I think they have to be doing some player-skill-based matchmaking in those queues. I think it would just be really un-fun if they didn't, and I'd bet Arena is optimizing for player hours over anything else. Nothing ends an Arena session like getting dunked on multiple games in a row in a ranked queue lol.

I’d bet that each format – Standard, Explorer, Alchemy, etc. – has its own set of weights.

I never thought about that but I'd bet you're right and I'd hope they're getting updated a lot more regularly than the Brawl ones.

Just out of curiosity, they must be using this for unranked and the play queue right? If not, there has to be something else they're using for those matchups because I still never see a wide deck/player disparity even in the unranked queues.

I also think most of the frustration was due to the improper weighting on cards. I think that indicated to people that they don't give a shit enough to keep them current or perhaps they don't have the resources to, both of which are bad news for players.

For me, the best change they could make would be to display the MMR/Deck Strength numbers everywhere in matches. The way you can see the Elo in all chess matches I think helps people understand why they're matched up against their opponent. Having everything in the dark makes people come up with conspiracy theories.

I think they should have dropped the 2,300 gem cost to unlock it, and just allowed everyone to accumulate tickets accordingly. I don't mind a new currency in the game, but this is really just another bundle sold to us for gems/money. And you have to do work to accumulate the rewards after you pay.

Not really in love with this, as it kinda reads like a second Mastery Pass that costs less but with fewer (worse?) rewards. Still just kind of comes off like another complicated and confusing system to extract more money up front from the players.

So far, fwiw, the best take on solving mana screw imo has been what the game Sorcery Contested Realm has done. You have a 40 card deck and a separate 20 card lands deck. In Magic you would start with 4 spells and 3 lands, one free mulligan in both decks, and then you draw from either deck for the turn. Cards would have to be erratad en masse to make this work in Magic, but I think Arena kinda solves it with "seeking" a land vs. a spell. I don't know how that works in Magic outside of at least smoothing an opening hand. The game would need to refer to the deck separately from the "atlas" of lands.

Regarding his biggest fear and Magic's biggest threats:

“The places I get worried about are Magic’s tournament system, which has historically been important to Magic’s health. And then the philosophy that you should not make rare cards so powerful that you need them. People feel that’s a philosophy that has been broken from time to time, and I think it’s always been a mistake. It might have made money in the short run, but it has hurt the game in the long run, or at least until it was corrected,” he said.

“I think things that are existential threats for a game like Magic is if the community breaks down, and here I'm thinking of the community built around tournaments, but not just that. Or if people see it as being a game where you can buy victory, which is associated with this idea of making rare cards too powerful—or powerful cards too rare would be another way to put it. Those are serious problems which might lead to short-term profit but will lead to long-term problems that could be catastrophic.”

As the number of cards in circulation grew, Garfield went out of his way to keep common or easier-to-find cards powerful, while also keeping the rare cards narrowly attuned and never so powerful that you needed them to win. He would sometimes demonstrate this by bringing a deck full of common cards to games stores and beating players who had decks stuffed with expensive rares.

Today, getting rich kids to buy 10 sets of the game seems to be Hasbro’s primary business model. Wizards has adopted a punishing release schedule, printing so many new cards that the Bank of America recently reprimanded Hasbro for trying to over-monetize their players and downgraded the company’s stock. When I asked Garfield what he thought about this, he pleaded ignorance and told me he’s been completely disconnected from the game since the pandemic. He’s heard rumors that have alarmed him, but he thinks Wizards of the Coast old-timers like Bill Rose and Mark Rosewater still have the game’s best interests at heart.

I thought this was particularly interesting. I love the original vision Garfield had with commons vs. rares, bring that back!

I am looking forward to playing this kinda strange Baldur's Gate commander draft event at my local store on the 18th. It's a casual event but I wonder if it comes w/ the Arena draft token.

This looks pretty fun to play:

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Congrats Evu! That's certainly the highest ranking from an MTGZone player I've ever seen!

The Ravnica event was awesome. That would definitely get me back to playing regularly if they had more stuff like that.

I completely agree, and I just don't play this event anymore because I in no way find it enjoyable. I don't even find the wins fun. None of it is fun to me. I question what anyone is even doing when they decide to spend their time in this.

Same more Momir draft for me too. I love the MWM events that let you play any card in the format for free. That to me is the absolute best thing a Midweek event can be doing. The phantom sealed and drafts are not bad but still feels like only people with stellar pools are playing the games. And then they play them over and over to farm win rewards.

This is worth it for the booster pack animation alone. Just an absolute insane amount of rares and mythics lol.

Dual lands with a land subtype that has never been on dual lands before

Intriguing....

Yes I would probably wait for MH3, but one thing I did to build up my Historic and Timeless collection was to buy packs from sets containing the lands that are staples in the formats. You could buy packs from KTK to have a higher chance at opening a fetchland for instance, which decreases the number of wildcards you would need.

The problem with buying packs from older sets is that they don't contribute towards the "gold pack". When you buy 10 packs from the latest standard, alchemy, or horizons/remastered release, you get a gold pack which is a pretty good value especially for building a timeless collection.

All I have to say is THANK GOD they got rid of the Geist combo. I'm thankful they hit Geo appraiser too but Geist/Fragment was just ridiculous. An own goal that took them too long to address and dramatically impacted historic.

I think it's kinda crazy how the Geist deck is still tiered in Bo1 Timeless. They REALLY need to fix that in Historic imo, the fact that it's competitive in Timeless is more than enough.

It's not a bad meta for Bo3, but it still just seems like the same pool of 60 different cards is being rearranged in every one of these decks.

I see why they did it, but personally I think saying "When [creature] enters, ..." sounds weird. It wants a noun after it when I hear it. It sounds like "enters the room" or "enters stage left" when I read it. It also kinda makes ETB no longer mean anything, and I really like that abbreviation 😕

I like the goad spell, but all of these seem pretty underwhelming to me