I’m not just being cynical when I say that the point is that Wizards won’t make enough money if your collection fills up too efficiently. I guess they might say something like “we want the experience of opening digital packs to closely mirror paper”. But if you pursue this line of questioning you pretty quickly end up at “why doesn’t everybody just get four free copies of every card so personal wealth isn’t a factor in deckbuilding?” And the answer is that that’s not WotC’s business model. They have to make money – even if we set aside the matter of profit, they have to fund maintenance & development somehow – and selling you packs that aren’t guaranteed to contain anything you need is part of how they stay afloat.

Maybe the more pertinent question is “how do they justify selling you things they know you don’t need?” If we’re asking about Arena, duplicate commons and uncommons contribute to your Vault progress, and periodically you’ll get to open your Vault and get six extra wildcards. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. If we’re asking about MTGO, theoretically you can trade your excess cards or sell them to bots, though typically for less than a penny apiece.

“My other car is a brushwagg.”

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.

That’s the only place to report bugs that I know of. I’ve been able to submit reports in the past, and it looks like other people are submitting reports today, so it’s probably not a general problem. Have you tried using another browser or OS?

I went 3-0 with this deck and every win was because the opponent gave up early. If they could have seen the junk in my hand they probably would have played on.

Then I took a powered-up version of it into the ranked queue and did not do as well. I think Standard is way too fast for this kind of thing these days.

I think it’s unusual for the “new set constructed” Midweek Magic event to start the same day as the set comes out. If you want to play in the event without spending a lot, here’s a mono-blue flash deck I threw together that (a) uses no rares and (b) uses a lot of cards you might already have from earlier sets. I obviously haven’t tested it. Might be terrible.

4 Opt
3 Unsummon
4 Spectral Sailor
4 Brineborn Cutthroat
2 Essence Scatter
2 Negate
3 Into the Roil
3 Think Twice
4 Faebloom Trick
2 Cancel
4 Refute
3 Tolarian Terror
2 Demolition Field
20 Island

If you luck into opening any, I would slip in Sphinx of Forgotten Lore or Voracious Greatshark in place of Tolarian Terror, and Crawling Barrens or Soulstone Sanctuary in place of Demolition Field.

Nobody is reading this post six months later, but I’m putting my post-rotation list up here in case I ever want to point someone to it.

About
Name Poison Burn

Deck
7 Island
2 Plains
4 Seachrome Coast
3 Floodfarm Verge
3 Adarkar Wastes
3 Mirrex
4 Skrelv, Defector Mite
4 Crawling Chorus
4 Prologue to Phyresis
4 Experimental Augury
4 Serum Snare
4 Bring the Ending
4 Soul Partition
3 Gadwick’s First Duel
4 Distorted Curiosity
3 Arcane Proxy

Sideboard
3 Ephara’s Dispersal
4 Not on My Watch
3 Rest in Peace
3 Annex Sentry
2 Reject Imperfection

The maindeck is very similar. Floodfarm Verge has been a fine addition to the manabase. Soul Partition is a serviceable replacement for Fateful Absence.

I could have condensed the whole match-ups section in the original post down to this, which is still true:

• You are heavily favored against control, especially domain control, which you almost can’t lose to. New in the post-Duskmourn meta is the ability to add time counters to Overlords when you proliferate (Arena doesn’t select them automatically, so remember to click them yourself).
• Midrange and combo decks are an actual challenge.
• Aggro is a very poor match-up. Two thirds of the sideboard is dedicated to fighting red decks, and you’re still not favored against them.

Take out the Arcane Proxies for the Rest in Pieces when facing any deck that makes heavy use of its graveyard – your Helping Hand or Squirming Emergence strategies. It’s not a panacea, because they’ll have stuff like Into the Flood Maw or Tear Asunder, but it should buy you some time. Incidental reanimation like Unstoppable Slasher is not worth diluting your own plan for.

Against base-red aggro decks, bring in the Ephara’s Dispersals, Not on My Watches, and Annex Sentries in exchange for your Proxies, Duels, and two each of Bring the Ending and Distorted Curiosity (I’m still fiddling with the exact balance on those last two). It is rarely safe to block with Sentries, but I run them anyway because the opponent is likely to bring in Urabrask’s Forge, and they’re your best answer to it. You can beat the red decks after sideboarding, just don’t expect it to happen regularly. It’s tough to find a window to get any poison counters on them because you need to be warding off potentially lethal attacks as soon as turn 2. Be very aware of whether your opponent might be able to cast Snakeskin Veil, which can single-handedly ruin your entire defensive strategy. Make them make the first move: if they send an attacker into the damage step with only one power, take it and be glad it wasn’t more.

The Reject Imperfections are catch-all answers for anything you might not be otherwise prepared for. If you suspect your opponent will bring in graveyard hate, use them to replace a couple of your Proxies.

Almost nothing in this deck will survive the 2025 rotation, so enjoy it while you can!

Three unrelated thoughts:

1. Brineborn Cutthroat and Spectral Sailor were at the core of a mono-blue flash deck I played, and enjoyed, in Standard ca. 2019. I will definitely be trying to resurrect it. But power creep has been so bad that I’m not sure it really has chance anymore. Is putting a counter on your 2/1 two-drop every turn still good enough in a world of Emberheart Challengers and Mosswood Dreadknights? I have a deck with Ayara’s Oathsworn in it and even that is kind of underwhelming in the current metagame.

2. I like Llanowar Elves, and it’s an iconic card, but I’m not sure it should ever be in Standard again. Are you ready for turn-two Glissa Sunslayers?

3. This spoiler list is the first time I’ve realized that “Extended Art” and “Borderless” were considered to be different treatments. The difference between them is pretty slight.

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.

Interesting statistic:

The number of Best-of-One Standard Constructed games ending before turn four has essentially doubled since the release of Duskmourn: House of Horror.

Important to note – wildcards will be given out, but the banning takes effect today, so I don’t know if there’s actually any window to do the “crafting in anticipation of wildcard refunds” thing. (Edit: wildcards have now been given out.)

I’ve saved up some gold for the Kaldheim flashback draft that starts tomorrow; any advice you fine folks may have on that format would be welcome!