Magic Head Designer Confirms Multiplayer Is Coming To MTG Arena

Last updated on August 22, 2025

Charge Through | Illustration by Craig J Spearing

Magic Head Designer Mark Rosewater has confirmed that multiplayer coming to MTG Arena is a when, not an if.

“Arena has announced long-term plans to allow multiplayer play,” Rosewater confirmed on his personal blog earlier this week, when asked by a player if it was still on the table, “so it is coming.” This confirmation reinforces what Rosewater had said earlier this year, when – after noting that MTG Arena is not his area of expertise – he wrote that “If [the MTGA devs] say when, believe them.”

Rosewater didn't say exactly when, though. Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly indicated that multiplayer is a long-term goal for MTG Arena (game designer Chris Clay was talking about the possibility, and the technical hurdles, as far back as seven years ago), but not an imminent feature.

In an interview last June for MTG Salvation with executive producer for digital Magic Chris Kiritz and senior game designer Jeremy Brower, the Arena devs mentioned that they were putting a lot of effort into developing MTGA's social component. “We're really trying to build a big ecosystem, and so that social component is a big part of that,” they mention. “And that social component is also the groundwork that we need to lay for three- and four-player Magic down the line.”

Separately from MTG Arena, Hasbro has discussed a different multiplayer Magic project focused on Commander. In a Nov. 20, 2024 Bloomberg interview, CEO Chris Cocks said Hasbro is testing a video game version of Commander, which according to Cocks will be a separate product from Arena. But Cocks has also mentioned, in previous interviews, that bringing multiplayer to Arena is one of their goals.

What They Write, Versus What They Say

Bruvac the Grandiloquent – Illustration by Ekaterina Burmak

The MTG Arena devs publish, roughly once per year, a “State of the Game” article. If you go by what they wrote last year, and what they wrote in their MTG Arena State of the Game 2025 – Spring Edition this year, there's no multiplayer in sight.

They do mention “social play”, but that refers to social features like being able to contact and challenge your friends. As Kiritz notes in the MTG Salvation interview that's indeed a core component of multiplayer Magic – yet very, very far from the thing itself, which goes to show how careful they are with managing expectations.

On the other hand, though, they've been very clear on YouTube that multiplayer is the next big thing for MTG Arena, as they did back in November last year:

In their State of the Game vid last year, they make it extremely clear that it will take them years to get there. “We're working on being able to work on it,” they joke. They note that they expect to hire the people that will work on this project during 2025, and that any results will come much later

But multiplayer Magic is indeed their big goal. “We want 3-4 player matches” on MTG Arena, they say. 

Multiplayer Itself Does Not a Commander Pod Makes

Lord of Atlantis – Illustration by Billy Christian

It goes without saying (and the Arena devs are careful to never say it…) but sitting down with three other friends is not enough for a game of Commander. You need the cards, too. And while Arena gets every Standard MTG set released for tabletop, some non-Standard sets – like Warhammer 40K, Fallout, or Doctor Who – don't make it to the digital client. And the same is true for many of the Commander-only cards from premium sets: You can play the Standard-legal cards from Final Fantasy on MTGA, but there are more than 300 cards from FIC that are unavailable there.

In fact, there are about 24,000 Commander-legal cards that are not on MTGA (versus just about 12,000 that are). And as we saw with how long it took them to add all the Pioneer-competitive cards, it looks unlikely that MTGA will be able to literally triple its card pool any time soon. And, of course, even if it could, then there's the question of how are players going to acquire all those extra cards…

So even if four-player Magic may be possible in Arena's future, it's not clear there will ever be enough of a card pool to call it Commander.

But, of course, the technical hurdles of fitting four players into the MTGA interface have to be solved first.

“We know we want to get there”, noted Kiritz in the MTG Salvation interview, while also acknowledging that tweaking an interface that was built specifically for two-player Magic will take time, before it can comfortably support more players on the same board. “It's important. Magic players like playing in group play. It's a thing that we're missing. It's definitely not this year. It's probably not next year.”