What to Know about the MTG: Arena Open Beta
Wizards of the Coast just put out a trailer featuring Danny Trejo to announce the date of Magic the Gathering: Arena’s open beta. The MTG: Arena Open Beta is set to be available for download on Sept. 27.
Magic Arena, which is created by Wizards of the Coast’s in-house Magic Digital Studio developers, launched on December 4, 2017. Since then, it has gone through several patches, quality of life changes, mode additions, expansions that parallel the real game, and more.
Starting today, purchases using the in-game store will be closed. Servers will be down between September 24th and the 27th, with long-term maintenance as an effort to prevent servers from crashing upon the MTG: Arena open beta release.
This announcement is also coupled with a crucial detail that may excite many Magic players. One in eight Guilds of Ravnica packs will come with a code inserted that is redeemable for three Guilds packs in Arena. Hopefully, this will be the first step in a continued effort to solidify the bond between paper collections and digital collections. Not only that, but Planeswalker decks, which are typically low-powered, will have a code for a matching digital copy, and all Guilds Prerelease packs will come with a free Sealed entry for Arena.
On September 26th, there will be a special Twitch event where over 300 streamers get early access to the cards of Guilds of Ravnica in a sort of pre-prerelease, according to Wizards of the Coast. Ravnica will fully release on the 27th, two days before its release in paper form.
Guilds’ release will also come with rotation, meaning that cards from Kaladesh, Aether Revolt, Amonkhet, and Hour of Devastation will rotate out. There are plans to possibly incorporate them in the future given that their coding and animation remains intact but there are no final decisions yet.
There will also be a cosmetic overhaul to the battlefield of Arena, making it themed around the plane of Ravnica for the new release. The trailer also showcased some of the animations that play for certain rares and mythics, which are splashier and more impressive than the ones that were given at the start of the closed beta.
Transitioning to MTG: Arena Open Beta from Closed Beta
Like most games with progression systems, there will be a massive inventory wipe moving from closed beta to the MTG: Arena open beta. All gems, the real-money currency, bought during the closed beta will be refunded, but any rewards earned through daily quests or events will be wiped, and all players will start with an even playing field of wildcards.
Wildcards are a kind of currency that allows you to craft any card you want of a given rarity. The rarities in the game are Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic. Every player will start with eight common wildcards, four uncommons, two rares, and one mythic.
Wizards of the Coast has stated in an official announcement article that they have no plans for another account wipe. There will most likely be a smoother transition from open beta to full release, mainly because the public beta start date coincides with the release of Guilds of Ravnica and the resulting standard rotation.
The beta will also launch with Sealed and Singleton formats. The first one is a reasonably common format while the second one is unusual for constructed players. Sealed involves opening six packs and building a 40-card deck using the cards you get, dueling against people who have done the same with six packs from the same set. Singleton involves using a 60 card pre-constructed deck that eschews the four of any card limit in favor of one of any card. This excludes basic lands, of course.
Planned features currently absent in the MTG: Arena Open Beta
The beta that players have participated in is more old school for developers in that there are many features and it is incomplete. Players are used to betas for games in recent years being demos, but Arena has been anything but.
The digital studio creating the game has come under fire for not including private matches and for limiting progression due to daily quests and grinding a la Hearthstone. They have said that part of the open beta’s focus is to look closer at the game’s economy and decide how best to improve it, as well as to focus on infrastructure that would allow for players to directly challenge each other. This would also be useful for communities to host tournaments exclusively on the Arena platform.
For those that like climbing, there is currently no meaningful ranking system. They plan to change this in the future, and hopefully, it will solve a lot of the matchmaking problems that new players experience. Those without a substantial number of cards have trouble facing people in matchmaking games that have full sets of mythics, rares, uncommons, and a strong mana base—hopefully, a progression or ranking system or even a new player queue like Magic Online can help this.
Wizards’ digital studio developers also have expressed plans to have cosmetic progression and experimental events and modes to differentiate itself from the paper game further. They also are working on the fifth card problem, as there is no disenchanting feature in the game currently—when you get more than the maximum amount of a card that you can use in the deck, which is four, it just rots in your inventory.
What to do when the MTG: Arena Open Beta launches
Read old-school content about how to effectively play Magic and build decks. The strategy and playstyles that people have been talking about and teaching for twenty-five years are still as relevant as ever, and there is a wealth of content already out there for the upcoming Standard format.
Standard will include cards from Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, Dominaria, Core Set 2019, and the new Guilds of Ravnica. New deck lists will be searchable on sites like MTGGoldfish, and the official Magic subreddit will have plenty of players discussing deck building strategies. If you’d like to build your own from scratch, you can search all the singular cards from the sets previously listed on Wizards’ Gatherer page.
Browse deck lists and sets and see what you want to spend your wildcards on and get started right away with your starting currency. You’ll be able to draft, with packs as rewards, as well as play Sealed. Opening your first packs should give you enough cards to play Singleton, which will be a free event for a short period as soon as the beta hits.
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