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There’s something that I first need to say before I get into the crooks and crannies of Wizard’s biggest issue currently facing Magic Arena, which is that game development is hell.

This is especially true for Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game spanning over 25 years and for those not in the know, essentially the foundation that Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon TCG and Hearthstone, among others, are built upon. Getting everything to work and not immediately break the game in both the video game space and on paper is a daunting task that when I closed my eyes to think about it, I broke out into a cold sweat.

Hell, the game is officially Turing Complete, meaning a computer cannot — as of right now — determine the game in any capacity. It’s such a wildly complex game that the rules are in the quad-digits and all have sub-sections, while each card could potentially have their own rulings and each format the game can be played in has their own meta-game to keep track of.

Magic: The Gathering is so incredibly complex and deep as a game itself that I can totally understand why Wizards of the Coast decided to announce that they have zero plans to bring their new format of the game, Pioneer, to their latest video game version and a direct competitor to the slew of video game card games.

The current state of Magic when I personally look over it is that it’s wildly expensive to truly get into some formats. The secondary market is full of sharks who will either buy up stock from around the globe to jack prices up, but Wizard’s inability to reprint product when it’s low or needed to combat a meta-shift is also a massive issue. Their ‘Masters’ sets were panned for being either shit or too expensive for what’s inside and more importantly, not including needed reprints. It’s just a huge issue apparently, that Wizards won’t put out a product that does what it needs to kill off a majority of the harsh price tags on cardboard floating around right now.

Here’s all the formats you can play in Magic: The Gathering right now:

Not counting Legacy or Vintage — which are at the mercy of collectors and are their own discussion for another day — the game features: Standard (a rotating format that is updated once every year); Modern (a non-rotating format that includes a ban list and can include every card between 8th edition — 2001 — and present-day); Commander (build a 99-card singleton deck based around a legendary creature, your commander); Brawl (a variation of the Commander format that utilises only Standard-legal cards and a 60-card singleton deck) and then the last notable format is Pauper (build a deck only using commons, from the entirety of Magic’s history).

The new kid on the block is Pioneer, Wizard’s attempt to reduce the barrier to entry that Modern has and also breathe some fresh life into the tournament scene by restricting the choice of cards to Return to Ravnica (2012) till the present day and generating their own ban list.

Magic is chock full of options and some players are completely dedicated to a couple or even just the one format. Some even only get involved in Draft and Sealed, which constitute Magic’s ‘Limited’ formats, where you build a deck out of what you get from the packs passed around a table or given to you.

There’s also Historic, which we’ll circle back around to in a little bit.

So why is it that Magic Arena is dragging me back to Magic Online, Wizard’s clunky old client for playing Magic against others around the world?

Because there’s fucking nothing to do outside of Standard. They introduced Brawl to the game and have limited it to just a single day a week, while the newly announced Pioneer format is absolutely not seeing that game for a long time — presumably due to the excessive work that’s going to be needed to even get half the stuff done correctly — and it’s also facing a crisis within the meta at the moment.

Throne of Eldraine, their latest expansion, features a card called ‘Oko, Thief of Crowns’, which they’ve had to ban from a number of formats due to his overwhelming power to just level the game into oblivion via the method of turning your stuff into generic elks, locking off their abilities and options to get your Commander back into the ‘Command Zone’ to play it again.

So wherever you went at that moment, Arena was filled with elks, fairy princes and still is plagued by a quite stagnant environment for experimentation. Pioneer might just provide that experimentation to a group of us who haven’t actually been playing the game as long as some of our comrades at the plastic tables in Modern or even have the cash to spend on cards. All the sets included have been printed en masse and aren’t that old, so there’s still plenty of copies floating about the ether or the highly ignored (by Wizards, for legal reasons) secondary market.

The alternative to all of this is to get really into Pauper, but that really requires you to be dedicated to the Online client, as events — at least in the UK — are sparse right now.

With all the lack of options via a dictated mode selection in Arena, I’m feeling the need to go back to MTGO. Sure, it’s still the same interface structure since 2003 and I’m positive it’s just running a solitary server on some guy’s desk at Wizards, held together with luck and a bit of string, but it’s the only place where whatever I want to play in MTG as of right now, I can do.

Pioneer is not just a new announcement made without thought. Wizards’ testing and design phase for their Magic products are so extensive, that sets that have only just come out have been in the works for years. I cannot begin to comprehend how far in advance the R&D team is at this moment in time and I’m sure that Pioneer was discussed thoroughly throughout the development of MTGA — which is still technically in beta.

What confuses me is that knowing how far Magic is prepared and developed, then why wasn’t Pioneer planned to be included? With this knowledge going in, why do Wizards continue to hide Historic from Arena players, a mode designed to use older cards from Kaladesh (2016) onwards and why are they restricting players from playing Brawl to just a Wednesday?

A brick and mortar store operates on that kind of schedule and limited time events with prizes in Arena or special Draft Cubes in Online (Cube is a variation of Draft, constructed by players in Paper out of their own collection or Wizards to feature specific sets or cards), because that’s how getting users to play regularly works, but if I want to play Brawl now, I should be able to! Instead, I have now wait until Wednesday again, because I couldn’t play the last event due to not logging in till like, 11 at night.

The reason I’m being dragged back to Online, rather than sticking with the ease-of-use that Arena provides, is because I can’t play the way I want to and that’s maddening. Hearthstone does weekly events really well and a majority of Arena’s run exactly the same way: it launches, it carries on for a few days and then an update takes it out. Done.

Instead, I feel like Wizards aren’t grasping what made Magic Online so good and why players are still willing to put up with it after all this time. Sure, don’t rush to plop Pioneer in the game, that’s madness and cruel to the team behind Arena, but the game needs more options and less focus on running like a brick-and-mortar store that has to use time restrictions because of reality.