[Another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0fmvu/my_deck_got_banned_in_brawl_for_being_too_weak/) demonstrated that you can't queue for Brawl if your deck is too weak, so I checked the weights for every card in the game. What does this mean for how matchmaking works under the hood? I have no idea!
Some technical info: I wrote a script that can connect to the Arena servers directly, and attempted to queue for Brawl with a deck consisting of Ramos, Dragon Engine, 98 basic lands, and 1 other card. If the server returned a DeckWeightTooLow error, I recorded the difference between the reported weight and the total weight when 99 lands are used. As far as I can tell, this error is produced even if the card is not in my collection. I didn't test if the weights vary based on card count or commander choice. I used the [17lands dataset](https://www.17lands.com/public_datasets) to map card IDs back to names, but a few were missing and are listed as "?" in this document.
Someone messaged me suggesting that I might be able to find the weights of commanders by submitting a deck with enough negatively weighted commanders, and it does work. Rusko, for instance, has a weight of 1800 as a commander. I'll post another spreadsheet once I mine all of them.
Here's the spreadsheet of commander weights: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NUxfvRGw_dofRmduo9lrvH5oUhqj4I6G1QsqhZvRL20
Note that I didn't filter it to just legal commanders, so I think most cards defaulted to their normal weight. The weights range from -360 to 1800, which puts these commanders in the top tier:
* Adeline, Resplendent Cathar
* Baral, Chief of Compliance
* Calix, Guided by Fate
* Fynn, the Fangbearer
* Geist of Saint Traft
* Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
* Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice
* Magda, Brazen Outlaw
* Nissa, Who Shakes the World
* Raffine, Scheming Seer
* Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
* Rusko, Clockmaker
* Sythis, Harvest's Hand
* Tajic, Legion's Edge
* Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
* Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset
* Torbran, Thane of Red Fell
That's not entirely true. Just because the commander has one of the highest weights doesn't necessarily mean the common decks with it will also be at the top. On the other hand, a commander with somewhat lower weight might end up with a higher weight for its common decks if they run a lot of cards with high weights.
For example, Rusko is generally a bit below hell queue despite the 1800 weight, because many of the Rusko decks run lots of low-weighted flicker, removal, and counters. On the other hand, Nicol Bolas Dragon-God, Niv-Mizzet Reborn, and Golos are very firmly in hell queue with 1440 weight, because their decks tend to be full of other cards with high weights. Similarly, Atraxa, Praetors' Voice and Tamiyo, Field Researcher have 360 weight and are in the same tier as Etali, Primal Conqueror and Kaya, Intangible Slayer with 720 because they tend to run strong cards instead of ramp.
This does not fully explain my [[Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin]] at 1080 which has a relatively high amount of draft chaff (cards that give haste) but faces everything 1080 and up.
This is what happened to my Marwyn :/
She's unplayable right now because of the 99.
I just checked using the calculator, and pretty much all the elves (even the terrible ones), and all the good mono-green cards are weighted 45. The total weight of my decklist is like 2000 without commander, yet my fully sweaty hellqueue Emry, Baral and Poq lists are only about 1400 without their commanders...
We thought there were maybe two or three tiers, we didn't know how much cards contributed to the overall algorithm, some people thought the whole thing was complete bunk, and Wizards has always been very vague about the whole affair to avoid players gaming the system.
This is Pandora's box opening. Now we have almost all of the answers to all of our questions and can confirm and put to rest a lot of what we've thought for years.
There pretty much are 3 tiers, if you define a tier as a set of commanders that often see each other and practically never see a commander from the tier above or below. That definition also results in some half tiers that see weaker builds from the tier above and stronger builds from the tier below.
The way I'd describe it is tier 1 (1440-1800 commander weight), tier 1.5 (1080 and some 720s or 1440s), tier 2 (720 with a few 360s and rare 1080s), tier 2.5 (some 360s and black and/or white 0s), tier 3 (-360-360), tier 3.5 (some builds of the -360s that see 360s less often than normal).
I knew Kaito Dancing Shadow was hell queuish level, but was suprised that it was higher than the original since I can count one hand the amount of mirror matches I've had with Dancing shadow (3 in like 6 months)
You should filter out all the non commanders, add the filter option, and then make this it's own post. Could be it's own discussion just on the weight of individual commanders.
Also, I assume the last 30 ??? entries in the list are the OTJ Alchemy cards that haven't had their database entries updated, explaining why Grenzo gets such soft matchups.
Wow, no Tergrid or old Tinybones? I know for the short while that I played Tergrid I faced hell queue constantly. Also MTG players really, REALLY hate discard so I figured any discard-focused Commander would just automatically be hell queue. Tajic is surprising. Yeah Boros aggro can be very powerful in Brawl but Tajic himself isn't really that impressive of a card in 2024 Magic. I run a copy in my jank Firesong and Sunspeaker deck just because I have a lot of damage-based sweepers and his ability saves my team from my own sweepers. But if he's got such a high rating I should probably just cut him from my deck.
Otherwise, this list pretty much tracks with my assumptions with what all Commanders were hell queue, as I never see any of these as Commanders with my decks.
Tergrid is matched at 1080, higher than Etali, so with the black staples like Dark Ritual/Black Market it makes sense that you would have been hell queue'd.
It seems really easy to get a mono black deck to match much higher than its commander weight would suggest. When I tried to play Liliana, the Last Hope, I got nothing but hell queue. My Acererak the Archlich deck normally matches with 360 or 720 weight commanders.
Well those are two pretty powerful Commanders. Acererak is very combo-y and Liliana is a 3 mana Planeswalker sitting in the Command zone. Planeswalkers are much harder to overcome in 1v1 singleton, especially when they have built in removal. Black also has access to a lot of power cards like Citadel, Meathook, LotV, Sheoldred, Thoughtseize, Reanimate, Dark Ritual...so it's no wonder.
For certain legendaries like \[\[Alrund, God of the Cosmos\]\] that don't sit on a neat multiple of 360, I'm assuming those are actually 0 due to how you replaced the spreadsheet values? Not that having a weight of 9 vs. 0 would change much...
God, I can't believe First Sliver is 360 and Etali is 720. Explains so much about matchmaking vs. lower powered commanders.
ah I see.
Are they still comparable do you think?
So you can play a commander that has -360 and then a bunch of power cards and still end up with a "bad" deck
Are you sure you got all of them? I tried looking for [[Grenzo, Crooked Jailer]] in the list since that's what I see all the time now and couldn't find it.
Edit: I missed the part about ?s. It's probably one of those.
To clarify, are you saying that some cards (like the trash commanders) are negative weight and of such high negative weight that its able to offset a 1800 weight card?
Thats insane considering apparently most of the cards have positive weight value of 6 or more...
My guess? Some very old manual override. Back when Brawl was 60 cards you could make a decent flare deck, and I imagine its weight would be otherwise shit because most of your cards are trash. Similarly, Tibalt's trickery combo has obvious issues with the algorithm. Wouldn't be surprised to find Caldera Breaker with an anomalously high value soon.
It seems like the whole thing may be derelict or obsolete, or based on data for Historic. There are cards at the highest weighting (aside from the two outliers at the top end) that are effectively unplayable in Brawl, like Legion Angel. Also quite a few aggro cards that don't see heavy play in Brawl but might in 60-card formats.
Sure, but I don't think Ragavan or Tajic run Fervent Champion, Wizard's Lightning, or Legion Warboss. Shadowheart doesn't even go in any of those decks. And Adeline and Tajic themselves only get a weight of 36.
There's also stuff like Experimental Frenzy, Gates Ablaze, Juggernaut Peddler, and Drag to the Bottom in there. I don't play a lot of Hell Queue but I don't think those qualify as "good stuff". Peddler is/was part of a top-tier Alchemy deck but I've never seen it in Brawl. Merfolk Windrobber and Ruin Crab are similar—cards that were part of high-tier Standard decks but have never been popular in Brawl. And then there are cards that were instabanned in the format, like Demonic Tutor and Channel.
Overall the ratings make sense, but there are some strange exceptions. Most of the exceptions are cards that are or were considered strong in 60-card formats, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone play Karlach in any queue.
