Stephen

The current system for Arena is fine where it is. A rule change like this 'may' clause shouldn't extend to paper. That has monetary impacts, whereas Arena is a wildcard system with no trading.

Arena regularly nerfs or even buffs digital only copies to include things like casting cost, power and toughness, triggered or activated abilities and gives an error if a player attempts to use the original version in the wrong format. Mostly this is an outcome of pseudo-random matchmaking with BO1 matches, especially Historic BO1. It can be pretty toxic. In your local card shop, word gets around what irritating deck that one person is playing and then other players can avoid them. In arena, you find out your opponent's deck once you start playing. Without a sideboard between matches, Arena needs to include nerfs and bans. It's also why the Historic card pool has its own ban list and straight out excludes cards from being included on release (Historic only sets). Historic does not match Modern.

The real problem with Arena is the salty-player community that intentionally burns all their timeouts when they quit (Roping one's opponent). Alt-tab or just walking to the kitchen or whatever. If you get roped, go do something else since the developers are clearly not doing anything about it either. That would be a hot article to write about, most of my friends list have stopped playing because of the rampant roping.