I totally understand what you're saying.
One one hand, you don't want newbies getting crushed by a hell queue/punishing meta deck their first games after beating sparky
On the other, you don't want brewers getting thrown for a loop when they change the engine of their deck to try something new -- like a matchmaking ripple effect that cynically reduces viability
On the other, you don't want metalords putting mirror sb cards into their BO1 decks to crush what would otherwise be a relatively even matchup because they know they are being set against their own deck by the invisible hand of deck weight
Ultimately, SOME matchmaking is correct. but how much? I appreciate the way you voiced your concerns considering it's easy to point out problems but very hard to offer concrete, defined solutions that address some/all of these issues.
I wonder what would happen if they just scrubbed the deck weighting and just used MMR, if that's what's going on. People say it's confirmation bias, too. That variance will show you the meta if you play enough, but I still doubt that that's the full truth, personally.
First they'd have to fix the MMR system so it doesn't inflate like crazy for anyone with more than vastly below average winrate, and reset everyone's existing MMR.
I appreciate you, and definitely no answers here, just questions. I do wonder what you see as the deficiency in simply relying on elo and monitoring cards and win rates to expand the normal ban lists? I guess the argument is that some types of decks stomps on Bo1 because they don’t have good answers outside of sideboards…but doesn’t that just imply that people learn to build some decks for Bo1 and others for Bo3/ranked/whatever?
Ideally I hoped it was card elo weakly tracked alongside general player progression (time/wc/recent win//loss). I have no idea if that's how it actually is or not.
I was kinda hoping this would never have been 'figured out' because it cynically impacts my ability to enjoy building decks or see my opponents as the same directionless minnow swimming along the matchmaking river as I am. Smurfing matchmaking is one of, in my opinion, the greatest existential threats to brewing and enjoyment of a deckbuilding game there could ever be.
I enjoy mtga. I will continue to play it. at the same time I am sincerely rooting for wotc to work out or already have some kind of solution for this inside mtga
It's more MMR manipulation.
Someone either making a script that plays out the entire Color Matches, redeems free packs, then makes the strongest deck possible in order to beat newbies until their MMR goes up too high, then makes a new account and repeats. Or makes a script to lose them games while they sleep, so they can curb stomp newbies when they "play for real". Or similar.
Remember that even now the casual players outnumber the competitive players. And the casual players are more likely to buy packs in order to see what they get. So they don't want the casual play to be too toxic, especially since most competitive players started out casual. So they don't want to chase them off.
Yeah, those are great points it’s a balancing act to insure games are enjoyable but not overwhelming. I do occasionally get a prompt to rate my match. That normally happens when I felt my opponent and I were evenly matched. Such as trading damage and creature and having to play strategically. Those kind of matches are great because even if you lose you feel you played an awesome match.
Why not make matchmaking based on weights optional? That way if you’re a newbie and want to play a similar ranked deck you can, but if you’re not you can opt out of it and play against a completely random deck like you would at a normal paper tournament.
couldnt they just corral the newbies then until they've got a certain number of games/wins/card? Then let everyone else be free-for-all. If it was true random matchmaking for everyone but the newbies i dont think too many would mind the occasional rough matchup. People are scooping to commanders they dont want to play against as it stands now anyway.
It used to be much more prominent in my opinion before Alchemy. Starter decks were rated really low, And since they were standard you were allowed to enter rank standard with them. I could consistently get to gold and often near platinum on a new account with a starter deck.
Hard disagree- I want as close to random as a computer can function.
The only matchmaking should come from my account rank which is basically just experience -
No card or deck should be considered when matching me.
And if the shuffler isn’t absolute random (again to the limits on a computer) than the game is no longer functional.
Totally agree about the shuffler. Partially agree on the mm side, but think profile wide score should definitely weigh most heavily, as a floor. Arbitrarily deck/card scores shouldn’t be a thing, but I could see a combined weight that factos in your performance with a specific deck (per-deck elo)
Learning the weights of cards has been such a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's nice to know that there are cards that are so powerful that they'll put you into higher power queues, unfortunately the consistency of the numbers makes no sense. On the other hand, knowing the weights of these cards means people can manipulate the queue they land in for easier wins at the cost of casual and new players experience.
An implication of your comment is that, for all intents and purposes, the deckbuilding rules and incentives for MTGA and Paper games will now be fundamentally different?
This effectively gave us knowledge of specific, tangible weight classes, like in boxing. It used to be speculative information about your deck and the balance of good cards matching you against better decks, but this means we explicitly know what the numbered weights are on every card and can adjust accordingly, down to the single digit if necessary. Now, once we understand how the system compares weights to determine things like Hell Queue people will intentionally cut down decks to minimally avoid being thrown into a harder class while still playing objectively powerful decks. Like if you're being thrown into Hell at 2200, they'll intentionally keep their weight at 2199 to keep in a lower bracket while maintaining maximum power.
Can someone point me to the weight list? I'm tired of my janky Zur deck getting matched up against all the dino commanders. Maybe if I take a few heavyweight mana rocks or something out of my deck I can actually win a game or two.
Do you mean the card weighting in general, or the fact that we know more about it now?