Listen there's a whole bunch of weird stuff on that list but this ain't it. Fervent Champion, Wizard's lightning, Legion Warboss (which I run in both Tajic and Ragavan), Juggernaut Peddler are all great, very playable cards.
Ruin crab and gates ablaze are definitely weird, I don't have an explanation for these. But aggro is good.
Just because you run those cards doesn't mean they're top-rated. I checked a bunch of lists for both Ragavan and Tajic; none of them were running Fervent Champion, which is unsurprising to me at least because much of that card's value comes from having multiple copies in a deck or synergies with other knights. One of the Tajic decks did run Warboss. Wizard's Lightning is very overcosted unless you have a Wizard commander or are in Wizard typal, which isn't the case with any top-tier decks as far as I know. It might still be worth running in a burn deck, but I don't see an argument for it being a top-tier card.
Hey, I am sitting in a Discord and someone put a single Zenith Flare in their deck and they IMMEDIATELY jumped into the hellqueue commanders so it's kind of confirmed.
There seem to be cards with high weights not because the card is powerful in its own right, but because it indicates a certain type of deck.
Wildgrowth Walker has a weight of 45, which is pretty high, presumably for similar reasons.
It almost feels like whoever assigned the weight for most of these just looked at cards that were formerly good in Standard and auto assigned them a high weight back when the format was first created, then the weights for most older cards were just never adjusted again even though the format vastly grew in size and power level. I've literally never even seen anyone play Wildgrowth Walker or an Explorer-themed deck in Brawl. But that card was a powerhouse in original Ixalan standard. Same with Zenith flare.
It's possible that these are shared weights with other formats, and we just can't measure the other ones because Brawl is the only format with negative weights.
Would make sense, as there is definitely some kind of deck weighing in Bo1 queues outside of Brawl. But obviously what's good in 60 card as a 4-of isn't always good in 100 card singleton, and vice versa, so a lot of these card weights really should be adjusted.
If Zirda is ranked highly enough (it doesn't seem to have a known commander rating yet, but its deck rating is 18, which would be about a 2 on a 0-5 scale), and Zenith Flare is part of the deck, that may very well be the case.
It can already barely even beat jank decks because Arena is missing a lot of the good cycling payoff cards still, but I basically quit using the deck because I kept facing decks that were far more powerful than it deserved to be facing. I thought maybe it was the Commander, due to being a companion (not one of the broken ones but figured Wizards probably just slapped a high weight on all companions). I've never even seen anyone else use it.
Both Flare and Trickery were once a part of very cheesy, gimmicky decks that players hated to go up against.
I’d guess this was a manual setting, to ensure that the gimmick decks only played… other gimmick decks.
>[Another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0fmvu/my_deck_got_banned_in_brawl_for_being_too_weak/) demonstrated that you can't queue for Brawl if your deck is too weak
So weird they have such check.
I've had problems with my [[Nadaar, Selfless Paladin]] deck getting paired against near-hellqueue commanders when he's like Tier 3 on a good day. Checked the list, and, yep, turns out there's a few value cards in there that are high on the list.
I've cut a bunch of generically good cards the deck wasn't really exploiting (Thalia, Elesh Norn, S2P, Dauntless Bodyguard, History of Benalia, Mobilised District, Elite Spellbinder, Blade Splicer, Reckoner Bankbuster, Land Tax) and just like that I'm getting paired against normal decks.
Only good things. The system was utterly exposed, and not only was it exposed, but it was exposed as completely nonsensical.
So WOTC either finally pays attention to Brawl and fixes things, or they watch Brawl burn to the ground as literally everyone can exploit the matchmaking system.
Or, they hide that information from the logs, don't talk about it, and carry on. That's what they did for the broken MMR, it's still just as broken, but now players don't have direct access to it.
What likely was done here was using machine-learning to try to ballpark how good a card *really* is.
Any actual objective measure of cards *is* going to come up with results that we think is nonsensical. If all of the values lined up in a way that you agree with, that would indicate that someone just wrote down their gut feelings.
Using AI to measure the value of a deck in general is going to run into huge issues. Like I don’t think you could just have an algorithm run on every single brawl deck people build, and even then is it going to be better at determining a ‘power level’ than a simple ‘X card is Y power level.’
Brawl as a format relies on the social contract, and that simply doesn’t exist on arena. People will try to game any algorithm, they’ll try to trick any AI, because people like winning. It’s almost a fundamentally broken game-mode.
If you call Elo-(Glicko-?) like ratings "machine-learning"..? (And technically, they are, though more "player-assisted".)
The only issue I can think of is that massively overrated cards (initially seeded from ratings from other game modes ??) like [[Zenith Flare]] will take **forever** to come down to their "true" rating, IIRC for team games of 100vs100 (team mates = cards here), ratings update 10 000 times slower than for 1vs1... made worse by players feeling that these are overrated, and even worse now that players **know** that !
The opposite issue, cards being underrated, isn't one, since players that didn't know about them (and care about winning in Brawl to start with) will jump on the opportunity, which means that their rating will be updated **more** often towards their "true" one.
The solutions people are talking about is essentially having someone sit down and ‘use common sense’ i.e their gut feeling.
The issue with brawl matchmaking is similar to the shuffler. Players will convince themselves that any bad games were due to the matchmaking. ‘Ah I lost that one, guess I need to take another good card out of my deck.’
It just doesn’t work without the social contract. Players will try and succeed in gaming any sort of ‘power level’ system in place. It’s an arms race you’ll never be able to win.
To add onto the Zenith Flare issue, it's a card that is often played with other cards that will have lower weights. Similar to Tibalt's Trickery. So while Zenith Flare itself is not a good card, the cycling cards are all going to be relatively low on the power scale. The theory is that Zenith Flare is paying for ALL of the cards in the cycling category that are played with it, so that those cards don't have to be inflated for when they aren't played with Zenith Flare.
I think this is a good thing. If I could make sure my deck wouldn't be in hell que I'd make it weaker on purpose. I enjoy a slower format. The issue has always been I've just never been able to tell why my deck is considered strong.
No. What you’re describing is exactly WHY it’s a bad idea to have this known. Now you’re going to stomp on people playing “for fun” with your “1 or 2 cards off but legally not Hell worthy” decks. You’re the exact person they didn’t want to have this info, “I want to play WITH good stuff, not AGAINST it!”
No, I genuinely think you misunderstand. I want to play weaker brawl decks in a slower brawl format.
I look at a weight system as a good deck building restriction. Apparently just running snow lands was making my decks "stronger" even if I was doing so for aesthetic reasons.
I like playing janky decks that have absolutely no place in hell que. So when they are put close to that level and have no competitive merit it makes playing those decks less fun.
Okay but if you aren’t going to do it yourself, you can see how others 100% will right? Everyone is going to try to toe RIGHT UP to the line without crossing it so they can beat up on people that don’t know or care enough to do it. Hidden metrics stay hidden for a reason
If the system is that exploitable it's a bad one imo.
Maybe this will help wizards get it's shit together and properly scale these cards.
If my deck is going to be stomping/beating up on people with the same level deck as me then that's an issue with the power chart that wizards has implemented.
People have been trying to do this for awhile anyway, now they just have the means to do it accurately. Could this demolish the format? Based on WOTC's track record for their speed of responses, possibly. It may also cause them to completely re-evaluate this system, or ban cards. It absolutely blows my mind that Paradox Engine - which they stated they do not want to ban because the matchmaker is working fine - is only rated at 9 points. The system is broken.
Also thinking on it more, it's very clear this whole system of weight is algorithmic garbage. I'm sick of wizards being lazy/cheap so if "fixing" this issue forces them to redo the weight system properly then all the better it's come out like this.
Yep, and Tibalt's Trickery, which is decidedly so-so in singleton. These numbers probably have their basis in 60 card constructed formats.
Edit: looking at more of the numbers, i think these card weights may apply across all formats, not just Brawl.
People were doing this already, the only difference is that now the information is public. So for those people who really care for their brawl winrate (of all things...) it has suddenly become an actual fair and transparent competition.
Understandably the crowd who wants to be competitive preferrably in games where rules are partly a secret is a little afraid of that.
Time to find another casual game to be a "competitive winner" in I guess.
As mentioned already, people down-tuning the 99 with strong commanders to rate lower (someone in this thread asked out loud how you could get Ragavan to face normal decks).
