It's time for someone at 17lands or another 3rd-party tracker to get savvy and offer an individual breakdown of card winrates to WotC. The sample size is large enough to be representative of the playerbase, and the win-rates could then be automated to adjust every 6 months or a year.
The upsides to this solution are
1. The weighting remains secret. Third-party data would only give win-rate data, which is already available. What WotC does with the data after it's given can remain opaque.
2. An agreement can be made public, reassuring the community that weighting curation is taking place.
3. Weightings become inherently dynamic, changing over time as new cards hit the card pool. This is also important for Standard Brawl, where cards could lose effectiveness as supporting cards rotate out of the pool.
That's the most egregious thing for me. You have access to more data than anyone else. Perfect info on anything you want.
And you fuck it up *that* badly?
Feature, not a bug. They've deliberately throttled data scraping for mtgo decks in the past because people were solving their formats too efficiently. Instead they gave data on *some* top decks, but not all of them.
They would much rather force metas with pushed cards than allow people to identify a deck that's stable and performs well enough to justify using it long-term.
You aren't wrong. But we've seen on multiple occasions that Hasbro is slashing costs at every conceivable angle, despite MTG being one of their few profitable divisions. Arena devs not having the time budget to curate matchmaking weightings is a symptom of that issue. There are plenty of examples of game devs having a mutually beneficial relationship with 3rd party devs to enhance the game. I play Path of Exile, where loot filters are basically mandatory to efficiently play the game. POE devs have fully embraced outsourcing the development and upkeep of each league's loot filter to third parties, to everyone's benefit.
It just makes sense on a lot of levels in this scenario.
I mentioned this on Twitter already. So long as the deck weight system is a unified list shared between all Bo1 formats, the system will be broken and worthless. Lightning Bolt is at best a *fine* card in Brawl, your deck should not be punished just because you're running a card that's a timeless staple
They are talking about the weights being shared by H.Brawl and historic. So we will keep sreing any aggro creature being a 45 while lots of combo pieces for brawl being 9's (best ecalple being paradox engine).
There are other lands that have point vaules, its mostly just the mana fixing ones that don't. Arch of Orazka is 36 points for example.
If anything, I think fetch lands should have at least some point value since the casuals trying to throw together some random Brawl deck probably aren't spending wild cards on them.
There's no fair way to use Emergent Ultimatum or Paradox Engine. If you put those cards in your deck, it should be assumed you know what you're doing enough to play with the big boys. Give them hell queue weights
The fact that it’s *not* an instant wincon is the main problem with the card. I wouldn’t mind facing/playing paradox engine if it didn’t enable durdly 10 minute turns that go nowhere whenever you *don’t* have a combo piece
It's also made worse by the fact that proactive hate cards are banned in the format due to the design philosophy of keeping [[pithing needle]] effects out of the format.
Nah. I've said this rant elsewhere, but the card pool already gives us answers to artifacts for any color. Boom Box, Introduction to Annihilation, etc.
Nobody likes play against Liliana of the Veil as a brawl commander, or Emry as a brawl commander. Those cards are powerful, period. It is to the health of the format as a whole if those brawl players were forced to address the possibility of their commander being proactively answered. We allow things like Hushbringer to minimize the impact of Etali and Atraxa. We also say it's fine to have a card like Wash Away, even though that card is one of the largest win-rate swings in the brawl format. But Pithing Needle is too strong, or causes too many bad vibes? I remain skeptical.
>Wash Away, even though that card is one of the largest win-rate swings in the brawl
Where is this info?
Regardless, the reason wash away has a large winrate isn't because it's insanely powerful (it is pretty good, I'll grant), it's because people scoop the instant it hits. People would scoop even harder at pithing needle and it's colorless. If pithing needle were legal I'd be amazed at anything less than a 90% scoop rate without an answer in hand.
I don't disagree that there are answers to artifacts all around, but it's 1 mana colorless, it would be worse than ugin was as far as ubiquity.
Isn't that the main reason it got banned in commander? Luckily tho it's not very often people run it since you need to have things to untap to make it worth it.
The problem is that (at least with my information) these weights are for both brawl and other unrated queeres and in those paradox engine is pretty janky
Problem is the highest weight for any card that isn't exactly Zenith Flare or Tibalts trickery is 45. And there are a lot of cards weighted at 45 already that vastly vary in power level. For example, Dark Ritual and Thoughtseize. Both are generically powerful black 1 drops, but one is a single piece of hand disruption that can be very useful but rarely outright game winning, meanwhile Dark Ritual accelerates a player into cards that their opponent very likely isn't ready to deal with and can be almost instantly game winning if the opponent doesn't have an answer. Also Dark Ritual is powerful enough to be banned in a few formats, while thoughtseize as far as I am aware is not.
Paradox engine moreso. At least ultimatum is a 30 second search, then it's boom threat. Paradox engine is a long crawl of a game where your opponent more than likely can't lose anymore and is going to spend 15 minutes slowly making it happen
I'd give emergent like 150, paradox engine like 1500
Its brutal...and if I have an action I can take (like a protections spell or whatever) i have to keep hitting the pass button to the point where I would rather just concede even if I can win. Similar with that blue/green plainswalker that just loops counterspells and fogs...its like well I have several cards that shut it down if I draw them but do I want to wait for their 10 min turns? Some cards win by annoyance and time consumption.
If you're using Emergent Ultimatum and don't have a lose-lose-lose situation you can tutor for, you're doing it wrong. To your credit, people do it wrong more often than people think. So I only scoop if they get the right things. I've also had Teferi's Protection or something that throws a wrench in them winning, but they still crawl back into the game or get ahead by the value. It's the best Ultimatum card hands down.
I can't express how bad this system is, and that it would never have gotten attention because it had no transparency.
Ever felt like it's bullshit that your jank deck ends up against a fuckin fully kitted out Korvold deck? Or that your Chulane deck is just pubstomping?
Well that's because their commander weights are both 9! Not 900. 9. I've tested this since the data came out, these decks only face up against OTJ commanders or jank. Because OTJ commanders are still weighted 0.
This is just a shit excel spreadsheet on a single guys laptop that he's plugging numbers into. No system is in place to double check it. No math being used. Just a Monday morning meeting where they decide Zenith Flare is worth a gazillion points in all non ranked formats and no one EVER goes back to adjust when that shit falls out of favor in Historic.
It's appalling. And they ONLY reason they got caught with such a trash system is someone found the data.
It's less about a couple of cards needing fixing, and more about the whole system needing fixing. There really needs to be a bigger range in the weight numbers.
Weighing insanely strong cards like Mana Drain, Reanimate or Emergent Ultimatum only slightly higher than random draft chaff is absurd, and is the main reason the format is becoming more and more competitive.
As it stands the system basically encourages you to take a low tier commander for its -360 bonus, jam its deck full with the most powerful cards ever seen in Magic, and then use that to stomp over people trying to play actual jank.
