MTG Arena State of the Formats 2024

Those three cards (and several others) are all cards we have looked at specifically. Based on all of our data, they do not have an outsize impact on the winrate of decks that use them. I'm not saying they're not good cards; they are. But the boost in winrate they give is equivalent to a lot of other good cards. They're not outliers.

We are actively monitoring Brawl balance for these outliers, we just don't see any large ones to act on currently

If you mean "We may see more Bo1-only bans like Leyline", then yes. That's a possibility, if we end up in a similar situation. If you mean rebalanced cards in Bo1 Standard, absolutely not.

The weights are regularly monitored and updated. We've also recently been improving tooling and hiring more people on that team so that we can make these updates more thorough and frequent.

Honestly, that makes sense. I wouldn't have believed it without seeing the data either.

Before we had data, our lead data person (who's also a very good Magic player) was 100% convinced we would have to ban Mana Drain. But I had been 100% convinced that we would need to restrict Dark Ritual in Timeless, and the data has been clear that we don't. So now I don't trust even what seems obvious, and I almost always want the data. And it says they're fine. Good, but fine.

And I'm never going to try to convince you what's fun. Every player knows best what they think is or isn't fun. I think there's a good debate to be had about whether those cards are net more fun to keep in the format.

The process is based on data, but it's not simply "Number says X, do Y". It takes someone who understands the format to look over the data and understand what needs to be tweaked, or often times even what the right questions to ask are.

As one example, if a commander's winrate has spiked, is that because new cards are letting players make a stronger version of the deck, or just because a new, super-popular commander is a favorable matchup?

Short answer: Yes

Longer answer:

All of our digital formats (largely Alchemy, Historic, Brawl, and Timeless*) share rebalances. We do this because we think it would be more confusing if a given card worked differently across those formats. (It's hard enough that cards work differently across the digital formats and the tabletop-analog formats.)

When we rebalance any card, we consider its usage across all of the formats. This is much like designing a new card, where we also consider impact across a variety of formats.

* Timeless is a bit different, since it uses the original version of any rebalanced card from the tabletop game. But Timeless is a weird place anyway.