As many already know, Magic’s Final Fantasy crossover has been wildly successful. Since preorder season began, this set has been breaking sales records everywhere. In fact, demand for everything Final Fantasy is so massive that it’s been causing problems.
After making a mess of the Secret Lair Summer Superdrop 2025 sale, extreme demand has now impacted the functionality of MTG Arena. The client experienced both record numbers and a massive crash on Final Fantasy release day.
Record Breaking Numbers
Mirroring the enthusiasm that MTG Final Fantasy has received at every turn, MTG Arena hit its all-time Steam record for concurrent players on Final Fantasy release day, and not by a little. The previous record was reportedly in the 12000s. Now, the record stands at 17,261, which could be as much as 45% higher than the previous record.
To be clear, there’s a good chance that even more players were on MTG Arena after the Final Fantasy release hit the client. These numbers, after all, only reflect players using Steam’s launcher. The main MTG Arena launcher, as well as mobile players, were excluded from these totals.
What this does suggest, however, is that Final Fantasy release day was the busiest day for MTG Arena in the last two years. MTG Arena jumped onto Steam back in 2023, and today’s record broke every other day seen since by a wide margin, including Lord of the Rings release day.
While this is a new event for MTG Arena, what followed, although unfortunate, is rather typical. Release days for new sets are often among the busiest days on MTG Arena, and as a result, crashes are relatively common.
The Following Crash
Unfortunately, it appears that MTG Arena itself was unable to handle the massive increase in traffic that the platform experienced. Just about an hour and a half after release, MTG Arena started crashing. Many players, after finishing their Draft games, were kicked out to the MTG Arena main menu, or kicked off the client overall. No matter what you tried to do, in MTG Arena Limited specifically, everything was frozen.
Fortunately, the crash only lasted for about an hour before Wizards of the Coast noticed the problem and fixed things up, but if you were one of the many whose Draft was affected by the crash, you may be wondering what you can do.
How to Respond to Draft Impact
Chances are, if you were Drafting near the release of Final Fantasy on MTG Arena, you were affected by the crash that occurred shortly after. Fortunately for many MTG Drafters, things seemed to just pick back up where they left off following the fix. For us, at least, the current Draft game was simply finished up, and then we were unable to re-queue back into Limited until MTG Arena was fixed.
Unfortunately, for many players, things weren’t so simple. It doesn’t appear that many players were kicked out during Draft games, but some were removed during the initial card-drafting process. Generally, when this happens, players are left with a rather unplayable collection of cards picked at random by the AI. In other words, winning against a player who manually chose their cards is incredibly difficult.
If this happened to you, your best bet is to ask for compensation. You can go MTG Arena customer service and report a problem in your event. This is a widespread issue, so you should hopefully have no issue getting your entry fee back for the botched Draft. It will likely take customer service a bit of time to sift through all the reports, so expect a bit of delay.
Regardless of whether you were impacted by the opening day chaos or not, we would recommend keeping an eye on your MTG Arena mailbox in case some small free goodies are on their way. These are commonly offered after some rough patches, but generally don’t amount to much. Either way, even just a little EXP and a card style or two is better than nothing. All of that said, MTG Arena inbox compensation for this crash is pure speculation.
Hopefully, this marks the end of MTG Arena’s Final Fantasy troubles. Players are evidently incredibly excited to play this set, and it would be a shame for server issues to ruin the biggest play period MTG Arena has seen in three years.
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