Shadows over Innistrad Remastered was released this week, along with over 300 cards new to MTG Arena plus 76 Shadows of the Past cards. Wizards of the Coast even brought Emrakul, the Primosed End, a card that they admitted required a lot of work. With all that, a game breaking bug has been introduced due to one of the new cards, Gutter Grime, breaking the logic of some existing cards.
Namely, this has affected equipment that sacrifice themselves, such as Ninja's Kunai and Blazing Torch Sacrificing the equipment causes all your permanents to be sacrificed at the same time, recognizing themselves as the equipment, dealing instant lethal damage (for example, 20 permanents would equal 60 damage for Ninja's Kunai). Using Citizen's Crowbar on the other hand, will make you sacrifice all your permanents.
This bug was being exploited by many players over the past few days in ladder and events to win games. These cards are never used in a constructed setting, so deliberately using the card to win will be flagged by Wizards – and players who did so will face temporary suspension and loss of any qualifications. If you face an opponent using this bug to win, please report the player and claim compensation from Wizards support if this was an event!
To add more chaos: Explorer Metagame Challenge was scheduled to start on March 24 (as per the weekly announcement post and past precedence of these events) but it went live today on March 23 instead: Giving players a chance to earn a lot of packs illegitimately. The bug looks like will take some time to fix, and with all the refund requests and player suspensions to catch up on, they Wizards the route of postponing the event until April 8. The cards themselves are not banned.
Unfortunately, our work to help you prepare for the Explorer meta has gone up earlier than expected – but you can still check them out and prepare for the next couple of weeks. And once again, please do not abuse the bug!