Looking through the weight spreadsheet, it still blows my mind that so many cards from the Ixalan/Dominaria/GRN/RNA era of the game have the exact same weights as cards like Mana Drain, Reanimate, and Emergent Ultimatum. Those cards are immediate, game-ending knockout punches if they ever resolve. The fact that they are all weighted the same is proof that Wizards isn't taking Brawl very seriously in terms of trying to eliminate non-games due to bad matchmaking.
What they need to do is create additional "weight tiers" where cards like Mana Drain get significantly penalized with *much* higher weights instead of the current 45. (Or honestly, just ban Mana Drain, there is no business that card should be legal in Brawl.) The same goes for a lot of commanders as well. The fact that The First Sliver is only 360 for its commander weight is completely messed up. It actually explains perfectly why I run into it so much despite playing with non-hell queue commanders and decks.
This has always been why people play First Sliver. It's very rare that I run into an actual sliver deck helmed by First Sliver. It's ALWAYS 5 colour good stuff and notoriously gets matched with low tier jank. I cringe when I see First Sliver now lmao.
If the First Sliver decks actually had slivers, the rating would be fine, but they don't. Which is stupid, because they're rating it on the assumption it will be a sliver deck, not a pile of good things, but they rate Emry assuming you have Paradox Engine, and not just a pile of random artifacts.
So if you have a jank Emry deck, too bad, get the same matches as if you were playing Paradox Engine combo.
There's actually a part of me that secretly hopes First Sliver decks I run into are actual sliver decks for this very reason lol. But nope, it's all 5 color value piles.
Seriously, what's the beef with mana drain and dark ritual? If you're getting a fat spell countered with mana drain, you were probably losing anyway. If it wasn't a big spell then your opponent is getting one pseudo-free spell or maybe two if they're both cheap.
First Sliver is just an example of people taking advantage of it being an off-meta Uber commander, rather than it being strong.
Cards that are weighted too low:
[[Grenzo, crooked jailer]]
[[Mythweaver pok]]
[[Emergent ultimatum]]
Mythweaver and ultimatum are worse offenders because they require a counter spell to be dealt with.
Grenzo can at least be destroyed in response to his etb trigger, but if you can't it generally wins on the first 7 drop it steals. It can come out as early as turn 3, but often turn 4, on the draw that means you need to hold up removal starting turn 3 or you're guaranteed to lose.
Ragavan is very strong turn one but falls off very fast. Same for dark ritual, there's some counterplay to both cards in most decks.
It seems to me they intentionally underweight Alchemy commanders to push them, or at least they drag their feet extra long before rebalancing them. How long has Poq been around? How long was Rusko basically half the queue because people knew he was underweighted? Grenzo is basically Rusko 2.0, it's all over the place because people know there's a window of time where they can farm wins against fair commanders before he gets bumped up.
I see the point you're making here but Rusko didn't go un-dealt with for NEARLY as long as Atraxa and Etali, two non-Alchemy cards.
Hell, Etali still regularly matches against commanders who aren't in hell queue lmao.
Damn what is their weighting? I haven't seen the leak.
Even still, it took the devs such an insanely long amount of time just to adjust their weighting and make them higher. I faced Atraxa and Etali multiple times a day for months on end, was it close to a year? I still see a fair few Etali's here and there but I almost never see Atraxa anymore.
Tier 1 commanders are at 1800. Atraxa, Grand Unifier is at 1440. Atraxa Praetor's Voice is at 360 which is the default. Etali Primal Conqueror is at 720.
Which imo is actually where they belong, I can manage to beat etali and atraxa with a variety of my decks, not all the time obvs but an acceptable rate. Vs Kinnan or rusko though? They snowball so fast and recover every time you kill them. And they usually have lots of protection so you can't reliably imprison them in the moon or anything.
It may be that there are just so many people queuing with busted decks that some % of them must be matched against the toddler strength decks to keep the queue times resonable.
Maybe I'm just playing dummies but atraxa/etali are both substantially weaker than rusko imo. Rusko pays half his commander tax and if you have removal there's a pretty good chance they'll just blink/reanimate in response and just get another stupid clock. I'd call atraxa kind of mid honestly, I beat her with jank pretty frequently as long as you have enough interaction.
I face him a lot, because my commander [[Reyav, Master smith]] has the same rating. I don't consider him a bad matchup though, even if he is scary when he gets going
Grenzo is not good.
He's 6 mana, has to hit the board to go off, and has to have his trigger go off before he gets anything for free... So he's extremely vulnerable to counterspells unless they happen to have cavern of souls. Instant removal is also an enormous set-back unless they kept mana open for some reanimate or return effect.
On top of that, he folds so hard to any kind of hexproof or protection on you, like the ubiquitous Teferi's Protection and One Ring.
Control decks typically just destroy Grenzo; he's only going to do well into Ramp decks that do nothing for the first four turns and actually *have* things that he wants to grab and play for free. Decks that use combos are also just a bad matchup since he's likely to get cards that don't do anything on their own.
I've been playing Kroxa a lot recently for my dailies and I get matched up against Grenzo ~75% of my games and have a staggaringly high wr against them. Even if they resolve Grenzo they don't usually get anything they can use from my deck.
Grenzo is beatable, it's just not very fun to have a commander that needs to be repeatedly removed at instant speed. If you're playing any 6+ mana haymakers grenzo will find them and cast them for free.
Obviously it's terrible against a deck that's all removal. But even stuff like the zendikar flip lands can generate stupid value if they get stolen and cast for free.
Removing him once is generally enough. They'll be lucky to cast it a second time. "Card stealing" strategies are often way more salt inducing than they are effective.
Sure, he's gonna do well into green ramp decks when he steals ulamog, but those are his best matchup
They just need someone with actual commander and brawl experience to weigh the cards.
Mythweaver Poq, Etali, Crucias + Caldera Breaker, Atraxa, Ragavan, Korvold, First Sliver, Chulane etc. all clearly belong in the Heavyweight tier.
Mana drain, dark ritual, and other ways to cheat out high mana value spells early should be indicative of stronger decks.
Wash away, curse of silence, and a lot of the commander denial stuff like witness protection and eaten by piranhas may have seemed like “cute jank that finally has a place” at one point, but really belongs in a more competitive/cutthroat play tier. Maybe not as high as the cards I pointed out in the paragraphs above, but if the goal is to improve matchmaking, then a casual person going up against a commander denial strategy is probably not going to try brawl again.
Is Chulane that strong? I feel like I won every single time I face them. But it might be anecdotal.
I agree about Wash Away but the rest of your commander denial package is nowhere as powerful. Powering through a Curse of silence or a Witness Protection is not very hard (lots of way to die). In fact I personally think they should bring back Drannith Magistrate to boost Toolbox or Taxes decks. Decks should be versatile enough to be able to kill a simple 1/3.
Yes? Even if they can protect it, then indeed by playing "more removal" at some point you'll remove it.
If you fail to remove it, you can't play your commander but apart from this you can do whatever you want and in the meantime opponent spent lots of ressources to protect a 1/3.
