MTG Arena Announces Changes Coming To Brawl

 

Wizards of the Coast has announced some plans for the second most played format on MTG Arena — Brawl.  Brawl, formerly Historic Brawl, is the 100 card format that most closely mirrors Commander on Arena. It was initially designed to be a fun casual format for building unique decks.  According to the announcement by Jay Parker at Daily MTG, the format has increasingly become less casual and more competitive. In response, Wizards will be trying a variety of approaches to balance the format and make sure it is received well by the largest number of players.

 

To accomplish this, Wizards has announced a new Metagame Challenge for Brawl.  This will allow Wizards to evaluate what kind of changes could be helpful to the format by testing different strategies over the next several months.  

 

The first of these tests start today, December 16th and will run until January 6th.  This will be a competitive Brawl event on MTG Arena.  The event which will use a ranked matchmaking system will also include a ban-list and there will be no free mulligan. The purpose of this event is to look into plausible ways to create a competitive iteration of Brawl.  

 

The Ban List

 

It’s important to note that the ban list from the 99 has been removed for this event making previously banned cards legal for this event.  The ban list instead will focus on banning powerful commanders from the last Metagame event.  The commanders being banned for the purpose of this event are:

 

Important Event Information

 

The Brawl Metagame event began this morning, December 16th at 8:00am PST and will run until January 6th at 11:00am PST.  At 8:00am on January 6th, sign ups will close and you’ll have 3 more hours to complete your current run.  Matches in progress at 11:00am will be allowed to finish. 

 

The entry cost is 5,000 gold or 1,000 gems. The format is Best-of-One Modified Brawl and the course length is 7 wins or 2 losses. Rewards will be given for joining and for winning matches. This is the breakdown for rewards:

 

Reaction

 

Prominent Brawl streamer, Amy The Amazonian has weighed in on the event. She said in part, “100 card competitive singleton makes more sense WITHOUT a Commander. The format is good. It's even Ranked-friendly and works for Best of Three.” Her point which she makes in a super thread of information and commentary on her social media accounts is that the point of Brawl is to be fun and casual. In one post she explains, “Commanders are there to be Your Guy. Your funky theme and character you love. With the expansion of for-Commander design and Universes Beyond sets injecting hundreds of additional Legendary creatures, the casual nature of Brawl should be encouraged more than ever. It gives a home to all legends.”

 

Amy believes the way to fix the competitive feel of Brawl is to make Gladiator available — a 1v1 100 card singleton format that doesn’t use a commander, therefore making it more viable as a competitive format.

 

Shivam Bhatt, another content creator in MTG circles, reposted Amy’s thread on Bluesky saying “This whole thread is 100% truth. It is also the exact reason some of us fought so hard against the rise of tournament commander.” 

 

You can download MTG Arena for PC. It is also available on Apple and Android devices.

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