Will Historic ranked eventually be available at all times?
u/WotC_Jay talks about that, right over here:
Read moreHistoric availability - Right now Historic is available through the Play queue and Competitive Events. What we're trying to do with bringing the Historic Ranked queue up each quarter is to say that during this time, Historic is the focus of MTG Arena. Why it's not live all the time is we want to balance with Standard being the focus the other two months. But we're ear...
Agreed, people seem to love this new format but its growth is stifled by this entry fee. I honestly believe this would be the most popular way to play on MTGA if it didn't feel like WotC was trying to prevent people from playing it.
We know there’s a lot of folks who love Brawl. Arena is for Brawlers, but it’s also for a lot of other player types. If we made Brawl available 24/7 with full daily rewards, it would impact other players by shifting the focus away from the other experiences we offer. And if Brawl became the focus, the fundamentals of Arena’s economy would have to change, and players may feel forced to play Brawl to play most efficiently.
- Cao
Read moreHello, some eternal format questions I'm burning to ask the Arena team:
• What is the intended difference between the Historic and Pioneer formats? (Will these formats merge? Will Historic eventually become Pioneer + older cards added in anthology releases? Is Historic intended to be a lower or higher power format than Pioneer?)
• Considering how Arena currently points players towards standard as the "most accepted way to play" by permanently limiting the availability/reward for other formats (e.g. time restrictions for Historic Ranked, economy restrictions for Historic non-ranked, time & economy restrictions for Brawl), I am very intrigued by the State of the Game section where they mention that "MTG Arena's formats, goals, and outlook are clearly changing from the Standard-only direction we originally built the game on... Magic is more than any one collectable card game. It's dozens of formats and event types that cater to a diverse player base, from Brawl brewers...
Historic & Pioneer - We'll see where this goes, but the general direction we're thinking is that ultimately Historic will be the place where cards from across Magic's history can be played. Mostly the "Historic becomes Vintage" version from the other thread.
Historic availability - Right now Historic is available through the Play queue and Competitive Events. What we're trying to do with bringing the Historic Ranked queue up each quarter is to say that during this time, Historic is the focus of MTG Arena. Why it's not live all the time is we want to balance with Standard being the focus the other two months. But we're early on in the lifespan of Historic. We haven't even completed a full cycle of turning the Ranked Queue off and on again. We're going to see how players engage with it in mid-March.
Commander - Making something "feel like Commander" takes an awful lot of cards. The current cardpool may also not be deep enough to make 100-card singleton decks that feel...
Read moreWill Amonkhet Remastered and future remastered sets be playable in Historic?
Yep!
Are multiplayer formats being considered? Regular Multiplayer, Two-Headed Giant, Emperor, Multiplayer with limited range, etc.
Are multiplayer formats being considered? Absolutely. Are they on the 2020 road map? Nope.
Any plans to help under-supported tribes in Historic with some card drops, you know like Dwarves, Minotaurs or kobolds?
No concrete plans, but we definitely enjoy doing things like this and have before. Let us know what tribes are important to you and we'll look into it!
When human drafting is released, do you plan for it to completely replace bot drafting? In both Ranked and Traditional?
Also, gotta ask: any idea when this will happen?
We do not plan for human drafting to completely replace bot drafting. There are plenty of good reasons to keep bot drafting around (time, convenience, etc.) even with fellow humans to draft with. Our goal is to implement human drafting sometime in the first half of this year, and it will be s h o c k i n g if it's not in by the end.
Read moreI understand the logistics of why you would not want to go through programming every card in all of the Pioneer sets (although for a while I thought that the rules engine of Arena was specifically designed to make this not a problem?) and I think most everyone is happy with the idea that skipping some cards will make the sets come out faster. But do you have a concrete plan to add cards into Arena in an 'emergency' contingency?
Just for the sake of a random example, it is very plausible that in six years there is some card printed that combos with a random uncommon from Origins or Fate Reforged or some other set, but that wasn't included in the remastered pioneer set, and the combo is strong enough that it creates a tier1/2 archetype deck that lots of people are playing in paper and on Magic Online. Would there be a hotfix that puts the card onto Arena to make sure the meta of the format isn't fragmented across different platforms of play? If you would add the card, how ea...
