MTG Arena State of the Game 2025 – Spring Edition

In an effort to share more about MTG Arena and how our team works on the game we love, we thought it would be a good idea to talk about the state of the game more than once a year. So, welcome to the MTG Arena State of the Game 2025, spring edition.

Today, we'll talk about recent and upcoming releases, touch on MTG Arena's economy philosophy, and look at how that affects our approach to 2025. Let's dive in.

---

Recent Magic Releases

Aetherdrift

Our first release of the year featured a bevy of new and old mechanics from a death race across the Multiverse. Mounts, Vehicles, and Pilots led the charge as players started their engines and exhausted their options while racing for glory and the coveted Aetherspark.

Alchemy: Aetherdrift also brought some awesome new cards, including a crew of Pirates, a plethora of powerful artifacts, a pair of Oozes, a Pilot, and a Moose. Alchemy: Aetherdrift embraces our goal of providing fun and exciting cards for many types of players. That ranges from newer players who've only played digital Magic to grizzled veterans who delight at the nostalgia of powerful swords and legendary monkeys.

Achievements

Alongside Aetherdrift, we delivered our core achievement system. As a reminder, achievements were designed to encourage exploration, satisfy a wide range of player types, and promote self-expression. Two months after their launch, we've been thrilled with players' responses. We're tickled every time a new achievement story crosses our social feed.

Now that it's been released to the world, we're watching how players engage in the system and will use that data as we explore what's next with achievements. As often is the case, we couldn't deliver everything we wanted at launch, so we already have a backlog of improvements we're looking at, but your interactions will help us refine and prioritize what we're working on. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on social media.

A Dastardly Companion

When I was asked in November's State of the Game video about my favorite feature from 2024, my answer was simple: Dwayne. He brings so much joy.

For 2025, achievements are the frontrunner, but the competition got much tighter with last week's release. If you missed him, I convinced Dastardly Dwayne to return for another one-day engagement, but you'll need to get to the MTG Arena Store before 10 a.m. PT on April 9.

Tarkir: Dragonstorm

Hot off the digital presses, Tarkir: Dragonstorm released on MTG Arena today! We're very excited to return to the dragon-filled skies of Tarkir, where the clans consult with their dragon spirits, interpret omens, and weather storms filled with the power to destroy planes.

And stay tuned, because in a few short weeks, the dragonstorms will intensify with the release of Alchemy: Tarkir. We've conjured up something very special alongside this Alchemy drop: the ten Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander face cards to power your Brawl decks.

If you play regularly (as in within the last week), you may have noticed the lack of download when you launched MTG Arena to play Tarkir: Dragonstorm today. This is because we have a new card set release process that comes in two parts: First, a prepatch, then the actual set release. The prepatch delivers the core download a week prior to the release date. This lets players download the update anytime the week prior to release so they can view cards, import decks, and then log in without waiting on launch day.

It also gives us a week to tackle any critical bug fixes or quality-of-life improvements well before players are drafting and opening packs from the latest set. Higher quality releases are big wins for both players and our engineering teams, and this will be a great framework to build off as we continue to evolve how we deliver the joy of Magic to everyone, everywhere.

Coming Soon

Reprint Improvements

We launched MTG Arena with some basic systems around collecting and duplicate protection based our understanding of the world as we were building the game. One constant in Magic is its continued change, so over time, we've evolved these systems to better meet the needs of the player and how collecting works on MTG Arena.

This has included updating how duplicate protection works, how different print versions are displayed, the ability to favorite styles, adjusting the rarity of Special Guests cards to match their historical rarities, and more. By the end of May, we will launch our next improvement for reprints. I'll save the details for when we're closer, but here are two of the key changes:

• Discount decks correctly in the Store based on card names so the version in the deck and the version in a player's collection don't need to be identical.
• Allow players to use any version of a printing in their collection as the style for all versions. For instance, if you have four copies of Opt from Ixalan and one copy from Magic: The Gathering Foundations, you can use the Foundations version as a style without crafting three more Foundations

Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™

We're excited that this iconic set is coming to MTG Arena and will be talking more about it soon. The team has been hard at work making this an extraordinary digital release, and we cannot wait to share everything we have in store.

