MTG Arena Announcements – June 3, 2024
MTG Arena Announcements – June 3, 2024
Catch up with the latest info and events on MTG Arena.
In this edition:
- Modern Horizons 3 Streamer Event June 5
- Modern Horizons 3 Historic and Brawl Pre-Bans
- MTG Arena Matchmaking and You
- Card Styles Button Returns
- Explorer Best-of-One Play-In This Weekend
- Currency Update for Players in Japan
- Event Schedule
I appreciate that they acknowledged the Brawl weighting system -- ignoring it would have been a real mistake -- and I'm satisfied with what they said about it.
I read some of the discussion about it on Reddit, and people were angry (because there are always angry Magic players on Reddit), but it seemed like most of the frustration was that the system isn't accurate enough, not that it exists.
Personally, I'm upset in the first place that Magic cards are so imbalanced that a weighting system is necessary, but given that they are, I'm glad such a system exists, at least for casual formats.
They talk about continuing to make changes to the system. The main change that I hope they'll make is to allow negative-weight decks to validate. Then I can take some of the useless utility lands out of my zero-weight Mycotyrant deck.
I also think most of the frustration was due to the improper weighting on cards. I think that indicated to people that they don't give a shit enough to keep them current or perhaps they don't have the resources to, both of which are bad news for players.
For me, the best change they could make would be to display the MMR/Deck Strength numbers everywhere in matches. The way you can see the Elo in all chess matches I think helps people understand why they're matched up against their opponent. Having everything in the dark makes people come up with conspiracy theories.
I think it's probably for the best that we can't see those numbers. For one thing, being able to see your MMR would turn casual games into ranked games, effectively. Plus there's the fact that both numbers are really just the developers' best guess, subject to a lot of fluctuation and not guaranteed to be accurate at any particular point in time, not to mention that you sometimes get paired way up/down if the system can't find a match fast enough. I think publicizing MMR or deck weight would lead to a lot more complaining and bad feelings, while not significantly improving the quality of your games.
This is probably a lot easier for me to say than it would be for the programmers to implement, but: the weighting system seems to only judge cards on an individual basis. I wonder how feasible it would be to weight card combos. Like -- Aftermath Analyst isn't too scary by itself, but if you see it in a deck with Nissa, Resurgent Animist, that's a different story.
So psyched they're finally fixing the card styles button! Tired of not being able to switch to the "regular" card version