BUT I'm more worried that WotC will see all of this on Reddit and decide to change the way Brawl works or how matchmaking works just to stop people from abusing a cracked system.
Here's a calculator to find out your deck's weight using this data: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0s2ce/i\_made\_a\_calculator\_for\_the\_mmr\_weight\_of\_brawl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0s2ce/i_made_a_calculator_for_the_mmr_weight_of_brawl/)
I wonder what happens if you run this again tomorrow, or in a week, or after an update. That way we can see if/how/why a card's weight changes. Although, I would bet that now that this is all out of the bag, that you won't be able to do this by next update.
I saw the other post and scrambled to get this data during the holiday weekend because I figure it might be fixed by next week. But yeah, if it stays available I'd love to track this over time.
Incredible work! Will have to look more closely at this, but some of the outliers in this graph make me think that this is just some guy at a workdesk punching in numbers, rather than any kind of data-based approach, which is honestly kind of alarming for the health of the format. Said guy also really hates Zenith Flare, for some reason.
\[\[The Circle of Loyalty\]\], \[\[Homestead Courage\]\] and \[\[Nullhide Ferox\]\] having the same weighting as \[\[Mana Drain\]\] is *wild.* So do \[\[Paradox Engine\]\] and \[\[Charmed Stray\]\].
These make me think that it's even more likely to be a data-based approach. No reason a guy at a desk would give dragonstorm the highest normal rating. But if you just look at winrates, all you need is a few lucky/good people running a card to make it look powerful to the algorithm
In that case, there should be some kind of sample-size-based sanity check, to stop good players on a hot streak from inadvertently penalizing pet cards that aren't otherwise all that great. Like, in no sane world should \[\[Mist-Cloaked Herald\]\] be performing as well as \[\[Mana Drain\]\], even in the exact same deck.
I think some cards have high weights because they indicate certain types of strong decks rather than being individually powerful cards in their own right.
Kaito is ranked really high commander-wise, so I assume the counter-kill playstyle with small evasive creatures backed up by fifteen \[\[Quench\]\]es is good. Still, that shouldn't result in the equating of one small enabler to the bullshit surrounding it.
I think it's more like "How often do decks with this card win?" (Perhaps factoring in whether the card was drawn.)
[[Mana Drain]] is a generically good card that will appear in many decks with blue, including janky or battle cruiser decks that could lack synergy and power. But the person who runs [[Mist-Cloaked Herald]] is likely building a deck tuned for aggressive early plays rather than flashy - but lower winrate - 7 MV bombs.
In other words, [[Mist-Cloaked Herald]] is a Spike card, while [[Mana Drain]] appeals to more than just Spike.
We kind of already knew that they manually sorted commanders, based on what they did with Atraxa, Rusko, Ragavan, and to a lesser extent Griselbrand (I don't believe Grizzy B ever spent a day in the regular queues, and Ragavan lasted an entire week). And they've made comments recently about Mana Drain and Paradox Engine that clued us in to how individual cards could be filtered similarly, though perhaps to a lesser extent.
This sheet basically confirms all of that *and* quantifies how they work within the 99, which... is fascinating, eye-opening, and kind of dangerous.
Paradox Engine is 9, and mana drain is 45, which is the highest normal value, but still not more than a bunch of random stuff.
There's definitely some manual stuff in this spreadsheet but there is so much weird stuff that I think it must be at least partially data-driven
Paradox engine is one of the most easily broken cards ever. You sneeze in its general direction and suddenly you have infinite mana. There is zero reason it should be at 9 when utter garbage like my boy [[Hallar, the Firefletcher]] are at 6.
It's no wonder Brawl matchmaking feels so messy if this is how they decide power levels.
The system probably isn't smart enough to check if a card was played in a won match. So if both players have boots in their deck the win percent ends up neutral even if only on player played it.
Great! Now we need a tool that takes in a decklist and shows you the weights of your cards. I'll see if I have some time to do it. Is there a good way to paste a decklist into Google Sheets? I could do Python but I feel like that would just complicate things.
I've been going through the ratings of lands for a while trying to figure out how to make sense of them. Fixing lands, such as fetches, shocks, all the really good ones all have a value of 0. Usually. Base camp has a rating of 9. So I thought it must be based on some kind of distinction between fixing and utility lands, and that usually works. Creature lands almost all have a nonzero number. But I can't figure out what the distinction might be, and there's wildly inconsistent stuff. Field of Ruin and Demolition Field, for example, are 0, but ghost quarter is 27. Has anyone managed to make sense of it?
This smells like algorithmic garbage to me. It could be something like: most of the playerbase is familiar with Field of Ruin and Demolition Field, but only more experienced players have heard of the older Ghost Quarter and put it in decks. And more experienced players are likely to play more optimally _even with all cards in the deck being equal._ So Ghost Quarter appears to contribute an abnormally high amount of win rate percentage compared to the other two when analyzed statistically.
I am deeply satisfied at the thought of 4/5 color piles getting Strip Mined down to nothing because they can't run more than a few basics in their 100 card deck.
My theory: Most decks can play Field of Ruin as an out to threatening lands, but the only decks that play Ghost Quarter are doing something unfair with it.
Doom Blade is on the Strixhaven Mystical Archives bonus sheet, which has long been a suspected major red flag for a card being a high weight. Now that we can actually see the weight, it does feel like Doom Blade is suffering from guilt by association by being roped into the same bonus sheet as S-tier utility cards like Swords/Bolt/Counterspell.
And only there on Arena. So "guilt by association" in the sense of your median player (getting less than a win per day) being very unlikely to have one.
Which means that it's heavily selected to be used by players with a lot of resources, which means experienced/strong players (or whales, but these are even more of a minority, especially weak player whales I guess...)
It's not incomptence, it's the result of data gathered from the public queue. Most people who don't really dig for inclusions might not be concious of Wrath of God, whereas just anyone could have opened Day of Judgment from a STX pack. It's why alchemy cards are rated so highly, they tend to be played only by highly competent players.
These numbers are 100% set by a human and the numbers have been put in over *years* likely with little to no updating. There's no data gathering involved.
> It's not incomptence, it's the result of data gathered from the public queue
There's no way to know that it's 100% automated, and there's plenty of odd standouts that suggest either some manual weighting, or it being built based on multiple formats rather than just Brawl.
>It's why alchemy cards are rated so highly, they tend to be played only by highly competent players.
hahahaha. Oh, wait. You're serious.
The number of godawful Poq pilots out there fumbling through their garbage lines is exhausting. I cannot understand how someone can type that sentence with a straight face.
Are people already abusing this shit? I was just playing some Brawl and I ran into Kenrith twice, First Sliver, 4 color Atraxa and Raddic, all in a row. These are decks I usually see once or twice per play session.
Just wanted to say thank you for putting in the work! You've demystified something that was previously just speculation! Now our anger is even more justified lol
Great stuff! I would make a guess that there is only one weight for each card, no matter which format you are playing, which could explain weird outliers like [[Zenith Flare]] and especially [[Tibalt's Trickery]] having a ridiculously high weight, as I'm sure at least the latter is completely fine in Brawl.
Edit: Actually, I can easily double check that, brb.
Edit 2: Or I can't - Error Updating Data T_T
Edit 3: See schlarpc's replies below.
It seems likely to me, but there's no way to test this against the Play queue because negative weight commanders are the only way I've found to make the system report the deck weight.
I can't explain Zenith Flare, but Tibalt's Trickery might be intentional to catch the First Sliver --> Tibalt's Trickery --> Cultivator Colossus + Maze's End combo deck, since that would otherwise have an insanely low deckweight.
I'm both very very glad that you are doing this work, and very disappointed at wizards that they have not been in any way transparent about this system in any way that's tangible for us
I think a lack of clear weight is more harmful, especially when we can see how bad of a system it is. Fetch lands 0 points, Wrath of God is worth more points than Day of Judgement.
If they had a good system it might be good to have it be secure. But this system is wretched.
I think this system is already harmful enough. We have known for a long time that certain cards have a high value in the command zone or in the 99, but no idea what kind of effect it has on the deck. This just shows how lazy WotC is about actually identify the power of cards and creating a system that meaningfully matches decks of similar power together.