Social

Our next major feature involves exploring ways to improve the social connections in MTG Arena while better bridging the gap between digital and tabletop play. The goal is to allow players to build better social groups and communities around how they like to play so when they hop onto MTG Arena, they have additional options that align with their priorities. In addition, we'd love for these players to be able to connect digital play to local store play and provide a truly integrated ecosystem.

While I'd love to provide concrete examples, we're still in the early exploration and prototyping portion of this project, so I want to be careful about setting expectations that are later crushed because the path we settle on is different than our current blue-sky concepts. There are a ton of moving parts we need to account for in our planning and road mapping, but you can expect to hear a lot more in the back half of 2025 as those plans solidify.

Philosophy of the MTG Arena Economy

The MTG Arena economy is always a popular topic, and because it's been a while since our last conversation, we thought it was a good time share how we define that economy, what we think is working well, and what it means moving forward. The goal today is to provide some context around the decisions we make and help set some expectations for the future.

Philosophy

Broadly speaking, we refer to the way players play and build collections as the economy. Our core vision for the game continues to be "fast, fun Magic for everyone, anywhere," and that guides our approach to everything we do. While we consider everyone on MTG Arena a Magic player, we know they all have their own motivations and needs.

We try to address as many of these players' needs as we can, which requires managing conflicting motivations while dealing with a variety of constraints. We focus on understanding the needs a particular player type might have, the pros and cons of possible solutions, and then choosing the one we think best meets the needs of both the player and the long-term health of MTG Arena.

As we evaluate possible changes, we have several core pillars:

• All players should have access to all core elements of the game solely through play, but spending money can accelerate that access.
• Free players should be able to update their current decks or build new ones through consistent play between set releases. Completing each set or building every possible deck combination is generally not expected for players who never spend money.
• We want to encourage healthy play patterns that let players play as much as they like while focusing on the types of play they find fun.
• Our focus is on building collections, not destroying them, so the system doesn't provide a card exchange or destruction system.
• We want to build a support structure that brings players joy and lets MTG Arena thrive for many years to come.

While these pillars help guide our decisions, it is worth pointing out that there is a healthy tension inside each of them. For instance, every player has their own idea of when they want to spend money or what a healthy play pattern is, and those may differ from where the MTG Arena team has landed.

We always try to provide a product, feature, or program that meets players' needs, but sometimes we miss the mark. If we do, that is simply a starting point for iteration until we've either found something that works in the game or discontinue it and look for something new. Through this process, we'll continue to evolve and grow MTG Arena for years to come, even though it may not always happen as quickly as we'd all like.

What's Working Well?

Much of our focus over the past few years has been improving how Constructed-first players acquire cards and introducing new ways to help players, particularly those who are not interested in Draft play, get the cards they need to build decks. Each of these solutions are targeted at different kinds of players.

• Mythic packs help set completionists get missing mythic rare cards.
• More competitive players can shortcut the randomness of packs by purchasing the Wildcard Bundles.
• Golden Packs mean that buying packs from the MTG Arena Store is a great way to build a collection without the time, skill, or desire for drafting.
• We're continually improving our preconstructed decks, from the types of decks offered to improving presentation and how we treat players' collections.
• We've changed how we manage reprints that show up as Special Guests cards so players can craft them at rarities that align more closely with other printings.

We think we're in a pretty good spot, but we'll continue evolving how players collect as we monitor player behaviors and evaluate what is working and what isn't, and I'll discuss some of our next targets below.

A collection isn't much use if you don't have places to play your cards, so we continue to support various player types through new formats, from Alchemy to Timeless and everything in between. Since the economy stream, we've doubled the number of formats available to players. Now the focus is on ensuring the formats we support are diverse and support a wide range of play styles.

