Yeah, but they can go up to four copies of Yotian Frontliner. It’s not as good, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to sink the deck. And that’s assuming that neither color gets an artifact-producing one-drop in the next set. Or lands that make it viable to go into a third color for Spyglass Siren.

I hope it’s not a constructed format, because I found a three-card game-winning combo pretty quickly: Sanguine Bond plus Exquisite Blood plus any way to gain life, like Honden of Cleansing Fire or the last mode of Glorious Sunrise. Just put one of each of those cards plus 57 lands in a deck and you can have your combo assembled by turn 4.

Interesting that they considered banning Atraxa or Knight-Errant from Standard. While I wouldn’t shed a tear for either one, I can’t honestly say that the format is unbalanced right now. Those decks are strong but beatable, and their metagame shares are reasonable.

In fact, I’ve been playing Poison Burn for so long that I actually look forward to facing Domain Ramp. And I think losing the triomes, and thus the potential for turn-two Leylines, will slow the deck down by a lot.

On the other hand, I don’t understand the argument that losing Voldaren Epicure will significantly hurt Boros Convoke. I hardly ever see that deck play Knight-Errant on turn 2, and yet I still lose to it plenty. If I could ban one card from the deck, I’d choose Imodane’s Recruiter, or maybe Warden of the Inner Sky.

The Midweek Magic page hasn’t been updated yet to explain what “Historic Chimil” is, but assuming it’s a format with the Historic card pool where everybody starts with a Chimil emblem, what do we think the strategy is? Just stuff a deck with busted five-drops, right? Do you even need lands? Maybe if you want to put some of the discovered cards in your hand for later use. Or will it be a Momir-like format where you just get a random Historic-legal spell with mana value <= 5 each turn?

before we put our children onto the battlefield, not ‘create’ them like some rules committees would have you believe.

A real Magic fundamentalist would put them into play.

Forbidden Orchard seems like a natural fit.

The article says:

the matchmaking we’re discussing today only applies to the Best-of-One play queues … and does not apply to Ranked play, Best-of-Three play, premier events, or events that have win/loss targets.

Interesting that they exclude casual Bo3. What exactly does that mean? I could see an argument that deck weighting is less important in a format where you have access to sideboards. But they must still do player-skill-based MMR, right? Casual play would surely be a nightmare without it.

We know from the Reddit spreadsheets that they have separate weighting for Standard Brawl and Historic Brawl. I’d bet that each format – Standard, Explorer, Alchemy, etc. – has its own set of weights. The reason we only know the weights for Brawl is because only commanders can have negative weights. So no Explorer deck, for example, can ever fail to validate because of a negative total weight.

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.

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.

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.

Commander
The Mycotyrant

Deck
1 Blightreaper Thallid
3 Swamp
3 Forest
1 Deathcap Marionette
1 Skullcap Snail
1 Synapse Necromage
1 Soul Enervation
1 Deathbonnet Sprout
1 Placid Rottentail
1 Cankerbloom
1 Tendril of the Mycotyrant
1 Spore Crawler
1 The Skullspore Nexus
1 Akawalli, the Seething Tower
1 Bortuk Bonerattle
1 Nemata, Primeval Warden
1 Insidious Roots
1 Chalk Outline
1 Rubblebelt Maverick
1 Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler
1 Lively Dirge
1 Plaza of Heroes
1 Underground Mortuary
1 Faerie Dreamthief
1 Ichor Drinker
1 Snarling Gorehound
1 Bitter Triumph
1 Riveteers Overlook
1 Argoth, Sanctum of Nature
1 Crawling Infestation
1 Tear Asunder
1 Command Tower
1 Uurg, Spawn of Turg
1 Blooming Marsh
1 Deathcap Glade
1 Festering Gulch
1 Haunted Mire
1 Jungle Hollow
1 Llanowar Wastes
1 Archpriest of Shadows
1 Coati Scavenger
1 Badlands Revival
1 Eerie Soultender
1 Audience with Trostani
1 Terror of Towashi
1 Bringer of the Last Gift
1 Evolving Wilds
1 Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
1 Boseiju, Who Endures
1 Arcane Signet
1 Mirrex
1 Chupacabra Echo
1 Branch of Vitu-Ghazi
1 Conduit Pylons
1 Drannith Ruins

Total deck weight: 0
Maindeck weight: 360
Rares: 16
Mythics: 2

No card in this deck has a greater weight than 9. I had to cut lands just to get the deck weight up to 0 (would rather be running 24, replaced a couple with mana-producing two-drops). Update: found a couple of 9-point utility lands I hadn’t been using, so we’re back up to 24 now.

I started looking at the low-weight commanders and The Mycotyrant caught my eye. Friends, it is low for a reason. There are not a lot of Fungi or Saprolings in the format. I decided to mash it up with the Insidious Roots combo deck that never really took off in Standard. Just try to keep things moving in and out of your graveyard. The list probably still needs some tweaking. I would have liked more removal, but didn’t want to run too many non-permanents, since we’re trying to Descend and then recur them.