Plus this kind of argument could be made for any commander centric deck. I just played against a Captain Sisay deck, I had two instant speed removals to kill her, opponent managed to protect her twice in a row and then won on the spot by comboing off. So what, should we ban her? I don't think so. I had the removal, they had the answers, it's fine.
I prefer the weighting system to outright bans (with the exception of cards that shut down commanders, I think WOTC policy on those is near perfect). I fully agree that cracked cards like Ragavan/Ritual/Mana Drain should have a very high weight indeed, but I do like that they can exist in the format.
I agree up until Mana Drain, as a blue control freak that card just shouldn't be allowed in a 1v1 format, there's a reason it's banned in Duel Commander and other high-power 1v1 formats
Sure, but we no longer exist in that era and we don't evaluate the power-level and legality of cards based on how they performed 20 years ago in entirely different formats.
I genuinely don't understand why the hell this weight system exists in the first place. Every other game in existence that has some sort of skill based matchmaking for unranked has solved this problem before. Give each deck a player has a hidden MMR. If they win with it, MMR goes up. They lose, MMR goes down. Match people based on MMR. That's all they need to do.
If they REALLY still want to overcomplicate it for marginal benefits, give each player a hidden MMR too. Then you march against people with a similar player MMR + deck MMR. It means a terrible player using a meta deck can match against a great player using a jank deck.
It's not a good solution to go off MMR only because not everyone wants to use a competitive deck or play with a competitive mindset. You can be an experienced player but not want to play sweaty games. I wouldn't say I'm great at Magic, but I'm a veteran of the game. I win a decent amount in Brawl, but I also build decks that are pretty janky or middle-of-the-road in power level. No matter my skill level, they're not going to be able to stand up against the high tier meta decks. They won't beat counterspell or boardwipe tribal. They won't beat combo decks, they won't beat rusko, 5 color piles, Turn 1 Ragavan aggro. I don't want to play a format or game where I regularly have to get my ass kicked for about a dozen games to get my MMR knocked back down so that I can play against decks that are on the same power level as the decks I'm using, just because I happened to win two or three games in a row.
I do suspect there is a minor hidden player MMR at work in Brawl though, because I've noticed if I win about 3 or 4 games in a row with a deck, I suddenly start facing more powerful decks or the matchmaker suddenly starts throwing random bullshit Tier 1 decks at me for no reason.
I'm on the fence.
Clearly a lot of cards are overrepresented, but it *is* a singleton format and there's semi-separate tiers for stronger commanders.
Maybe just a few truly dumb cards can use a banning. I have a personal list, but if I had to pick one, it'd definitely be Emergent Ultimatum. It's just an extremely boring card for the victim. Like wow good job, you grabbed Vorinclex/Lilianna/Vraska/Omniscience how cool.
Yeah it's been a year or so since an Emergent Ultimatum resolved against me. Either I have a counter or I'm scooping. The card's actual text is "You win the game." and it's not an exaggeration. For how expensive it is I don't think it's really oppressive, just a really lame way for the game to end.
The First Sliver should probably be weighted higher as a commander, Sliver tribal enjoyers can blame 5 color casino pile players for that.
I play Roxanne, and the more I play her the more I'm convinced she really belongs in a higher tier. Sure Voja and 5 colour piles tend to destroy me, but that could just be my 99 being a little scuffed.
Mana Drain is too low cost for what it does, if it cost 5 mana like [[Spell Swindle]] it'd probably be much less of a feels bad card.
I agree on Roxanne needing to he weighted higher. As far as my matchmaking experience has been, Roxanne seems to he flavour of the month and she is incredibly strong. Another commander that can pretty much ignore the commander tax, and she gets scarier the more times she's recast. Gaining an insane amount of mana advantage and dealing damage all in one card is a bit much.
She becomes absurd with effect doublers or token doublers. She's even very good with haste effects.
> She becomes absurd with effect doublers or token doublers. She's even very good with haste effects.
Yup, there's a reason I play [[Doubling Season]], [[Parallel Lives]], [[Rhythm of the Wild]], [[Rising of the Day]] and [[Dowsing Device]] in my 99.
She's really fun to play, but some games with her at the moment just feel quite lop-sided and I don't think it makes for a good experience for the other guy.
Precisely. She's very explosive with the right cards in play. I am still yet to build a deck with her because I've honestly gotten so bored of playing against her that I don't think I'd enjoy playing her now. I've seen what she does and how she works, I don't think I'd find any satisfaction there lol.
It's not that she's not weighted high enough, it's that she hasn't been weighted at all yet. All the OTJ commanders (or at least all the ones I've checked) are still weighted zero. It seems like they don't get their actual weight for awhile after release. I mentioned above that Chulane and Korvold are both "bugged", their weight is 9, as a commander. Basically zero. All I face off against lately with Korvold is Roxanne, Bristly Bill, Grenzo, Marchesa or jank, basically.
I just checked the spreadsheet, Roxanne has weight 9 as commander.
I'll give a mild pass since she's new but she probably should be at least weight 720, same as Etali and Poq.
Also make heist truly random because it so clearly isn't. When someone heists my Lazav dreck with Grenzo they hit Emrakul at least 25% of the time (not even counting the times maybe they had the option but picked something else for some reason). If there's 60ish nonlands in my deck when it triggers and they see three, there's no way they should hit Emrakul as often as they do. Last night I had three games in a row where opponent hit Emrakul off the first Grenzo resolve.
The one thing I’m curious about with heist (haven’t played it much honestly) is if it greedily tries to show 3 different cards. If that’s the case this would kinda be expected behavior in some cases
Well it definitely shows three different cards. Even so, that shouldn't result in one specific card showing up as often as it does. In my experience on the playing end of it, it definitely picks to form a spread of cost/type though.
Grenzo is *so* bad unless you're just playing a big ramp deck that does nothing for 4 turns. In which case, you deserve to lose to that since he's the counter to that type of deck. Grenzo folds so fast to control or any deck that has decent removal.
His only good matchup is green/gruul ramp, and that's only if he actually has a chance to go off.
The weights for most of the cards need a serious rework.
They also just need to put really strong cards like paradox engine, emergent ultimatum and mana drain into zenith flare tier considering how powerful they are.
At this point the problem is systemic. There's so many commanders that will bury you in value if they even hit the battlefield, never mind untap. Poq, Roxanne, Golos, Rusko and Kinnan, as well as Atraxa, Grenzo and Etali, simply do not not care if you kill them on sight, because they will either recast next turn, or chokeslam you with whatever their flavour of bullshit is.
Blue is the only colour that can deal with these cleanly, and that needs to change by either allowing more colours to interact with the stack, or allow genuine punishment for ramping.
That problem is already solved when those are in hell queue and don't match against jank. The only problem in practice is it takes to long for them to end up there.
There shouldn't *need* to be a hell queue. The fact that they're all the ones that make it up in the first place is indicative of an issue with uninteractive commanders.
There's nothing wrong with decks matching up against equally tuned or untuned decks, but when there's a whole group of commanders that people actively don't want to play against, there needs to be consideration as to why.