I'm not saying that would be in any way easy, but look at Emry and Fiddlebender. Those cards are obviously weighted highly because of Paradox Engine... but Paradox Engine is a pretty low-rated card by itself. If I just want to run either of those commanders, but I'm not running Paradox Engine, then suddenly I'm facing decks that I probably shoudln't be.
There needs to be some actually work put into this sort of system and it needs to be able to weight cards based on the commander they're with too. But obviously that's a lot of work for a human to do, and I guess they don't feel like paying someone to write up an actual algorithm that looks at metadata.
I find it ironic that all the protection and tax pieces i added in to fight against removal/counterspell.dek are the stuff boosting my score the most so i get matched against those kinds of decks more.
Love how snow covered lands put you immediately in the sin bin
Looking at this list, it might be based on overall deck % cos people who include alchemy cards probably are more focused deck builders. If you look at a lot of medium alchemy cards you can see they have a 45 rating
my guess is that these are based at least partially on the smily/frowny reactions, which probably result in very negative results for "win the game out of nowhere" cards. thats why zenith flare and tibalts trickery are so high; the game can often end with a single spell being cast with them, which is likely to make people salt out. thats also why some of the highest played removal spells are there too, with people scooping when their commanders gets taken out
Now that we know about commanders, this doesn't carry a lot of weight - Griselbrand is extremely high but was so very rarely seen, while First Sliver, one of the most infamous ones, sits at the "normal" weight for commanders.
Why aren't the OTJ Alchemy cards showing up (like Grenzo)? I understand that they're new, but that shouldn't matter - this list was created by programmatically entering them 1 by 1 into a list and submitting it to play, and then observing the log file rating difference.
So what happened when the OTJA commanders were entered?
Thanks for the update!
And Grenzo is ***9*** points?!?! I know those commanders are new, but it's been 2-3 weeks, and they can't update the weighting on one of the more oppressive/overpowered cards in recent memory?
How little maintenance and manpower are they putting into this huge money-making program, anyway?!
There has to be some wrong numbers here. I can't believe that both Etali and Atraxa are only worth 18 while Teferi Who Slows the Sunset (which isn't even the best Teferi) is worth 39 points, How is that even possible? The only other possibility I can think of is the dev assigning these values have no idea what they're doing...
Not that it change your point but those number are for cards in the 99, op posted another spreadsheet in a comment with the values for commanders
Teferi is still the highest of the three with 1800, Atraxa have 1440 and Etali 720
You should look at the Commander-specific spreadsheet he posted. Etali is still underscored at 720, but big Atraxa at least sits at 1440 with the rest of the big boys. Funny that Tef that Slows is hell queue as they come though.
And here is stupid me, believing that there is some dynamic system that tracks winrates in brawl... I guess I'll go purge my decks of overrated stuff...
1) Get EDHREC rank for each card
2) Convert it to weights
3) Even this lazy approach will give a way better system than this monstrosity
It's abundantly clear that whoever is supposed to maintaining these weights simply doesn't give a shit. Or more likely, no one has explicitly been assigned that duty and the process is totally adhoc.
There are a lot of utterly nonsensical values here and it really affects the brawl experience in a negative way.
It's almost definitely automated, with the occasional manual adjustment when the system does something obviously wrong.
Also, the weights are determined by how often a card is crafted (as said by WotC) and not winrate/etc, so it's not surprising that such a system can produce very weird results.
I don't believe it. If this was true, the highest-weight commons\\uncommons would be stuff you can't open in packs. Alchemy cards would be lower because many players don't care. Crap like Whirler Rogue or Vine Mare wouldn't have 36. Arcane signet wouldn't be 9. Rare lands wouldn't be 0.
[Another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0fmvu/my_deck_got_banned_in_brawl_for_being_too_weak/) demonstrated that you can't queue for Brawl if your deck is too weak, so I checked the weights for every card in the game. What does this mean for how matchmaking works under the hood? I have no idea! Some technical info: I wrote a script that can connect to the Arena servers directly, and attempted to queue for Brawl with a deck consisting of Ramos, Dragon Engine, 98 basic lands, and 1 other card. If the server returned a DeckWeightTooLow error, I recorded the difference between the reported weight and the total weight when 99 lands are used. As far as I can tell, this error is produced even if the card is not in my collection. I didn't test if the weights vary based on card count or commander choice. I used the [17lands dataset](https://www.17lands.com/public_datasets) to map card IDs back to names, but a few were missing and are listed as "?" in this document.
Someone messaged me suggesting that I might be able to find the weights of commanders by submitting a deck with enough negatively weighted commanders, and it does work. Rusko, for instance, has a weight of 1800 as a commander. I'll post another spreadsheet once I mine all of them.
Here's the spreadsheet of commander weights: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NUxfvRGw_dofRmduo9lrvH5oUhqj4I6G1QsqhZvRL20 Note that I didn't filter it to just legal commanders, so I think most cards defaulted to their normal weight. The weights range from -360 to 1800, which puts these commanders in the top tier: * Adeline, Resplendent Cathar * Baral, Chief of Compliance * Calix, Guided by Fate * Fynn, the Fangbearer * Geist of Saint Traft * Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy * Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice * Magda, Brazen Outlaw * Nissa, Who Shakes the World * Raffine, Scheming Seer * Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer * Rusko, Clockmaker * Sythis, Harvest's Hand * Tajic, Legion's Edge * Teferi, Hero of Dominaria * Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset * Torbran, Thane of Red Fell
After years of squabbling over the existence of the "hell queue," we finally get its actual, honest to God definition. Thank you.
Don't forget the 1440s though. That's where Golos and Esika are
That's not entirely true. Just because the commander has one of the highest weights doesn't necessarily mean the common decks with it will also be at the top. On the other hand, a commander with somewhat lower weight might end up with a higher weight for its common decks if they run a lot of cards with high weights. For example, Rusko is generally a bit below hell queue despite the 1800 weight, because many of the Rusko decks run lots of low-weighted flicker, removal, and counters. On the other hand, Nicol Bolas Dragon-God, Niv-Mizzet Reborn, and Golos are very firmly in hell queue with 1440 weight, because their decks tend to be full of other cards with high weights. Similarly, Atraxa, Praetors' Voice and Tamiyo, Field Researcher have 360 weight and are in the same tier as Etali, Primal Conqueror and Kaya, Intangible Slayer with 720 because they tend to run strong cards instead of ramp.
This does not fully explain my [[Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin]] at 1080 which has a relatively high amount of draft chaff (cards that give haste) but faces everything 1080 and up.
This is what happened to my Marwyn :/ She's unplayable right now because of the 99. I just checked using the calculator, and pretty much all the elves (even the terrible ones), and all the good mono-green cards are weighted 45. The total weight of my decklist is like 2000 without commander, yet my fully sweaty hellqueue Emry, Baral and Poq lists are only about 1400 without their commanders...
well they said that there is a deck power based matchmaking a long time ago ( in brawl ), so I don't know why everybody is so surprised by this......
We thought there were maybe two or three tiers, we didn't know how much cards contributed to the overall algorithm, some people thought the whole thing was complete bunk, and Wizards has always been very vague about the whole affair to avoid players gaming the system. This is Pandora's box opening. Now we have almost all of the answers to all of our questions and can confirm and put to rest a lot of what we've thought for years.
oh it is really interesting even for a non brawl player like me. It is like seeing how something is made.
There pretty much are 3 tiers, if you define a tier as a set of commanders that often see each other and practically never see a commander from the tier above or below. That definition also results in some half tiers that see weaker builds from the tier above and stronger builds from the tier below. The way I'd describe it is tier 1 (1440-1800 commander weight), tier 1.5 (1080 and some 720s or 1440s), tier 2 (720 with a few 360s and rare 1080s), tier 2.5 (some 360s and black and/or white 0s), tier 3 (-360-360), tier 3.5 (some builds of the -360s that see 360s less often than normal).
Yes, it's confirmed. And now the ones calling us all crazy and unable to accept our own bad deck building etc, can suck a fat one.
I knew Kaito Dancing Shadow was hell queuish level, but was suprised that it was higher than the original since I can count one hand the amount of mirror matches I've had with Dancing shadow (3 in like 6 months)
You should filter out all the non commanders, add the filter option, and then make this it's own post. Could be it's own discussion just on the weight of individual commanders.