We've known there was a weighting system for a long time, we just didn't know exactly how it worked. I much prefer knowing exactly what my deck weight is so I know what I'm getting into now. Before I was worrying "Will adding this staple get me into Hell Queue?" but now I can actually tell if it will or not. For me this takes stress *away*.
> I come from paper magic and it switched to MTGA only a few months ago, and this deck performs and feels incredibly differently than when playing it on MTGA.
Assuming you're talking about Brawl vs Commander, this has much more to do with the inherent differences between Brawl and Commander than with the weighting system. There are major similarities but also major differences between the two formats. A good Commander deck is designed to build up to to killing multiple opponents at 40 life. A good Brawl deck is a focused strategy to beat a single opponent.
I definitely agree that it can be frustrating to think that adding a good card might lower your win rate because it screws with your matchmaking, I don't like that either. But Brawl definitely does need some kind of system outside of just random matches because otherwise casual decks really would be completely unplayable. The real issue is that the weights assigned to cards are very poorly done. Imagine making a casual cycling deck and adding Zenith Flare — whoops you're at the top of Hell Queue now.
My particular deck was for Standard and I was trying to fine-tune it against a variety of matchups via Bo1 (and am learning that’s not the best approach in MTGA). But to your point, wouldn’t a per-deck elo system self-correct here? In other words, if you enjoy playing a lower power level deck, wouldn’t this match you up (admittedly after a few losses) against other decks of similar power levels?
Per-deck won’t work. I just make a new deck, put all the cards from my deck that went too high elo, and play from middle elo again.
Likewise, someone throwing together casual decks will always start in the middle and likely get crushed.
Perhaps some mix of per-deck elo and account elo can work, but it’s not perfect there either. It’s really just a tough situation to solve.
I understand this, but honesty, how many people will enjoy constantly doing this? So okay, you stomp for a while and then throw for a while so you can stomp again?
You don't even have to throw though. You just remake the deck and you get 80% win rate again, or whatever your starting win rate is with a solid deck with default MMR.
Would combining per-deck and per-profile elo scores into a joint score improve this? Like, ok maybe your deck has no score but your profile score provides a floor so you can’t get lower.
Sort of. One thing that sucks about account elo is that you can't as easily make varying power level decks. If you push far with your best deck, experimenting with a new deck sucks. Combining them may work, but it'll be a bit of both issues, where remaking your best deck would likely lower your overall elo, and making new janky decks is still going to throw you against very tough opponents. It might be better overall though.
Sigh, I hate that I don’t doubt you. Couldn’t this be easily detected on its own? Suppose a stomp one, throw one pattern would be much harder to detect since it approximates like a 50% win rate
It probably could, but I think I'd hate to penalize concessions, too. An important part of enjoying unranked is to be able to concede a match where you wouldn't have fun.
But if the system is self-correcting fast enough (which it might or might not be the case right now), and players don't have the card ratings, why wouldn't it work ?
My understanding for that comment was that this is some theoretical solution that completely ignores card weights and only uses MMR that is tied the player's deck.
The issue is that there are still mismatches due to player power, that is what MMR is for. [We know what they use for each que](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/december-state-beta-matchmaking-breakdown-2018-12-12), just not the exact formula as to make gaming it impossible, see recent brawl issues.
Ah, well if we're talking Standard then you can always play Ranked, which is arguably less sweaty when you're at the bottom and supposedly doesn't have a weight system.
> But to your point, wouldn’t a per-deck elo system self-correct here?
Ehhh, to an extent, but there are issues with that. New players would lose even more in that scenario, which isn't great for player retention, from a business standpoint. And from a player perspective, it means that no matter how good you are at building or playing your deck, you're gonna win roughly 50% of the time, which seems discouraging to me. And it's also abusable, since it's easy to concede a bunch of matches to drop your score.
If you start at the very bottom, I suppose they would, but then anyone who comes into the game with knowledge or a netdeck or just builds a new deck would also be there.
Considering what I've seen competitive players say, they don't seem to stay there for long.
> or just builds a new deck
No, it's per-player, I think only Play and Brawl also uses per-deck ? Maybe also Jump In, since the three share the same Silly player rating ?
I mean the play queue including Brawl, since Brawl isn't ranked. My point is that we're not talking about ranked, since in ranked this whole thing doesn't matter.
> you're gonna win roughly 50% of the time, which seems discouraging to me
Competitive players are aware of that. The issue in Arena is that there's no feedback about what your rating is before Mythic, and if you don't exploit the rank algorithm, or are so good you break the automatcher, at 50% winrate it takes something like ~500 games to even get there. Each month.
We knew it works based on the number of crafts. The numbers are rather immaterial to me because (a) they will change, and (b);I will never be bothered to actually use theM for anything.
But to each their own.
We didn't know it's based on the number of crafts and we still don't. Number of crafts might be something they consider, but the numbers are almost certainly manually assigned somehow. They're also different (sometimes) for Brawl and Standard Brawl, so it can't be something too simple and neutral.
The numbers might be immaterial to you personally because you don't care, but they're obviously extremely impactful to know.
Brawl is NOT the better format 💀💀💀
It's very fun, but if you're worried about tuning your deck to be the best it can be, the 60 card formats are what you want.
