Magic: The Gathering Arena Announces Big Updates

Significant updates are in store for Magic: The Gathering Arena in the coming days and months. In addition to launching on macOS and making Brawl a full-time game mode, Wizards of the Coast laid out additional updates to the free-to-play digital game coming soon. In today's State of the Game update, Wizards revealed that the new Jumpstart set would be coming to Magic: The Gathering Arena in July. Jumpstart offers a new way to play Magic that joins Arena's growing options for limited format play. Wizards also confirmed that all Jumpstart cards, with 20 substitutions, will be legal in the game's Historic format. That's 300 new cards entering Historic play in July.

Wizards also laid out Arena's "Road to Rotation." These are steps being put into place to prepare for the Standard Format rotation that accompanies the release of Zendikar Rising in the fall. As of that release, four sets will leave standard and be legal in Historic play only: Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, and Core Set 2020. As of Thursday's game update, Quick Draft events will no longer include those sets, nor will Standard individual card rewards. Wizards is also reformulating its new player decks to use cards from the new standard and, like with last year's rotation, is planning "Renewal" events for when rotation goes into effects.

Wizards also mentioned that Amonkhet Remastered would launch in August. The launch marks the return of Amonket sets to Magic: The Gathering Arena for Historic play. Amonkhet sets were available in Arena during its closed beta phase. Wizards removed the sets during a previous Standard rotation that coincided with the game entering public beta about a year before introducing Historic. Amonkhet Remastered adds 300 more cards to Historic, meaning the format's metagame may see a significant change when it gets 600+ new cards over two months.

Finally, the new update sees improvements to the game's deck builder interface. It adds Advanced Filters and new tools for deck building in Draft and Sealed events. Players will be able to expand the amount of space used when viewing their deck in the horizontal layout, and quickly add cards by their color identity.

Wizards also teased that more information will be coming in July. With Jumpstart launching on the 15th, the company plans to lay out the game mode in full shortly before then, along with a roadmap for the next year of updates.

What do you think of these updates? Let us know in the comments.