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.

It’s this one:

I’d assume the problem was with my computer or my connection if it were happening all the time, but it seems to be limited to games with this backdrop.

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.

Give me your Zendikar Rising draft tips! It runs for a week starting tomorrow and I’ve saved up some gold to play it. I’ve never drafted it before but I’ve been practicing a bit on Draftsim, and what I’ve got so far is that W/G landfall and U/B Rogues seem good. What about Wizards, is that a viable archetype?

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 played a few games just now to figure out the answer to that question, and it seems like it’s usually “build a big Dreyleader”, although one time I pulled off the Throne-into-Bodyguard trick. But I haven’t seen Squirrels in ranked games in a while. It seems like people agree with you that they’re not really competitive. I do think Ygra or Viper are probably good fits mechanically if somewhat disappointing thematically.

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

A relatable sentiment.

I admire the restraint it took to write calmly about a subject that must be pretty personal for Mark.

I think Mark is misunderstanding what “stop designing for Commander” means. His response here would be more appropriate if fans were saying “stop balancing for Commander” – which of course nobody is. I don’t know about anyone else, but speaking for myself, when I say “stop designing for Commander” I mean “stop printing undercosted legends with as many abilities as you can jam into a text box”. It is okay – preferable, even – if one card can’t do everything by itself.

I think Mark is probably right about playtesting, in that no amount of additional resources would be enough to guarantee they’d catch every mistake. But I still don’t love the “eh, what can you do” attitude. I keep thinking, maybe they could hire a consultant with experience in an industry where rigorous testing is the norm. There’s got to be room to improve their processes.

The event schedule says that Midweek Magic this week is Momir, but actually it’s “Phantom Golden Sealed”. You build a sealed deck from six packs containing all rares and mythics.

Free Gold Day and Wilcards for Banned Cards Day at the same time. It’s like some kind of Arena eclipse.

Yeah. Which is why they’ll never do it, I know…

I’m just saying if they’d banned it after the “card starts to dominate” stage they could have spared you and everyone else from the “try to play around them” stage, saving both money and heartache.

Of course, in my fantasy world, they would stop constantly pushing power level so much, and we’d all have to go through this whole cycle a lot less often.

Also, I can’t speak for everyone, but I caved and started playing decks with Sheoldred, and I’d still be delighted if that card were banned tomorrow. Admittedly I spent Arena wildcards on it rather than actual money. But the point I’m trying to make is, I’d rather have a fun Magic format than economic recompense. The purpose of spending the money in the first place is to have fun playing Magic. Making Magic affordable is a laudable goal (which they could pursue in numerous other ways, many of which they are currently ignoring), but if making it fun doesn’t come first, what’s the point?

I can forgive a lot of the mistakes they made here; we’re all only human and I’m not going to pretend I’ve never shipped code with a bug that I really ought to have caught. They probably should never change any text without playtesting (unless it’s to make a card strictly worse, and even then you need to be pretty sure about the “strictly”), but I’ll bet they’ve gotten away with that a lot more than we realize.

But I think the cardinal sin here, and the mistake I can’t really understand, is that they changed an ability and “how does this interact with zero-mana spells or abilities” wasn’t in their top three considerations. Like, Cephalid Breakfast is over 20 years old. That type of interaction is not new or obscure; you can’t not have it on your radar.

As is tradition, this B&R announcement begins by saying that they will be changing the frequency of B&R announcements.

And then there’s this:

It is worth noting that we don’t plan on changing the current Standard B&R philosophy, meaning we still only want one window per year, barring an emergency, where we consider taking action in Standard.

I’m not sure I get the concept of non-emergency bans. If a card needs to be banned, ban it immediately; if it doesn’t, don’t ban it at all. This once-a-year interval makes even less sense for Standard than for other formats, since a year is proportionally longer for Standard.

I understand that they want people to feel confident that their chosen deck won’t disappear at a moment’s notice, I just don’t think that’s worth the trade-off of making everyone put up with an unbalanced format for months.

Ninja of the Deep Hours and Sprout Swarm are two of my favorite cards ever; it’s like they made this video just for me. Great showmanship to boot.

Historic Pauper is on the Midweek Magic schedule next month!

They’ve updated the Midweek Magic page now and it’s not that similar:

Choose any legendary Frog (or Tatsunari, Toad Rider) on MTG Arena and build a Brawl deck without needing the cards in your collection! Plus, Yargle’s magic makes all of your frogs better than ever: they’re cheaper to play and hungry for power.

So you have to build your own deck, but it’s all-access. I like it. There are 13 possible commanders (that search says 14 but I’m pretty sure you’ll only be able to use the rebalanced Uurg, not that you’d want to use the original anyway), and you’ll definitely at least be in either green or black.

“Cheaper to play and hungry for power” might indicate the same emblem as last year: frogs cost 2 less and when a frog ETBs, you may sacrifice a creature to draw a card and have the frog gain all the abilities of the sacrificed creature.

Based on the timing and the unpronounceable name, the Midweek Magic event scheduled for the first week in September is likely to be similar to last year’s “Yargle Day” event.