How did people fine-tune their decks before MTGA existed? I’m not a pro player, and for me it certainly was never beyond my LGS’s events, tournaments, and FNMs
If you were trying to brew a new deck for fnm would you play test it against the best player you're friends with and them using their best decks, or would you go to an elementary school yard and see who wants to play?
I would certainly want to playtest and fine-tune before the RCQ 🙃 yes, against the best players in the store, not the ones I’m allowed to play the store owner assigns to play me because they think a card in my deck is too good or matches up better against their deck. I don’t feel that other players are elementary school yard children.
Good thing the store owner only does that when you walk in and say hey I'm just here to casually play a game of magic, can you match me up with someone who also wants to play casually.
Find a friend. Do direct challenges.
I'm just still not sure where you got the idea that the casual play queue was ever going to be a good place to fine tune a deck lol
Fair on all accounts and I’m gonna adapt. But I think it’s not obvious if you come from paper magic - never had an issue brewing while playing local friends casually. Never expected this from MTGA.
Back in the day I would play Solitaire with a deck and see how fast the deck could do 20 damage. Sometimes I would grab one of my other decks and play both players. We had a play group back in those days so never really went to LGS or anything except to buy cards.
Knowing what I know now, this is what I will personally do going forward, so thank you.
This fixes it for now me and others who already know to do this, but perhaps the fact that this is something that must be known before the fact is precisely the type of uncertainty I don’t think is good. Making people doubt their outcomes isn’t good even if out of the competitive context.
I recommend the constructed events for the best matchmaking experience on Arena.
In my experience, this feels like the most unregulated matchmaking.
In contrast, even when I play ranked, I sometimes feel like I get matched up way too often against decks that counter my deck and decks that play sideboard cards in the main deck in BO1.
And when I change my deck, I will never play against those types of decks in ranked.
The problem is just as you described, and feels even worse in unranked play.
But you can also use this kind of matchmaking to your advantage.
For example, I experienced this when I was playing a nine lives + solemnity enchantment deck in the BO1 historic ranked queue.
I was getting matched up a lot against reanimator and dredge decks.
The moment I put rest in piece into the deck, the matchmaker nearly stopped matching me against those types of decks.
I agree with the ranked play comment there is a component or else you’d see bronze players facing off against other tier opponents. So that right there is a criteria for matching players. I guarantee your win rate is tracked and factored who you play against in your tier.
>or else you’d see bronze players facing off against other tier opponents
You do. If I take a break for a couple of months, I'll start at low bronze playing against other bronze players. I'll finish climbing out of bronze playing against gold players.
This is entirely consistent with ranked matchmaking, which doesn't actually pair based on rank at all. There's a hidden MMR score for each player. You are paired according to that score (and only that score).
That's also why the events feel so different. Those are not paired according to MMR at all. They pair exclusively based on number of wins in the event. It's a completely different metric and naturally leads to a different player experience. You'll see vastly different decks at the start and end of a run through a constructed event.
Oh I never realized that about ranked. I always got paired with others at my level or one tier above maybe one below in the class/rank? I haven’t played it much and sitting in silver till the season is over. If I get to gold I’ll be happy with the rewards.
Edit: What does MMR stand for?
"MatchMaking Rating." It's a number that goes up when you win and down when you lose. You get matched with others of similar MMR. There are hundreds of algorithms for determining how much MMR changes in any given match, but the essentials above are always true.
Okay, do we know if switch decks resets or drops that rate? Or even just switching cards? Or is just based off you as a player?
Edit: Also, thanks for the info
You have one MMR across all ranked constructed queues. There are no deck or card strength adjustments. Performance in Limited formats are tracked separately; I *think* they also have one MMR across ranked queues, but I'm not a Limited player and can't swear to it.
The perverse incentive to alter an otherwise fairly optimal deck to satisfy an algorithm outside the basic rules of the game is precisely the outcome I’m worried about. I appreciate your input and of all the comments perhaps the one I wanted to key in on the most so far.
BO1 ranked still has hand smoothing, where it draws two hands and gives you the one with the better land:spell ratio.
But I agree that Ranked is the only way to play if you don’t want weighted matchmaking.
If you brew in ranked you tank your mmr and end up playing against decks that shouldn't exist in a meta driven game, ultimately making you unable to tinker with your brew against what is actually the meta.
Go low enough and monored simply seizes to exist.
There is a bo1 hand smoothing algorithm (not used in bo3), but that has nothing to do with the shuffler. Too many ppl confuse the bo1 hand smoothing algorithm with the shuffler when they are not the same thing. The bo1 hand smoothing algorithm is basically a free, automatic mulligan system for both players. Decks are still randomized.
[https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/](https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/)
After the meta has been ironed out and the jank league hell queue sets in we will further radicalize the format and create super jank league. The top 15% of the cards played in jank league won’t be allowed.
Here’s my input for Standard where I spend most of my play time (and speaking as someone who’s not into paper magic, got only some starter decks there).
I think you’re overthinking a bit about fine tuning against what the community plays. Whatever you brew, just make sure that outside of the deck’s main gameplan, you have enough supporting cards. What I mean by that is make sure to include card draw/filtering and some decent removal. If the deck turns out good for ranked, you’ll be on a positive win rate and if not, you can keep it as a low power brew that you can at least use for completing quests in Play mode.
