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I skimmed through yesterday's Weekly MTG video and here are some summarised answers from Jay Parker, our new Game Director:
- Standard rotation will come in with the set codenamed "Archery" (expected September 2019), and there will be a new format (like "Arena Modern/Wild") to allow playing with your rotated cards. Nothing mentioned about Kaladesh block or prior.
- They would like to put Arena on all other platforms wherever people would like to play Magic, but it may be a while yet.
- They have no intentions of allowing people to disable animations.
- Popular one-off events (e.g. Singleton) are not expected to become permanent to avoid the player base from being stretched across multiple queues.
- Friendlists will come hopefully soon.
- They would like to implement multiplayer but it will require a huge overhaul so might be a distant project.
- They would like to implement non-AI drafts but it would be difficult from the back-end, and even if it's possible, human draft queues may not fire as frequently as people would like. May be more likely once friendlists get released.
- No plans for in-game chat against strangers, chat between friends are coming.
All in all nothing too groundbreaking but still interesting to have an update on their direction. Disappointed they didn't pick a question to answer on Brawl/Commander/EDH. It does sound like a number of things holding MTGA back from what the we want is the playerbase size, so I hope that if we grow the player base through positive word of mouth and the new Netflix show, we will scale up to a point where WotC doesn't have to worry about stretching the player base too thin or slow queues. The future looks bright for us! :D
Let me know if you want me to add any other interesting answers to the main text, I skipped on a few questions that I didn't consider interesting for brevity. There are timestamps in the first pinned YouTube comment.
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