MTG Arena is really embracing the detective theme of the upcoming Murders at Karlov Manor set, with a feature that forces you to guess the power and toughness of certain creatures. We kid of course: it’s an MTG Arena bug, one seemingly introduced in the latest update.
MTG Arena has seen a couple of huge multiple gigabyte patches in the past week, and it seems one of them has introduced a very strange bug to the game. The alternate art forms of certain MTG creature cards are glitched in such a way that you don’t see their power and toughness, just a strange symbol.
Our attention was drawn to the issue by Reddit user GrumpyGrampa7, who complained about the problem on Thursday. It seems it’s not just an individual instance however, the affected creatures are like this for everyone. Those cards are the alternate artwork versions of Kaldheim creatures including those introduced in Kaldheim itself and the MTG set March of the Machine.
Fortunately, the impact of this bug has been quite limited: none of these cards see much play in the best MTG Arena decks… for Standard, that is. In formats like Historic Brawl, some are more likely to show up.
The affected cards we think you’re most likely to run into are Esika God of the Tree, (a 1/4 for future warning), Vorinclex Monstrous Raider ( a 6/6) and Toski Bearer of Secrets (a 1/1). That last one could be particularly frustrating, since if you don’t realize that the indestructible squirrel is only tiny, you might let your opponent draw a free card unnecessarily.
You could consider the bug a funny little ‘test your knowledge’ experiment, but it is a potentially aggravating error, that’s for sure. Strangely, it seems like the Kamigawa Ukiyo-e lands are also affected, with their mana symbols and Japanese text mysteriously absent.
We’re seeing reports of another bug that turns your cards into pink rectangles, completely obscuring them from view. We haven’t been able to replicate this one yet, but Twitter user JanIlgen shared the image below a couple of hours ago.
Is this all one big ARG clue? Perhaps linked to the mysterious code found on Karlov Manor land cards? Probably not.
Hopefully the update that comes with the imminent release of MTG Murders at Karlov Manor will fix all this. And hey, perhaps we’ll get a free MTG Arena code if the problem is deemed serious enough.