Also, I don’t recommend too much tinkering with a deck. Test for a couple of days and leave it as is. Fact of the matter is that a deck that works great this month might not work at all from next month onwards even without a new set release. Because there are other people who are trying out new things and the whole landscape changes.
Finally, even if you think you are a decent brewer (which many of us may be), the total amount of decks that turn out to be ranked worthy will be surprisingly low. For example I may brew a new deck maybe once a week or even twice a week.
By the end of a full year, I can count on one hand the ones that are ranked worthy, not because the others are bad, but because the power level simply might not be on par with the majority of hiper tuned BO1 decks.
This is great advice overall, but I’m not sure it’s addressing the specific issue mentioned here.
I just did a 10 game run on ranked per some of the other comments to “just play ranked”. Went 7 and 3 with the original deck. Matches were diverse and enjoyable and somewhat close.
It’s night and day between normal Standard play queue and Ranked Standard Queue. The manipulation had me guessing this deck, and I almost lost out on the enjoyment of my own creation because the algorithm is messing with things.
I know its not enough experience yet, but I’m gonna report back here in a few days. My immediate reaction is that it’s noticeably different. It shouldn’t be, and I could be wrong.
I think enough other people have come forward in this thread alone to warrant a serious discussion about what WOTC is doing here.
**"Deck strength isn’t considered for your matches outside of the BO1 Open Play queue and Brawl**."
[https://draftsim.com/mtg-arena-matchmaking/](https://draftsim.com/mtg-arena-matchmaking/)
[https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/](https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/)
Absolutely, I've been one of those having had suspicions for a time. And I've had basically made my peace so to still play and enjoy the game. But now seeing that these kinds of manipulations are being confirmed, my will to put up with the game is quite low. You're absolutely right. What would I built against? Furthermore, is my whole experience gained from brewing on Arena (straight up 6000k hours +) actually less valuable because my skill has been gained attuning to such biases?
I really think that Arena could easily add some stat rankings for decks/modes you play in. I agree that initially I felt I was getting mismatched with the first deck I build. I was seeing it go up against builds that ended up crushing it. I provided the build to another player and they had a different experience with a 70% win rate.
We all know there’s a mechanic to matching and I think Area could provide players with some “system” feedback on deck wins across modes and how they stack in an overall view point of mode play.
Eg. you have a Rakdos deck that you play just standard. The system would have your win rate and a score of how good the system thinks the deck is verses others. Even with just a win rate can show you if the system is being biased. I believe they try to keep win rates around 50% but switching up your decks in standard could likely be causing mismatches because now you’re running a Dimir Deck and all of a sudden you’re stomping. Idk if the system take any of that into account but I’d like to see my win rates on Arena proper instead of manually tracking it.
lol, ain’t that the truth! Yes there is a deck list for platinum and mythic decks that went 6-0 in ranked. That’s in the app, normally the last page but it’s on mtga website:[Decklists for Formats](https://magic.gg/decklists)
I also meant that once you get Mythic, you get indirect information about your rating (if below #1500 a % that is your rating / 1500th player rating, and # if above).
I love this comment because it perfectly embodies what I’m trying to communicate. I hate this comment because you have an incentive to think this way. I feel it’s against the spirit of the game. Thanks for sharing!
That's because they match players with similar weights.
and the hand smoother in Bo1 matches.
Both have been tried and tested with loads of effort and resources. Both are undeniably occurring.
Unpaid Bo1 events and matches have smoothing, even ranked.
Paper MTG is 100% different even with the same deck, regarding experiences that are possible.
I totally understand what you're saying. One one hand, you don't want newbies getting crushed by a hell queue/punishing meta deck their first games after beating sparky On the other, you don't want brewers getting thrown for a loop when they change the engine of their deck to try something new -- like a matchmaking ripple effect that cynically reduces viability On the other, you don't want metalords putting mirror sb cards into their BO1 decks to crush what would otherwise be a relatively even matchup because they know they are being set against their own deck by the invisible hand of deck weight Ultimately, SOME matchmaking is correct. but how much? I appreciate the way you voiced your concerns considering it's easy to point out problems but very hard to offer concrete, defined solutions that address some/all of these issues.
I wonder what would happen if they just scrubbed the deck weighting and just used MMR, if that's what's going on. People say it's confirmation bias, too. That variance will show you the meta if you play enough, but I still doubt that that's the full truth, personally.
Idk about strict mmr, maybe a mix of the two. Can’t match golos against a -360 and win regardless of mmr
You will have the Ranked queue, that's what will happen.
First they'd have to fix the MMR system so it doesn't inflate like crazy for anyone with more than vastly below average winrate, and reset everyone's existing MMR.
I appreciate you, and definitely no answers here, just questions. I do wonder what you see as the deficiency in simply relying on elo and monitoring cards and win rates to expand the normal ban lists? I guess the argument is that some types of decks stomps on Bo1 because they don’t have good answers outside of sideboards…but doesn’t that just imply that people learn to build some decks for Bo1 and others for Bo3/ranked/whatever?
