It’s that time of the month again where Wizards of the Coast lays down the present and future of the digital version of the card game Magic: The Gathering called Arena. This is where we learn all about the new additions and changes that are going to be shaking up the game in the coming days and weeks.

MTG Arena State of the Game October 2019 Released

As such, the new MTG Arena October update comes at an interesting time in the game’s life-cycle. This is the very first post of this kind to appear after the official launch of the game out of open beta after being in that early access phase for a year or so.

Also, this is the first one to arrive after the launch of the fall expansion Throne of Eldraine, which was also a game-changing moment in the metagame. With all of this said and done, this is an instrumental MTG Arena October update for numerous reasons.

Wizards of the Coast takes the time to address the performance issues with the game, give its focus on the title moving forward, reveals everything that we need to know about the Brawl format, and much more. This is one of the biggest States of the Game that we’ve had in a while.

State of the Game: Performance Improvements

The MTG Arena October update begins with the immediately addressing the performance and gameplay issues that players have been dealing with. Just because the game is out of open beta doesn’t mean that it performs as perfectly or good as you would think.

Wizards of the Coast is prioritizing the overall client health of the game and general performance. This is going to be the primary focus for the developer for the next few months. The company acknowledges that even though this has been a focus, it needs to do more.

Since the release of the latest fall card set, the number of developer resources has been increased to find and fix the underlying problems that are plaguing the game. To achieve this, Wizards of the Coast outlined a few different things regarding accomplishing this.

The first is a small patch that was released last week to address some of the crashes that players were experiencing when playing on a device that has an integrated GPU rather than a dedicated one. It is also keeping an eye out for any users who are still reporting a problem with this.

Since the release of the game out of open beta at the end of September, there have been a good

number of players who are experiencing a black screen when they attempt to reconnect to an online match. The match is still going on, but you can’t see any of the action.

The sounds of the gameplay can still be heard by the player even though nothing is appearing on the screen. This causes the player to see this until the timer runs out in the match, or they fully restart their game client.

Thankfully, there is a fix for this issue on the way, and it will be dropping with the October update later this week. It is hoped that this patch will be the one to fix this problem for players, but if it doesn’t, be sure to report it directly to the developer.

Next up are the batch of issues that relate to the overall hitches that players experience in gameplay plus the unresponsiveness of some actions, and the constant frame rate drops. These are issues that seem to be stemming from the same central issue in the game.

It appears to be related to how the assets in the database are handled within the game. The way that the database is handling rendering stuff like the animations, effects, textures, artwork, text, the size of the card, shape of it, where it is located at the time, and more contribute to this problem.

There are a lot of factors that go into what makes this problem happen and is the reason why players can even experience some frame rate issues and overall unresponsiveness outside of matches like while building decks or opening those sweet card packs.

Because of content-heavy the game is, the assets system must be scaled to handle all of the assets for all of the cards and layers. The company has already identified the issues and the improvements that need to be made, but it is going to take time.

State of the Game: Gameplay Issues and Friends List

Another performance issue that players are dealing with is related to the memory allocation and management of it. Known as a memory leak, there are a bunch of assets that are not being correctly cleaned up between the games, and this is bogging down the performance for players.

This is the lead problem that Wizards of the Coast believes is causing it, but there may be something else that could be the issue with it. As such, the developer is going to continue investigating the issue while still trying to fix what it believes is the current cause.

Because of all the issues that players are experiencing, Wizards of the Coast reiterated that players must report when they have problems. There are so many factors that can go into the performance and other issues so providing details through support tickets can help find the causes.

Wizards of the Coast is exploring other developer options for addressing the issues as well as hiring six more software developers to increase the possible workload in investigating and fixing everything.

From there, there is an update to the friends list update that was set to be coming out with the October update later this week. Unfortunately, it is being delayed due to the list of priorities that the developer has.

Since the focus right now is on the performance problems, it doesn’t want to risk adding a new feature like the updated friends list until there are some improvements and progress in the area of performance. Everything that was in the original roadmap announcement is still on the way, nonetheless.

