Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

Ha, thanks for the game! I conceded because I was mana screwed, believe it or not my hand was nothing but copies of [[Light Up the Stage]] (and I wasn't gonna get damage in) and [[Anax, Hardened in the Forge]]!

Personally, I don't "play to quests", I just acquire them naturally, maybe I'll go an extra game or two to finish it off.

While the team occasionally has gotten gems as a thank you, I'm glad we have to play through the game the way everyone else does. Not having the normal play experience is a good way to lose touch.

One thing that's hard as a designer is recognizing your own bias, and accounting for it. I may play in ladder one night and see the same deck multiple times, and that deck might having amazing draws every time. It's super frustrating! But, that doesn't really mean the deck is too strong - humans just like to make patterns out of randomness.

We look at the large amounts of data to make those sorts of recommendations and work with Studio X (the part of the company that makes the cards) to figure out what is too oppressive to be in a format. Playing against the real meta definitely helps you figure out what you want to look for in the data.

Personally, I don't play meta-decks in ranked. I usually play this weird Bioessense Hydra deck I have, because I love it and it's fun until gold.

Mostly, this is about fairness to the players. We already have a lot of unfair advantage from playing with the cards sooner than the public, we don't need to add freebies on top of that.

On dev environments (where it's just employees) we can have as many WC and Gems as we want. So we have a lot of fun testing the events and sets before the players get to them. But on production, I personally enjoy trying to collect 1x every card every set (I love Brawl). See you out there!

Ha! You beat Lee? I will have to tease him tomorrow. Let me guess, he was playing mono-red? :D

Yes, Arena devs don't get cards for free, we have to play or pay for them just like everyone else. "We are the players that make the game" is on the wall in the studio.

Ya, Offspring’s Revenge was the inspiration here.

What can I say, our release schedule is weird. The fix isn't live yet, but it will be pretty soon. #wotc_staff

I coded up a fix a little while back, but it's not live yet. It should be going up in our next update (as it just got promoted to trunk yesterday). #wotc_staff

Thanks for the report. I'll look into it. We've been having trouble with that dang Wildbonder... #wotc_staff

Most of our dev budget is going towards player-v-player interactions at the moment. It's definitely a fascinating subject, though. I wish I had the time and domain knowledge to mess around with it.

Adding features that require new UI is actually a lot more difficult than tweaking Sparky's match parameters. That said, manabase testing is something I have personally used when building decks online before Arena, and I can see some utility in adding it. No promises of when (or if) we would work on something like that, but I will put it on the design backlog.

All decks in the Heroes workshops are decks from actual players that went for 7 wins on the live server. (I don't think we differentiate between 7-0/7-1/7-2, though.)

This was really a victim of how quickly language develops. We weren't on guard to differentiate between a solid deck with some cycling synergy layered on top for extra kick vs. the extremely specific set of cards that players now refer to as "The Cycling Deck." Given how that label is now used, I would have chosen a different name for this deck in hindsight.

Anyway, even if the deck is somewhat unconventional, it still got 7 wins!