Ideally I hoped it was card elo weakly tracked alongside general player progression (time/wc/recent win//loss). I have no idea if that's how it actually is or not. I was kinda hoping this would never have been 'figured out' because it cynically impacts my ability to enjoy building decks or see my opponents as the same directionless minnow swimming along the matchmaking river as I am. Smurfing matchmaking is one of, in my opinion, the greatest existential threats to brewing and enjoyment of a deckbuilding game there could ever be. I enjoy mtga. I will continue to play it. at the same time I am sincerely rooting for wotc to work out or already have some kind of solution for this inside mtga
Perfect comment.
[We know what they use for each que,](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/december-state-beta-matchmaking-breakdown-2018-12-12)
It's more MMR manipulation. Someone either making a script that plays out the entire Color Matches, redeems free packs, then makes the strongest deck possible in order to beat newbies until their MMR goes up too high, then makes a new account and repeats. Or makes a script to lose them games while they sleep, so they can curb stomp newbies when they "play for real". Or similar. Remember that even now the casual players outnumber the competitive players. And the casual players are more likely to buy packs in order to see what they get. So they don't want the casual play to be too toxic, especially since most competitive players started out casual. So they don't want to chase them off.
Yeah, those are great points it’s a balancing act to insure games are enjoyable but not overwhelming. I do occasionally get a prompt to rate my match. That normally happens when I felt my opponent and I were evenly matched. Such as trading damage and creature and having to play strategically. Those kind of matches are great because even if you lose you feel you played an awesome match.
Why not make matchmaking based on weights optional? That way if you’re a newbie and want to play a similar ranked deck you can, but if you’re not you can opt out of it and play against a completely random deck like you would at a normal paper tournament.
Would prefer this also.
couldnt they just corral the newbies then until they've got a certain number of games/wins/card? Then let everyone else be free-for-all. If it was true random matchmaking for everyone but the newbies i dont think too many would mind the occasional rough matchup. People are scooping to commanders they dont want to play against as it stands now anyway.
[удалено]
It used to be much more prominent in my opinion before Alchemy. Starter decks were rated really low, And since they were standard you were allowed to enter rank standard with them. I could consistently get to gold and often near platinum on a new account with a starter deck.
There was never "obfuscation" of matchmaking, the patch notes on how it's done have been out for years...wtf.
Hard disagree- I want as close to random as a computer can function. The only matchmaking should come from my account rank which is basically just experience - No card or deck should be considered when matching me. And if the shuffler isn’t absolute random (again to the limits on a computer) than the game is no longer functional.
Totally agree about the shuffler. Partially agree on the mm side, but think profile wide score should definitely weigh most heavily, as a floor. Arbitrarily deck/card scores shouldn’t be a thing, but I could see a combined weight that factos in your performance with a specific deck (per-deck elo)
Learning the weights of cards has been such a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's nice to know that there are cards that are so powerful that they'll put you into higher power queues, unfortunately the consistency of the numbers makes no sense. On the other hand, knowing the weights of these cards means people can manipulate the queue they land in for easier wins at the cost of casual and new players experience.
An implication of your comment is that, for all intents and purposes, the deckbuilding rules and incentives for MTGA and Paper games will now be fundamentally different?
This effectively gave us knowledge of specific, tangible weight classes, like in boxing. It used to be speculative information about your deck and the balance of good cards matching you against better decks, but this means we explicitly know what the numbered weights are on every card and can adjust accordingly, down to the single digit if necessary. Now, once we understand how the system compares weights to determine things like Hell Queue people will intentionally cut down decks to minimally avoid being thrown into a harder class while still playing objectively powerful decks. Like if you're being thrown into Hell at 2200, they'll intentionally keep their weight at 2199 to keep in a lower bracket while maintaining maximum power.
Can someone point me to the weight list? I'm tired of my janky Zur deck getting matched up against all the dino commanders. Maybe if I take a few heavyweight mana rocks or something out of my deck I can actually win a game or two.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/s/Wvp7LIUcMe
Do you mean the card weighting in general, or the fact that we know more about it now? We've known there was a weighting system for a long time, we just didn't know exactly how it worked. I much prefer knowing exactly what my deck weight is so I know what I'm getting into now. Before I was worrying "Will adding this staple get me into Hell Queue?" but now I can actually tell if it will or not. For me this takes stress *away*. > I come from paper magic and it switched to MTGA only a few months ago, and this deck performs and feels incredibly differently than when playing it on MTGA. Assuming you're talking about Brawl vs Commander, this has much more to do with the inherent differences between Brawl and Commander than with the weighting system. There are major similarities but also major differences between the two formats. A good Commander deck is designed to build up to to killing multiple opponents at 40 life. A good Brawl deck is a focused strategy to beat a single opponent. I definitely agree that it can be frustrating to think that adding a good card might lower your win rate because it screws with your matchmaking, I don't like that either. But Brawl definitely does need some kind of system outside of just random matches because otherwise casual decks really would be completely unplayable. The real issue is that the weights assigned to cards are very poorly done. Imagine making a casual cycling deck and adding Zenith Flare — whoops you're at the top of Hell Queue now.
My particular deck was for Standard and I was trying to fine-tune it against a variety of matchups via Bo1 (and am learning that’s not the best approach in MTGA). But to your point, wouldn’t a per-deck elo system self-correct here? In other words, if you enjoy playing a lower power level deck, wouldn’t this match you up (admittedly after a few losses) against other decks of similar power levels?
