As of today, Tarkir: Dragonstorm is now available on MTG Arena and Magic Online. With many players rushing to these online clients, it’s the perfect time for a Weekly MTG stream all about Arena. Rather than just playing the game, however, Wizards went all out in a State of the Game discussion, going over everything going on.
As usual, this livestream and accompanying article revealed all manner of details about stats and future plans. Thankfully, it seems there’s quite a lot worth looking forward to in the future. While the newly announced updates won’t all be arriving this year, it seems the future is looking bright nonetheless.
Major Reprint Changes
During the State of the Game livestream, the most significant talking point was upcoming changes to the MTG Arena reprint policy. Scheduled to be implemented by the end of May, these changes are also the closest on the horizon. This is great news, as this change could potentially save you a fair few wildcards when reprints roll around.
At its core, the new reprint policy updates how duplicate protection works, so you don’t need to craft as many different art variants. Right now, if you want to use a playset of a reprint with new art, you’ll need to craft, or open, four copies of that card. However, you’ll only need one copy of the new art reprint once the reprint update arrives.
“Allow players to use any version of a printing in their collection as the style for all versions. For instance, if you have four copies of Opt from Ixalan and one copy from Magic: The Gathering Foundations, you can use the Foundations version as a style without crafting three more Foundations”
Wizards of the Coast
In addition to this major positive change, decks in the store should also soon be discounted correctly. When this update is implemented, discounts will be based on card names rather than the specific art used. Overall, these changes should make MTG Arena slightly better for free-to-play players, which is always incredibly welcome.
Sadly, outside of the reprint changes, Wizards of the Coast isn’t planning on overhauling the MTG Arena economy. Unsurprisingly, this may rub a lot of players the wrong way since building collections can be somewhat daunting. Now that even more Standard-legal sets are being released yearly, this problem may worsen.
Despite this threatening prospect, Wizards appear to be happy with the state of the Arena economy. Sadly, this means that no card-dusting or wildcard exchange system will be implemented anytime soon. Such a feature is supposedly against Wizards’ plans overall since it’s destructive to a player’s collection.
Growing Social Features
Looking further ahead, Wizards of the Coast briefly discussed their plans for enhanced social features on MTG Arena. While this sounds very exciting, sadly, there’s very little concrete information about what this may look like. Additionally, the release date for any expanded social features is similarly nebulous, as it’s only aimed for late 2025/early 2026.
Thankfully, while Wizards didn’t give many concrete details, vague plans were discussed during the livestream. Specifically, groups were mentioned as a potential feature; however, how this would manifest is unclear. What we do know, at least, is that Wizards favors the idea of having multiple joinable groups, rather than just one main clan.
Supporting these social features, Wizards mentioned that friend Drafts, sharing collections, and even a Sandbox mode are on the table. While each of these sounds exciting and comes highly requested from the community, there’s no guarantee these features will make the cut. Hopefully, since Wizards has a long time until release, any potential issues can be ironed out.
For better or worse, while Wizards is looking at improving MTG Arena’s social features, a direct player chat wasn’t spoken about. Technically, this feature is already possible between friends, but it’s not an option in random matches. Potentially, we might hear more about whether this is planned down the line, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.
New Anthologies Planned
Later in the livestream, Wizards of the Coast addressed the possibility for more Anthology sets in the future. So far, it’s been almost two years since the last Explorer and History Anthology sets were released. Players were repeatedly requesting new anthologies nonstop, with little success.
Now, Wizards has at least revealed that future Anthology sets are on the table, though none are coming out soon. In somewhat of a running trend, no plans were explicitly concerned, but Brawl, Historic, or Timeless could all feasibly get Anthology sets. Sadly, there’s no word on when this might happen, but we should get something new eventually, at least.
The accompanying State of the Game article mentioned that future Anthology sets could “try something new.” While it’s unclear how this might manifest, Wizards may experiment with smaller releases, such as only giving players a five or ten-card cycle. Technically, Wizards has already done this with the implementation of Fetch Lands back in 2024.
Last but by no means least, Wizards was surprisingly cryptic about some of the uncraftable cards on MTG Arena. Unsurprisingly, given that the Power Nine falls into this category, Wizards doesn’t want to just give them all to us. At the same time, however, some cards are more appropriately powered and could be fun in Brawl.
Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast is well aware of this growing list of cards. During the livestream, Wizards stated, “Maybe there’s something we can do about that,” so there is some hope, at least. Once again, however, as with many of the planned features discussed today, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
