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This is a somewhat delicate matchup. Both decks have nigh-unbeatable draws, and games can be quite precipitous. The difference between, say, playing an accelerant to help offset a land-light draw, versus losing it to a Drill Bit, can make the rest of the game look either pedestrian or impossible.
That said, this one did turn out kind of harsh. It's almost exactly 60/40 for Empty Throne, which is outside the range I consider "successful," even for an event that only requires one win. (For some background, the enchantments deck had a lot of trouble taking off during testing - too many hands that just petered out or folded to a little disruption. I spent multiple iterations boosting its resiliency and adding a little inevitability, but it seems I Went Too Far.)
I think this type of workshop post mortem would be really interesting, if you were inclined to do it every so often. As ever, I enjoyed trying to win with both decks in this event.
I'll be around. :)
Workshops remind me of Tavern Brawl in Hearthstone, where the developer also gave little looks behind the curtain every so often. One of the things that surprised me was how work-intensive they were, for something that the player base ended up taking for granted--does that match your experience too? I'm glad these exist but I hope it's not a huge pain.
Yes, a lot of these are a lot of work! For the rules engine, there's especially a lot of coordination problems for juggling data around, e.g. for adding novel cards to Momir events. Not to mention the challenges for our designers! #wotc_staff
Do you use a custom rule engine or do you use something like Drools?
The rules engine is custom to M:tG Arena. #wotc_staff
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Sure. As we were starting up the Workshop series, we were looking at all kinds of sources for decks content - this is a new feature, and it wasn't clear (still isn't!) what kinds of things players would enjoy or hate. One source we tapped was the old NPE precon decks that you see here (and there's another Workshop coming in a few weeks that uses a different set of decks from the same family).
For a couple reasons, this Workshop didn't get as much direct scrutiny during development: one, these decks came from that common source, and two, having three decks is a bit of a backstop for lopsided matchups (as players can go try the third deck instead of beating their heads against the unfavored one). We certainly don't want to put up an imbalanced scenario, but we have limited time and attention, and we focus them where we think they will do the most good.
That said, regardless of the "expected" deck balance, experience with the tools will make a noticeable difference. If you've been playing a lot, you almost certainly know the matchup better than your opponents, and you should expect to be winning even more than raw numbers would suggest. (This phenomenon bites us internally sometimes, FWIW. We put in a decent number of reps during testing, and you can end up balancing around non-obvious mulligans or lines of play that players coming in cold won't necessary notice.)