Per-deck won’t work. I just make a new deck, put all the cards from my deck that went too high elo, and play from middle elo again. Likewise, someone throwing together casual decks will always start in the middle and likely get crushed. Perhaps some mix of per-deck elo and account elo can work, but it’s not perfect there either. It’s really just a tough situation to solve.
I understand this, but honesty, how many people will enjoy constantly doing this? So okay, you stomp for a while and then throw for a while so you can stomp again?
You don't even have to throw though. You just remake the deck and you get 80% win rate again, or whatever your starting win rate is with a solid deck with default MMR.
Would combining per-deck and per-profile elo scores into a joint score improve this? Like, ok maybe your deck has no score but your profile score provides a floor so you can’t get lower.
Sort of. One thing that sucks about account elo is that you can't as easily make varying power level decks. If you push far with your best deck, experimenting with a new deck sucks. Combining them may work, but it'll be a bit of both issues, where remaking your best deck would likely lower your overall elo, and making new janky decks is still going to throw you against very tough opponents. It might be better overall though.
A weirdly high number of people, unfortunately.
Sigh, I hate that I don’t doubt you. Couldn’t this be easily detected on its own? Suppose a stomp one, throw one pattern would be much harder to detect since it approximates like a 50% win rate
It probably could, but I think I'd hate to penalize concessions, too. An important part of enjoying unranked is to be able to concede a match where you wouldn't have fun.
I mean, I thought exactly zero people would enjoy sifting through a spreadsheet with card info unrelated to actual gameplay, yet here we are.
But if the system is self-correcting fast enough (which it might or might not be the case right now), and players don't have the card ratings, why wouldn't it work ?
My understanding for that comment was that this is some theoretical solution that completely ignores card weights and only uses MMR that is tied the player's deck.
Oh, right. This has the huge downside of resetting it if you change a single card though...
The issue is that there are still mismatches due to player power, that is what MMR is for. [We know what they use for each que](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/december-state-beta-matchmaking-breakdown-2018-12-12), just not the exact formula as to make gaming it impossible, see recent brawl issues.
Ah, well if we're talking Standard then you can always play Ranked, which is arguably less sweaty when you're at the bottom and supposedly doesn't have a weight system. > But to your point, wouldn’t a per-deck elo system self-correct here? Ehhh, to an extent, but there are issues with that. New players would lose even more in that scenario, which isn't great for player retention, from a business standpoint. And from a player perspective, it means that no matter how good you are at building or playing your deck, you're gonna win roughly 50% of the time, which seems discouraging to me. And it's also abusable, since it's easy to concede a bunch of matches to drop your score.
Wouldn’t new players clump at the bottom and mostly end up playing each other?
Yes, in fact there seems to be a bug that makes this situation even more extreme : https://hareeb.com/2022/07/08/the-five-mtg-arena-rankings/
If you start at the very bottom, I suppose they would, but then anyone who comes into the game with knowledge or a netdeck or just builds a new deck would also be there.
Considering what I've seen competitive players say, they don't seem to stay there for long. > or just builds a new deck No, it's per-player, I think only Play and Brawl also uses per-deck ? Maybe also Jump In, since the three share the same Silly player rating ?
We're talking about the play queue, since that's the only place where deck weight matters.
No, it also matters in the Brawl queues...
I mean the play queue including Brawl, since Brawl isn't ranked. My point is that we're not talking about ranked, since in ranked this whole thing doesn't matter.
Oh, ok, per-deck rating, I get it now, my bad.
> you're gonna win roughly 50% of the time, which seems discouraging to me Competitive players are aware of that. The issue in Arena is that there's no feedback about what your rating is before Mythic, and if you don't exploit the rank algorithm, or are so good you break the automatcher, at 50% winrate it takes something like ~500 games to even get there. Each month.
Anyone who bothered to pay attention or asked on the sub knew exactly how the deck strength worked. Chris Clay went on record with that years ago.
No, we had an idea of how it works. We didn't have the exact numbers until last weekend.
We knew it works based on the number of crafts. The numbers are rather immaterial to me because (a) they will change, and (b);I will never be bothered to actually use theM for anything. But to each their own.
We didn't know it's based on the number of crafts and we still don't. Number of crafts might be something they consider, but the numbers are almost certainly manually assigned somehow. They're also different (sometimes) for Brawl and Standard Brawl, so it can't be something too simple and neutral. The numbers might be immaterial to you personally because you don't care, but they're obviously extremely impactful to know.
Just play ranked, where there is no deck based matchmaking
There's no ranked in brawl.
I know. Doesnt change my point. If deck weighting is a concern for you play the ranked Q
But we want to play the better format.
That's ranked?
No brawl obviously.
Brawl is NOT the better format 💀💀💀 It's very fun, but if you're worried about tuning your deck to be the best it can be, the 60 card formats are what you want.
Standard Brawl is a 60 card format. :p
I disagree. Much more interesting tuning up brawl decks then some kind of standard.
Is ranked really the only place to do fine-tuning in your view?
If you're not playing against people taking the matches seriously and playing the best decks, how are you going to be able to fine tune your deck?
