WotC_Jay

We thought about routes like that, but we didn't feel confident enough that was a card that any existing deck wanted.

Really, we felt like the problem was about having too high a density of "cheap pump spell" in Red (given the other cards in the meta). Since we want rebalancing to preserve the original design intent of the card, we can't really take a cheap pump spell and make it something else. So, while we prefer to rebalance rather than ban in Alchemy, this is a case where we felt like the ban was most appropriate

[[Time Warp|TMP]]

"Let's do it again" - Squee, goblin cabin hand

Done! And thank you kindly

They will be, but not yet. These will become our new player decks soon, but making a new set of starter decks takes some real time for balance, complexity tuning, etc. Once we get the time to do that with these decks, we'll move them over to be the rewards from the new player experience and the decks used in Starter Deck Duels.

Those versions will likely be slightly different from these initial versions, but hopefully close. We wanted to give out these early versions now, since players will get the most benefit from the new cards that way.

All of the cards in these decks came from Foundations. There are likely some that are reprints of cards already on Arena, but they're totally different than the current dual-color starter decks.

Some cards are too old and iconic to rebalance. I can't think of Time Warp without smiling as I remember Squee's old flavor text. That card is an old friend, too well-known to rebalance. Temporal Manipulation is only barely younger than Time Warp.

The One Ring or Nadu, on the other hand, are recent additions. Players don't have a decade of memories about them, and that makes them more malleable.

Yes on Monstrous Rage (but it's uncommon, so no big excitement there).
Temporal Manipulation isn't on Arena yet; it's coming tomorrow as a Special Guest in Magic: The Gathering Foundations. So this is a pre-ban, and no one has any copies to refund

I don't know what this thread is talking about. I'm pretty sure we didn't implement any kind of special pop-up ghosts on the cards. Are you sure it wasn't just a smudge on your monitor, or maybe you were playing late at night? It is a pretty spooky set.

This is absolutely correct - The whole point of Explorer is to be an analog to Pioneer in Tabletop. It would never get digital-only content.

This chart is showing Brawl & Standard Brawl lumped together. Brawl is, by far, preferred over Standard Brawl, but we know Standard Brawl has its fans too.

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.