Monday, November 3, 2025

Is Anybody in Charge of the Arena Qualifier Weekends?


The Arena Qualifier Weekends are known for their convenience, letting you play important matches on demand. They are known for feeding the Arena Championship, with its $250,000 prize pool. Most of all, they are known for being the most consistently dysfunctional tournaments that have existed in the 32-year history of Magic: the Gathering. 

Here is a list of incidents that have affected the Qualifier Weekends in just the past six months:
  • May Qualifier: Players are wrongly afforded one loss to spare instead of two. Many players are eliminated prematurely.
  • June Qualifier: Despite the official Arena schedule and multiple announcements pages listing the Qualifier as Historic for months, the tournament goes live on Arena as Pioneer. The Arena Team eventually corrects the error after players complain they had spent weeks testing Historic. 
  • July Qualifier: Players are afforded 36 hours to finish their Day 1 matches, and then another 36 hours to finish their Day 2 matches, instead of the 10 hours per day as is custom. 
  • September Qualifier: A few months prior, the Arena Team realized they had significantly undershot the number of qualifications per month and changed the Day 2 threshold from 6 wins to 4 in order to qualify more people for the Arena Championship. However, they let participants continue to play until their 6th win anyway, resulting in extremely foreseeable collusion. Possibly having become aware of this issue, the Arena Team altered Day 2 of the August Qualifier so that it cuts players off after their 4th win. For September, the Day 2 structure inexplicably reverts to the 6-win format and has remained that way since. 
  • October Qualifier: Players who got 4 or 5 wins in the prior month's Qualifier are incorrectly invited directly to Day 2 in the October Qualifier. Somehow, 6-win players are not invited. 
  • November Qualifier: Attempting to account for Daylight Savings, the Arena Team accidentally alters the two-hour entry window times in the wrong direction. Instead of 6-8am PST, entry is moved to 4-6am PST. As a result many players who had made Day 2 are unable to participate. 
  • November Qualifier: Day 1 participation tokens are not handed out to many players who are eligible to play in the Qualifier. To "fix" this issue, the Arena Team grants all of these people direct access to Day 2, despite a small fraction of Day 1 participants making Day 2 (under typical circumstances). 
The above list of incidents is not comprehensive. I'm sure there are many more problems of which I am not aware. The above list also does not account for long-term issues like the Sideboard Bug, which prevents players from sideboarding if they get disconnected at any point during a match (for which, even if it prevents you from sideboarding in your match for Day 2, the Arena Team will award you 4000 gems). It does not include people playing on multiple accounts despite this being strictly forbidden by the Arena Code of Conduct

Though I refer above to an "Arena Team," it's unclear whether an Arena Team actually exists. It often seems like there is no planning or oversight of these qualifiers whatsoever. Which begs the question: Who is in charge of this? Is anybody in charge of this? 





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Is Anybody in Charge of the Arena Qualifier Weekends?

The Arena Qualifier Weekends are known for their convenience, letting you play important matches on demand. They are known for feeding the A...