Magic: The Gathering Arena Suspends Cards in Historic Format

The new nonrotating Historic format in Magic: The Gathering Arena is giving more players ways to play the free-to-play digital card game. The Historic ranked period is already around a month old, and based on the data Wizards of the Coast has gathered, the format is showing a fairly healthy-looking metagame balance and good play rates, but there are some issues they're addressing about the digital-only format.

WotC has announced that it's suspending four cards in the Historic format that they found to be problematic, and they won't come as a surprise since these cards have been banned in other formats before. The four cards suspended in the format are:

Once Upon A Time

Field of the Dead

Veil of Summer

Oko, Thief of Crowns

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Since Historic is a digital format, WotC says that suspension works like a ban but explains how it's different: "For gameplay purposes, a suspension works like a ban, in that the card will not be legal to use in the format while it is suspended," Wizards said. "But unlike how we handle banning cards, we plan to use the flexibility that the digital format provides to move cards onto and off of the suspension list more commonly. The "off of" portion there is important. Suspension isn't a final verdict, it's an indication that we think this card may be causing issues, and we'd like to see what the meta looks like without that influence."

WotC went on to say that suspension is a temporary measure, and all the cards they're suspending will be removed from the suspension list by or before the Ranked Historic queue returning in March, and while some may be returned to the playable pool (likely because they believe the new environment provides the appropriate answers or countermeasures), the rest will be fully banned.

When cards are fully banned in the Historic format, players will receive Wildcard reimbursement as normal, but they won't receive multiple reimbursements for the same, individual card, so if the same card was banned in another format like Standard, you won't get multiple Wildcards for the same card.

Wizards went on to point out that overall play in Historic is tracking slightly lower than they were hoping, and that's probably because more players prefer to play Best-of-One over Best-of-Three. "Somewhat surprisingly, we saw about three times the rate of games played in the Historic launch event (Best-of-One) than we do in the Historic Ranked Queue (Best-of-Three)," Wizards said. "This suggests that while Best-of-Three is the most competitive way to play, the majority of our players still prefer Best-of-One. And this holds even in the Historic format, which we expected to attract more competitive-minded players. With this in mind, we're looking at expanding the importance of Best-of-One play in future Ranked Historic periods."

MTG Arena's first Historic Ranked Draft will start with Dominaria from January 3-16. There will also be a high-stakes Constructed tournament on January 11-13 to cap off the current Historic Ranked period. Regular Historic Constructed events will begin on January 16, as Ranked Historic moves to offseason with the release of Theros Beyond Death to shift the focus to the Standard format. In March, Historic Anthology 2 will be released and Ranked Historic will return.

Related: Theros Beyond Death Will Have 1 Full-Art MTG Land Per Pack