Below, you can see the relative Constructed play rates of formats since the start of 2024, which was several weeks after we introduced Timeless:

The play rates are healthy and roughly in line with what we'd expect. Standard continues to be the leading format and has been very active following Bloomburrow. When Standard is clicking, the change of pace that Alchemy provides isn't needed as much, so we see a decline right as Bloomburrow launched. Brawl has surpassed Historic as our second most popular format, partly due to the launch of Timeless and partly due to Brawl being a blast.

What's to Come?

As MTG Arena marches through its seventh year, we're generally happy with our core economy. The adjustments over the past few years have addressed many of the largest pain points, particularly around the value disparity of collecting cards through Draft versus opening packs, but we still have some areas to iterate on.

First, we have several opportunities to improve our events suite. Arena Directs have been wildly popular but are new enough that we're still uncovering issues that we need to solve. While we believe we've made significant progress in our fulfilment issues, tax season brought new challenges that we're working through and will lead to some structural adjustments to account for the differences in US and international players. We expect to have these changes locked in soon and will share when they are ready.

Beyond Arena Directs, we think our Constructed events could use another evolution. When we changed them a few years ago, the goal was to provide Constructed players with the opportunity to convert gold into gems through play, which they did well. The next step will be providing more separation between ranked play and event play to really give each mode its own identity and well-defined purpose, but the timeline for changes in this space is still pending.

We'll also continue exploring ways that let you engage in your favorite formats and explore new ones. Champion deck sales have opened a new way to both enhance collections and let players get right into the game, and we'll continue to make the process clearer, better respect your collections (particularly different printings), and try new things in this space. These decks have been very popular with Brawl players, so we want to build on this success by delivering more cool cards for the format, whether that's in decks or other through other routes.

Completely unrelated, it's been a while since our last Anthology release, so we've started discussing what our next release in that space might be and if it will be like previous versions or if we'll try something new (which is likely a requirement for any format that hasn't yet received an Anthology release). We don't currently have any plans for remastered sets, so Anthologies are good tools to add cards to non-rotating formats.

We've also added a game designer to our team whose primary focus is on Alchemy and digital format support rather than having Alchemy design and balance functions dispersed amongst several members of the team. Our original goal for Alchemy was a diverse, evolving, digital format. While it is doing quite well in the diversity and digital departments, we think there is an opportunity to make changes more often, and having a dedicated designer will help us get there.

Finally, Standard has changed quite a bit. Moving to a three-year rotation and adding Foundations creates a broad, stable base to build upon along the same timeline of regular Magic releases, and Universes Beyond sets will deliver more cards to the format than ever before. We think these two factors do a good job of balancing each other and don't plan on making major changes.

Based on how we built the MTG Arena economy, we expect most players to be able to continue playing and building collections like they always have. The Mastery Pass will provide the same value, even if the seasons are slightly shorter. Draft players will generally be able to play the same number of drafts as always, but the available formats will rotate more quickly. If you're building or maintaining a couple decks each season, each new release should provide a handful of upgrades for decks you already have or inspire you with an all-new deck to work toward, but the number of viable decks you have shouldn't change significantly. Players who are completionists or want access to every meta-relevant card will likely have the same constraints and concerns as they do now. Regardless of which player group you fall into, we'll be looking at player data and working to address any problems that may crop up as we see what this bigger, badder Standard looks like over time.

Wrapping It Up

Whew! Even though I tried to keep it high level, that was quite a bit to get through, so thanks for making it this far. If it isn't clear, 2025 is shaping up to be an awesome year for Magic and MTG Arena, and we can't wait to share it with all of you. You make it all possible. Now, excuse me, but I have to get back to my Tarkir: Dragonstorm draft.

Thanks, and see you in the queues,
Executive Producer Chris Kiritz – Magic Digital