A lot of what he’s saying here matches my own experience playing ranked games on Arena. I made it to Mythic (playing Standard) a few days before the end of December. When I finally broke in, my rank was 92%. That’s a pretty high number, and it’s actually even better than it sounds: I’m not just in the 92nd percentile of all Magic players worldwide, I’m in the 92nd percentile among people who take Magic seriously enough to play ranked matches on Arena.

Surely an accomplishment one could be proud of, right? But the whole time I was getting there, I felt mediocre, because I kept losing about as much as I was winning. I also wasn’t experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.

As soon as I reached my competitive goal, I switched to playing more offbeat or experimental decks. And honestly, I started having more fun, if only from the change of pace, even though my rating dropped into the 80s. And then something interesting happened: I got more comfortable with those decks, and/or started facing lower-ranked opponents, and my rating climbed back into the 90s.

So I think Richard is right about ladders’ capacity to suppress one’s enjoyment of the game. However – I’m still not sure I would want to play without one. From time to time I play unranked games with decks that I think are fun, but pretty far (even intentionally far) from Tier 1. But I can never put up with it for very long: the caliber of the decks that I face varies too widely. I’ll stomp someone’s precon in one game and then get stomped in turn by a tournament deck in the next. I keep coming back to the ladder because, as unfair as the cards and decks I see there may be, at least both players agree at the start on what power level we’re aiming for. (Having separate lobbies for “unranked play with tournament decks” and “unranked play with casual decks” might sound like a solution, but some players would still join the wrong ones.)

As for tournaments: I’ve been on Arena for two or three years now and I’ve never joined a constructed tournament. The prize structure makes them effectively single-elimination, and I’m not sure I’ve ever won five matches in a row on the ladder, so what would make me think I could do it when there was even more on the line? My gold and gems are much more wisely spent doing drafts so I can build my collection.

But that may not be a refutation of Richard’s point so much as a criticism of Arena’s tournament structure. If Arena had Swiss-style tournaments, with flatter prize structures, I would be more likely to join them.

This all sounds reasonable to me. An understandable motivation for changing, and a sensible way of approaching it.

It’s not clear and it’s going to just be used to further whatever conclusion they’ve already come to.

Yeah, whatever the results of this poll are, I guarantee Mark/WotC are going to learn the wrong lesson from it. Like when they look “it’s too hard to maintain a collection for Standard” to mean “cards should stay in Standard for longer” and raised the format’s power level by half.

Yeah, I found this pretty unintuitive in a few ways. To name the card, you have to click “Guess card”, then type out the name (even though it looks like the fields are disabled), then click the button again. If that isn’t working for you then I don’t know.

Are we talking about cookie tins, or what? The article doesn’t have pictures of the actual product, and doesn’t describe them as anything other than “promotional tins”. We know they’ll contain five booster packs plus two cards, so I guess that puts a floor on how small they could be.

I’d expect you could fit about four cookies, depending on their size and shape, in the space taken up by five booster packs.

Commander players have a thing called “Rule 0” that basically says you can change whatever rules you want as long as your whole playgroup agrees to it. But if you want to get your changes accepted on a broader scale, so that you could go to a store event or a big tournament and expect other players to be familiar with them, that’s a much taller hurdle. Can you convince the community that your banlist is better than the official one and also better than any other fan-made ones? Can you get stores to support it – keeping in mind that they have to curry favor with Wizards in order to maintain WPN certification, be allowed to pre-order the amount of product they want, etc.? If you could do it successfully, you’d basically be building a grassroots competitor to the Commander Format Panel. Not impossible, but it would be an uphill battle for sure.

The tone of this article sounded so much like a farewell letter or a eulogy, I really was not expecting it to end with “and that’s why I’m excited to continue being a part of the Commander Format Panel”.

I’m not going to think of Magic as a canvas no matter how many times some suit at Hasbro who probably doesn’t even play the game tells me I should.

This is probably one of those cases where most players were already doing it this way anyhow, because they weren’t aware of the actual rule (which I’d have to say is not intuitive).

The initial shock of Universes Beyond is well behind us at this point.

No, it isn’t.

I could complain about this, or explain why I don’t want it, but what good would it do? The fact that they’re making this announcement means it’s already too late to stop it.

“Creatures you control get +10/+10”

I hope this one is called “Bag of Colossus Hammers”.

Artifact Creature – Phyrexian Construct

Let’s assume this is a reprint. Here are the possibilities. What’s your vote?

I haven’t heard that Snow or Poison are going to be in this set, so that rules out some things. I think Zenith Chronicler is likely because it plays well in Commander. Personally I’m rooting for one of my pet cards, Phyrexian Walker. It’s probably a dark horse but I think as zero-cost creatures go it’s one of the fairest.

It crossed that threshold for me a while ago. “Diluted” is the right word. If somebody asked me to describe Magic to them now, I don’t know what I would say.

Arena could really be better about handling large numbers of triggers and/or tokens. There’s no reason why creating 250 tokens needs to be substantially more work than creating 2, and I suspect that the reason why it is is because there’s a lot of redundant stuff – animation, sound effects – that it could be skipping, but isn’t.

For example, you could imagine bracket one has cards that easily can go in any deck, like Swords to Plowshares , Grave Titan , and Cultivate , …

Swords to Plowshares, which is currently banned from Historic and will probably never be printed into Standard again, is in the lowest power bracket? Am I misunderstanding the purpose of these brackets?

I know one-for-one removal isn’t as good in Commander as it is in two-player formats, but even so. Adding Swords or Grave Titan would noticeably raise the power level of every Commander deck I’ve ever built. Apparently my decks are in bracket zero.

I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.

I agree with most of this.

Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.

Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.

As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.

I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.

That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.

Yeah, I was hoping to see more (or any) actual cards with Phasing, like Sandbar Crocodile. The highest Mirage block card on the list was Teferi’s Veil at #18, and there was sadly no mention of one of my pet cards, Dream Fighter, who can block first-strikers, flankers and deathtouchers with impunity. But I suppose it’s Wizards’ fault, really, for making the original batch of Phasing cards underpowered, and then never revisiting the keyword.

I feel there are much better examples, but I wanted to stop thinking about it.

A relatable sentiment.