Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

I mean, every team would always love to have more employees (if only managing costs weren't a thing), but that's not really the issue here. Making large-scale software is complex, and there are a lot of factors that go into it.

It's not just a matter of the raw data entry side (which, as you say, can get done in an afternoon), it's also about the build & deploy loops necessary to get it to QA for testing, their test time, and making any fixes. Now that we know it's properly built, it's ready to go into a build, which involves a whole additional round of steps.

It's not really a person-power problem, it's the fact that big things are complex. And there are ways to cut through that complexity and build special channels, but that also takes time. That's what we're working on here.

Oh, sorry, Foundations Jumpstart is the real name; Jumpstart 25 was the working name. (We use the working names so much I often forget the real ones.)

It will be showing up tomorrow

Decreasing the time it takes us to get decks into the game and available to players is definitely something we'll be working on. We know that the delay here makes these less fun, and we're looking to bring it down as much as we can

So, there are two things here: There are Foundations packets added to our normal Jump In, and there's the Jumpstart 25 event. The Jump In event will have only Standard/Alchemy cards, while the J25 event will have a mix of Standard-legal and Historic-legal cards.

We discuss the name of the format a good bit here: MTG Arena State of the Formats 2024

Thanks for the callout here! We're looking into this and determining what the proper behavior is. I suspect that "one or more" is the right answer here, but I want to more thoroughly consider the cases.

Unsurprisingly, this is not the intended look. The depth art should use the full-art frame, and we'll get it fixed so that it does

Unsurprisingly, this is not the intended look. The depth art should use the full-art frame, and we'll get it fixed so that it does

Unsurprisingly, this is not the intended look. The depth art should use the full-art frame, and we'll get it fixed so that it does

No, there will not be an Alchemy drop after Foundations. Pioneer Masters is eating up the bandwidth and schedule slot that would normally take

I mean, it certainly wasn't the intended experience. It wasn't intended that 4 of them were missing their names either.

With every build, you'll find some bugs too late to fix and have to decide what to do. Usually the choices are to cut the item, delay the item, or live with the bug and maybe fix it later. Here, we decided to live with the bugs a go with the route that got players these cards and decks on release day for the set. I feel good about that being the right choice.

This is correct. They're full of exciting options like "Force crash" (so we can test our crash reporting) or "Force disconnect" (so we can test reconnect), etc. Basically ways of making happen on command for testing purposes

Our understanding is that it's because the decks are using the new versions of the Temples (or other reprints), so you could play them after swapping. Does that seem to match your experience?

They will be coming in an inbox message soon. We want to make sure everything is fully up and responding as normal first.

That's a good idea! I'm not sure we can do exactly that with our existing tech, but I'll bring it up with the Events team

It's certainly a judgement call, and it's not just age (though age is a big factor).

We rebalanced Unholy Heat and we banned Ragavan, both from MH2. Why the difference? Because we felt like Unholy Heat's identity was being a powerful direct-damage spell, and we could rebalance it and preserve that. And Ragavan's identity was in being the most unholy terror of a monke that anyone's seen this side of a Kird Ape. And you can't rebalance him to make him "fair". Anything that's fair is no longer Ragavan.

With things as recent as Nadu, I think we still have room to rebalance now matter how big an impact the bird has made. 5 months is not enough time to set yourself up as "iconic", no matter how hard Nadu tried.

This is certainly a thing on which reasonable people will differ. It's a lot of close calls, and we debated a lot about Ragavan. As with all similar spaces, we're going to try things, we're going to learn, and we'll hopefully get better as we go.

This is correct. Cards that have been printed use their printed form. Digital-only cards use their rebalanced forms.

In my head, it starts like this:
Should we rebalance a Black Lotus?
- Clearly not. That card is way too classic, it does what it does, and making a balanced version of a Black Lotus is just contradictory at this point. The card has a well-defined identity, and a big part of that identity is its power.

Ok, so should we rebalance Counterspell or Lightning Bolt?
- Again, no. For most of the same reasons. The identity of these cards is well-defined, and its about the power level.

Ok how, about Unholy Heat?
- Well, spoilers, we rebalanced Unholy Heat a while ago, so clearly we think that was on the table. It hadn't had enough time to establish a firm identity around doing 6 damage, so we had the freedom to adjust it.

We thought about routes like that, but we didn't feel confident enough that was a card that any existing deck wanted.

Really, we felt like the problem was about having too high a density of "cheap pump spell" in Red (given the other cards in the meta). Since we want rebalancing to preserve the original design intent of the card, we can't really take a cheap pump spell and make it something else. So, while we prefer to rebalance rather than ban in Alchemy, this is a case where we felt like the ban was most appropriate