Earlier this month, Wizards of the Coast announced MTG Arena is getting a brand new format: Timeless. Positioned as Arena’s version of Vintage, this new format has players incredibly excited, to say the least. Offering access to every single card in the game, Timeless has already taken the MTG Arena audience by storm.
As if that wasn’t enough to be excited about, at the same time, Wizards has re-released Khans of Tarkir. Debuting Delve cards, five Fetch Lands, and a new Draft experience, this release is undoubtedly incredibly exciting. Despite all the great developments that have happened recently, MTG Arena has been hit with a major problem.
Unfortunately for some, it seems a new major bug on MTG Arena is keeping some from playing the game.
A Baffling Bounty of Bugs
Sadly, since it is a digital game, bugs on MTG Arena are nothing new. Around the launch of a new major patch, most games will experience these issues, however, Arena is unfathomably more complex. Even with only around 10,000 cards in the game, the amount of interactions and edge cases is practically infinite.
Thanks to this unfathomable depth, bugs on MTG Arena can spring up from the strangest places. Prior to the launch of Shadows over Innistrad Remastered, for instance, no one would have thought that Gutter Grime would break the game.
More bafflingly than this card simply being broken, the mere implantation of this card broke sacrifice effects. In turn, this created several bannable broken combos that dominated the MTG Arena ladder for a short time. Thankfully, this bug hasn’t emerged again for Khans of Tarkir’s MTG Arena re-release, but an even stranger one has emerged…
Error Updating Data
Currently, it seems that many MTG players are experiencing a new bug upon login. When trying to launch MTG Arena, the game will simply spit up the message “Error Updating Data”. Currently, there is no real fix to this issue. It doesn’t matter if you reboot the game or even reinstall Arena. If you see this error message, you simply can’t play right now.
Technically, there is one workaround to this error, however, this is to simply create, or log into, an alternative account. While this will let you finally play, unfortunately, it also means starting fresh with no gold, cards, or wildcards. Should you go back to your main account once this issue is resolved, all the progress you make will be for naught.
Considering this complete lack of options is rather uncommon for MTG Arena bugs, you may be wondering what’s going on. Thankfully, following a new video from Amazonian, it seems we finally have an answer. For whatever reason, the “Error Updating Data” message appears if you have a Brawl deck with a Specialize Commander.
Unfortunately, thanks to the popularity of Baldur’s Gate 3, quite a lot of MTG Arena players have made these decks. In turn, this means the “Error Updating Data” bug appears to be rather widespread at the moment. Beyond hurting Baldur’s Gate fans, this new error also punishes Arena’s most diehard fans. Should you enjoy the digital-exclusive mechanic of Specialize, your reward now is not being able to play.
As you can imagine, many MTG Arena players aren’t too happy about this. “Wizards of the Coast, I want you to know. This is… kind of outrageous,” Amazonian stated in their video.
“The only people impacted by this are the people who chose to play with an Arena-only mechanic. We gave you the ‘You know what, a lot of people hate Alchemy but we’re willing to play with your Alchemy stuff anyway.’ Well, guess what, it was a mistake. We shouldn’t have played with the live cards. We shouldn’t have played around with fire because it has caused this to happen.” – Amazonian
Amazonian
Let Me In. Let Me IIIIIIIIIIIIIN
At the moment, there is no word on when the “Error Updating Data” issue may be solved. According to Amazonian, Wizards of the Coast is aware of this problem and working on a fix, but there’s no timeline yet. All that affected players can do right now is sit and wait, or start a new account. As Amazonian jokes, since Baldur’s Gate cards caused this issue, now would be a great time to play Baldur’s Gate 3.
To add to the problems that Arena is currently facing, there’s currently a severe lack of communication from Wizards. Unfortunately, this may have something to do with the fact that MTG Community Manager Jesse Hill was recently laid off. This saddening layoff comes as part of a wider move by Hasbro plans to cut 1,100 jobs.
Ultimately, there’s nothing that affected MTG Arena players can do at the moment. Subsequently, we’re just going to have to wait and see what the future holds, and hope that a fix is released shortly. Whether or not that will happen, however, remains to be seen.
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