Howdy,

We've done a lot of listening over the past week and talking among the team. Let's dive into some issues and how we're going to address them.

Performance Issues – Hotfix Scheduled for July 10, 2019.

We have been working hard on a number of fixes to address the performance issues players have been experiencing since the release of Core Set 2020. This release is scheduled to go live tonight, so keep an eye on our status page for the latest information on maintenance times. If you continue to experience any performance issues after the update is live, please reach out to support.wizards.com so we can get to the bottom of any lingering performance losses.

Mastery System – Updates Coming (also) on July 10, 2019.

We're also going to update Mastery System rewards with this update to better balance daily versus weekly play.

Weekly win rewards are back. For your first 15 wins of the week you will get 250 XP per win. XP will be removed from daily wins. They’ll still award gold and individual card rewards (ICRs). Quests will still give out XP, but we’re lowering it to 500 per quest; the amount of available XP has increased overall, with the difference being earned through weekly wins. Through events and codes, there will still be another 15+ levels of XP players can earn over the course of a set.

Once these changes go live:

All players will begin at 0/15 Weekly Wins, regardless of Daily Wins rewards they have already received.

All Quests (including those in progress) will reward 500 XP.

Players will keep any XP they have previously earned from Daily Wins and/or Quests; we are not retroactively lowering the amount of XP you’ve earned.

We hope this addresses the major concern we’ve seen from players: feeling punished if you don't play MTG Arena every day.

Progression

Let’s look at these changes in practice:

If you complete your quests and earn all your weekly wins, you’ll be able to reach Level 67 by the end of set, even if you only play once a week (before any codes or events). Previously, you’d only be able to reach Level 32.

If you play more than once per week, you’ll be able to reach at least Level 74 by the end of a set (before any codes or events). Previously, the minimum level you could be expected to reach was 46.

Depending on the days you played and the number of quests available your level prior to these changes could vary dramatically, but regardless the new system should be better for everyone. For those of you who play more regularly the difference isn’t as drastic, but you do end up with a higher expected level overall.

What’s Next

These changes are not the endpoint for Mastery Pass. There are a number of other changes we're talking about for the future.

As previously announced, we will remove the level purchase button at the end of this month. After hearing player feedback, we are looking at ways to let people who want to purchase levels to still do so somewhere. But this will be surfaced in a natural and not "in your face" way. For the next Set Mastery (Archery), we are thinking about a few, larger changes to make it easier for players to reach the maximum level, such as "catch up" modifiers. These ideas will evolve based on how players progress through the first Set Mastery.

Events – Chronicles, and More

A new set of Chronicles events will start up at the end of this month and will contribute to Set Mastery by offering an extra 1,000 XP per week of rewards (along with other goodies). We've also taken learnings from the War of the Spark Chronicles events that will be applied to new Chronicles. In particular, the maximum wins needed and event length, which will both be shorter.

In September we will have another series of end-of-season events that reward XP. More details as we get closer to those, but this will be part of the end-of-season "catch up” in lieu of larger changes we’re considering for Archery.

Lastly, if you haven't already: Redeem the codes LevelUp and BroughtBack for an additional 4,000 XP (2,000 XP each). Between these codes and the Weekly Wins returning (and starting at 0/15 for all players), there’s a lot of extra XP available.

Keep the feedback coming. You are helping us make the game better in a major way.

Thanks for joining us in our mission to be the players who change the game.