Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

The bots still distinguish between good and bad rares. Bad rares get passed often - although still not as often as they do in Premier Draft, because Quick Draft players still place at least some premium on them for collection purposes.

We do try to keep the gameplay experience the same. If we have done our job well, the players you play against in Quick Draft will have decks pretty similar to what you'd see in any other draft event, and the gameplay will feel broadly the same. That requires that the bots enforce scarcity during the draft at the same rate as the players.

But player behavior is different in Premier and Quick drafts, in part because of the price difference. If the bots allowed players in Quick Draft to end up with all of the rares, and every deck you play against contains six or seven rare cards, that wouldn't resemble drafting with other players either.

The benefit is that it results in your draft opponents having realistic draft decks. When players change their behavior, whether by favoring certain colors or drafting rares at a drastically different rate, we try to adjust to keep things in line.

Only to about the same degree as the players do. Why should they act differently? We are trying to provide an experience that resembles (to the best degree that our system allows) drafting with the other players in the event, so the behavior of other players in this event seems like the most reasonable thing to base it off of, no?

We are well aware that players treat rares differently in normal Quick Drafts, compared to a phantom draft or Premier Draft. We account for that difference in the bot behaviors and do not blindly copy the behaviors from other modes.

Basically, Quick Draft bots are set up to treat rares the same way that Quick Draft players do, on average. Don't burn too much energy trying to manipulate the system. :)

Essentially, shipping releases is a pretty complicated process that involves a lot of coordination. We keep them pretty tightly to a schedule. The December holidays were certainly a big gap there. #wotc_staff

This issue should be fixed with the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty release, by the way. #wotc_staff

Probably the most notorious card for us to implement was [[Explore the Vastlands]], the backside of [[Wandering Archaic]]. It literally took weeks to work out the kinks on this card - and to add insult to injury, it's such a strategically worse card than its other face that it feels like it was a waste of our time. Managing the control flow of the "each player" loop was very much like pulling teeth for our semantics processing...

For QA, I'd say something like [[Thief of Sanity]] and/or [[Underworld Breach]] would be the biggest problem child. Essentially every action permission mechanic (e.g. MDFCs, Mutate, Disturb, etc) needs to be vetted through "well what happens if you get to cast your opponent's cards, and what if they're face down?". And there have been many bugs with conferring an alternative cost with non-mana payments over the years; I think we're finally through the woods with them though. #wotc_staff

Why thank you! While we still have never found a good opportunity to give an in-depth article about its workings (and it's one of those topics where's it's very hard to avoid going down endless digressions!), we did do a video with Gavin Verhey's Youtube show, Good Morning Magic, a few months ago that discusses this very topic, featuring yours truly! Here it is. Also I'm usually open to answering ad-hoc questions (at least ones that I have good answers to!). #wotc_staff

Looks like the predictive discount from Vine Gecko is acting up, possibly in combination with the Skydiver's minimum-1 kicker. That can definitely cause you to lose priority of it's your only meaningful action. I'll look into it tomorrow. #wotc_staff

This was definitely unintentional. We've also taken note of the failure to save edits, which is doubly frustrating. I'm sorry to say that, due to being focused on Kamigawa right now, this is unlikely to have a fix pushed before the event would end anyway. :(

This is exactly correct. For any event with finite allowed entries, queue health is potentially at risk, especially for the final hours when most entries have been played out. We really weren't sure what to expect with the Decathlon, so the setup was on the conservative side. But the feedback about the length of play vs the event window has certainly been heard.

It will not be the 6th. The issue about removing wrong versions of cards is definitely on the radar, but we aren't going to push an update from a cold start right after returning from the holidays.

It actually came from tech limitations. There is an object that you actually win from the Finals and that stays on your account so that you get the cards when the time comes - but this type of object doesn't "stack" in your inventory in a way that would work here.

That said, I consider it a positive of the design that you can still "win it all" with only a single entry. Players don't have to force every different event, even if they don't like them, just because they feel the need to win multiple sets - everyone already has the ability to win the top prize just by showing up at all. Of course, getting multiple attempts is still worthwhile if you feel the competitive urge or love lots of different formats, but it's also totally okay to choose only the few that speak to you.

I honestly wish we could, but unfortunately not given the specifics of the issue and the timing.

Unfortunately, the issue wasn't simple enough to fix on the fly, so the event will be back tomorrow morning. :( Support is on hand to resolve lost entry fees.

Sorry you encountered this issue. This event erroneously appeared and has been administratively disabled.

If you are unable to connect after joining this event while it was up, wait at least 10 minutes without attempting to log in, and then afterward log in and your account should again be in a good state.

Sorry you're experiencing this issue.

This bug is isolated to attempting to add the styled version. You can circumvent the bug by turning off the style, adding the cards, and then applying the style.

That's a fair piece of feedback. I'll tell you now that 100% Alchemy packs isn't going to happen - as you say, there are other formats on the platform that we want to be represented here, that's the whole point of the Decathlon - but a bit more of the new thing could be appropriate. I can't make any promises, but we'll see if we can do a quick adjustment.

And we are thankful for you and for all of our players - without you, there is no game! I'm especially thankful that you and so many others care enough about the game to tell us how you feel. I'm also thankful that I get the chance to bring new and fun experiences to people who love Magic, and to bring new players into our world where they can ultimately find the part of the game that they love and that fits them just right (whether that's on Arena or not).

I hope your weekend has been great, and that you're feeling good as we head into the final stretch of the year. We'll be here trying to bring you the fastest, funnest, most convenient digital Magic experience that we can.