As you might have heard, this coming Saturday, May 10th, will mark the full, official launch of Pioneer on MTG Arena. While still incomplete in terms of cards, this is where Wizards is choosing to draw the line in the sand. The placeholder Explorer format will be retired, and it’ll just be digital Pioneer from here on out. One interesting side-effect of this transition is that the in-game achievements related to Explorer will be retired from MTG Arena, making them completely unobtainable from May 10th onwards.
This may not sound like the biggest deal in the grand scheme of MTG, or even MTG Arena. Achievements have only just arrived on MTG Arena, after all, so who cares if one or two slip through your grasp? Well, turns out some MTG Arena players care, actually, to the point where they’re now playing bizarre non-games to try and earn the Explorer achievements before Saturday.
The Last Dash For MTG Arena Explorer Achievements
Before we look at just what players are doing, let’s break down the specifics of the situation. Right now, there are three Explorer-related achievements in MTG Arena: Exploring Mage I, II, and III. Tier I requires you to play 25 games of Explorer, Tier II needs 150, and Tier III needs 450.
These are the only achievements tied to the format, which means they’re the only three that will be retired come May 10th, when Pioneer takes over. The rewards for completing the achievements aren’t huge, just an “I’m on a quest!” emote and the Veteran Explorer title, but they do exist.
Players who want these rewards need to earn them now. As an additional incentive, Wizards note in the official announcement article that those who’ve finished Exploring Mage III will also automatically finish the new Pioneer equivalent post-update. This comes with a new title as well, Prominent Pioneer.
In order to lock up these achievements this week, MTG Arena players are engaging in some truly bizarre play patterns. According to HEEYOIT on Twitter, the unranked Explorer queues are currently full of players spamming zero-mana artifacts and then conceding the game.
Since the achievements don’t specify ranked Explorer, this is a good strategy. The zero-mana artifacts bit is down to how Arena counts games towards achievements. Simply conceding a game right away won’t progress an achievement. Instead, you need to cast at least two spells in a game for it to count.
This is HEEYOIT’s conjecture, anyway. Other players believe it has something to do with the number of turns/lands played as well. In any case, if you’re playing Explorer right now, you’re likely to see a lot of people trying this strategy.
A Serious Problem?
In our personal experience, decks hunting the MTG Arena Explorer achievements have a significant presence right now. Across 40 games, we encountered 10 players clearly running such decks. I’m talking full-on ‘Bone Saw into Accorder’s Shield, pass, concede’ style lists. That’s a 25% rate, which doesn’t sound huge, but it’s a bigger meta share than Izzet Prowess has in Standard, according to MTG Goldfish.
This means that one in four unranked Explorer games right now are just going to be total non-games for the most part. With players like HEEYOIT sharing the strategy on socials, and videos like this one from Bosmagnus promoting it as a great way to farm the achievements, this is hardly surprising.
Is the prevalence of this deck in Explorer a problem? Honestly, probably not. Sure, non-games can be frustrating when you’re looking to play some actual Magic. On the other hand, games against achievement-hunting decks are over extremely quickly, generally before turn two rolls around. This means you don’t lose much even if you do come up against them. You also get a free win every time, since these decks always concede once their artifacts are played. This is a pretty nice boost for those just playing out their Quests, so in that sense, it’s a positive.
With those elements in mind, running into these decks 25% is really not too bad. HEEYOIT’s warnings to avoid Explorer right now are likely a tad overblown for this reason. It is still a bizarre phenomenon, however, and one that wouldn’t have come about in a pre-achievements world.
Psychology In Action
This mad scramble for the MTG Arena Explorer achievements is a fantastic case study in the psychological impact that adding achievements to your game can have. Ordinarily, players wouldn’t be dedicating time to spamming a few artifacts and conceding hundreds of times in a row. Such actions likely wouldn’t even qualify as “playing Magic: The Gathering” in most players’ eyes.
Throw in a tiny cosmetic incentive, however, and suddenly the queues are full of players doing just that. Even with a good connection and lucky hands full of free cards, this strategy will still take a few minutes per game. Multiply that by the 450 needed to get the tier III version of the achievement, and you’re looking at over 20 hours of grinding easily. The completionist urge among certain players is clearly strong enough to propel this kind of tedious play.
“Actually encountered this yesterday while practicing for the upcoming Pioneer event. I’m surprised people care about that achievement enough to waste that much time?”
moonwave69, via Twitter
It may seem silly to many, but the psychological hooks that achievement-like systems create are no joke. With the achievements leaving on Saturday, the sense of FOMO is an additional draw, too. Magic has leveraged this idea to sell products for years, so it’s little surprise that players are vulnerable to this flavor of it as well.
As Game Designer Soren Johnson famously said, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” There are countless examples of this idea in action across competitive Magic, but this achievements nonsense is a great example on another axis. If you really want to fill out your achievements library, spamming artifacts is undeniably the best strategy to do so. Make sure you weigh up the time investment required, however, before you embark on such a journey.