ban Nadu, Winged Wisdom as we don't believe the tabletop version of Nadu would be fun or fair to play against at any tier.

Competitive Brawl

As the team spent more time investigating Brawl, we saw several different player motivations for choosing the format. Some players had these well-tuned, incredibly efficient, and powerful decks that could win in just a few turns. Other players just want to build a deck with every Dinosaur they have in their collection. To better support both groups of players, we realized it was time to split the queues and make a new home for competitive-focused players. Instead of trying to guess what players wanted while playing Brawl, we can let them opt into their ideal experience. This tells the opponent what type of match they are entering.

At just under ten percent of all queue matches played on MTG Arena, Competitive Brawl is one of our most successful new formats to date. More players than ever are playing Brawl and Competitive Brawl on MTG Arena.

As we look to the future of Competitive Brawl, we expect a light banned card list for cards in the 99. Instead, we will focus on managing the metagame by taking action against problematic commanders. There are a number of very powerful cards that are most useful when they are commanders, and we want to create a place where they can be played. That does not mean we are ignoring individual cards, but we do have expectations that are closer to Timeless's power level that will influence when we ban cards.

Limited Overview

As our Limited players know, MTG Arena has added a lot of new ways to draft recently! Each time we add a new Limited format, we need to ensure we have the audience to support players finding a group to draft with and play matches afterward. So, you might be asking yourself, "Are people really playing all these different types of draft events? Why do they have so many?" Let's dive into the data to understand what's been going on.

This chart shows the relative matches for our different draft events over the course of a seven-week period on MTG Arena following a set's release. At the start, Premier Draft makes up almost 60% of all matches but gradually declines as the set ages. Pick-Two Draft is consistent across the set's lifetime, hovering around 15% to 20% of play. Quick Draft has more variance from event to event depending on the format on offer. We typically see a spike when Quick Draft uses the latest set, so we rotate to that as soon as we are able. Contender Draft, our newest Limited event structure, accounts for around 5% to 10% of the matches. We are still experimenting with this new event to find the ideal timing and length.

As Premier Draft declines, we add a few different Limited formats to offer more variety and mix things up for Limited players. Cube has been the most successful event for this, regularly making up to 20% of all Limited play during the end of a set release. Flashback Draft also plays a role, but we haven't found the best way to promote it in MTG Arena yet. In the coming year, we hope to find better ways to inform players about what events are available.

Lastly, it's worth noting that Traditional Draft makes up a consistent one percent of matches, representing a dedicated audience that is looking for a competitive, true-to-tabletop-Magic experience. This is lower relative engagement than we see from Best-of-Three Constructed formats.

Premier Draft

Premier Draft is the most popular way to draft on MTG Arena, and for good reason! The "default" Limited format features eight players drafting in real time to compete for moderate stakes. The popularity of this event has cemented its linear reward structure and entry cost as the baseline to which we compare all other events. For most players, the seven-win-or-three-loss structure is the right amount of time for Best-of-One Limited. It hits a sweet spot between finding a variety of opponents and letting your deck run its course before drafting a new deck.

Traditional Draft

As the most tabletop-authentic Draft format on MTG Arena, Traditional Draft plays an important role for the small group of players looking to practice matches at home like they would in person. Best-of-Three has remained niche on MTG Arena as matches take longer and give players more rounds against the same opponents. The play rate for Traditional Draft stays relatively consistent throughout a set's release as players who enjoy the format tend to stick with it.

Traditional Draft is unranked on MTG Arena because that best matches the play experience you'll find in person. With ranked events, everyone has their win rate pushed toward 50%, but with unranked events, the better players can achieve higher win rates, just like in-person events.

Quick Draft

Learning to play Limited events is challenging. It's a problem we think about a lot on the design team. In addition to Jump-In!, we have found that Quick Draft is one of the best places for new players to learn how to play Limited events. There is no timer on picking cards, players can stop drafting and return at any time, the event entry cost is cheaper, and the rewards are a little more spread out across the reward track.

When a new set is released, it takes a few days for us to gather data on card picks and update the algorithm that powers Quick Draft for the latest set. This is why Quick Draft does not show up for a short period after a set's release on MTG Arena. We rotate the set that is featured in Quick Draft every ten or so days, focusing primarily on recent releases, as we know players like to use this format to fill out their collection.

Pick-Two Draft

Initially designed as the primary Limited format for smaller sets, Pick-Two Draft established a new audience on MTG Arena for players who were looking for a fast-paced Limited event. We initially experimented with a few different structures and timers for this event. By a large magnitude, the cheaper and faster version proved most appealing to players. With fewer players at the table and two picks per booster, the drafting portion of the event is twice as fast as Premier Draft. We paired this experience with the faster four-win-and-two-loss structure to encourage players to try new decks and reenter these events.

When we first launched Pick-Two Draft on MTG Arena, we thought the event would only be used for the smaller sets. However, we quickly found that there was a new audience for these faster drafts that now make up around 15% to 20% of Limited play. Pick-Two Draft also increased the total volume of Limited matches by 10%! More players enjoying Draft is a wonderful thing, so we are keeping Pick-Two Draft around for all future sets unless something shifts with how players are engaging with these events.

Contender Draft

Our newest draft event offering was developed for our players who enjoy the competitive aspect of Limited. Contender Draft offers a high-risk, high-reward payout and a chance to show off by earning the "Draft Contender" title. This format is for a new kind of drafter and is not for people who already like the drafts they've been doing. It's for players that want some slightly higher stakes and a more curated opponent pool.

We are still dialing in how often and for how long we want to run these events. We are also exploring additional ways to add excitement to the play experience itself and push that feeling of competition as much as possible. There is nothing quite as thrilling as coming back from two losses to make it all the way to seven wins in Contender Draft, so we are looking to find more ways to build up the intensity and celebrate those moments.

Cube

Since our last update, we released Arena Powered Cube, which has been a major success by all metrics. Before Arena Powered Cube was released, Cube Draft on MTG Arena was mostly an event we offered to give Limited players a break from the latest set before the next big release. We had three main cubes we rotated through, each with their own unique textures and strengths: Arena Cube, Tinkerers Cube, and Chromatic Cube.

Arena Powered Cube changed everything. Cube on MTG Arena is no longer an appetizer to get ready for the next set release, it's now an exciting event worth logging on for! We see more players entering these events than ever before in MTG Arena's history.

With this success, we have been cautious to not have Arena Powered Cube overstay its welcome. With data from Magic Online, we know this is a format that needs a break from time to time to allow players to recharge. Each time Arena Powered Cube returns, we try to keep it fresh by updating the card list to feature new archetypes, cards from the latest sets, and when time allows bring new cards to MTG Arena only for this event.

We have also been experimenting with other cubes, like Planar Cube or even Remix Draft. The MTG Arena team is really passionate about Cube. We want to develop better on-ramps to Cube for players less familiar with the format, as it can be daunting to start playing. Additionally, we believe there are a lot of incredible experiences being developed in the Cube community that we hope to bring to MTG Arena.

Conclusion

MTG Arena's mission to create "fast, fun Magic for everyone, anywhere" continues to be the focus of our teams. As the game has evolved, we have shifted resources to the parts of the game that resonate the most with our players. Sometimes this means we must make challenging decisions, like removing a format entirely. As stewards of Magic, these are decisions we don't take lightly. They are the result of months of discussion and exploration of alternative ideas.

We look forward to sending Alchemy off with a celebration in the coming weeks. As one of our most ambitious projects to date, we learned a lot from its many releases, events, and more. To Alchemy players, thanks for going along with us on this journey. We are very excited to see where our formats and the future of Magic take us next!