Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

We're talking actively about this (as in, Lee Sharpe and I were talking about it just a couple days ago). Nothing new to announce here yet, but it's definitely on our radar.

Edit to add: Please let us know what "feels right" to you here

We're actively working on it, most likely the first half of this year!

We love the fun, brewing space as well, and we've talked a lot about how we can build events that work for those players. Standard Shakeup is one take at that, and we'll keep working on more. As you say, it's tricky to build a mode that doesn't encourage players to run the top-meta decks.

Last time we talked about it, we said it would arrive after Epic Games Store. That's still the plan. It's just not going to be "soon" after. Catalina (the latest macOS) requires 64-bit, which MTG Arena doesn’t support yet. So there’s background work to do first.

- Cao

We take a lot of data into consideration. We have both a WotC BI team and an Arena data team analyzing and acting. Ultimately, we're making the best decisions based on what we see.

We waited 6 months to get lots and lots of data. And we also took some good learnings from Eldraine on how to better update our draft bots. The bottom line is, it's in our best interest to give you lots of reasons to play Draft. So this is not a decision we make lightly and will monitor things very closely. 

One of those learnings was that it’s challenging to keep our draft bots performing well when the draft format is always available. When we were using this rotating schedule (pre-M20), we were able to keep the bots in better shape.

- Cao

We're working closely with R&D on the remaster process for these sets. The key goals are getting the bulk of Pioneer playables out to players soon and making great Limited formats. Cards that saw little play in either constructed or limited are the ones we're likely to skip here.

We don't have any plans to get rid of The Vault. What we like about The Vault versus other systems we've tinkered around with is how it provides long-term value for your duplicate Commons and Uncommons. It’s hidden now on the main UI bar (until it’s ready to open) because an in-progress Vault doesn’t merit that kind of UI prominence. We should have a better way to see what your progress is, and it will likely make its way to the Profile page at some point.

Cube: We'll play with a number of things, but we're planning to start with a Historic cube so we get the largest pool to choose from

Asynch human drafting: We've talked about this mode a lot, but right now we're focused on improving our bot drafting and adding human drafting.

Leaving Feedback: We gather feedback from our forums, Reddit, and other social channels. The forums are the most "official" channels.

Theros board: This is just a bug; it'll show up properly in the Feb release.

Sharing more data: We'll keep sharing the key points we think are valuable (like popularity of Bo1 vs Bo3). The full data gets really difficult to parse.

Perfect burrito: Anything with beans and rice makes me happy.

We didn't make any major changes to who is managing Arena's development. We are working with Skybox Labs to help bring the game to more platforms. And we are working with R&D to make sure our Pioneer and Historic play experiences are really fun. 

Should you expect more features rolling out in the coming months? Yep 😊

- Cao

Chris Cao here borrowing a community account.

To answer Brawl, we need to go back in time a bit. We originally built MTG Arena for Standard players. Now we're moving beyond Standard, and that means going places which aren't exactly balanced for our Standard-focused rewards structure. That means we need to experiment to find the right balance, which is what we're doing with Brawl. 

We haven't found the right balance between availability/entry fees/rewards with Brawl. That's why we're testing all three right now. Direct Challenge play is outside of daily rewards and the most social  and casual way to play Magic in the game currently. The Wednesday Brawl queue is testing availability balance. Brawl Hall is testing earn vs rewards balance. In fact the 10K cost was set after simulating earn rate vs consumption rate of an average player. We haven't gone down the path of a permanent queue with no entry fee that limits daily rewards, but it is something we're exploring. Wh...

Hello all, happy to be here. Thanks for all of the great questions over the last few days, and a big thank you to the mods for helping out with this. We're going to hop in and answers questions here, and also from the last thread if those questions aren't repeated here.

This. :)

Cards like Agonizing Remorse that allow a player to choose a card from among multiple zones had little consideration for which zone should be shown first. Anticipating that Agonizing Remorse would likely be popular, we set out to make the behavior consistent--in this case, Agonizing Remorse would start with the opponent hand if there is a legal choice. This may still not be ideal if there are no legal choices in hand, which will result in the opponent graveyard being shown first. We will continue working toward the ideal.

With all of that said, the work was intended to be released with the Theros update but got lost in the process; waiting to see it go live has been agonizing.