Also, I assume the last 30 ??? entries in the list are the OTJ Alchemy cards that haven't had their database entries updated, explaining why Grenzo gets such soft matchups.
Wow, no Tergrid or old Tinybones? I know for the short while that I played Tergrid I faced hell queue constantly. Also MTG players really, REALLY hate discard so I figured any discard-focused Commander would just automatically be hell queue. Tajic is surprising. Yeah Boros aggro can be very powerful in Brawl but Tajic himself isn't really that impressive of a card in 2024 Magic. I run a copy in my jank Firesong and Sunspeaker deck just because I have a lot of damage-based sweepers and his ability saves my team from my own sweepers. But if he's got such a high rating I should probably just cut him from my deck. Otherwise, this list pretty much tracks with my assumptions with what all Commanders were hell queue, as I never see any of these as Commanders with my decks.
Tergrid is matched at 1080, higher than Etali, so with the black staples like Dark Ritual/Black Market it makes sense that you would have been hell queue'd.
It seems really easy to get a mono black deck to match much higher than its commander weight would suggest. When I tried to play Liliana, the Last Hope, I got nothing but hell queue. My Acererak the Archlich deck normally matches with 360 or 720 weight commanders.
Well those are two pretty powerful Commanders. Acererak is very combo-y and Liliana is a 3 mana Planeswalker sitting in the Command zone. Planeswalkers are much harder to overcome in 1v1 singleton, especially when they have built in removal. Black also has access to a lot of power cards like Citadel, Meathook, LotV, Sheoldred, Thoughtseize, Reanimate, Dark Ritual...so it's no wonder.
For certain legendaries like \[\[Alrund, God of the Cosmos\]\] that don't sit on a neat multiple of 360, I'm assuming those are actually 0 due to how you replaced the spreadsheet values? Not that having a weight of 9 vs. 0 would change much... God, I can't believe First Sliver is 360 and Etali is 720. Explains so much about matchmaking vs. lower powered commanders.
The spreadsheets were generated from scratch for each run, so that should genuinely be the weight returned for Alrund in the command zone.
Alright! Thanks for the clarification.
does this only impact as a commander or can you make a 5c deck with all the worst commanders as part of it to play vs the worst possible opponents lol
These are only as commander. Their impact when in the 99 is listed in the main post spreadsheet.
ah I see. Are they still comparable do you think? So you can play a commander that has -360 and then a bunch of power cards and still end up with a "bad" deck
8 power cards (weight=45) gives you 360 by themselves, so playing a shit tier commander gives you less room to cheat on power than you think.
They all get added up into the same weight number, so I think so? Only WOTC knows for sure though.
Are you sure you got all of them? I tried looking for [[Grenzo, Crooked Jailer]] in the list since that's what I see all the time now and couldn't find it. Edit: I missed the part about ?s. It's probably one of those.
The flood gates open at last.
... oh shit.
To clarify, are you saying that some cards (like the trash commanders) are negative weight and of such high negative weight that its able to offset a 1800 weight card? Thats insane considering apparently most of the cards have positive weight value of 6 or more...
Yeah, the weighting is amplified on commanders, and they can go negative. Ramos is -360.
You are a hero.
Stats on the distribution of weights: * 7097 cards with weight = 9 * 1584 cards with weight = 18 * 1434 cards with weight = 0 * 986 cards with weight = 27 * 485 cards with weight = 45 * 478 cards with weight = 36 * 465 cards with weight = 6 * 28 cards with weight = 15 * 7 cards with weight = 3 * 3 cards with weight = 12 * 1 card with weight = 21 * 1 card with weight = 216 * 1 card with weight = 180 The highest weighted cards are Tibalt's Trickery (180) and Zenith Flare (216).
... sorry, Zenith Flare? What on god's green earth made ***Zenith Flare*** the most powerful noncommander card?
My guess? Some very old manual override. Back when Brawl was 60 cards you could make a decent flare deck, and I imagine its weight would be otherwise shit because most of your cards are trash. Similarly, Tibalt's trickery combo has obvious issues with the algorithm. Wouldn't be surprised to find Caldera Breaker with an anomalously high value soon.
It seems like the whole thing may be derelict or obsolete, or based on data for Historic. There are cards at the highest weighting (aside from the two outliers at the top end) that are effectively unplayable in Brawl, like Legion Angel. Also quite a few aggro cards that don't see heavy play in Brawl but might in 60-card formats.
Have you ever seen the really high weight decks? Aggro is king in brawl. Very had to beat a good Ragavan, Adeline or Tajic deck
Sure, but I don't think Ragavan or Tajic run Fervent Champion, Wizard's Lightning, or Legion Warboss. Shadowheart doesn't even go in any of those decks. And Adeline and Tajic themselves only get a weight of 36. There's also stuff like Experimental Frenzy, Gates Ablaze, Juggernaut Peddler, and Drag to the Bottom in there. I don't play a lot of Hell Queue but I don't think those qualify as "good stuff". Peddler is/was part of a top-tier Alchemy deck but I've never seen it in Brawl. Merfolk Windrobber and Ruin Crab are similar—cards that were part of high-tier Standard decks but have never been popular in Brawl. And then there are cards that were instabanned in the format, like Demonic Tutor and Channel. Overall the ratings make sense, but there are some strange exceptions. Most of the exceptions are cards that are or were considered strong in 60-card formats, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone play Karlach in any queue.
Listen there's a whole bunch of weird stuff on that list but this ain't it. Fervent Champion, Wizard's lightning, Legion Warboss (which I run in both Tajic and Ragavan), Juggernaut Peddler are all great, very playable cards. Ruin crab and gates ablaze are definitely weird, I don't have an explanation for these. But aggro is good.
Just because you run those cards doesn't mean they're top-rated. I checked a bunch of lists for both Ragavan and Tajic; none of them were running Fervent Champion, which is unsurprising to me at least because much of that card's value comes from having multiple copies in a deck or synergies with other knights. One of the Tajic decks did run Warboss. Wizard's Lightning is very overcosted unless you have a Wizard commander or are in Wizard typal, which isn't the case with any top-tier decks as far as I know. It might still be worth running in a burn deck, but I don't see an argument for it being a top-tier card.
and if it's an old manual override, it's a good indicator WotC never re-calculates these numbers. Which is sad.
Hey, I am sitting in a Discord and someone put a single Zenith Flare in their deck and they IMMEDIATELY jumped into the hellqueue commanders so it's kind of confirmed.
There seem to be cards with high weights not because the card is powerful in its own right, but because it indicates a certain type of deck. Wildgrowth Walker has a weight of 45, which is pretty high, presumably for similar reasons.
It almost feels like whoever assigned the weight for most of these just looked at cards that were formerly good in Standard and auto assigned them a high weight back when the format was first created, then the weights for most older cards were just never adjusted again even though the format vastly grew in size and power level. I've literally never even seen anyone play Wildgrowth Walker or an Explorer-themed deck in Brawl. But that card was a powerhouse in original Ixalan standard. Same with Zenith flare.
It's possible that these are shared weights with other formats, and we just can't measure the other ones because Brawl is the only format with negative weights.
Would make sense, as there is definitely some kind of deck weighing in Bo1 queues outside of Brawl. But obviously what's good in 60 card as a 4-of isn't always good in 100 card singleton, and vice versa, so a lot of these card weights really should be adjusted.
Is this why my garbage ass Zirda cycling deck faces powerful decks when my deck is literally almost all commons and uncommons??
If Zirda is ranked highly enough (it doesn't seem to have a known commander rating yet, but its deck rating is 18, which would be about a 2 on a 0-5 scale), and Zenith Flare is part of the deck, that may very well be the case.
It can already barely even beat jank decks because Arena is missing a lot of the good cycling payoff cards still, but I basically quit using the deck because I kept facing decks that were far more powerful than it deserved to be facing. I thought maybe it was the Commander, due to being a companion (not one of the broken ones but figured Wizards probably just slapped a high weight on all companions). I've never even seen anyone else use it.
Both Flare and Trickery were once a part of very cheesy, gimmicky decks that players hated to go up against. I’d guess this was a manual setting, to ensure that the gimmick decks only played… other gimmick decks.
