MTG Arena Rolls Out Achievement System Full of Player Rewards

Last updated on February 4, 2025

Last One Standing | Illustration by Svetlin Velinov

Achievements have a long, storied history in gaming. Their spiritual predecessor (the “high score”) dates all the way back to 1982 Atari games, while modern achievements really kicked off in 2007 once they were featured on Steam. Given this pedigree, it's kind of surprising to see that after six years of MTG Arena, we are only just now getting achievements! Better late than never, as they say….

What We Know So Far

Magic Arena's achievements hit the client with the release of Aetherdrift next Tuesday, February 11. WotC's official goals for achievements that they stated in their article are as follows:

• “Encourage Exploration: MTG Arena offers an array of ways to engage with Magic: The Gathering, and with achievements we wanted to embrace that. Achievements focus on rewards for playing matches rather than simply winning. This encourages experimentation and trying new things. (But don't worry: if competition is your cup of tea, we've also got you covered!)
• Provide Engaging Content for Everyone: Achievements should deliver fun and novel challenges for the widest variety of players—whether you're learning the fundamentals of each color, are a long-time Brawl fan, or want to show off your competitive mettle. We kept how you play in mind when designing the milestones and challenges, and we have 113 achievements for launch!
• Promote Self-Expression: Completing achievements should offer unique rewards that allow you to express yourself and show the challenges you've overcome. To that end, we've created brand-new avatars, phrases, stickers, and sleeves to celebrate your achievements!”

In addition to these, WotC also provided a screenshot showcasing the new achievements in action:

Source

The plan is apparently to create a 7th button on the top left for achievements (and color masteries, which have been grouped here now). The achievements shown are fairly barebones too; use cosmetics, enter events, spend in-game currency, hit Gold rank, etc. It wasn't stated if there's any sort of separation of difficulty, but players should probably expect some harder achievements too, like reaching Mythic rank for a season, or completing a Draft without complaining about the shuffler.

You'll note a tracker above the actual achievements list that seems to indicated rewards like card styles or an in-game sticker. It's unclear what the crown icon indicates, though it could very well be one of the new titles.

Titles

Source

A complementary feature to achievements will be titles, which are also coming when the update drops. These will be earned for completing specific achievements, and offer a way to show off your accomplishments and personality. “Standard Bearer” and “Achievement Hunter” were displayed as two of the 21 titles being released.

Who Needs “Official” Achievements Anyways Though?

While it's nice to have an official WotC stamp on things, Draftsim's been doing achievements long before it was cool. It's one of many great features in the (completely free) Arena Tutor app. It can also be said without a hint of bias that Arena Tutor's achievements are just better than the anemic ones previewed by WotC; The app tracks all sorts of things from board states to win streaks. Give it a try today!