When Wizards of the Coast announced their 2:1 Wildcard ratio for Historic cards, they got a ton of backlash. For the past couple of weeks, to the frustration of many people, they have largely been silent on the MTG Arena Historic issue. Today, we finally got an actual update. Unfortunately, it’s not quite the news people expected. Let’s check it out.
MTG Arena Historic Update
After the blowback from the community, Wizards of the Coast has rolled back its 2:1 rule. This is fantastic news! However, there is a pretty rough drawback to this new development: Historic wins no longer count towards your 15 weekly wins. This means that if you want to play only Historic and also get your usual weekly rewards to help build your collection… you can’t. You have to play Standard in addition to Historic, or else you miss out on a ton of XP.
How else could WotC make sure people play Standard?
The reason Wizards of the Coast is constantly forcing sub-optimal rules onto Historic that would limit its play is that they don’t want Historic to eclipse Standard. That makes sense – Standard is their money-making machine. Every 3 months, you have to buy new cards to be relevant, which works just fine for them. However, there are probably a few avenues Wizards could take that would support Standard without punishing Historic players.
- Only sell Historic packs on the MTG Arena website – Do this for the same gold/gem amount as in the Arena client and this makes buying Standard a less tedious task than buying Historic. But, it also doesn’t remove the option.
- Have more Standard events than Historic – They were going to do this anyway, but it’s another great way to keep people focused on Standard.
- Keep the Magic Pro League focused on Standard – This makes sure that players who want to watch content have more Standard content than Historic to watch. If people’s favorite players are playing Standard, they’ll want to play Standard too.
These are obviously just suggestions for the MTG Arena team. Maybe these would work, maybe they wouldn’t. However, @MTG_Arena has done a great job listening to the community so far, so we can only hope they continue to work to find a middle ground on this issue.
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