At long last, Bloomburrow was released yesterday on MTG Arena. Ushering in the long-awaited Standard rotation, alongside a set of new cards, this was an incredibly exciting time. Unfortunately, enjoying the new cards and rotated formats isn’t as you would hope. Thanks to overwhelming demand and new bugs, MTG Arena has been plagued by a major outage.
Best-of-Three Begone
When a new MTG set launches, players are quick to flock to Draft and Sealed events to get their fix. Not only is this the best environment for all the new cards, but these events also grow your collection. The only question is whether you pick between best-of-one or best-of-three events.
Sadly, MTG Arena players don’t have a choice right now, as best-of-three Sealed and Draft queues have been entirely disabled. This outage is due to an issue that made it impossible to sideboard between matches. Considering this is the major selling point of best-of-three formats, it’s no wonder Wizards decided to shut it down temporarily.
Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast is aware of this issue and is currently working on a fix. When exactly this fix will be implemented is unclear, but hopefully, players won’t be left waiting for too long. According to the MTG Arena Status Page, affected players should be able to resume their matches once this bug is fixed.
Graveyard Greviances
As if one Bloomburrow-based bug wasn’t bad enough, MTG Arena is currently grappling with two of them. For some strange reason, players are currently struggling to look in graveyards when they’d want to. Unusually, it now seems you can only open and look into a graveyard when you have priority.
On its own, this isn’t the most devastating bug since you can still look into graveyards after a little wait. All you have to do is click or tap as normal, and then the interface will appear as soon as possible. While this isn’t a game-breaking outage, it is admittedly annoying for MTG Arena players. After all, it’s common to check graveyards during downtime when you don’t have priority, which now doesn’t work.
Much like the bug currently affecting best-of-three matches, it’s unclear exactly why this problem has arisen. On Reddit, some MTG players suspect the new Forage mechanic, since it interacts with the graveyard, but this is unconfirmed. All we do know for now is that Wizards of the Coast is aware of the issue, and hopefully working on a fix.
Earlier Outages
With two major bugs causing frustration, it’s safe to say the release of Bloomburrow isn’t going well. This disruption, however, is nothing compared to what happened yesterday. On launch day, the entire MTG Arena client crashed and was unavailable to everyone for a short while.
Thankfully, this MTG Arena outage was short-lived and has since been resolved. In the moment, however, it was incredibly frustrating for everyone wanting to play the game. While the exact cause of this outage is unknown, it seems likely that the servers were simply overwhelmed by immense demand.
Considering the immense amount of hype surrounding Bloomburrow, as well as rotation, this overwhelming demand is ultimately unsurprising. While briefly annoying, we can at least take solace now that the game is back after the peak of demand. Hopefully, Wizards will be able to sure up their servers so post-release outages like this don’t happen in the future.
Complimentary Compensation
Ultimately, bugs and outages are nothing new in MTG Arena. While these problems are annoying, Magic is a fragile house of cards built upon decades of rules and corner cases. Due to this, it’s honestly a surprise that MTG Arena is as stable as it is. We have the game’s dedicated development team to thank for that.
Thanks to the skills of the development team, hopefully, the bugs players are currently experiencing will be fixed soon. When they are, there’s a non-zero chance that players will receive some compensation too. Judging by past precedent, players will hopefully receive some free gold and XP as an added apology.
On top of this compensation, Wizards of the Coast has also apologized for the inconvenience being caused.
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