State of the Game: Brawl Is Almost Here

With all the sad and unfortunate stuff out of the way, the MTG Arena October update goes into more exciting things like the reveal of the Brawl release date. As we already noted in a post dedicated to this upcoming new match format, the Brawl mode will be releasing with the October update this week.

Players will be able to enjoy this new mode beginning on Thursday, October 24. It all starts with a launch celebration event that will start that day and run for a week until November 1. Players will have to pay to enter the event, though, with fees of 1000 gold or 200 gems required.

However, it is worth it because players can earn some sweet cards for getting wins. Each win up to five wins will grant players a new card that is dedicated to the Brawl match format. Those cards each represent one of the five colors and are Mace of the Valiant, Faerie Formation, Taste of Death, Embereth Skyblazer, and Thorn Mammoth.

Each of the cards will also come with their unique card style for free. This is great since these five cards are hard to get outside of redeeming them with the wildcards since they aren’t available in booster packs and the like. Players can continue playing the event past the five wins, as well.

What does suck about Brawl, though, is that it is going to remain a limited-time mode. It will be available only once a week in the play queue on Wednesdays starting at 8 am PT. It will only last for 24 hours before disappearing again until the following week.

This begins after the end of the upcoming launch celebration. Players will be able to challenge someone to Brawl directly, but it is still rather unfortunate that there is no dedicated play queue 24/7. We hope that this could come if it is popular enough.

If you don’t know what the new Brawl mode is, it is Commander but for the digital game. Players can select a legendary creature or planeswalker as their partner for the mode. They must use Standard-legal cards for their decks and build a deck with a minimum of 60 cards.

The other 59 cards in the deck must match the colors only of the partner creature or planeswalker that you select. So, if you pick someone like Oko, Thief of Crowns as your partner, you can only have blue and green cards in your deck.

But if you do need more Brawl in your life beyond the direct challenge and limited time play queue, you can visit your local participating game store for some in-game weekend Brawl action. And if you happen to participate in one of these Brawl weekends, you will receive a code for the game that comes with some sweet rewards.

State of the Game: New Events and Daily Wins Changes

Speaking of awesome rewards, Wizards of the Coast finally announced when players will be able to get those epic showcase cards from the recent card set. Starting in November, players will be able to take part in the Festival of the Fae event series where you can earn these showcase versions of your favorite cards.

There are plenty of fan favorites like Brazen Borrower, Giant Killer, Order of Midnight, and more that are being shown off for this event. They each have a more streamlined and cleaner card style that you will be able to collect and show off from then on.

Unfortunately, though this is an event series like the summer ones that took place earlier this year, each of the events will have an entry fee. Each of them will cost 2500 gold or 500 gems, depending on what money format that you want to use.

Three match formats will be used in the event series. The first is Artisan, where players will need to build a Standard-legal deck using only common and uncommon cards. The next is Oko’s Madness, which is like Momir’s Madness.

The latter has players create tokens on the field using a specific land-based deck, but the twist this time around is that the creatures are also the three/three elk creatures that Oko, Thief of Crowns is known for. The third and what seems to be the final event in the series will be Cascade.

If you don’t know Cascade, it is a special mode where it affects the match based on the first spell you cast each turn. Doing so will require you to exile the cards from the top of your deck until you find a nonland card that costs less than the one spell you cast. You must exile it as well, but you can cast it without paying the mana cost.

The entire event series will begin very soon on November 3, and the first mode up will be Artisan. Each of the three events will have five cards to collect based on how many wins you get during it. However, those aren’t all the showcase cards that will be available during each event.

There are more Adventure cards with their unique showcase forms that will be available for bundle purchase through the in-game store. They will be sold separately in the store after the November game update later.

Last but certainly not least in the MTG Arena October update is a major change to the daily wins. Daily wins will now reward players with 25 experience each for the first 10 wins that a player gets per day. This is another way to level up faster for the Mastery Pass. And it won’t take away from the weekly win rewards either.

Wizards of the Coast has addressed a lot of changes and more coming to the game soon. We were able to cover most of the changes, but there are still some minor ones out there. For more on the MTG Arena October update, be sure to check out the full blog post here.