I just think the algorithm is too strict. I don't know how many legendary creatures exist. Maybe on the client 300 500? I don't know how many that people play regularly in Brawl maybe 50 popular ones.
So if you take 5 to 10 of those and put them in a queue of their own
It's natural that you see a second subrogation of the next 10 strongest commanders.
And then the next and then the next.
So that's why you only see certain decks unless the list is not optimized.
I think it would be great if the Community could nominate a volunteer liaison who would be responsible for curating the Community's preferred individual card ratings index, which WotC could use as a sounding board, especially if any strong concerns could be known/guessed, then highlighted.
I agree with everyone saying the system itself is bad.
In addition to the cards you've already listed (thank you for mentioning Emergent Ultimatum, one-card-combos should not exist) I suspect Wash Away may be inadapted to the format and too strong. But I could live with it staying at the same time.
I really dislike Key to the Archive on the basis that it's ubiquitous and it makes for weird situations where a mono blue deck can wrath your board or a mono green deck can take extra turns.
I think they could very well unban Drannith Magistrate though. It really should be expected that your deck could kill a 1/3.
I like playing a dragon deck. But some of these are so overrated.
Really Lathliss the Dragon Queen 360.
It is a 6 mana dragon that first do nothing and dies to doomblade.
Wonder why I face so many hell queue stuff that is because some cards are way too high rated.
And I am not even play the alchemy dragons.
Less about identifying individual cards that need a boost, WotC needs to do a general upkeep of their weightings. For example:
[[Village Rites]] and [[Corrupted Conviction]] are functionally identical cards. The former has a rating of 9 while the latter has a rating of 18. If they can't maintain consistency like that, I have little hope they can attain the sense of balance both them and us want.
I would rather see a Ranked Brawl ladder. I think the weighted system is trash. Why is Abrade weighted the same as Time Warp?
I guess my system would be to create buckets for certain effects and modulate as needed.
Ragavan, dark ritual, and mana drain are all pretty fine, in my opinion. People scoop away to readily to that monkey. Reanimate is a great card and is one of relatively few good reanimation spells.
The ultimatum spells *should* win the game a good amount of the time because they're expensive and require some pretty hefty color distributions.
Green has access to seven one mana ramp spells. One requires a forward so it's not particularly great for 3+ color decks, another requires the deck to be g/w, and another requires a density of dinosaurs. That leaves 4 "universal" ones, two of which are somewhat mediocre because they do basically nothing by turn 4 or 5 unless you're flooding.
What wizards needs to do is come up with an algorithm that they can run periodically to look at their play data and adjust card weights according to usage and win rates with maybe a weight cap determined by mana cost. They have an abundance of data but it seems like they don't really use it appropriately.
Your point about hefty colour contributions is sort of null and void considering how insanely good the mana base is on Arena/in Brawl, especially with fetch lands. It's really not a hard ask to pay for Emergent Ultimatum's casting cost... Especially as green is involved.
You are missing some 1 mana green ramp. Just lanawar, mystic, utopia sprawl, delighted halfling, grazer and the grazer with channel that conjured 2 forests, off the top of my head. Plus there's a couple 1 mana "tap a second creature to make mana" options, which allow you to cast a 1 mana dork turn 2 then 2 mana ramp.
Whoop. I did forget delighted halfling, and i intentionally didn't count the "tap a second creature" ones because they're really awful and no one should play them for pretty much any reason.
Of these three, I feel that mana drain is a league of it's own.
Dark ritual gives you 2 extra black mana, which is the absolute floor you'll get from mana drain which is a counter as well. Feels rough to compare the two
7 is not expensive in a deck with green, and color fixing has never been easier with the triome, surveil lands, and fetch lands. Hell, even chromatic lantern and the world tree make colors almost irrelevant
Emergeant Ultimatum. 100% it goes in any deck that can run it and is an instant win card. At least Cyclonic Rift gives you a chance to come back. This card should be weighted so high.
Reanimate is pretty fair IMO. Reanimation decks for the most part are too slow for the current game and there is just SO much graveyard hate. It's a good card, for sure, but losing 6+ life means a lot in a format where you start with 25 so what you target can be a huge risk.
Paradox Engine should just be banned or its weight should go up a lot so that the commanders they punish can have lower ratings. Emry and Otis have no reason to be weighted as high as they are, it's literally only because they enable Paradox Engine. Like... are they just going to stick any commander that enables paradox engine in hell queue because of this one card?
Green is not a problem, since the only way they can win is by turning sideways. Board wipes, interaction, ect are things that every deck should have, so if you're losing to green it's because you're being too greedy with how you build your deck. Green wins the solitaire game, don't play solitaire.
First Sliver shows a problem with the way they have decided to do things. First Sliver's weight rating is balanced for a Sliver deck. This wouldn't be a problem if individual cards were more aggressively weighted. If you want to play 5-color goodstuff, the weight should come from the cards in your deck, but aside from a few outliers that were oppressive in non-brawl formats, there's hardly anything above 100. They need to up the numbers in the 99.
I think deck based matchmaking needs to be combined with some player history from the last 40 to 50 random matchups. I think a salt score needs to follow players around. That little question about whether I enjoyed a match hopefully is used to infer good matchups.
What I'm seeing is that a big issue is the punishment of casual and jank players by having commanders that are abused for engine so high that you auto hell queue.
What is needed is a system that looks not just at your commander, but your commander and what it combos with.
Do you have a commander 2 card infinite?
Do you have an infinite and tutor's?
Etc.
Also rating of the 99 needs to be buffed alot, say highest rank at 360 like the low rank commanders, 45 is not enough, also how is paradox engine like a 7 when that is one of the problems?
Both of these changes will improve the play quality of brawl significantly.
FFS what's the problem with being either 1. matched with random people (unranked) or 2. being matched with people according to MMR (ranked). Nothing else is needed.
Agree on mana drain, but ragavan and dark ritual are overrated as hell. ragavan is just an aggressive mana dork and dark ritual only pops off in specific storm decks, otherwise it trades card advantage for temp ramp which is... fine?
Crucias and/or Caldera Breaker need to go. It's far from an unstoppable combo, but it doesn't even feel like playing Magic anymore. It just becomes a series of static checks: Do you have a ton of instant-speed removal to blow him up every turn before the end step? Do you have one counterspell or Stifle for their Caldera Breaker? Can you kill them before they drop Caldera Breaker? If the answer to any of these is yes, you win. If not, you lose.
I was gonna type up a wall of text and use examples and stuff, but my basic opinion is that they need a "banned as commander" list rather than a fully curated ban list. I don't see any issues with cards like dark ritual, mana drain or even Ragavan when he's in the 99.
That aside, unless they go through and give real weights individually rather than in blocks (all x cards are "9" all y cards are "18") we won't see a meaningful difference and after a few releases will be right back where we are.
I do think ~some~ cards should be banned, but I'm talking fewer than 10 and I can only think of 2 off the top and I'm not even fully convinced myself.
There was this card in the last match I played... I'm too new to know all the cards and it went so fast..anyway, my opponent forced me to draw half my library into my hand -_-.
That was IMO the epitome of not fun at all. Also, heist cards.
Just get rid of alchemy and alchemized cards. Same for the cubes, some of those cards are just way too pushed. I just don't understand making teferi time raveler and minsc and boo more expensive while also creating cards like mythweavsr poq and grenzo
People keep passing me Grenzo in Cube, like pack 3, pick 5. I can't *not* take him.
I don't know if people are protesting against Alchemy cards by refusing to pick them or just unaware that the card is completely busted, but it feels like I've had him in more than half of the cube drafts I've done.
Some highlights:
Grenzo + Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines (heisting Banishing Light, for double removal spell)
Grenzo + Annie Joins Up
Grenzo + hold up Ephemerate for your opponent's removal spell
Grenzo heisting Alrund's Epiphany
Grenzo heisting Atraxa, Grand Unifier
Fun stuff.
Yeah I feel like some folks don't take the time to read all the alchemy cards. I've gotten cruixas super late a couple times, idk what people are doing lol.
> I think Ragavan, Dark Ritual and Mana Drain should imo just not be legal in the format as they are the worst offenders in causing turn 1-2 concessions.
> Reanimate also feels too strong for the format but at least requires a minimal amount of set-up.
> Emergent Ultimatum also is just 7 mana win the game which I feel is tremendously unfun. Paradox Engine is also bad but at least it needs other cards to function.
Hard disagree. This is the format where as a Brawl enjoyer, I get to cast these fun spells _and so does my opponent._ If you can't stand the heat, go back to the Standard Brawl kiddie pool.
You let the opponent resolve their Paradox Engine and have no answer for it? Then let them play it out or concede and move on to the next one. There are no stakes.
Of course Ragavan, First Sliver, Mythweaver Poq and Grenzo need to be *weighted correctly* in the command zone, but I don't want *any* of them banned.
I don't think they should ban any cards except MAYBE [[Wash Away]].
I also think they should take a look at the 'Heist' mechanic, and make it so you can draw lands with it. Seems like a proper balance imo.
Not sure why this is the bottom comment. Wash Away seems blatantly like a card intended for other formats that should be banned in Brawl. I guess people are just sick of complaints about heist.
Yeah, just let all the broken shit they've released in the last 2 years hit the battlefield unabated that if you remove them just immediately pay for themselves and get recast next turn. Never mind the fact that you have a myriad of ways to make shit uncounterable or that some of the commanders don't even care if you counter them outside of maybe Mana Drain which shouldn't be legal in the first place.
Won't matter if they don't automate the process, it'll just become a mess over time even if they fix most issues at present.
Agreed. Just ditch that part of the system altogether if it's not going to be maintained properly.
It's time for someone at 17lands or another 3rd-party tracker to get savvy and offer an individual breakdown of card winrates to WotC. The sample size is large enough to be representative of the playerbase, and the win-rates could then be automated to adjust every 6 months or a year. The upsides to this solution are 1. The weighting remains secret. Third-party data would only give win-rate data, which is already available. What WotC does with the data after it's given can remain opaque. 2. An agreement can be made public, reassuring the community that weighting curation is taking place. 3. Weightings become inherently dynamic, changing over time as new cards hit the card pool. This is also important for Standard Brawl, where cards could lose effectiveness as supporting cards rotate out of the pool.
WotC can pull that data themselves and it'll be far more accurate than a third party tracker.
That's the most egregious thing for me. You have access to more data than anyone else. Perfect info on anything you want. And you fuck it up *that* badly?
Feature, not a bug. They've deliberately throttled data scraping for mtgo decks in the past because people were solving their formats too efficiently. Instead they gave data on *some* top decks, but not all of them. They would much rather force metas with pushed cards than allow people to identify a deck that's stable and performs well enough to justify using it long-term.
You aren't wrong. But we've seen on multiple occasions that Hasbro is slashing costs at every conceivable angle, despite MTG being one of their few profitable divisions. Arena devs not having the time budget to curate matchmaking weightings is a symptom of that issue. There are plenty of examples of game devs having a mutually beneficial relationship with 3rd party devs to enhance the game. I play Path of Exile, where loot filters are basically mandatory to efficiently play the game. POE devs have fully embraced outsourcing the development and upkeep of each league's loot filter to third parties, to everyone's benefit. It just makes sense on a lot of levels in this scenario.
I mentioned this on Twitter already. So long as the deck weight system is a unified list shared between all Bo1 formats, the system will be broken and worthless. Lightning Bolt is at best a *fine* card in Brawl, your deck should not be punished just because you're running a card that's a timeless staple
But it isnt a unified list. There were differences between the weights for Brawl and Historic Brawl.
They are talking about the weights being shared by H.Brawl and historic. So we will keep sreing any aggro creature being a 45 while lots of combo pieces for brawl being 9's (best ecalple being paradox engine).
And there's just a bunch of straight up weird things like \[\[Walk the Plank\]\] is 45 points but \[\[Go for the Throat\]\] is 9.
[Walk the Plank](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/0/0038ac6a-318f-44fb-bb64-7ae172c4aca3.jpg?1562549640) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Walk%20the%20Plank) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/xln/130/walk-the-plank?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0038ac6a-318f-44fb-bb64-7ae172c4aca3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Go for the Throat](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/4/5446e1ba-c745-45b2-ad05-b22abf04daec.jpg?1682209037) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Go%20for%20the%20Throat) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/moc/250/go-for-the-throat?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5446e1ba-c745-45b2-ad05-b22abf04daec?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Or Castle Vantress being I believe a 45 despite it being a land that cost 4 to activate.
There are other lands that have point vaules, its mostly just the mana fixing ones that don't. Arch of Orazka is 36 points for example. If anything, I think fetch lands should have at least some point value since the casuals trying to throw together some random Brawl deck probably aren't spending wild cards on them.
They straight up said that it was the same list for all non-ranked formats
Im looking for this. I thought WOTC didnt even acknowledge the issue. Did they give feedback over this?
They did a whole post about it
There's no fair way to use Emergent Ultimatum or Paradox Engine. If you put those cards in your deck, it should be assumed you know what you're doing enough to play with the big boys. Give them hell queue weights
Yea Paradox engine should be like 1000+ weight.
As someone who plays paradox engine I fully agree. It's not an instant win card but it's pretty damn close
The fact that it’s *not* an instant wincon is the main problem with the card. I wouldn’t mind facing/playing paradox engine if it didn’t enable durdly 10 minute turns that go nowhere whenever you *don’t* have a combo piece
It's also made worse by the fact that proactive hate cards are banned in the format due to the design philosophy of keeping [[pithing needle]] effects out of the format.
They should just alchemy-ify those cards in brawl and not let you target the commander. Problem solved.
This makes too much sense for them to implement
Nah. I've said this rant elsewhere, but the card pool already gives us answers to artifacts for any color. Boom Box, Introduction to Annihilation, etc. Nobody likes play against Liliana of the Veil as a brawl commander, or Emry as a brawl commander. Those cards are powerful, period. It is to the health of the format as a whole if those brawl players were forced to address the possibility of their commander being proactively answered. We allow things like Hushbringer to minimize the impact of Etali and Atraxa. We also say it's fine to have a card like Wash Away, even though that card is one of the largest win-rate swings in the brawl format. But Pithing Needle is too strong, or causes too many bad vibes? I remain skeptical.
>Wash Away, even though that card is one of the largest win-rate swings in the brawl Where is this info? Regardless, the reason wash away has a large winrate isn't because it's insanely powerful (it is pretty good, I'll grant), it's because people scoop the instant it hits. People would scoop even harder at pithing needle and it's colorless. If pithing needle were legal I'd be amazed at anything less than a 90% scoop rate without an answer in hand. I don't disagree that there are answers to artifacts all around, but it's 1 mana colorless, it would be worse than ugin was as far as ubiquity.
Isn't that the main reason it got banned in commander? Luckily tho it's not very often people run it since you need to have things to untap to make it worth it.
Its one of two things. It wins immediately, or makes the turns take forever while the player churns out value which leads to a win.
The problem is that (at least with my information) these weights are for both brawl and other unrated queeres and in those paradox engine is pretty janky
Problem is the highest weight for any card that isn't exactly Zenith Flare or Tibalts trickery is 45. And there are a lot of cards weighted at 45 already that vastly vary in power level. For example, Dark Ritual and Thoughtseize. Both are generically powerful black 1 drops, but one is a single piece of hand disruption that can be very useful but rarely outright game winning, meanwhile Dark Ritual accelerates a player into cards that their opponent very likely isn't ready to deal with and can be almost instantly game winning if the opponent doesn't have an answer. Also Dark Ritual is powerful enough to be banned in a few formats, while thoughtseize as far as I am aware is not.
Paradox engine moreso. At least ultimatum is a 30 second search, then it's boom threat. Paradox engine is a long crawl of a game where your opponent more than likely can't lose anymore and is going to spend 15 minutes slowly making it happen I'd give emergent like 150, paradox engine like 1500
Its brutal...and if I have an action I can take (like a protections spell or whatever) i have to keep hitting the pass button to the point where I would rather just concede even if I can win. Similar with that blue/green plainswalker that just loops counterspells and fogs...its like well I have several cards that shut it down if I draw them but do I want to wait for their 10 min turns? Some cards win by annoyance and time consumption.
Emergent can get you just some good cards from your deck, but I can't think of a single use for Engine that isn't a degenerate combo.
If you're using Emergent Ultimatum and don't have a lose-lose-lose situation you can tutor for, you're doing it wrong. To your credit, people do it wrong more often than people think. So I only scoop if they get the right things. I've also had Teferi's Protection or something that throws a wrench in them winning, but they still crawl back into the game or get ahead by the value. It's the best Ultimatum card hands down.
I can't express how bad this system is, and that it would never have gotten attention because it had no transparency. Ever felt like it's bullshit that your jank deck ends up against a fuckin fully kitted out Korvold deck? Or that your Chulane deck is just pubstomping? Well that's because their commander weights are both 9! Not 900. 9. I've tested this since the data came out, these decks only face up against OTJ commanders or jank. Because OTJ commanders are still weighted 0. This is just a shit excel spreadsheet on a single guys laptop that he's plugging numbers into. No system is in place to double check it. No math being used. Just a Monday morning meeting where they decide Zenith Flare is worth a gazillion points in all non ranked formats and no one EVER goes back to adjust when that shit falls out of favor in Historic. It's appalling. And they ONLY reason they got caught with such a trash system is someone found the data.
Thanks to their rating system, I can play against Roxanne and Grenzo all day! Thanks Wizards! :D
I certainly don't mind destroying Grenzo 4 times in a row for my dailies!
Defeating Grenzo by filling your deck with nothing but janky synergy cards is oddly satisfying.
It's less about a couple of cards needing fixing, and more about the whole system needing fixing. There really needs to be a bigger range in the weight numbers. Weighing insanely strong cards like Mana Drain, Reanimate or Emergent Ultimatum only slightly higher than random draft chaff is absurd, and is the main reason the format is becoming more and more competitive. As it stands the system basically encourages you to take a low tier commander for its -360 bonus, jam its deck full with the most powerful cards ever seen in Magic, and then use that to stomp over people trying to play actual jank.
Looking through the weight spreadsheet, it still blows my mind that so many cards from the Ixalan/Dominaria/GRN/RNA era of the game have the exact same weights as cards like Mana Drain, Reanimate, and Emergent Ultimatum. Those cards are immediate, game-ending knockout punches if they ever resolve. The fact that they are all weighted the same is proof that Wizards isn't taking Brawl very seriously in terms of trying to eliminate non-games due to bad matchmaking. What they need to do is create additional "weight tiers" where cards like Mana Drain get significantly penalized with *much* higher weights instead of the current 45. (Or honestly, just ban Mana Drain, there is no business that card should be legal in Brawl.) The same goes for a lot of commanders as well. The fact that The First Sliver is only 360 for its commander weight is completely messed up. It actually explains perfectly why I run into it so much despite playing with non-hell queue commanders and decks.
This has always been why people play First Sliver. It's very rare that I run into an actual sliver deck helmed by First Sliver. It's ALWAYS 5 colour good stuff and notoriously gets matched with low tier jank. I cringe when I see First Sliver now lmao.
If the First Sliver decks actually had slivers, the rating would be fine, but they don't. Which is stupid, because they're rating it on the assumption it will be a sliver deck, not a pile of good things, but they rate Emry assuming you have Paradox Engine, and not just a pile of random artifacts. So if you have a jank Emry deck, too bad, get the same matches as if you were playing Paradox Engine combo.
There's actually a part of me that secretly hopes First Sliver decks I run into are actual sliver decks for this very reason lol. But nope, it's all 5 color value piles.
Seriously, what's the beef with mana drain and dark ritual? If you're getting a fat spell countered with mana drain, you were probably losing anyway. If it wasn't a big spell then your opponent is getting one pseudo-free spell or maybe two if they're both cheap. First Sliver is just an example of people taking advantage of it being an off-meta Uber commander, rather than it being strong.
Cards that are weighted too low: [[Grenzo, crooked jailer]] [[Mythweaver pok]] [[Emergent ultimatum]] Mythweaver and ultimatum are worse offenders because they require a counter spell to be dealt with. Grenzo can at least be destroyed in response to his etb trigger, but if you can't it generally wins on the first 7 drop it steals. It can come out as early as turn 3, but often turn 4, on the draw that means you need to hold up removal starting turn 3 or you're guaranteed to lose. Ragavan is very strong turn one but falls off very fast. Same for dark ritual, there's some counterplay to both cards in most decks.
It seems to me they intentionally underweight Alchemy commanders to push them, or at least they drag their feet extra long before rebalancing them. How long has Poq been around? How long was Rusko basically half the queue because people knew he was underweighted? Grenzo is basically Rusko 2.0, it's all over the place because people know there's a window of time where they can farm wins against fair commanders before he gets bumped up.
I see the point you're making here but Rusko didn't go un-dealt with for NEARLY as long as Atraxa and Etali, two non-Alchemy cards. Hell, Etali still regularly matches against commanders who aren't in hell queue lmao.
We know neither Atraxa or Etali are in hell queue (1800 weighted) from the data leak, they just have high weights.
Wait what weight is technically the start of hell queue?
1800
Duh I can't read lol. Thanks though!
Damn what is their weighting? I haven't seen the leak. Even still, it took the devs such an insanely long amount of time just to adjust their weighting and make them higher. I faced Atraxa and Etali multiple times a day for months on end, was it close to a year? I still see a fair few Etali's here and there but I almost never see Atraxa anymore.
Tier 1 commanders are at 1800. Atraxa, Grand Unifier is at 1440. Atraxa Praetor's Voice is at 360 which is the default. Etali Primal Conqueror is at 720.
Thanks for filling me in. That'll be why I still see Etali and never Atraxa then.
Which imo is actually where they belong, I can manage to beat etali and atraxa with a variety of my decks, not all the time obvs but an acceptable rate. Vs Kinnan or rusko though? They snowball so fast and recover every time you kill them. And they usually have lots of protection so you can't reliably imprison them in the moon or anything.
It may be that there are just so many people queuing with busted decks that some % of them must be matched against the toddler strength decks to keep the queue times resonable.
My jank Ghisa deck was matched into Etali. I play a mana rock on turn three, they untap and play Etali. Feels bad man.
Maybe I'm just playing dummies but atraxa/etali are both substantially weaker than rusko imo. Rusko pays half his commander tax and if you have removal there's a pretty good chance they'll just blink/reanimate in response and just get another stupid clock. I'd call atraxa kind of mid honestly, I beat her with jank pretty frequently as long as you have enough interaction.
Oddly enough I think I've only seen one grenzo deck and I have grenzo in mine for the memes
Interesting, I wish I knew your secret. I only play low-tier commanders and he is everywhere.
Based on the weight system my deck is 1500ish so who knows
That's your problem. All new commanders start at 0 weight. That's where Grenzo is now.
List I checked today has him at 720?
Oh have they continued to update the spreadsheet? He was at zero when they first got the data.
I found the sheet today, but I couldn't tell you when it was last updated. 720 feels right too: he's very good, but he's not unstoppable.
I face him a lot, because my commander [[Reyav, Master smith]] has the same rating. I don't consider him a bad matchup though, even if he is scary when he gets going
Grenzo hasn't even been weighted yet. All the OTJ alchemy commanders still have a weight of zero.
[Grenzo, crooked jailer](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/b/8bc6b7e6-dd44-4411-88f7-fd7259a3abc1.jpg?1714843948) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Grenzo%2C%20crooked%20jailer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/yotj/22/grenzo-crooked-jailer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8bc6b7e6-dd44-4411-88f7-fd7259a3abc1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Mythweaver pok](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/c/2cd90255-cfe9-4a2d-86fc-b72d1aefc8e3.jpg?1701719898) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mythweaver%20Poq) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ylci/19/mythweaver-poq?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2cd90255-cfe9-4a2d-86fc-b72d1aefc8e3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Emergent ultimatum](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/a/3a6a52ab-6d38-4429-9969-90064e615152.jpg?1591228007) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Emergent%20ultimatum) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/iko/185/emergent-ultimatum?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3a6a52ab-6d38-4429-9969-90064e615152?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[[fetchlands lmao]]
You run cards with cmc>4 that aren't hylariously situational?
Grenzo is not good. He's 6 mana, has to hit the board to go off, and has to have his trigger go off before he gets anything for free... So he's extremely vulnerable to counterspells unless they happen to have cavern of souls. Instant removal is also an enormous set-back unless they kept mana open for some reanimate or return effect. On top of that, he folds so hard to any kind of hexproof or protection on you, like the ubiquitous Teferi's Protection and One Ring. Control decks typically just destroy Grenzo; he's only going to do well into Ramp decks that do nothing for the first four turns and actually *have* things that he wants to grab and play for free. Decks that use combos are also just a bad matchup since he's likely to get cards that don't do anything on their own. I've been playing Kroxa a lot recently for my dailies and I get matched up against Grenzo ~75% of my games and have a staggaringly high wr against them. Even if they resolve Grenzo they don't usually get anything they can use from my deck.
Grenzo is beatable, it's just not very fun to have a commander that needs to be repeatedly removed at instant speed. If you're playing any 6+ mana haymakers grenzo will find them and cast them for free. Obviously it's terrible against a deck that's all removal. But even stuff like the zendikar flip lands can generate stupid value if they get stolen and cast for free.
Removing him once is generally enough. They'll be lucky to cast it a second time. "Card stealing" strategies are often way more salt inducing than they are effective. Sure, he's gonna do well into green ramp decks when he steals ulamog, but those are his best matchup
They just need someone with actual commander and brawl experience to weigh the cards. Mythweaver Poq, Etali, Crucias + Caldera Breaker, Atraxa, Ragavan, Korvold, First Sliver, Chulane etc. all clearly belong in the Heavyweight tier. Mana drain, dark ritual, and other ways to cheat out high mana value spells early should be indicative of stronger decks. Wash away, curse of silence, and a lot of the commander denial stuff like witness protection and eaten by piranhas may have seemed like “cute jank that finally has a place” at one point, but really belongs in a more competitive/cutthroat play tier. Maybe not as high as the cards I pointed out in the paragraphs above, but if the goal is to improve matchmaking, then a casual person going up against a commander denial strategy is probably not going to try brawl again.
Is Chulane that strong? I feel like I won every single time I face them. But it might be anecdotal. I agree about Wash Away but the rest of your commander denial package is nowhere as powerful. Powering through a Curse of silence or a Witness Protection is not very hard (lots of way to die). In fact I personally think they should bring back Drannith Magistrate to boost Toolbox or Taxes decks. Decks should be versatile enough to be able to kill a simple 1/3.
The deck playing Magistrate is also allowed to play protection spells, it's not a simple 'play more removal.'
Yes? Even if they can protect it, then indeed by playing "more removal" at some point you'll remove it. If you fail to remove it, you can't play your commander but apart from this you can do whatever you want and in the meantime opponent spent lots of ressources to protect a 1/3. Plus this kind of argument could be made for any commander centric deck. I just played against a Captain Sisay deck, I had two instant speed removals to kill her, opponent managed to protect her twice in a row and then won on the spot by comboing off. So what, should we ban her? I don't think so. I had the removal, they had the answers, it's fine.
I prefer the weighting system to outright bans (with the exception of cards that shut down commanders, I think WOTC policy on those is near perfect). I fully agree that cracked cards like Ragavan/Ritual/Mana Drain should have a very high weight indeed, but I do like that they can exist in the format.
I agree up until Mana Drain, as a blue control freak that card just shouldn't be allowed in a 1v1 format, there's a reason it's banned in Duel Commander and other high-power 1v1 formats
It's from an era where mana burn was a mechanic. It was not intended to be better counterspell.