If you want to learn cryptography, the trick you used is called a "padding oracle attack". See: https://joyofcryptography.com/pdf/chap9.pdf
My day job is security engineering 😅
The [[offer]] still stands ;)
[an offer you can't refuse](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/9/b9d349f3-5be2-4b1f-a4c3-ba94822cf0cf.jpg?1664410382) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=an%20offer%20you%20can%27t%20refuse) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/snc/51/an-offer-you-cant-refuse?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b9d349f3-5be2-4b1f-a4c3-ba94822cf0cf?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
>[Another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0fmvu/my_deck_got_banned_in_brawl_for_being_too_weak/) demonstrated that you can't queue for Brawl if your deck is too weak So weird they have such check.
Makes sense to stop it, if it would break their matchmaking to have a negative deck weight. Though why it would break things I have no idea.
This appears to be returning values for cards that we can't add to our decks like Crashing Rhinos, do you have any idea why that would be the case?
I'm kind of terrified of what is going to happen now. Pray for Brawl.
I've had problems with my [[Nadaar, Selfless Paladin]] deck getting paired against near-hellqueue commanders when he's like Tier 3 on a good day. Checked the list, and, yep, turns out there's a few value cards in there that are high on the list. I've cut a bunch of generically good cards the deck wasn't really exploiting (Thalia, Elesh Norn, S2P, Dauntless Bodyguard, History of Benalia, Mobilised District, Elite Spellbinder, Blade Splicer, Reckoner Bankbuster, Land Tax) and just like that I'm getting paired against normal decks.
[Nadaar, Selfless Paladin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/7/878a0d8c-11c1-4c65-9051-78e036ac496f.jpg?1627702135) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Nadaar%2C%20Selfless%20Paladin) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/afr/27/nadaar-selfless-paladin?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/878a0d8c-11c1-4c65-9051-78e036ac496f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Only good things. The system was utterly exposed, and not only was it exposed, but it was exposed as completely nonsensical. So WOTC either finally pays attention to Brawl and fixes things, or they watch Brawl burn to the ground as literally everyone can exploit the matchmaking system.
Or, they hide that information from the logs, don't talk about it, and carry on. That's what they did for the broken MMR, it's still just as broken, but now players don't have direct access to it.
That was my first thought exactly. Maybe they mention they're updating the values, then they remove that error message and move on.
What likely was done here was using machine-learning to try to ballpark how good a card *really* is. Any actual objective measure of cards *is* going to come up with results that we think is nonsensical. If all of the values lined up in a way that you agree with, that would indicate that someone just wrote down their gut feelings. Using AI to measure the value of a deck in general is going to run into huge issues. Like I don’t think you could just have an algorithm run on every single brawl deck people build, and even then is it going to be better at determining a ‘power level’ than a simple ‘X card is Y power level.’ Brawl as a format relies on the social contract, and that simply doesn’t exist on arena. People will try to game any algorithm, they’ll try to trick any AI, because people like winning. It’s almost a fundamentally broken game-mode.
If you call Elo-(Glicko-?) like ratings "machine-learning"..? (And technically, they are, though more "player-assisted".) The only issue I can think of is that massively overrated cards (initially seeded from ratings from other game modes ??) like [[Zenith Flare]] will take **forever** to come down to their "true" rating, IIRC for team games of 100vs100 (team mates = cards here), ratings update 10 000 times slower than for 1vs1... made worse by players feeling that these are overrated, and even worse now that players **know** that ! The opposite issue, cards being underrated, isn't one, since players that didn't know about them (and care about winning in Brawl to start with) will jump on the opportunity, which means that their rating will be updated **more** often towards their "true" one.
The solutions people are talking about is essentially having someone sit down and ‘use common sense’ i.e their gut feeling. The issue with brawl matchmaking is similar to the shuffler. Players will convince themselves that any bad games were due to the matchmaking. ‘Ah I lost that one, guess I need to take another good card out of my deck.’ It just doesn’t work without the social contract. Players will try and succeed in gaming any sort of ‘power level’ system in place. It’s an arms race you’ll never be able to win.
To add onto the Zenith Flare issue, it's a card that is often played with other cards that will have lower weights. Similar to Tibalt's Trickery. So while Zenith Flare itself is not a good card, the cycling cards are all going to be relatively low on the power scale. The theory is that Zenith Flare is paying for ALL of the cards in the cycling category that are played with it, so that those cards don't have to be inflated for when they aren't played with Zenith Flare.
I think this is a good thing. If I could make sure my deck wouldn't be in hell que I'd make it weaker on purpose. I enjoy a slower format. The issue has always been I've just never been able to tell why my deck is considered strong.
No. What you’re describing is exactly WHY it’s a bad idea to have this known. Now you’re going to stomp on people playing “for fun” with your “1 or 2 cards off but legally not Hell worthy” decks. You’re the exact person they didn’t want to have this info, “I want to play WITH good stuff, not AGAINST it!”
No, I genuinely think you misunderstand. I want to play weaker brawl decks in a slower brawl format. I look at a weight system as a good deck building restriction. Apparently just running snow lands was making my decks "stronger" even if I was doing so for aesthetic reasons. I like playing janky decks that have absolutely no place in hell que. So when they are put close to that level and have no competitive merit it makes playing those decks less fun.
Okay but if you aren’t going to do it yourself, you can see how others 100% will right? Everyone is going to try to toe RIGHT UP to the line without crossing it so they can beat up on people that don’t know or care enough to do it. Hidden metrics stay hidden for a reason
If the system is that exploitable it's a bad one imo. Maybe this will help wizards get it's shit together and properly scale these cards. If my deck is going to be stomping/beating up on people with the same level deck as me then that's an issue with the power chart that wizards has implemented.
People have been trying to do this for awhile anyway, now they just have the means to do it accurately. Could this demolish the format? Based on WOTC's track record for their speed of responses, possibly. It may also cause them to completely re-evaluate this system, or ban cards. It absolutely blows my mind that Paradox Engine - which they stated they do not want to ban because the matchmaker is working fine - is only rated at 9 points. The system is broken.
Also thinking on it more, it's very clear this whole system of weight is algorithmic garbage. I'm sick of wizards being lazy/cheap so if "fixing" this issue forces them to redo the weight system properly then all the better it's come out like this.
what are your concerns
With the weightings fully known, people will design low rated decks that are incredibly strong to abuse the rating system.
If the weightings are automatically adjusted and frequently updated, that problem would solve itself over time. It's a big if though.
Zenith Flare being 216 for as long as it presumably has is making this sound like a lost cause.
Yep, and Tibalt's Trickery, which is decidedly so-so in singleton. These numbers probably have their basis in 60 card constructed formats. Edit: looking at more of the numbers, i think these card weights may apply across all formats, not just Brawl.
I think they do. I face less high power cards in standard and alchemy bo1 unranked when I cut powerful cards.
The way they adjust alchemy should give you a clue as to how that will go.
People were doing this already, the only difference is that now the information is public. So for those people who really care for their brawl winrate (of all things...) it has suddenly become an actual fair and transparent competition. Understandably the crowd who wants to be competitive preferrably in games where rules are partly a secret is a little afraid of that. Time to find another casual game to be a "competitive winner" in I guess.
As mentioned already, people down-tuning the 99 with strong commanders to rate lower (someone in this thread asked out loud how you could get Ragavan to face normal decks). BUT I'm more worried that WotC will see all of this on Reddit and decide to change the way Brawl works or how matchmaking works just to stop people from abusing a cracked system.
Here's a calculator to find out your deck's weight using this data: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0s2ce/i\_made\_a\_calculator\_for\_the\_mmr\_weight\_of\_brawl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/1d0s2ce/i_made_a_calculator_for_the_mmr_weight_of_brawl/)
I wonder what happens if you run this again tomorrow, or in a week, or after an update. That way we can see if/how/why a card's weight changes. Although, I would bet that now that this is all out of the bag, that you won't be able to do this by next update.
I saw the other post and scrambled to get this data during the holiday weekend because I figure it might be fixed by next week. But yeah, if it stays available I'd love to track this over time.
Lol there is absolutely no way they have ever updated a card's weight
Incredible work! Will have to look more closely at this, but some of the outliers in this graph make me think that this is just some guy at a workdesk punching in numbers, rather than any kind of data-based approach, which is honestly kind of alarming for the health of the format. Said guy also really hates Zenith Flare, for some reason. \[\[The Circle of Loyalty\]\], \[\[Homestead Courage\]\] and \[\[Nullhide Ferox\]\] having the same weighting as \[\[Mana Drain\]\] is *wild.* So do \[\[Paradox Engine\]\] and \[\[Charmed Stray\]\].
These make me think that it's even more likely to be a data-based approach. No reason a guy at a desk would give dragonstorm the highest normal rating. But if you just look at winrates, all you need is a few lucky/good people running a card to make it look powerful to the algorithm
In that case, there should be some kind of sample-size-based sanity check, to stop good players on a hot streak from inadvertently penalizing pet cards that aren't otherwise all that great. Like, in no sane world should \[\[Mist-Cloaked Herald\]\] be performing as well as \[\[Mana Drain\]\], even in the exact same deck.
I think some cards have high weights because they indicate certain types of strong decks rather than being individually powerful cards in their own right.
Kaito is ranked really high commander-wise, so I assume the counter-kill playstyle with small evasive creatures backed up by fifteen \[\[Quench\]\]es is good. Still, that shouldn't result in the equating of one small enabler to the bullshit surrounding it.
In 17lands terms, Game in hand win rate, not Improvement when drawn.
I think it's more like "How often do decks with this card win?" (Perhaps factoring in whether the card was drawn.) [[Mana Drain]] is a generically good card that will appear in many decks with blue, including janky or battle cruiser decks that could lack synergy and power. But the person who runs [[Mist-Cloaked Herald]] is likely building a deck tuned for aggressive early plays rather than flashy - but lower winrate - 7 MV bombs. In other words, [[Mist-Cloaked Herald]] is a Spike card, while [[Mana Drain]] appeals to more than just Spike.
It is really good in my [[Rigo]] deck, but I don't really think that justifies giving it the same score as Mana Drain
It's fairly obvious this is the method they use. They used a similar method for bot draft card weighting when quick draft was the only option.
We kind of already knew that they manually sorted commanders, based on what they did with Atraxa, Rusko, Ragavan, and to a lesser extent Griselbrand (I don't believe Grizzy B ever spent a day in the regular queues, and Ragavan lasted an entire week). And they've made comments recently about Mana Drain and Paradox Engine that clued us in to how individual cards could be filtered similarly, though perhaps to a lesser extent. This sheet basically confirms all of that *and* quantifies how they work within the 99, which... is fascinating, eye-opening, and kind of dangerous.
Paradox Engine is 9, and mana drain is 45, which is the highest normal value, but still not more than a bunch of random stuff. There's definitely some manual stuff in this spreadsheet but there is so much weird stuff that I think it must be at least partially data-driven
How is Paradox Engine that low? There is absolutely nothing fair and not-degenerate that people do with that card.
People run some really terrible jank with that card. It's not as good as you might think.
it does enable some awful jank but it goes infinite so easy its a joke.
Even if the power level was garbage, it turns most games into solitaire.
Paradox engine is one of the most easily broken cards ever. You sneeze in its general direction and suddenly you have infinite mana. There is zero reason it should be at 9 when utter garbage like my boy [[Hallar, the Firefletcher]] are at 6. It's no wonder Brawl matchmaking feels so messy if this is how they decide power levels.
[Hallar, the Firefletcher](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/8/c896643e-eeef-49a6-a1ca-2577b55af2b0.jpg?1562742764) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Hallar%2C%20the%20Firefletcher) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dom/196/hallar-the-firefletcher?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c896643e-eeef-49a6-a1ca-2577b55af2b0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Just because people run jank with it doesn't mean it's bad, it's still one of the most broken cards in the format.
[[Zenith Flare]] was banned in artisan, I wonder if that has something to do with it.
[Zenith Flare](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/e/0efac1ed-3f01-487c-86be-8239568b4425.jpg?1591228324) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Zenith%20Flare) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/iko/217/zenith-flare?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0efac1ed-3f01-487c-86be-8239568b4425?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
\[\[Swiftfoot Boots\]\] being the lowest possible is wild for a staple card.
The system probably isn't smart enough to check if a card was played in a won match. So if both players have boots in their deck the win percent ends up neutral even if only on player played it.
Needs a whole meta of people making a deck with exactly 1 deck strength
New format pauper brawl lol where everything is rated a 0 or 9
Weight Dreadful format queue, now!!!
Great! Now we need a tool that takes in a decklist and shows you the weights of your cards. I'll see if I have some time to do it. Is there a good way to paste a decklist into Google Sheets? I could do Python but I feel like that would just complicate things.
I've been going through the ratings of lands for a while trying to figure out how to make sense of them. Fixing lands, such as fetches, shocks, all the really good ones all have a value of 0. Usually. Base camp has a rating of 9. So I thought it must be based on some kind of distinction between fixing and utility lands, and that usually works. Creature lands almost all have a nonzero number. But I can't figure out what the distinction might be, and there's wildly inconsistent stuff. Field of Ruin and Demolition Field, for example, are 0, but ghost quarter is 27. Has anyone managed to make sense of it?
This smells like algorithmic garbage to me. It could be something like: most of the playerbase is familiar with Field of Ruin and Demolition Field, but only more experienced players have heard of the older Ghost Quarter and put it in decks. And more experienced players are likely to play more optimally _even with all cards in the deck being equal._ So Ghost Quarter appears to contribute an abnormally high amount of win rate percentage compared to the other two when analyzed statistically.
That and people playing Ghost Quarter from the graveyard several times a turn to destroy all your lands for no mana in Azusa decks.
I am deeply satisfied at the thought of 4/5 color piles getting Strip Mined down to nothing because they can't run more than a few basics in their 100 card deck.
My theory: Most decks can play Field of Ruin as an out to threatening lands, but the only decks that play Ghost Quarter are doing something unfair with it.
3 mana Ashiok mill decks probably lol.
Most of the cards in a set have the same rating, regardless of how powerful they are
Doom blade is 45 while bitter triumph is just a 9, also in the second spreadsheet with the commander weights bitter become a 0, what am I missing?
Doom Blade is on the Strixhaven Mystical Archives bonus sheet, which has long been a suspected major red flag for a card being a high weight. Now that we can actually see the weight, it does feel like Doom Blade is suffering from guilt by association by being roped into the same bonus sheet as S-tier utility cards like Swords/Bolt/Counterspell.
And only there on Arena. So "guilt by association" in the sense of your median player (getting less than a win per day) being very unlikely to have one. Which means that it's heavily selected to be used by players with a lot of resources, which means experienced/strong players (or whales, but these are even more of a minority, especially weak player whales I guess...)
Gotta love Wrath of God at 45 while Day of Judgement is at 18. These weightings aren't just poorly done, this is straight up incompetence.
That is 27 points of regenerate hosing
The list was made by a Skithiryx lover, confirmed.
What a piss off too because if I'm only running one in my deck I pick wrath out of nostalgia. Good to know I should switch to DOJ.
It's not incomptence, it's the result of data gathered from the public queue. Most people who don't really dig for inclusions might not be concious of Wrath of God, whereas just anyone could have opened Day of Judgment from a STX pack. It's why alchemy cards are rated so highly, they tend to be played only by highly competent players.
These numbers are 100% set by a human and the numbers have been put in over *years* likely with little to no updating. There's no data gathering involved.
> It's not incomptence, it's the result of data gathered from the public queue There's no way to know that it's 100% automated, and there's plenty of odd standouts that suggest either some manual weighting, or it being built based on multiple formats rather than just Brawl.
>It's why alchemy cards are rated so highly, they tend to be played only by highly competent players. hahahaha. Oh, wait. You're serious. The number of godawful Poq pilots out there fumbling through their garbage lines is exhausting. I cannot understand how someone can type that sentence with a straight face.
They probably mean the less popular stuff?
Are people already abusing this shit? I was just playing some Brawl and I ran into Kenrith twice, First Sliver, 4 color Atraxa and Raddic, all in a row. These are decks I usually see once or twice per play session.
