Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

For rules correctness, the work for the sets that were in the Closed Beta is almost nothing. For getting the quality of those sets to match that of those that are in the live game, there's at least a couple weeks of work. But the big hurdle I think is in answering the question "what's the best way for players to get access to these cards", which is a reasonably tough question that happens to be entirely out of my domain. #wotc_staff

No, those sets still work. The level of polish on them is lower than the bar we've had since open beta though. #wotc_staff

I recommend applying if you think you're a good fit. #wotc_staff

Fortunately, we got to do one better for Legion Warboss: all cards that trigger when a certain step or phase occurs will give your opponent priority for the rest of the current step/phase if you put it into a legal zone for that trigger this step/phase. This also means that stuff like Arclight Phoenix entering your graveyard before combat will give your opponent a chance to react.

There is not a list of all the weird things that we do for Arena's default priority. It's already pretty unwieldy to describe and it changes with almost every release. If there's a frequent case that you think we don't handle, feel free to suggest it!

As for your complicated play, my recommendation is to open your Settings. Under Gameplay there should be an option called "Show Phases", which always shows the "phase ladder". You can toggle this setting by hitting the 'L' key in game (for "ladder", I guess?). This will allow you to put a stop at the beginning of combat any time. Alternativel...

Yes, it is. We added the work for Wicked Wolf specifically because of the interacting abilities. I'm still trying to convince our designers that holding for any fight-resulting trigger is a good idea. #wotc_staff

Sure, I'll try to summarize. Most of what I say below could be changed to make Overload work; my point is that that work hasn't been done yet and is pretty nontrivial.

The Games Rules Parser (GRP) reads the exact text on the card. So, for [[Cyclonic Rift]], it sees two abilities, "Return target nonland permanent you don’t control to its owner’s hand." and "Overload 6U". It parses those abilities independently. That is, for [[Mind Rake]], its first ability is literally the same as [[Mind Rot]]'s. They literally use the same code, there's not a Mind Rake version and a Mind Rot version.

Not only that, but there isn't any text on the card that says "Return each nonland permanent you don't control to its owner's hand." So we'd need to recognize that that is a text that we need to create. And then that needs to be an ability that Cyclonic Rift has access to (i.e. is loaded into the game when Rift is), but that it doesn't actually have (until you cast it using Ove...

You could apply here if you'd like! We do have an open position on the Rule team.

As for bringing in old sets, it's really equivalent to bringing in a new set for a lot of them (roughly as many unimplemented sentences and keywords). And RTR is actually one of the worst: Overload is a pretty yucky mechanic for a system that expects cards to do what their text says. #wotc_staff

Firstly, that warning is automatically generated because it makes the target lose all abilities. Remember that code for MtG: Arena is generated via parsing the card text. Virtually nothing is hand-coded for exclusively for a single card.

Secondly, Arena usually starts implementing a set weeks after the set is "locked in" because the printing pipeline is longer than digital's. We give feedback about what's likely to be easy or hard to do during the design process, but it's set pretty much in stone before we start committing code. I look forward to the day when Play Design can iterate on a set in Arena, but that's still petty far out. #wotc_staff

Correct, these events are one time entries where losses don't hurt you.

#WotCStaff