This "emergency contingency" is one of the main roles we see Historic Anthologies taking once we start releasing the remastered Pioneer sets. If there's some immediate problem that comes up and it needs quick action, we'd likely suspend one of the problematic cards until we could get the "answer cards" delivered.
A while ago(Nov state of the game I think?), there was mention of letting your friends use your decks in direct challenges. Is that still in development? Do I understand the idea behind it correctly? My card collection is extensive while my buddy has barely any but wants to play w/ me. This feature would do a lot to enable a more fair playing level between him and I if he can use my decks to play with against me.
Yes it is still in development, and yes your assumption is correct. As for timing, we are trying to release Deck Sharing this year.
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Our goal is to get Deck Sharing out this year, just make sure to share jank only please :)
when are we getting a mobile app?
Still on the road map, just not ready to talk about it yet.
Read moreHi. Here as a "tool" developer, with a question that's a bit more geeky.
A few months ago, ya'll pushed a change that completely changes the log file format that various tools rely on to get game information. This caused a lot of churn and required us to make many updates in a very short amount of time to restore functionality.
You've started including sample "log files" in your patch notes on occasion, which is nice, but leads into my question:
Will WotC consider putting out public "API" documentation for the log file, and the various events within, as well as keep it up to date when patches change the format?
Right now, to develop a tool, someone must start by reverse engineering the logs, or by building off of someone's already existing work. With a publicly available and updated API and documentation, developers of tooling would have a much easier time maintaining their applications, spending less time worrying about updates rand...
We love that folks are developing tools using our logs. The recent change was made to improve performance because we were logging way too much. With that change, we also implemented QA steps to verify the log quality and make sure the changes get clearly communicated. We have talked about an API a lot, but it isn't on our 2020 roadmap.
- Cao
Anyway we can save or revisit closed drafts? Sucks that you can 7-0 but you can't see the list after that seventh win.
The ability to export your draft decks to your deck collection is coming with February game update (i.e. tomorrow). Ironically, there is a known issue that when you reach the "Claim Your Rewards" scene the option disappears - but this is a bug, not an intended feature.
Decks that use a large number of activated effects (like the various cat-oven decks) tend to be fairly miserable to play against, purely due to the amount of clicks needed to resolve a turn. Are there any plans to speed up this process? Is there even a way to speed it up?
This is something we continually work on. The rules of Magic make it tricky/complex sometimes to smooth things out where we'd want to, but we'll keep working at it.
When is Lord Of Atlantis getting added to Historic?
Just for you, coming 2024.
Can you please elaborate on the deck sharing? I would like to teach my father how to play the game. He lives faraway from me and I wanted to share some cards with him and play with direct challenge. Will I be able to share some decks in the future although he doesn’t own those cards?
That's exactly the kind of thing we want to enable with our deck sharing!
Are older sets eventually coming entirely along with their draft formats?
Our goal for 2020 is to get the most relevant backlist cards into Arena to support Pioneer and Historic (both for constructed and limited). There are a lot of cards that don't meet that bar, so we're waiting on those to give dev time to the more important ones. We'll see over the next year how remastering shakes out and go from there.
- Cao
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.
I am honestly curious why something like Brawl, which utilizes the standard card-pool, requires a separate reward structure? What makes it fundamentally different than "normal" standard play that dictates a different reward structure?
In Ranked Standard, the goal of most players is to play the most-effective decks, which change nicely as the meta develops. In Brawl, many players are looking to play the decks they find fun, which change much less. For example, I Brawl as Vraska, and it's going to take something pretty massive to move me off of that.
Will MTGA ever come to consoles?
There are no current plans to be on consoles, but no platforms are off limits! What console would you like to see?
The Traditional bo3 draft event can feel very long to play. Experienced drafters with above average winrates play up to 6 bo3s and hence up to 18 games with the same deck. I also like watching streamers play limited, and I've seen streamers drop out of the event after a 3-0 so they can start a new draft and hence have a larger variety of decks.
How was the maximum number of matches in the bo3 event originally determined, and do you think this number is still optimal? Have you ever considered changing it? (Note I'm not asking about adjusting the rewards; one could conceive of a bo3 event with a maximum number of 3-5 bo3 matches, while holding the expected cost and rewards the same.)
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
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