Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

Thanks for the report, I'll look into it. EDIT: The gist of the bug is that Valiant Emberkin is retriggering each of the triggered abilities for each creature you control that the source spell/ability targets, instead of once. Here is an article my colleague Alex wrote about our card ability code that illustrates a bit of why this bug happens. Working on a fix now! #wotc_staff

That's an error in the gallery. Special Guests will appear in Arena store packs at the normal rate

This is exactly right. We made sure to include the key cards, that saw real play. Cards on the fringes of play, like these, got included or excluded based on building a better draft environment

Short answer: Yes

Longer answer:

All of our digital formats (largely Alchemy, Historic, Brawl, and Timeless*) share rebalances. We do this because we think it would be more confusing if a given card worked differently across those formats. (It's hard enough that cards work differently across the digital formats and the tabletop-analog formats.)

When we rebalance any card, we consider its usage across all of the formats. This is much like designing a new card, where we also consider impact across a variety of formats.

* Timeless is a bit different, since it uses the original version of any rebalanced card from the tabletop game. But Timeless is a weird place anyway.

The process is based on data, but it's not simply "Number says X, do Y". It takes someone who understands the format to look over the data and understand what needs to be tweaked, or often times even what the right questions to ask are.

As one example, if a commander's winrate has spiked, is that because new cards are letting players make a stronger version of the deck, or just because a new, super-popular commander is a favorable matchup?

It's something we're (still) interested in. It's been hard to prioritize, because it's meant building some different types of tech than what we have now, which makes it expensive. No promises, but it's something we agree would be valuable and are trying to find a way to make work.

Honestly, that makes sense. I wouldn't have believed it without seeing the data either.

Before we had data, our lead data person (who's also a very good Magic player) was 100% convinced we would have to ban Mana Drain. But I had been 100% convinced that we would need to restrict Dark Ritual in Timeless, and the data has been clear that we don't. So now I don't trust even what seems obvious, and I almost always want the data. And it says they're fine. Good, but fine.

And I'm never going to try to convince you what's fun. Every player knows best what they think is or isn't fun. I think there's a good debate to be had about whether those cards are net more fun to keep in the format.

The weights are regularly monitored and updated. We've also recently been improving tooling and hiring more people on that team so that we can make these updates more thorough and frequent.

They were all cards that, basically, one or two players had in their sideboard. Many of them were cards that showed up literally once across all the decklists.

Nothing was left out for complexity or any reasons like that. They were just the least-popular cards that still see a tiny bit of play. And, if any of them prove important, we'll add them in down the road.

Username checks out

If you mean "We may see more Bo1-only bans like Leyline", then yes. That's a possibility, if we end up in a similar situation. If you mean rebalanced cards in Bo1 Standard, absolutely not.

Those three cards (and several others) are all cards we have looked at specifically. Based on all of our data, they do not have an outsize impact on the winrate of decks that use them. I'm not saying they're not good cards; they are. But the boost in winrate they give is equivalent to a lot of other good cards. They're not outliers.

We are actively monitoring Brawl balance for these outliers, we just don't see any large ones to act on currently

[[One with Nothing]]

You make a really good point there. I don't have an ETA, but I agree it's valuable.
In lieu of an ETA, I will offer trivia: This broke when we stopped putting a maximum collector number on cards, because that's how the old system worked

Hey, as you've probably noticed, we pulled this down. We had originally planned to run an event here, but we've canceled it. As people have noted in this thread, there are still players from the earlier events who don't have their boxes, and we want to make more progress on those issues before we run another event.

The response to our first few Arena Directs was overwhelming, and though over 95% of winners have gone through all the steps to get their boxes, there are still a few who are having problems preventing this. If you're one of those players with a problem, and you haven't submitted a ticket, please contact us here so we can resolve things. We're working every day to both fix those individual issues and to improve our systems ...

This is correct. Duplicate protection works by name since WOE. (You'll find things saying it works by art; that was the old system.)

It applies to Rare and Mythic cards evenly, so if you have 4 Thousand-Year Storm (at M) from GRN, you won't pull any from FDN packs (until you have all of the other FDN rares in packs)

This is a known side-effect of fixing the Mastery Pass bug (which did indeed happen today; Inbox message incoming soon). For some players, fixing this resulted in doubling up of some rewards. Bank error in your favor; enjoy.

All of the standard-legal cards are coming to Arena. The three you mentioned are not standard-legal and are not coming to Arena. Command Tower and Arcane Signet are already on Arena; Sol Ring will not be coming to Arena.