Ever since Hearthstone’s immense success, the competitive gaming community has been waiting with bated breath to see who will challenge Blizzard’s stranglehold on the online DCCG market. Wizards of the Coast, the creators, and owners of Magic: The Gathering, have pushed an open beta for an online version of Magic: The Gathering that plans to emulate the core concepts of Hearthstone alongside the classic Magic gameplay called Magic: The Gathering Arena.

The update for Magic: The Gathering Arena, which is slated for an August 16 release, plans to remove a lot of complaints from beta players that deemed the game slow and “miserable.” A lot of the problems that consumers have with real-life paper card games like Magic are “removed” in Hearthstone—Blizzard allows players to turn cards into other cards, the rotation schedule is clear, it isn’t necessary to spend any cash on the game, etc. Magic: The Gathering Arena, however, seems to “rewind” a lot of those ideas and go back to older design changes with some murky explanations.

A major problem with adding Hearthstone-style animations and sound effects is that it clashes with the way Magic traditionally handles “priority.” Priority is what allows players to play during each other’s turns; players switch priority in between phases of a turn and in between each individual action. Because players have the opportunity to respond to different actions (like casting a creature, attacking, or removing a creature), the gameplay is “interrupted” far more often than Hearthstone.

One of the fixes to this is by adding a “queue” of actions the same way that Hearthstone does. For example, you can make the command to attack with a creature in Hearthstone and keep making more commands to attack/play cards without waiting for the first animation to finish. Magic uses the same system now, which can be very convenient for playing several cards or activating several abilities in a row.

They are also getting more familiar with their own economy and understanding how long it “should” take players to gather sets of cards. They are giving out more and more “freebies” while they sort this out to keep the beta player base stable; they recently have given out several free drafts and gold to help players work towards their Wildcards (which allow players to craft the exact card they want or need).

Wizards of the Coast has at least heard the complaints and has plans to make the game more fun for new players with some ideas to utilize the digital gameplay with a market that just wants to play the game as its own entity rather than a “simulation” of “real” paper Magic. Part of this is a focus on events, weekend or otherwise, to unify the community and differentiate it from regular-old-FNM.

The developers have “learned their lessons” with previous events, like Singleton (only one of any card), but they will continue their experimentation and certainly are just not playing it safe. Their target for events is six modes at a time, as opposed to a generic “play Constructed” mode like Hearthstone.

The modes are:

Notably, Competitive Constructed is absent, due to their own internal analysis showing that it was the least played mode amongst all players. It will likely be totally replaced with the non-rotating “Best of 3” ladder, which includes side-boarding (having 15 “extra” cards to prepare for other matchups). They have already been experimenting with rotating weekend events, but it clearly will be a more stable addition to the game.

To start, the development team is adding Standard Pauper as a competitive addition. For those familiar with Magic, Pauper means “commons only,” but traditionally Pauper went as far back as the origin of a marked rarity on cards, meaning it included cards from decades back. Standard Pauper, on the other hand, uses the same card pool as the current Standard rotation (which is about two years), except it uses only the common cards.

This format is pretty much unheard of in any capacity, so it’s interesting to see how it will play out. It could be very fun, using plenty of all-stars from previously limited environments (like Night Market Lookout, Renegade Freighter, Artificer’s Assistant, and Ghitu Lavarunner), or it could be some very boring low-powered magic without any fun, splashy creatures or spells.

They are also adding an online-magic staple, in the form of Momir Basic. Momir Basic is a little bit hard to explain for those that have never played online magic, but the rules are as follows:

Momir Vig is played on Magic the Gathering Online with the entire Magic card pool (going back as far as the Alpha Magic release), so no one really knows how a Standard-only Momir Basic will play out. These modes could also be a convenient segue for them to tackle the question of adding non-recent cards into Magic: The Gathering Arena, which could also segue into Magic: The Gathering Arena replacing the classic MTGO…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit there.