We sometimes use FNM to spotlight niche formats, and sometimes we use it to focus interest on something coming up on the schedule - like this weekend's Grand Finals, where Standard is one of the main formats.
(We also just generally try to rotate what's in FNM so that all kinds of players get exposed to all kinds of things. There are players in Arena who don't play much Standard, even though it's a regular queue, and we want them to see new stuff as much as anyone else.)
Yeah, why’d they stop those?
The short version is, they weren't accomplishing their goal. Workshops were intended to be an engagement tool that enticed players to come back every week and see what's new. As it turned out, players who were already in the client played them, but they didn't really move the needle for anyone else. Given that, we couldn't justify the time commitment for creating play experiences that got used up and forgotten so quickly, especially once we moved to work-from-home and everything had that little bit more friction clogging things up. Plus, they often seemed to create more aggravation than excitement (due to matchups, formats that people didn't enjoy but felt obligated to play to collect the free rewards, etc).
So basically, for several reasons, many of which are only tangentially economic. It's nice to know that there's some folks who miss them, though.
Is there any chance we will see more best-of-three draft options in addition to ZNR? I know it’s not the most popular way to draft on Arena, but I would bet there are enough people interested to keep the queues full enough to justify their existence.
I understand if you can’t answer, but thanks for reading this anyway!
To borrow a line from Maro, "I never say never."
Notice how one of them says “Zendikar Restless” and at the top it says “Zendikar is restless.” I’m guessing that each of them is a complete sentence shortened to fit in an emote slot.
^ This is it.
Wait, what? That has to be a mistake in the article, right? If traditional draft gets the axe I won't be buying the gems I usually buy when a new set is launched. It's easily my favorite format and it's lack would really lower my interest in the game.
It is just an error in the article. Traditional Draft will be around for the entire set cycle, like normal.
If the point of this event is to have fun with a big, dumb creature, I don't get why they put so much cheap removal in it. I've played four games so far, I haven't untapped with Yargle once and only one of my opponents has. The event is okay but it seems pretty hard to do the Yargle thing.
Yargle population control is an important part of any ecosystem.
Okay, but real talk - when you make the games to revolve around a 9-power creature (and there are 9 copies of it), things can end FAST and MESSILY. It's nice to balance out the times when you get your head knocked in by a giant frog with no way to fight back with times when you carefully use your resources to scrape out a well-fought win.
Yargle, I've come to bargle
It's time to d-d-d-d-dargle!
I don't care about the meta, i just want to make a big frog becoming a knight and flying over to smash my opponent's face.
Also, it took a while to understand why they made this event. Silly americans with your random dates.
I don't care about the meta, i just want to make a big frog becoming a knight and flying over to smash my opponent's face.
This is the way.
is there not still 'deck strength matchmaking' active in the 'Play' / unranked queue? I think the prominent perception here is that that matchmaking algorithm skews toward mirror matches or otherwise serves up very specific slices of available opponents based on the way it's implemented. is it possible this is true, or is that just confirmation bias / misconception from the players?
Deck value is a metric that we use in Play, yes. Without going too far into specifics, this only prevents you from matching with decks that are very far away from yours. The matchmaker does not prefer (and is not even aware of) specific matchups, be they mirrors, counters, or anything else.
To your question, a deck's reach still covers a fairly broad range, but excluding some options by definition increases the probability of facing any given deck that remains. I can't speak to anyone's personal experience, but we believe the current setup still provides a diverse spread of opponents.
They're hoping to get un-loseable matches.
That's why you were specifically selected to face the opponent and why my life loss rakdos pile keeps getting nine live opponents as well
Happens with every powerful combo deck. Win too many times and arena wags its finger at you and gives you the foil combo or someone else running the same combo but better to destroy you.
That's why you were specifically selected to face the opponent and why my life loss rakdos pile keeps getting nine live opponents as well
We do not do this - not in ranked, not in any queue in the game. Even if we thought it was a good idea for some reason (which we don't), it would be extremely difficult to implement. We've got plenty to do already.
I remember Adamant as the reason Eldraine Omniscience Draft didn't pan out. Which reminds me that I don't think we've had Omniscience Draft period for a few sets now.
Where the Omniscience Draft, Wizards?
Well, GreatSeaBattle, I will tell you.
In order to be a good fit for Omniscience draft, a set has to pass two main criteria: the cards have to work the way you expect, and the cards have to be fun and different to use in a mana-safeties-off world. Throne of Eldraine failed both criteria in a variety of ways:
Theros and Ikoria both also had some challenges. Our emblem doesn't affect Escape costs or Mutate costs, plus both sets have mechanics that really suffer from smaller opening hands (Constellation asks yo...
Read morePeople complain about best-of-1 a lot, and we hear that. We also see that people play best-of-1 a lot. More than the corresponding best-of-3 formats, every time. Even among our highly invested players, who have all the game modes turned on and spend money and participate in multiple formats, the data shows the same trend.
Our goal with the Arena Open is to make meaningful tournament play available to the greater Arena population - not just players who are already deeply invested in competitive Magic and familiar with all of its trappings. In order to reach that audience, we wanted it to be more approachable. By making Day 1 best-of-1, players can (initially) play the event the same way they play Arena every day.
Once a player has qualified to Day 2 and established that they have something serious to gain, we're more comfortable asking them to commit additional time, energy, and resources to playing best-of-3. Because we agree with the premise behind...
Read moreWhen are these coming?
I believe this is changing over with the August release. (I'm, like, 80% sure...)
Nice. Are there new mono decks coming?
There are!
I never knew Unicorns could be so stealthy...
So the blue/black deck doesn't have a mythic? :( As a new player, makes me sad my favorite combo (so far) isn't getting any love.
This version didn't, but we've since added one to the version that will go out to players. (There may also be other changes to the lists for balance and stuff.)
The three "billboards" that you see on the landing screen usually show recent or limited-time game modes, but there are others available! If you click the orange "Play" button in the bottom right corner of the client, a popout (we call it the "play blade") will show you all of the different modes in the game right now - like, for instance, Premier Draft Core Set 2021.
This is actually a fairly common issue, and we'd definitely like to help players get more comfortable navigating the client. (This is why you sometimes see a "play blade rework" on our roadmap.)
In non-ranked modes, the game matches you according to your "power level", which is basically "how popular are the cards of your decks". So obviously someone playing playsets of check and shock lands has a bigger "value" than someone playing 20 basics. Also the fact that Jumpstart cards aren't really "calibrated" yet since it got released not long ago, and the elves deck has a bunch of them.
We do not use the deck-strength system for all non-ranked modes, only where we think it's appropriate. It is not being used in this week's FNM mode.
Even where we do use it, mana bases contribute very little, in part to avoid exactly the effect you describe.
While they are on hold could you revisit having the description in the form of in universe dialogue? It's a nice idea but everytime Feldon said something about decks or cards it was really incongruous and made me feel LESS immersed in the multi-verse than if it had just been flavourless functional text.
Perhaps there's a solution that lets you have the best of both worlds though I'm not sure what.
We could probably split it between some flavor and some function. Keeping the actual game mechanics on the functional side seems like a good idea.
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