[2020] Friend Features I really want to see!

I love the Standard ranked and all but my heart is in kitchen table Magic with real friends.

I recently moved from Canada to Germany and got into MTGA about a month ago, so it's been an absolute delight to be able to get a friend onto Discord and do some Challenge rounds as we talk sh*t and catch up.

A features I'd really love to see:

1 - Remember last settings for Challenges. I only want to play best-of-3 so I have to manually tick it over every single time. It would be a lovely little QoL feature.

2 - Unending Challenge

When a game finished, auto-start a new one with the same opponent, but give me the option to pick a new deck. Keep all previously applied settings.

Just now, I came off an evening of playing about six best-of-three games with a buddy, and every single time we had the friction of setting up a new challenge and accepting. It works but it could be smoother.

3 - Random Unending Challenge

I loooove having a ton of decks, and randomly selecting matchups. Let me do the above Unending Challenge, except a random deck of mine (and theirs) is picked for each round. I'd still like the best-of-three (for the same deck matchups) as an option.

I've got about 25 physical decks and I often break out 20 and roll a d20 to determine which I play. We here on MTGA have a ton of decks, so this would be a fun friendly option. Bonus points for being able to select only your Favorites, or some form of UI or tagging to choose the set (since we might have Standard-ready decks that are actually terrible and in progress).

4 - Show Deck Boxes and Names

I'm a huge fan of being able to select good deck box art, and I love giving all my decks unique names which are often fun for my friends too. Even if it's only for Challenge, this is a really personal feature of MTGA that is sadly kept to oneself.

5 - Play with friends decks!

I think I saw that this is already on the roadmap, but please! I've already brought about four friends into MTGA and it sucks that I've got a bunch of rockin decks and they're still on the starter ones. And by nature, the noobies are not as comfortable with deck building yet, so it'll stay that way for some time.

Just like with Kitchen Table magic, I love having newer friends play with my awesome decks! I get to show them how insane real synergies can be, they get experience with better decks and cards, and I shed a tear when mah baby (a fav deck) kicks my ass in someone else's hands

All in all, awesome game, awesome product, I'm hooked and I can't wait to see what's next. Thanks dev team!

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Cool feature requests, here's my feedback:

Sometimes it's hard to keep context between matches because the match scene is different from the out-of-match scene. Seems like a good QOL addition, if it's easy.
This one is probably a little harder, but I can see the utility of not breaking the friend challenge between matches. I think it would be something we could only do through the friend menu, (not direct challenge) but it's an interesting suggestion.
I'd love more random options. Like random pets for example, or random avatars. I always used to play Street Fighter using the random fighter button, so random decks sounds fun like that. I agree there would have to be some limit to the selection to make it work, maybe favorite, I'd have to put some thought into how that works from the UX standpoint. I like the idea, though.
This would have to only be for friend challenges because competitively no one wants to give up the knowledge of a card in their deck for free. We do this for brawl, so it is tech that somewhat exists already. Not really a priority, but it would make deckboxes feel more social.
Yes, this is on our dev roadmap.

I always write down suggestions if they seem actionable and good for the game, so we can have more options for small, community-focused QOL work. That doesn't mean anything is a lock to get in just because someone said it on Reddit, but I always appreciate these longer posts with constructive ideas on how to make the game better. Thanks for the input!

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