Currently, there are no bots in MTG Arena multiplayer - outside of the tutorial, everyone you play against is an actual, real person. Will that change by the end of 2025?
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3.00@marvingardens Respectfully... have you played any multiplayer game from the past decade besides MTG Arena? They're rife with multiplayer bots now. Fortnite multiplayer has fake bots disguised as players, as does Halo Infinite, as did the most recent Battlefield, Splitgate and its sequel, etc.
Worst of all, Fortnite goes to great lengths to disguise those bots a real players.
It's an epidemic that's reached every corner of multiplayer games in the past few years - and the only reason it's not in MTG Arena is because the game launched 7 years ago. It's totally well within the realm of possibility that Arena would add them -- just look at the "Did you enjoy this match?" pop-up at the end of games.
Even setting aside any pedantic squabbling of the definition of multiplayer (is Fortnite not multiplayer in your mind?) , this question makes plenty of sense. Sorry you somehow managed to get confused!
@NeurokFamiliar wtf do you mean "add them"? Sparky has been there from day 1.
For the "pedantic squabbling", Fortnite is, what, a fifty player game? If it was you and 49 bots, yeah, that wouldn't be multiplayer. MTGA is a two-player game.
But anyway, leaving aside that "pedantic squabbling" -- which I think is basically one of the most important parts of this website's whole thing -- Sparky is right there. If we gloss past "multiplayer" pedantry, this question resolved to YES the day Arena was launched.
@marvingardens Sparky? The tutorial bot, lol? The question in the title literally says "bots in multiplayer." As in, you queue into a multiplayer game and play against an undisclosed bot (as happens in countless other modern multiplayer games in 2025). Feels pretty self-explanatory!
Just a few weeks ago, Marvel Rivals launched - it's a 5v5 multiplayer shooter. In Marvel Rivals, if you lose a couple games in a row, the game secretly puts you and your teammates in a match against 5 bots (with real player names, totally undisclosed to the player), intended to mislead players into thinking they beat a real human team. I'm surprised this is the first you're hearing on this, but I guess not everyone knows everything!
At any rate, the question here is whether that phenomenon - which is popping up broadly across an increasing amount of multiplayer video games to artificially boost player retention - will be implented in Magic Arena before the end of the year. I hope this helped you understand the question!
Instead of just repeating all the stuff I already said, I would like to recommend that you add extra conditions to ask something more specific -- "will there be a queue in which you can be either matched with a human or a bot without being able to choose which", for example. I don't know, it's your business to fully verbalize your intention here.
As written, this market either could not logically resolve as YES (if a match with only one human person is definitionally singleplayer) or otherwise came already pre-resolved as YES, as you could already play against Sparky in an explicit game mode that is not the tutorial at all.
A match with two human players and eight bots is unimpeachably a multiplayer game.