Since Tarkir: Dragonstorm’s launch earlier this year, Wizards has tweaked how releases work on MTG Arena. Now, sets are released in two parts, where cards are first uploaded before being unlocked later. Ideally, this should allow for less downtime and maintenance, creating a smoother experience overall.
Unfortunately, this ideal situation hasn’t exactly come to pass since the new strategy has been implemented, as Edge of Eternities had massive problems on release. Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom, however, as Edge of Eternities did quietly get better once released. Not only were the issues mercifully fixed rather quickly, but the much-maligned Mastery Pass was improved too.
Making Mastery Manageable
In the lead-up to Edge of Eternities’ release, MTG players quickly became concerned about the amount of time available to play the set. Thanks to the short gap between this set and Marvel’s Spider-Man, there’s only around eight weeks to get everything done. While the entire set doesn’t disappear after this point, the Mastery Pass does.
When it was first announced, the Edge of Eternities Mastery Pass consisted of 70 levels. After some quick maths, it was determined this really wasn’t enough time for the average player. While technically possible to earn every reward, you’d need to be grinding out a lot of daily wins. Not only can this stop being fun at a point, but not everyone has time for such a commitment.
After this was discovered, players began wondering how Wizards might address this situation. In the past, Wizards have given players free XP in order to make completing the Mastery Pass more realistic. Thankfully, Wizards has already implemented a solution to this problem by simply shortening the Mastery Pass.
On release, the Edge of Eternities Mastery Pass only included 60 levels. Mercifully, this sudden and unannounced shortening hasn’t reduced the rewards that are on offer. Instead, Wizards has simply compacted the preannounced offerings into a more realistic window, which is good news for everyone.
As if this wasn’t exciting enough, Wizards also changed what’s on offer in the Edge of Eternities Mastery Emporium. Rather than including five card sleeves, as originally advertised, the Mastery Emporium has five new avatars on offer. While change might not be to everyone’s tastes, these avatars have already received a very warm welcome online.
Stick the Landing
Unfortunately, while the Edge of Eternities Mastery Pass has been significantly improved, the set’s release was far from perfect. While MTG players didn’t have to sit through hours of maintenance, there were hours of technical disruptions instead. This even led to ranked matches being disabled as players were plagued with connection issues.
Thankfully, these issues didn’t last too long, as Wizards was seemingly able to fix things. That said, for the entire first day of the set’s release, the servers were a little bit unstable. For better or worse, it seems MTG Arena is now suffering from success somewhat.
After the release of Final Fantasy, MTG Arena has more players than ever before. This can clearly be seen on Arena’s Steam Charts page. When Final Fantasy released, Arena hit a new all-time peak player count of 17,989. While Edge of Eternities couldn’t match this, the 16,239 player count is incredibly close.
While these numbers are just on Steam, it’s clear that MTG Arena has seen a massive boost in popularity. Beyond just being a one-and-done spike, it seems a lot of these new players are actually sticking around, too. While this is great for Magic: The Gathering and MTG Arena’s future, the servers aren’t built for this.
Due to the increased player count, it seems the rush of release day is too much for Arena to handle. Frustratingly, this is the second time this has happened, as the launch of the Final Fantasy set was also a mess. Hopefully, Wizards will be able to adapt to this over time so future releases can go smoothly.
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