Despite being the biggest fish in the physical TCG pond and having two very respectable digital clients as well, Magic: The Gathering has never quite managed to marry its two sides successfully. Wizards have made several attempts over the years, certainly, but most have fizzled out in time. Today, Wizards announced some new MTG Arena rewards tied to physical, in-store play. Unfortunately, these only seem to reinforce the game’s issues in this area, rather than solve them.
New In-Store MTG Arena Rewards
The new rewards in question were announced via an official article, sneakily following in the wake of today’s monumental ban announcement. Whether Wizards tucked this away intentionally or not is up for debate, but given the nature of the rewards, I’d say it’s likely.
Essentially, each time you participate in an in-store, tabletop MTG event after November 11th, you’ll receive three wins worth of progress on your daily and weekly Arena reward tracks. What exactly this means will depend on how often you play. The weekly progress will generally translate into 750 XP. The daily progress, however, could be anything from 450 gold and 75 XP, if it’s your first three wins of the day, to 25 gold and a couple of random cards if it’s your last three. In both cases, the extra wins won’t add anything if you’ve already maxed out the track.
On the surface, this seems like a generous gesture from Wizards. It’s something free and useful that we didn’t have access to before, after all. When you consider how low the purchasing power of gold on Arena is, however, it looks a lot less so. A single booster pack costs 1,000 gold on Arena, for example, and events are even worse. As players on social media have already noted, you’d need to attend 23 in-store events to earn enough gold for a single best-of-one Draft.
These stingy rewards aren’t an isolated incident, either. They’re merely the latest example of Wizards holding back when it comes to the physical/digital Magic crossover. Back in February, Wizards removed the redemption codes from Prerelease kits, meaning paper players could no longer gift them to their friends. Starter deck codes were also altered, and now no longer give extra copies of already-owned cards on Arena. Sadly, it seems there’s a consistent trend of Wizards making their digital/physical integrations stingier over time.
A Better Path?
Ultimately, all of this tightfistedness isn’t really necessary. As we’re constantly being told, Magic is doing better than ever at the moment. Passing on some of that success in the form of better Arena/tabletop integration is something that Wizards definitely could do. Beyond that, there are a lot of reasons why it should, too. Having more synergy between the two forms of Magic would likely lead to more players who play both sides. This, in turn, would almost certainly lead to more sales.
In terms of how Wizards could approach this subject better, there are a few clear avenues open to them. Firstly, it could take a leaf out of Pokémon’s book. In Pokémon, the majority of physical sealed products, booster packs included, come with a redemption code that gives you access to a rough equivalent on the game’s digital client. While it’s not totally 1:1, this lets physical players maintain solid digital collections as well. Something similar for Magic could really get some paper loyalists playing Arena regularly.
We could also see some more interesting use cases for the in-store rewards that were introduced for MTG Arena today. Instead of generic win track progress, we could have multiple booster packs as you’d get at an in-store event, or maybe even exclusive alternate-art digital promo cards. After attending an in-person Draft, we could receive a code that grants access to an Arena Draft as well.
Fortunately, it looks like we could well see some changes along these lines soon. Today’s article notes that the new rewards are “just the beginning,” and that Wizards is “exploring more ways to connect activity across Wizards systems”. Hopefully, these statements aren’t hollow promises. There’s a ton of potential for Wizards to provide rewards that genuinely encourage cross-medium play here, as opposed to a paltry handful of gold and XP.
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