Wizards of the Coast has announced new changes for Magic: The Gathering Arena in their June 2020 State of the Game, and now the company is making the game's fan-favorite format better with the latest update.
Last year, MTG Arena added Brawl, a singleton Constructed format with a legendary Commander but only Standard-legal cards are allowed, but fans can only play for a limited time every week unless they purchase the entry fee for the Brawlers' Guildhall event. However, since March, Wizards made the Brawlers' Guildhall free to all MTG Arena players as a way to give players more ways to play Magic during the coronavirus pandemic. With Thursday's new update, the Brawlers' Guildhall will be removed; instead, Brawl will just be available every day with no entry fee, and you can still earn daily wins and quest progress by playing. There will be a Brawl queue alongside Play, Standard Ranked, etc. starting in July and into the foreseeable future, Wizards stated in the State of the Game.
"When we first introduced Constructed Brawl as a format back in October, it was the first time we planned to support something other than Standard or Limited events on a regular, albeit rotating, schedule. Up until this point, MTG Arena had been almost exclusively Standard-focused, and this was one of our first forays into expanding our formats beyond your typical 60-card Constructed deck or Limited events on a regular cadence.
It proved popular enough that we began to explore ways we could support the format more often, without undermining the Standard-focused experience that MTG Arena was originally designed to provide. We had to make certain assumptions using the data we had based on player behavior up until this point, which is why we initially charged an entry fee for Brawlidays and the subsequent Brawlers' Guildhall events.
Well, as COVID-19 changed the daily lives of many of us, one of our initiatives was to offer more ways to play Magic from the comfort and safety of our homes. One of the ways we did that was by removing this entry fee for the March Guildhall. Then we did it again in April, and then we did it again in May.
. . . And as it turns out, having supported Brawlers' Guildhall without an entry fee for several months now, a lot of our concerns over having a permanent Brawl queue never really manifested. Brawl continues to be a popular "sometimes" food for most of our players, who enjoy playing it in between drafts or other Constructed formats."
As for Historic Brawl, a singleton format that features all the cards on MTG Arena instead of just Standard-legal ones, Wizards said that the Arena team will have to evaluate the effect of permanent playable Brawl queue before adding Historic Brawl permanently; however, they still plan to feature Historic Brawl as part of the game's rotating events.
Are you happy that Brawl is now permanently a free mode on MTG Arena? Would you like to see them add Historic Brawl as a permanent mode in the game? Let us know in the comments section below.
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