We want Magic Online to be the best place to play non-rotating Constructed formats. Magic Online has been running monthly format challenges for Legacy and Vintage to help grow these formats. We like how excited players get about these so much that on May 20 we're going to be expanding them!

Challenges Now Happening Every Weekend

Format challenges are to be big events with prizes for top performers that make people interested in acquiring cards and building decks for these formats. They also help establish what sort of metagame to expect when playing in Leagues.

With a monthly schedule, however, it was easy to lose track of the event rotation and miss an event. Well no longer! Now you always know: Every weekend we'll be running all five challenges, each having a dedicated day and start time. Wait . . . five challenges?

Expanding to More Non-Rotating Constructed Formats

We'll now be running five challenges every weekend, one for every non-rotating Constructed format that we offer events for. The schedule of these challenges every weekend is as follows:

Saturday, 8 a.m. PT—Modern Challenge

Saturday, 10 a.m. PT—Vintage Challenge

Saturday, 12 p.m. PT—1v1 Commander Challenge

Sunday, 8 a.m. PT—Legacy Challenge

Sunday, 10 a.m. PT—Pauper Challenge

No matter which of these formats you prefer, you'll be able to play it every weekend! Most of our Modern PTQ and MOCS events have ended up on Sundays, which is why we scheduled the Modern Challenge for Saturday. While we can't guarantee it will never conflict, we will certainly do our best to have Modern premier play on Sundays, away from the challenge.

We also know there is a lot of overlap in the Legacy and Vintage communities, and we wanted to give those players the ability to play in both, so scheduled them on separate days.

Larger and More Consistent Prizes

The existing Legacy and Vintage Challenges have prizes based on awarding some of the staple cards in that format. To create a more consistent experience, we'll be standardizing prizes to mostly consist of Play Points and Treasure Chests across all five challenges.

The new event details are as follows:

Entry Options:

25 Event Tickets

250 Play Points

Number of Players: 8-672

Structure: Swiss rounds based on attendance, then cut to top 8

Prizes:

1st Place: 500 Play Points + 100 Treasure Chests + 1 non-foil set of the most recent Standard-legal set + 6 QPs

2nd Place: 500 Play Points + 75 Treasure Chests + 5 QPs

3rd–4th Place: 400 Play Points + 50 Treasure Chests + 4 QPs

5th–8th Place: 400 Play Points + 25 Treasure Chests + 3 QPs

9th–16th Place: 300 Play Points + 10 Treasure Chests

17th–32nd Place: 250 Play Points

New Challenges Begin May 20–21

Since we don't want to disrupt players who've already made plans to play in the May 13 Legacy Challenge (which starts at 11 a.m. PT), the new challenge schedule will begin on Saturday, May 20.

We hope you enjoy coming out and playing in the challenges. Have fun!

—Lee Sharpe

Digital Product Manager, Magic Online