Yesterday, on August 24, the MTG Arena servers went down for several hours to deploy the 2021.8.0 update. The new update made significant changes to the backend services for Arena, as well as adding the new Jumpstart: Historic Horizons set which will become available on the 26th (read more on the specifics of the update here).
The update took about five hours longer than originally planned, and when the game was finally back online, things didn’t go smoothly for many players logging in to play. On social media, players reported long load times, blank loading screens, and disconnects. Connection problems are nothing new to Arena, especially after a major update, and it’s possible that some of these issues were due to heavy server load as so many players rejoined the game.
Aside from the connection issues which are expected to some extent, a handful of other, more peculiar bugs have also been reported. Certain cards which have been banned can be played again on ladder. Specifically, players have seen Brainstorm return to Historic and Traditional Historic ranked queues even though the card was suspended from the format in late July.
— TheOneJame 🔜 DreamHack Dallas (@TheOneJame) August 25, 2021
In addition to Brainstorm, it appears that The Book of Exalted Deeds, which was banned from the Standard 2022 queue due to a broken interaction with the land card Faceless Haven, is able to be played despite the ban. I tested this bug myself, and can confirm that on my client, I was in fact able to enter the Standard 2022 ranked and play queues with the Book in my deck.
On top of the mysteriously legal banned cards, there are a smattering of other bugs that players have brought to light. The new Historic Brawl queue, where players play 100-card decks against each other in a slower format, has players beginning the game with 20 life even though brawl usually has a starting life total of 25.
In today’s MTG Arena Announcements bulletin, Wizards published a list of known bugs that they are working to fix in the wake of the update. This list includes the 20 life brawl issue but notably says nothing about the banned cards bug. The banned cards bug is also absent from Arena’s known issues page which otherwise appears to be up-to-date.
Although the connection issues seem to be fixed for the most part, the rest of the bugs that have been encountered since yesterday’s patch was deployed remain. It’s unclear if fixes for any of these issues will be deployed before Jumpstart: Historic Horizons launches tomorrow, or if the introduction of the new content will result in more gameplay issues.
Looking for more information? The MTG Arena subreddit is a great source about bugs as players experience them. There is also an official Wizards Support Twitter account which typically announces issues and their subsequent hotfixes in real time, although as of the writing of this article, there is nothing on their page which we haven’t already discussed.
Are you experiencing bugs, or have you seen bug reports absent from Wizard’s official list that we haven’t discussed here? Let us know in the comments or on the MTGA Zone official Discord. Feel free to tag me @Paul if you have experienced a not-yet-reported bug that you would like to see publicized, but please provide screenshots as evidence. This article will be updated if Wizards offers any additional official responses or patches for the client.
Included below is a collection of other threads discussing various bugs:
