The second set of the Battle for Zendikar expansion in Magic: The Gathering is already upon us, but the digital version will take a while to catch up. Duels players will have to wait until the next expansion, Shadows over Innistrad, is released in April for a double update.
Appearing a video together, lead game designer Drew Nolosco and community manager Chris Peeler announced that the Oath of the Gatewatch addition will be pushed back to April, when the next expansion was due to be released. The extra time hopefully means that more bugs will get fixed and more quality of life improvements will implemented. They also announced that players were right to say they should get gold from Two-Headed Giant mode, and that change is incoming.
Nolosco and Peeler are very careful to not use the word “delay” in the above video, but that’s the name for a thing that has been moved to a later date. The positive spin here is that by combining two sets of card creation, time spent will be more efficient:
We went through a lot of different plans and examined, with these different plans, how we could get the most improvements to the fans as fast as possible. And with each content release, and each new set of cards, it’s not just the card content that goes into that release, there’s a bunch of stuff that sort of surrounds it. A wrapper of testing, certification, server work, and by combining two releases, instead of doing card content -> wrapper stuff -> card content -> wrapper stuff, we can do card content + card content, and then one big wrapper around it. And then all that time that we save, we can plough into bug fixes and quality of life.
Magic Duels is Wizards of the Coast’s end to the annual Duels of the Planeswalkers games, instead becoming a more modern version of Magic Online that will be consistently updated. If this is the version of Magic you play, it looks like you got the short straw on Gatewatch, but Nolosco has promised that beyond April, Duels updates will be in line with the physical card game.
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