Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

It certainly should be automatically choosing a target opponent. What card are you using that isn't?

Edit: I misread the post (it was late, oops) - this is intended behavior for good reason. Read more below if you like!

Unfortunately, yeah, it's a bug (one which will with good luck be patched this week). The script that converts the mana cost to mana value did not adequately account for the "hybrid-phyrexian" mana symbol. #wotc_staff

QA's been trying all day and can't repro this - are you sure you weren't just disconnected? Were you able to cast other cards or activate other abilities? Was there anything else unusual going on with your battlefield at that time?

Aha! Someone caught the mistake that I, um, clearly inserted into that answer very deliberately. Yes. (I think the general point still stands: rank gains & losses only really make sense when being measured against others of the same rank)

In order to contribute to rank, an event needs to pair by rank. (Don't want to give someone in Diamond progress for beating someone in Bronze, nor take pips away from someone in Bronze for losing to a Diamond.)

If an event pairs by rank, it changes the benefit for high skill. In a ranked event, high skill means you're playing in a higher rank bracket, which means more skilled opponents and more complex, interesting games. In an unranked event higher skill translates straightforwardly into a higher winrate. Unranked events are also a better match for the tabletop experience.

Different players prefer one experience over the other, so where we can we provide both (ranked & traditional drafts, ranked & play in constructed). Sealed play volumes aren't high enough to do this (especially with Bo3 Sealed), so we have to pick one. In this case we chose unranked because that makes Sealed a better match to a traditional pre-release, and it works well for the somewhat more casu...

Currently planning for Monday.

The format selector no longer presenting on the top level for new decks is a bug. We're looking into it.

Who woulda thunk it? #wotc_staff

I honestly don't know what could cause that. It doesn't match what I'm seeing on the live game, so you may be finding some very specific bug case. Please use the bug report function in the Options menu to send us some info!

What formats are you seeing? Can you scroll the list down to see more options?

Are you not able to change the deck to Historic Brawl once you get to the Details view?

If you click on the deck box while editing, it will open the Deck Details view, where you can still change your deck's format to Brawl.

The format selector is supposed to show up in the main view when you create a new deck, to make it easier to choose the deck's format for the first time. We updated the default card filter in this release to also show digital cards, but the selector is now missing - which clearly is not great, and we're looking into it.

On average, collecting a full playset of Rares through duplicate-protected methods like store boosters will yield 50% of that same set's Mythic-Rares, regardless of set. Imagine a sheet of physical cards ready to be cut into packs that has two copies of every Rare and one copy of every Mythic. Thus, collecting two full sheets means collecting a full playset of rares and two of each Mythic-Rare.

A fundamental axiom here is that "A Mythic-Rare card is twice as rare as a Rare card." Or, here is the quote from Mark Rosewater: "Rares appear one per pack, except roughly one in eight packs, when you get a mythic rare instead. The one in eight packs, by the way, might make it feel as if mythic rares are seven times as rare as rares. They're not; they're twice as rare." Source: ...

Hey, sorry for any confusion here. It was always the intent for the backside to have this color indicator, and it was simply a miss that it didn't. This wasn't included in the release notes for totally boring reasons - the work ticket that tracked making this change got improperly assigned to the next release (13.0), so the change didn't get picked up when we built the release notes for 12.80.

It happens in Quick Draft, too. Some players focus on rares, some players focus on their decks. We try to calibrate the bots so that (in theory) these types of players end up with similar drafting results in similar proportions as the players in Premier Draft.

Our goal is not to deny drafters as many rares as possible. It's for drafters to average about as many rares (and as many powerful commons, and as many signpost uncommons, etc etc etc) as they would get if they were drafting with each other.

One or even two drafters at a Premier Draft table might get a lot of rares and then make for an unusual match, but a player will (on average) only face that once in a while as they play out their course. The rest of the time, they play against normal decks with normal distributions of rarities. In a world of Quick Draft rare-bonanza, a player might face that every game, because the drafters who weren't getting all those rares don't actually show up to even out the queue, because they're bots.

As to how Limited is "supposed" to work, I don't entirely disagree. However, it's how players are using the mode, and that affects the play experience, just like how players' choice of commanders affects the play experience of the Brawl queue. (BTW, that's another mode where we put controls in place to keep the gameplay from degenerating.) I don't think players would stop doing this unless we significantly raised the price of Quick Draft or made it phantom. (Yes, I kn...

There is some baked-in variance, so when cards are close, then it might go either way. If the gap is significant, you'd probably see the same behavior every time. (There's also context beyond purely the pack contents, like the bot's deck color, but I'm assuming that's all the same for your question.)

The player I responded to seemed to value the cards - they specifically cited the rares as a positive aspect of their Double Feature experience.

Of course, players who prefer strictly limited game modes should absolutely set their own value for what they get out of a draft experience and make their choices as appropriate.

Yes, it is my position that the content of our game is worth something. That's why we make it. If your position is that the content of the game has no value, then we will indeed disagree. For instance, you will feel that the "break even" point of events is different than we do, and you will make your gameplay choices accordingly, which is absolutely your right.

Sorry for the minor digression, but I always have to shake my head that players describe these points as "break even"... when you get your currency back, but you've also earned a bunch of cards, that's a lot of gain! The real break-even point is when the cards you gain are worth the same to you as the currency you spent, and that happens way earlier.

But to your actual question, Quick Draft has a flatter prize structure - it's generally less risky, and when you take less risk, it takes longer to earn a bigger reward.