WotC_Jay

He's definitely available for cube where appropriate, yes. He'll make some appearances there. (And in MOM limited, of course.)

From an email I sent our comms team a week ago:
"Oh, forgot another point we’ll want to make prior to launch: Ragavan is pre-banned in Historic. (Yes, we’re cowards. Yes, we can’t block warriors.)"

I get it. I love silly fun. I was a big fan of New Historic, and I keep pushing for more of that. But we all know that Ragavan would have torn the forma up and needed to be banned. And I think that whole process would have created more net frowns than smiles.

I wouldn't say "No regular". I expect us to continue running and testing both. But we're interested in seeing if we can find something overall more fun that the all-lands version. (Individual tastes will always vary, of course.)

Ragavan's a really interesting case there and has caused a decent amount of internal debate on where the "iconic" line should be. On the one side are people saying "A card less than 2 years old can't be iconic, and it's more fun to build a version people can play with". On the other side are people saying "But Monkey!"

Both sides raise good points and, at least for now, we're staying away from rebalancing it.

Short version: Yes, it's one of our more popular Midweek Magic modes.

Longer version:

MWM events are what we call "engagement plays" - they're events we run to give players something fun to do. This means the key ways we evaluate them are factors like how many players they appeal to and how much fun those players seemed to be having. Social sentiment is one way to measure this, but it's prone to some well-known biases. We do look at and consider those opinions, but we rely more on the play data we have.

Turns out that there are some pretty predictable patterns to these numbers.

The baseline is "Novel Constructed format" (On the Edge, Pauper, Singleton, etc.) For ease of comparison, I'll say that gets 100 players.

You would probably expect Phantom Limited events to be more popular, and you're right. They get ~150 players. Precon events are pretty similar, coming in just under 150 players.

When we run Normal Constructed MWM events (Sta...

Wasn’t that game, and I think it was in 2011 or 2012. I was working with Ian back then as well, but at a different company.

Yup, this is why it was left off. It got suggested a lot when we were working on it

Fblthp was always in the Play bundle for MOM; it’s a change relative to ONE

Another factor here is QA time. Just because the parser thinks it understands a card, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's right (there are some great stories here that we'll tell sometime). We need to either write automated tests to validate behavior (which takes time) or have QA manually test the card in a variety of scenarios (also takes time).

We want to expand Arena's card pool just like players want. At the most obvious level, releasing new cards directly makes us money. But, more than that, we all work here because we love Magic, and we love Arena, and we want it to continue to grow. But we need to balance that with the people we have who can do the work required. As Ben noted, we're also ...

It's a bug. We're very frustrated too (we like players having easy access to the events they want). It won't go away on its own, but it will be fixed soon.

You already have all of the cards in these decks; there's no value in farming them again

Our ability to do this is bugged, so it wasn’t an option here, unfortunately. We’re working on a fix for that.

Yup, that’s why

Length of suspension will be based on degree of abuse, and full bans are on the table too.

Great description, thanks so much! That will really help us try to narrow down what went wrong here.

Thanks for the report!
QA's been trying to reproduce this, but can't get it to happen. Do you have any other details about what happened here so we can get closer? What exactly was happening as your opponent conceded in game 1? Where in game 2 did you get stuck? Do you think it's possible you disconnected anywhere in there?

Has anyone else had/not had this happen to them?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Because of a bug (introduced by Gutter Grime), the sacrifice part of: Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and has “{W}, {T}, Sacrifice Citizen’s Crowbar: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.” Lost its reference to Citizen's Crowbar, and the rules engine decided it meant sacrifice All The Things.

The Arena rules backend works by basically reading the cards (natural language parsing), and we have to regularly adjust that reading process to make sure it understands new cards properly. In some cases, like this one, that can lead to older cards getting new (and improper) behaviors. We have a lot of automated and manual testing to check for this, but with ~8k cards there's always the possibility that something sneaks through.

In any case, we're working to get a fix out soon. Until then, I wouldn't recommend sacrificing Citizen's Crowbar (and your whole board).

Do you not have phones? Wait...

When you tap on the opponent's hand it opens a browser (like you were searching your library), and you pick from that.

Mobile has a different interface for selecting opponent cards when casting Emrakul. Our data shows most mobile players are not ants, so the cards were too small to keep the desktop interface.

No, not me. Some people from the team were, but I’ve never done MMOs.