I’m betting folks have forgotten all about this by now, but last December, Daybreak and Wizards of the Coast announced that Daybreak would be taking over publishing duties for Magic the Gathering Online, complete with an in-house Daybreak studio to develop and run the game. We haven’t heard a whole lot about the game’s development ambitions since. But that’s changing this week, as yesterday the teams dropped two dev blogs diving into just that.
The first piece reiterates that Daybreak is still taking over and that the officially moves to Daybreak’s server infrastructure as of next week as the “final step” in the transition. In addition to introducing Executive Producer Sarah Parsons and Creative Director Ryan Spain, the post explains that the team is working on multiple “initiatives” to improve the game, including multifactor authentication, better metrics and tools behind the scenes, better rewards, battlefield automation, better newbie onboarding, and improved multiplayer in the Commander update.
The second blog outlines the precise schedule for the hand-off, during which the teams will pull the old servers offline for around eight to 10 hours starting at noon EDT on October 18th. Players will be expected to uninstall the old client and reinstall Daybreak’s new client, but accounts and everything else will copy over and it ought to be pretty seamless. It also looks as if physical products associated with the game will see a price hike once installed under Daybreak’s purview. The studio does recommend players to “clear out old non-League draft decks from the Freeform section” of their collections to improve client performance, but this is not required.