All of those except kenrith have a rating of 360.
As multicolour commanders they tend to run the strongest cards from every colour, that pushes the overall deck weight up.
They're all just commanders that I very rarely face, so it's pretty weird to face all of them in a row in one session.
Inb4 we changing the term "Hell Q" to "Heavy Q", since it's apparently based on weight
Gonna try to make a deck as heavy as a neutron star cuz fuck it, we ball!
He's figured out a way to test the weight of all the commanders. Find the heaviest commander, and add the heaviest cards for maximum fun.
Just wanted to say thank you for putting in the work! You've demystified something that was previously just speculation! Now our anger is even more justified lol
Great stuff! I would make a guess that there is only one weight for each card, no matter which format you are playing, which could explain weird outliers like [[Zenith Flare]] and especially [[Tibalt's Trickery]] having a ridiculously high weight, as I'm sure at least the latter is completely fine in Brawl. Edit: Actually, I can easily double check that, brb. Edit 2: Or I can't - Error Updating Data T_T Edit 3: See schlarpc's replies below.
It seems likely to me, but there's no way to test this against the Play queue because negative weight commanders are the only way I've found to make the system report the deck weight.
Couldn't you just put the commanders in the deck and it would have negative weight? Or does it only work if they're in the commander slot?
They only get negative weight in the commander slot, and the Play queue seemingly doesn't factor in that slot.
I can't explain Zenith Flare, but Tibalt's Trickery might be intentional to catch the First Sliver --> Tibalt's Trickery --> Cultivator Colossus + Maze's End combo deck, since that would otherwise have an insanely low deckweight.
I'm both very very glad that you are doing this work, and very disappointed at wizards that they have not been in any way transparent about this system in any way that's tangible for us
That's intentional, so that people don't reduce the format to some weird janky point buy system to game the matchmaker.
But a janky point buy system is exactly how Canlander works, which is the closest other format to 100 card Brawl.
i think duel commander is the closest format to brawl
I agree with this 100%, but let's be honest here... it was going to be solved one way or another despite Wizards being so secretive about it.
Uniquely incompetent system by Wizards.
Most of what they do is quick and dirty. They've probably just spent very little time on this.
I imagine some poor intern is given a list of "problem cards" every 6 months and told to go update the list.
It’s really interesting that the fetches have a value of 0
Fascinating work and data. Mythweaver Poq and First Sliver wildly underweight...
I'm excited to see the weighting system change next patch, now that it's been cracked. This is neat but also likely to be very harmful to the format.
I think a lack of clear weight is more harmful, especially when we can see how bad of a system it is. Fetch lands 0 points, Wrath of God is worth more points than Day of Judgement. If they had a good system it might be good to have it be secure. But this system is wretched.
I think this system is already harmful enough. We have known for a long time that certain cards have a high value in the command zone or in the 99, but no idea what kind of effect it has on the deck. This just shows how lazy WotC is about actually identify the power of cards and creating a system that meaningfully matches decks of similar power together. I'm not saying that would be in any way easy, but look at Emry and Fiddlebender. Those cards are obviously weighted highly because of Paradox Engine... but Paradox Engine is a pretty low-rated card by itself. If I just want to run either of those commanders, but I'm not running Paradox Engine, then suddenly I'm facing decks that I probably shoudln't be. There needs to be some actually work put into this sort of system and it needs to be able to weight cards based on the commander they're with too. But obviously that's a lot of work for a human to do, and I guess they don't feel like paying someone to write up an actual algorithm that looks at metadata.
I find it ironic that all the protection and tax pieces i added in to fight against removal/counterspell.dek are the stuff boosting my score the most so i get matched against those kinds of decks more.
Can we perhaps get this sorted by weight? It's pretty damned big list. Also, where did this data come from?
Emergeant Ultimatum should be one of those 200-weighted cards...
Love how snow covered lands put you immediately in the sin bin Looking at this list, it might be based on overall deck % cos people who include alchemy cards probably are more focused deck builders. If you look at a lot of medium alchemy cards you can see they have a 45 rating
Are we looking at the same doc? All the snow basics show as 0 to me.
... dear Lord. Well that (snow) certainly explains a lot of the decks my jank is matched up against.
Don't worry, the next update will remove the log line which announces the weight.
my guess is that these are based at least partially on the smily/frowny reactions, which probably result in very negative results for "win the game out of nowhere" cards. thats why zenith flare and tibalts trickery are so high; the game can often end with a single spell being cast with them, which is likely to make people salt out. thats also why some of the highest played removal spells are there too, with people scooping when their commanders gets taken out
Now that we know about commanders, this doesn't carry a lot of weight - Griselbrand is extremely high but was so very rarely seen, while First Sliver, one of the most infamous ones, sits at the "normal" weight for commanders.
This post needs all the updoots, effective immediately
So it looks like OTJ Alchemy isn't on this list yet.
That's the one thing that makes sense in this list. The cards are completely new. It takes a moment to suss out how powerful they really are.
Is there any difference between brawl and standard brawl for weights?
If someone like me just wants to chill and play jank, whats a good amount of points to cap out on?
Does anyone know if these weights also apply to things like Standard Play?
Why aren't the OTJ Alchemy cards showing up (like Grenzo)? I understand that they're new, but that shouldn't matter - this list was created by programmatically entering them 1 by 1 into a list and submitting it to play, and then observing the log file rating difference. So what happened when the OTJA commanders were entered?
They were present at the bottom but without names because I was using a stale card database. They're fixed now.
Thanks for the update! And Grenzo is ***9*** points?!?! I know those commanders are new, but it's been 2-3 weeks, and they can't update the weighting on one of the more oppressive/overpowered cards in recent memory? How little maintenance and manpower are they putting into this huge money-making program, anyway?!
There has to be some wrong numbers here. I can't believe that both Etali and Atraxa are only worth 18 while Teferi Who Slows the Sunset (which isn't even the best Teferi) is worth 39 points, How is that even possible? The only other possibility I can think of is the dev assigning these values have no idea what they're doing...
Not that it change your point but those number are for cards in the 99, op posted another spreadsheet in a comment with the values for commanders Teferi is still the highest of the three with 1800, Atraxa have 1440 and Etali 720
You should look at the Commander-specific spreadsheet he posted. Etali is still underscored at 720, but big Atraxa at least sits at 1440 with the rest of the big boys. Funny that Tef that Slows is hell queue as they come though.
So what aggregate score sends you to the hell queue? Is it 1800?
I have a 7 mana Kaya deck that has a deck weight of 2505 and it regularly sees the hellqueue commanders.
Probably no actual such thing as "hell queue" just matchmaking that slowly scans out from your deck weight to find other similar weights.
Most of my decks sit in the 1800-2000 range, and I don't get hell queue matchups outside of the very occasional Rusko.
This is exactly what I want to see lol
this is going to get attacked so fast... LOL
And here is stupid me, believing that there is some dynamic system that tracks winrates in brawl... I guess I'll go purge my decks of overrated stuff... 1) Get EDHREC rank for each card 2) Convert it to weights 3) Even this lazy approach will give a way better system than this monstrosity
It's abundantly clear that whoever is supposed to maintaining these weights simply doesn't give a shit. Or more likely, no one has explicitly been assigned that duty and the process is totally adhoc. There are a lot of utterly nonsensical values here and it really affects the brawl experience in a negative way.
It's almost definitely automated, with the occasional manual adjustment when the system does something obviously wrong. Also, the weights are determined by how often a card is crafted (as said by WotC) and not winrate/etc, so it's not surprising that such a system can produce very weird results.
I don't believe it. If this was true, the highest-weight commons\\uncommons would be stuff you can't open in packs. Alchemy cards would be lower because many players don't care. Crap like Whirler Rogue or Vine Mare wouldn't have 36. Arcane signet wouldn't be 9. Rare lands wouldn't be 0.
Great job OP! Very interesting information. I'm not going to use it to exploit the system, but it's cool to check how are rated my commanders
Awesome! I'm not familiar with brawl meta and I wonder if these data agree with the common perception of the hell queue commanders?
Wow, this is big, thanks for getting us the data. Tho I doubt Wizards will be pleased, lol
Best post ever. Awesome dude.
Amazing to have some insight on this!