[2020] Things that bother me in MTGA

Wow, this was a lot of work putting this together. I love the passion you have for the game. It's always easier to start the conversation with images and possible solutions. Here are some answers to your questions:

1. We try to reduce information in the UX when we can, but keep it accessible. Magic is a complicated game, and having tons of extra things to look on the screen isn't always helpful for decision making. This is one of those instances where hiding it until pulled up is trying to thread that needle between over and under sharing information.
2. I'm not a rule dev: u/WotC_BenFinkel
3. This is to minimize crossing lines during a complicated blocking situation, but I will say it annoys me too sometimes. +1
4. Probably just to make this action clear (if it was land there is a different interaction, so players might get confused if they just drew a card)
5. There is no 5.
6. Cool feature. I'm sure others want this too, there is probably some infrastructure to build here for storing this data. I don't work on the game engine, so I'm not sure if it's being planned or not.
7. I'll put in a bug on it.
8. Yeah, I personally do the same thing. I think we could make Not Collected "sticky" for players without a gameplay setting. (just by having it default to whatever you last selected) There are a couple of technical things that stop me from doing it right now, but those should be cleaned up soon. Added to my backlog.
9. Some of this stuff is coming soon. I was working on it last week actually. :D No promises yet, but it's definitely one of my current priorities.
10. Lots of good stuff here and some of it is on our backlog.
11. Also coming soon! The explanation screen's all done, I just have to hook it up and get it localized.
12. Like it. We've got some designs in this space, but the "Requeue" button is a nice addition (although maybe not the right word).

I'll be hanging around this thread so feel free to sound off on UX questions or needs. Thanks, Annegrim for starting the conversation!

Regarding Chandra's Embercat, if by "block the stack" you mean prompts you for priority for its mana ability, it is a bug that should be fixed when Historic Anthology 3 goes live. We want to prompt you for priority for mana abilities with a side effect, like The Great Henge's, and abilities with mana that can be spent for two different types of costs accidentally got caught up in the logic for that.

As for Risen Reef, you have to remember that 99% of our rules-text code is machine-generated from the text of rule, in English. Risen Reef reads "look at the top card of your library. If it’s a land card, you may put it onto the battlefield tapped. If you don’t put the card onto the battlefield, put it into your hand." That is literally broken into 25 steps, branches, and labels, which look a little like the following (I took some out for brevity):

1. Look at the top card of your library (this pops up that "Seen Cards" interface)
2. Check if it's a land card, if it is go to 3 otherwise go to 7
3. Prompt the player to put it onto the battlefield or not
4. Check if the player said yes, if so go to 5, otherwise to go 7
5. Set up an "enters tapped" modification
6. Put the card on the battlefield
7. Check if the card was put on the battlefield, if it was go to 8 otherwise finish
8. Put the card into your hand

That's a lot of stuff! Given that that structure is automatically generated, it's hard to have the code introspect enough to know "every path this ability can go through will result in the ability controller seeing the card, therefore there's no need to prompt them when allowing them to look at the card." Compare with something like [[Adventurous Impulse]]: if we didn't have a step there to prompt you for the cards you saw even if you couldn't do anything with them, it would look like the spell whiffed when it resolved! Sure, Risen Reef can't ever "fully whiff", but it's really hard to get the code to know that, especially if we take into account the possibilities of replacement effects. #wotc_staff

I haven't been working on a "Maybeboard", but there's a cool feature that I'm testing around right now that would really improve deckbuilding. That's all I can say, for now, I still have to get it approved. :D

Talked with one of our other designers about this to get an idea of when it might get fixed.

Currently, you can't assign multiple blockers at the same time when the attacker has any restrictions (like menace). It's really lame, and people do want to get it fixed, but it also involves rewriting that part of the combat manager. So sadly, it's not a super trivial fix. That's the only insight I can give, sorry I can't be of more help.

Just to clarify your feedback. Are you talking about when drafting, in your collection view, or when you see them in other people's decks? (Or all of the above?)

We are currently collecting feedback about these styles and talking about possible settings changes. Nothing concrete yet, but it is a current topic of conversation.

Would the ability to put a custom tag on your deck and search for those tags solve some of your problems? We currently aren't planning on raising the deck limit, but we are talking about ways to better display and organize them.

Yes, in fact that was the card that the bug was specifically made to address. Both say "Spend this mana only to cast [...] or activate", which resulted in the parser thinking that that mana did something special besides having a spending condition. #wotc_staff

Yeah, that seems lame. I have Unity open right now so I'll see if it's a quick fix.

No promises; there are sometimes UX patterns that are to make sure users don't get lost. I wouldn't want someone to think "Where'd my decks go?", but it sounds fine in theory.