Last night, Twitch announced that it would be hosting another $10k MTG Arena tournament on its Twitch Rivals channel next Wednesday, February 20, at 1PM Eastern.
The event will feature 48 steamers (24 each from the Americas and Europe), with streamers like Gaby Spartz and reigning champion Caleb Durward already confirmed as competitors. They will battle in matches of Best-of-3 Standard constructed (with sideboards) over the course of a 5-round Swiss tournament, with a cut to a Top 8.
As the tournament’s name would suggest, the prize pool totals $10k, with $3k going to the winner, and $1.5k for second place. Payouts extend all the way down to 16th place with a prize of $250.
Next Wednesday’s event will be Twitch Rivals’s second MTG Arena tournament, following in the footsteps of its first foray into MTG Arena tournaments in December. The core element of the first tournament, Best-of-3 Standard matches, was the source of a lot of headaches because, at the time, Best-of-1 was the only option for direct challenges on MTG Arena. This forced streamers to manually recreate Best-of-3 matches out of separate Best-of-1 matches, sideboarding between each Best-of-1 match and even conceding from a Best-of-1 match if the wrong player was put on the play.
Thankfully, support for Best-of-3 will be added to MTG Arena’s direct challenge system on February 14. This addition will make it infinitely easier for third parties that want to use Magic’s traditional Best-of-3 match system to organize MTG Arena tournaments. It will also significantly improve the viewing experience for the Twitch Rivals tournament on February 20 as viewers won’t be subjected to the unpredictable periods of downtime that plagued December’s event.