Yesterday MTG Arena revealed an in-client event that's been in the works for a while; The Arena Open. A two-day Standard tournament featuring Best-of-1 followed by a cut to a Best-of-3 day two. The twist? 2,000$ crisp American Dollars to players with a total of 14 wins and 1,000$ to those with 13. The cost? 4,000 gems or 20,000 gold. Cash money being given out entirely online is one hell of a feat for making Magic the Gathering logistically smoother for all aspiring professional players.
The news seemed to had originally emerged from Forbes and later revealed entirely in the MTGA State of the Game.
I'm not done yet! Or should I say, Channel Fireball is not done yet. They built the MagicFest Online tournament series in just a few days. In my opinion, the only negative remark from it was the communication and matchmaking platform they were using was ... Discord. It worked. Was it user-friendly? No. Did they fix it? I believe so!
Arena Nexusis a tracker they revealed yesterday somewhat quietly, as they were primarily announcing the CFB Pro Showdown event for their members.
Information is fairly limited, but we can understand from the tutorial video that it is a tracker they purposely created to smooth out the logistical complexity that is running an online tournament. We have limited knowledge of the actual functionalities, but one thing that stands out is how beautiful it is visually speaking. I'm really excited to try it out, literally just for the science of it.
