In Magic: The Gathering: Arena‘s latest State of the Game article, Wizards of the Coast announced that the Standard Brawl format will be a permanent fixture on the platform starting July 1st. Instead of the Brawler’s Guildhall event, Brawl will now always be available as a play mode alongside Standard Ranked, Traditional Standard and more.
Here’s WotC’s reasoning behind elevating Standard Brawl to permanent status:
having supported Brawlers’ Guildhall without an entry fee for several months now, a lot of our concerns over having a permanent Brawl queue never really manifested. Brawl continues to be a popular “sometimes” food for most of our players, who enjoy playing it in between drafts or other Constructed formats.
As a permanent format, players will no longer need to pay entrance fees to join the queue. Moreover, playing Brawl will also earn folks progress in their daily win tracker and daily quests.
This change comes after Arena removed the entry fee for the Brawler’s Guildhall events from March to April. They did this to give players affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting quarantine measures more opportunities to play Magic.
As for Historic Brawl, WotC says that they plan to continue offering it as a rotating format. According to Magic‘s publisher, Historic Brawl is in fact a popular format independently of its Standard counterpart. Once Zendikar Rising releases, Magic: The Gathering Arena will have supported Standard Brawl for a few months. This will allow them to decide how to approach offering two different Brawl variants in the future.
Finally, WotC encouraged the community to keep offering their perspectives on when and how they enjoy their Brawl experience on Arena.