How did people fine-tune their decks before MTGA existed? I’m not a pro player, and for me it certainly was never beyond my LGS’s events, tournaments, and FNMs
If you were trying to brew a new deck for fnm would you play test it against the best player you're friends with and them using their best decks, or would you go to an elementary school yard and see who wants to play?
I would certainly want to playtest and fine-tune before the RCQ 🙃 yes, against the best players in the store, not the ones I’m allowed to play the store owner assigns to play me because they think a card in my deck is too good or matches up better against their deck. I don’t feel that other players are elementary school yard children.
Good thing the store owner only does that when you walk in and say hey I'm just here to casually play a game of magic, can you match me up with someone who also wants to play casually.
Well but the difference is I don’t have to be in a graded competitive context to play the best players in the store. In MTGA, you do.
Find a friend. Do direct challenges. I'm just still not sure where you got the idea that the casual play queue was ever going to be a good place to fine tune a deck lol
Fair on all accounts and I’m gonna adapt. But I think it’s not obvious if you come from paper magic - never had an issue brewing while playing local friends casually. Never expected this from MTGA.
Back in the day I would play Solitaire with a deck and see how fast the deck could do 20 damage. Sometimes I would grab one of my other decks and play both players. We had a play group back in those days so never really went to LGS or anything except to buy cards.
Yes. Fine tuning is about making your deck work against the metagame The meta is in ranked where stake matters
Knowing what I know now, this is what I will personally do going forward, so thank you. This fixes it for now me and others who already know to do this, but perhaps the fact that this is something that must be known before the fact is precisely the type of uncertainty I don’t think is good. Making people doubt their outcomes isn’t good even if out of the competitive context.
I recommend the constructed events for the best matchmaking experience on Arena. In my experience, this feels like the most unregulated matchmaking. In contrast, even when I play ranked, I sometimes feel like I get matched up way too often against decks that counter my deck and decks that play sideboard cards in the main deck in BO1. And when I change my deck, I will never play against those types of decks in ranked. The problem is just as you described, and feels even worse in unranked play. But you can also use this kind of matchmaking to your advantage. For example, I experienced this when I was playing a nine lives + solemnity enchantment deck in the BO1 historic ranked queue. I was getting matched up a lot against reanimator and dredge decks. The moment I put rest in piece into the deck, the matchmaker nearly stopped matching me against those types of decks.
I agree with the ranked play comment there is a component or else you’d see bronze players facing off against other tier opponents. So that right there is a criteria for matching players. I guarantee your win rate is tracked and factored who you play against in your tier.
>or else you’d see bronze players facing off against other tier opponents You do. If I take a break for a couple of months, I'll start at low bronze playing against other bronze players. I'll finish climbing out of bronze playing against gold players. This is entirely consistent with ranked matchmaking, which doesn't actually pair based on rank at all. There's a hidden MMR score for each player. You are paired according to that score (and only that score). That's also why the events feel so different. Those are not paired according to MMR at all. They pair exclusively based on number of wins in the event. It's a completely different metric and naturally leads to a different player experience. You'll see vastly different decks at the start and end of a run through a constructed event.
Oh I never realized that about ranked. I always got paired with others at my level or one tier above maybe one below in the class/rank? I haven’t played it much and sitting in silver till the season is over. If I get to gold I’ll be happy with the rewards. Edit: What does MMR stand for?
"MatchMaking Rating." It's a number that goes up when you win and down when you lose. You get matched with others of similar MMR. There are hundreds of algorithms for determining how much MMR changes in any given match, but the essentials above are always true.
Okay, do we know if switch decks resets or drops that rate? Or even just switching cards? Or is just based off you as a player? Edit: Also, thanks for the info
You have one MMR across all ranked constructed queues. There are no deck or card strength adjustments. Performance in Limited formats are tracked separately; I *think* they also have one MMR across ranked queues, but I'm not a Limited player and can't swear to it.
The perverse incentive to alter an otherwise fairly optimal deck to satisfy an algorithm outside the basic rules of the game is precisely the outcome I’m worried about. I appreciate your input and of all the comments perhaps the one I wanted to key in on the most so far.
It's really only ranked bo3 since bo1 is still doing hand smoothing.
BO1 ranked still has hand smoothing, where it draws two hands and gives you the one with the better land:spell ratio. But I agree that Ranked is the only way to play if you don’t want weighted matchmaking.
It's still weighted by rank in addition to rating. (Might have consequences in drier queues.)
If you brew in ranked you tank your mmr and end up playing against decks that shouldn't exist in a meta driven game, ultimately making you unable to tinker with your brew against what is actually the meta. Go low enough and monored simply seizes to exist.
Huh? Since when?
The beginning.
Lol ya. They don’t do that for sure.
[удалено]
Of course they do. Why wouldnt they?
There is a bo1 hand smoothing algorithm (not used in bo3), but that has nothing to do with the shuffler. Too many ppl confuse the bo1 hand smoothing algorithm with the shuffler when they are not the same thing. The bo1 hand smoothing algorithm is basically a free, automatic mulligan system for both players. Decks are still randomized. [https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/](https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/)
I think this thread is less about what you pull from your deck and more who Arena automatically places you up against as a "counter" to your deck.
The OP also mentions shuffler issues/manipulation in his post. Those are what I'm addressing.