One of the most interesting lines: cast Lively Dirge, burying a Coati Scavenger, get back the Scavenger and a random one-drop, then get back something else with the Scavenger’s ability.

I won a few games so I guess I can’t complain too loudly, but this didn’t really get me into the kind of match-ups I was hoping for. Still plenty of power on the opponent’s side of the board. But it’s not WotC’s fault if nobody else is out there playing decks like this; I’m sure the algorithm did the best it could. I feel like I had to wait a little longer than usual to find opponents, but still less than a minute.

I’ve been experimenting with building low-weight decks for Standard Brawl. Some observations (which may not necessarily apply to Historic Brawl):

• As far as the maindeck goes, it looks like the lowest (non-zero) weight is 6 and the highest is 45. All weights are multiples of 3 and most are multiples of 9.
• I don’t think the card pool is deep enough to build a coherent deck of all sixes, but I’d love for someone to show me I’m wrong.
• It seems like 0 is the minimum weight for the deck to “validate”. This is an issue because some commanders have negative weights. (No cards have negative weights when they’re in the maindeck.)
  • Honestly, it’s poor planning that exposed the weighting system; it was entirely foreseeable that sooner or later someone would submit a deck with a negative total weight, if only for laughs.
• If a card weighs less than you think it should, there’s no incentive not to use it. Building a low-weight deck is not the same as building, say, a Pauper or Peasant deck; there are definitely some rare cards with splashy effects that can be had for cheap under the weighting system.
• This Zur, Eternal Schemer list that I posted a while back has a weight of 729 (ish; I might have tweaked it some in the interim). More recently I built (and have been doing well with) a Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds deck that weighs in at 1,152.
• Evolving Wilds has a weight of 9. Terramorphic Expanse has a weight of 0.

I assume there’s little or no human intervention in assigning weights. More likely they’re determined programmatically by observing the win ratios of decks containing the card.

When they started doing borderless cards and showcase art, I thought they were going to use those things as an excuse to stop printing foils. “Let’s face it, we’ve never been able to figure out how to make foils that last, but it’s okay because we’ve got multiple other cool, popular premium treatments to take their place.” But here we are years later and they’re just… still printing foils? Even though they don’t have to?

If I were in a draft and got passed a foil and non-foil version of the same card, I would most likely take the non-foil.

It’s worth mentioning that at the time Cranial Plating was first banned, Ornithopter was not legal in Pauper (it was on MTGO but only at uncommon). As Alex says, [[Somber Hoverguard]] was the best Plating-bearer, and you couldn’t realistically be swinging with it sooner than turn 4, although you could easily hit for a third or more of the opponent’s life total when you did. Now Ornithopter is legal and you could do the equivalent with a Cranial Ram on turn 3.

I think between the mana cost and the equip cost(s), Ram is slower than Plating by enough that it’s worth a trial. I won’t be shocked or sorry if it gets banned, but I also won’t be surprised if it turns out to be safe.

This set looks powerful … will we see Historic bans on day one?
Most Modern Horizons 3 cards will be legal in Historic and fewer than 20 will be pre-banned. We’ll let players know what ones before the set releases.

“Fewer than 20”?? They are trying to make that sound like it’s not a big deal, and failing. Any number of pre-banned cards is a big deal. The fact that there is a double-digit number of cards in MH3 that are so powerful Wizards doesn’t dare let them see the light of day in Arena’s second most powerful format is jaw-dropping.

As someone who rarely plays older formats, the only reward I value in here is the draft token. Drafts normally cost 1,500 gems. Unlocking the Horizon Hideaway costs 2,300 gems. Are a bunch of cosmetics, mostly for cards I won’t play often, worth 800 gems to me? When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like they should be. I guess we’ll see what they look like?

The Ashling avatar looks pretty cool, although I prefer my avatar not to be a named character (currently using the Dreadhorde one).

There are some things you don’t put in error messages; guess the Arena developers just learned that the hard way.

I’m actually glad that they try to do some kind of weighting, although as the Reddit threads say, there are apparently a lot of mis-weighted cards. I’m wondering if I can use this to build a deck full of draft chaff and get myself matched against similar things.

You might be on to something there. Expanding into white would also let us replace Scorching Shot with better removal, like Get Lost. I’ll give it a try…

When they announced Pioneer I assumed it was going to be the revival of Extended. I couldn’t, and still can’t, fathom why they chose to make another non-rotating format. It’s just Modern Jr., and with every passing year the difference between them becomes smaller. I’d be much more interested in a six- or eight-year rotating format. It could target newer players who have smaller collections but are turned off by the churn of Standard.

Yeah, there’s been an Affinity deck in Pauper for as long as the format has existed. I have no concerns that banning All That Glitters, a relatively recent addition, might change that.