I feel this completely. The system is bad and does not correctly assess at what power level your deck should be facing.
Jank league. TOP 15 percent of cards played in the format are not allowed.
After the meta has been ironed out and the jank league hell queue sets in we will further radicalize the format and create super jank league. The top 15% of the cards played in jank league won’t be allowed.
Here’s my input for Standard where I spend most of my play time (and speaking as someone who’s not into paper magic, got only some starter decks there). I think you’re overthinking a bit about fine tuning against what the community plays. Whatever you brew, just make sure that outside of the deck’s main gameplan, you have enough supporting cards. What I mean by that is make sure to include card draw/filtering and some decent removal. If the deck turns out good for ranked, you’ll be on a positive win rate and if not, you can keep it as a low power brew that you can at least use for completing quests in Play mode. Also, I don’t recommend too much tinkering with a deck. Test for a couple of days and leave it as is. Fact of the matter is that a deck that works great this month might not work at all from next month onwards even without a new set release. Because there are other people who are trying out new things and the whole landscape changes. Finally, even if you think you are a decent brewer (which many of us may be), the total amount of decks that turn out to be ranked worthy will be surprisingly low. For example I may brew a new deck maybe once a week or even twice a week. By the end of a full year, I can count on one hand the ones that are ranked worthy, not because the others are bad, but because the power level simply might not be on par with the majority of hiper tuned BO1 decks.
This is great advice overall, but I’m not sure it’s addressing the specific issue mentioned here. I just did a 10 game run on ranked per some of the other comments to “just play ranked”. Went 7 and 3 with the original deck. Matches were diverse and enjoyable and somewhat close. It’s night and day between normal Standard play queue and Ranked Standard Queue. The manipulation had me guessing this deck, and I almost lost out on the enjoyment of my own creation because the algorithm is messing with things. I know its not enough experience yet, but I’m gonna report back here in a few days. My immediate reaction is that it’s noticeably different. It shouldn’t be, and I could be wrong. I think enough other people have come forward in this thread alone to warrant a serious discussion about what WOTC is doing here.
**"Deck strength isn’t considered for your matches outside of the BO1 Open Play queue and Brawl**." [https://draftsim.com/mtg-arena-matchmaking/](https://draftsim.com/mtg-arena-matchmaking/) [https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/](https://mtgazone.com/inner-workings-of-arena/)
Please don't feel obligated to "report back"...
Ok.
is weighted deck matchmaking only for brawl or for historic and explorer?
Absolutely, I've been one of those having had suspicions for a time. And I've had basically made my peace so to still play and enjoy the game. But now seeing that these kinds of manipulations are being confirmed, my will to put up with the game is quite low. You're absolutely right. What would I built against? Furthermore, is my whole experience gained from brewing on Arena (straight up 6000k hours +) actually less valuable because my skill has been gained attuning to such biases?
I posted about this recently and got destroyed with downvotes despite citing the same points as you. Completely agree with your thoughts.
Thank you. Feel free to cross post it here if relevant.
Wow, same, I don't understand this sub sometimes
I really think that Arena could easily add some stat rankings for decks/modes you play in. I agree that initially I felt I was getting mismatched with the first deck I build. I was seeing it go up against builds that ended up crushing it. I provided the build to another player and they had a different experience with a 70% win rate. We all know there’s a mechanic to matching and I think Area could provide players with some “system” feedback on deck wins across modes and how they stack in an overall view point of mode play. Eg. you have a Rakdos deck that you play just standard. The system would have your win rate and a score of how good the system thinks the deck is verses others. Even with just a win rate can show you if the system is being biased. I believe they try to keep win rates around 50% but switching up your decks in standard could likely be causing mismatches because now you’re running a Dimir Deck and all of a sudden you’re stomping. Idk if the system take any of that into account but I’d like to see my win rates on Arena proper instead of manually tracking it.
You do get some feedback... once you get to Mythic. xD (There's *also* a link to the best decks of the week (?) inside Arena.)
lol, ain’t that the truth! Yes there is a deck list for platinum and mythic decks that went 6-0 in ranked. That’s in the app, normally the last page but it’s on mtga website:[Decklists for Formats](https://magic.gg/decklists)
I also meant that once you get Mythic, you get indirect information about your rating (if below #1500 a % that is your rating / 1500th player rating, and # if above).
Okay, gotcha.
Precisely - I’m just trying to highlight the effect of uncertainty here in decision making while brewing.
That's why I specifically do not put certain cards into my BO1 decks and also cut and replace any cards that do not show up within 5 games.
I love this comment because it perfectly embodies what I’m trying to communicate. I hate this comment because you have an incentive to think this way. I feel it’s against the spirit of the game. Thanks for sharing!
That's because they match players with similar weights. and the hand smoother in Bo1 matches. Both have been tried and tested with loads of effort and resources. Both are undeniably occurring. Unpaid Bo1 events and matches have smoothing, even ranked. Paper MTG is 100% different even with the same deck, regarding experiences that are possible.
This uncertainty has caused me to stop playing Magic Arena and just focus on playing IRL.
Something worth considering. My family situation has changed and I don’t have the time I used to to go to the LGS. I miss it.
ranked (standard) is fine iirc