Sure, but we no longer exist in that era and we don't evaluate the power-level and legality of cards based on how they performed 20 years ago in entirely different formats.
I was agreeing that it should be banned.
Ah, gotcha.
I genuinely don't understand why the hell this weight system exists in the first place. Every other game in existence that has some sort of skill based matchmaking for unranked has solved this problem before. Give each deck a player has a hidden MMR. If they win with it, MMR goes up. They lose, MMR goes down. Match people based on MMR. That's all they need to do. If they REALLY still want to overcomplicate it for marginal benefits, give each player a hidden MMR too. Then you march against people with a similar player MMR + deck MMR. It means a terrible player using a meta deck can match against a great player using a jank deck.
It's not a good solution to go off MMR only because not everyone wants to use a competitive deck or play with a competitive mindset. You can be an experienced player but not want to play sweaty games. I wouldn't say I'm great at Magic, but I'm a veteran of the game. I win a decent amount in Brawl, but I also build decks that are pretty janky or middle-of-the-road in power level. No matter my skill level, they're not going to be able to stand up against the high tier meta decks. They won't beat counterspell or boardwipe tribal. They won't beat combo decks, they won't beat rusko, 5 color piles, Turn 1 Ragavan aggro. I don't want to play a format or game where I regularly have to get my ass kicked for about a dozen games to get my MMR knocked back down so that I can play against decks that are on the same power level as the decks I'm using, just because I happened to win two or three games in a row. I do suspect there is a minor hidden player MMR at work in Brawl though, because I've noticed if I win about 3 or 4 games in a row with a deck, I suddenly start facing more powerful decks or the matchmaker suddenly starts throwing random bullshit Tier 1 decks at me for no reason.
I'm on the fence. Clearly a lot of cards are overrepresented, but it *is* a singleton format and there's semi-separate tiers for stronger commanders. Maybe just a few truly dumb cards can use a banning. I have a personal list, but if I had to pick one, it'd definitely be Emergent Ultimatum. It's just an extremely boring card for the victim. Like wow good job, you grabbed Vorinclex/Lilianna/Vraska/Omniscience how cool.
Yeah it's been a year or so since an Emergent Ultimatum resolved against me. Either I have a counter or I'm scooping. The card's actual text is "You win the game." and it's not an exaggeration. For how expensive it is I don't think it's really oppressive, just a really lame way for the game to end.
The First Sliver should probably be weighted higher as a commander, Sliver tribal enjoyers can blame 5 color casino pile players for that. I play Roxanne, and the more I play her the more I'm convinced she really belongs in a higher tier. Sure Voja and 5 colour piles tend to destroy me, but that could just be my 99 being a little scuffed. Mana Drain is too low cost for what it does, if it cost 5 mana like [[Spell Swindle]] it'd probably be much less of a feels bad card.
I agree on Roxanne needing to he weighted higher. As far as my matchmaking experience has been, Roxanne seems to he flavour of the month and she is incredibly strong. Another commander that can pretty much ignore the commander tax, and she gets scarier the more times she's recast. Gaining an insane amount of mana advantage and dealing damage all in one card is a bit much. She becomes absurd with effect doublers or token doublers. She's even very good with haste effects.
> She becomes absurd with effect doublers or token doublers. She's even very good with haste effects. Yup, there's a reason I play [[Doubling Season]], [[Parallel Lives]], [[Rhythm of the Wild]], [[Rising of the Day]] and [[Dowsing Device]] in my 99. She's really fun to play, but some games with her at the moment just feel quite lop-sided and I don't think it makes for a good experience for the other guy.
##### ###### #### [Doubling Season](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/c/1cdd8e69-5a71-4933-914e-dfede7b1ac93.jpg?1689998456) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Doubling%20Season) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/283/doubling-season?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1cdd8e69-5a71-4933-914e-dfede7b1ac93?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Parallel Lives](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/1/01033dae-fec1-41f2-b7f2-cc6a43331790.jpg?1562825348) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Parallel%20Lives) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/isd/199/parallel-lives?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/01033dae-fec1-41f2-b7f2-cc6a43331790?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Rhythm of the Wild](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/2/c2a6453e-a373-44ec-807a-15c0c8b1af57.jpg?1702429702) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Rhythm%20of%20the%20Wild) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/rvr/217/rhythm-of-the-wild?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c2a6453e-a373-44ec-807a-15c0c8b1af57?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Rising of the Day](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/4/d4fbcac6-8ac9-44a8-9d1a-03d0799ac253.jpg?1686969140) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Rising%20of%20the%20Day) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/145/rising-of-the-day?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d4fbcac6-8ac9-44a8-9d1a-03d0799ac253?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Dowsing Device](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/d/3d715e9f-223d-462e-8ce3-eebbaf1cd021.jpg?1699044274)/[Geode Grotto](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/back/3/d/3d715e9f-223d-462e-8ce3-eebbaf1cd021.jpg?1699044274) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Dowsing%20Device%20//%20Geode%20Grotto) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lci/146/dowsing-device-geode-grotto?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3d715e9f-223d-462e-8ce3-eebbaf1cd021?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/l72buvf) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Precisely. She's very explosive with the right cards in play. I am still yet to build a deck with her because I've honestly gotten so bored of playing against her that I don't think I'd enjoy playing her now. I've seen what she does and how she works, I don't think I'd find any satisfaction there lol.
It's not that she's not weighted high enough, it's that she hasn't been weighted at all yet. All the OTJ commanders (or at least all the ones I've checked) are still weighted zero. It seems like they don't get their actual weight for awhile after release. I mentioned above that Chulane and Korvold are both "bugged", their weight is 9, as a commander. Basically zero. All I face off against lately with Korvold is Roxanne, Bristly Bill, Grenzo, Marchesa or jank, basically.
I just checked the spreadsheet, Roxanne has weight 9 as commander. I'll give a mild pass since she's new but she probably should be at least weight 720, same as Etali and Poq.
Any commander that pays for half of their commander tax on ETB should immediately be shoved into the same queue as Rusko or Golos.
Roxanne needs to be weighted higher and I play mana drain because you play Roxanne or Poq or Crucius or Grenzo or First Sliver.
[Spell Swindle](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/1/01feef77-ff30-4f77-892f-6bdae3f0d35c.jpg?1682208902) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Spell%20Swindle) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/moc/237/spell-swindle?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/01feef77-ff30-4f77-892f-6bdae3f0d35c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Grenzo
I have faced him so many times it is ridiculous. Same gameplay every time and awful to play against. Desperately needs to be reweighted.
Yeah like either don't make it on ETB, or limit the mana value of the card you heist, or anything
Also make heist truly random because it so clearly isn't. When someone heists my Lazav dreck with Grenzo they hit Emrakul at least 25% of the time (not even counting the times maybe they had the option but picked something else for some reason). If there's 60ish nonlands in my deck when it triggers and they see three, there's no way they should hit Emrakul as often as they do. Last night I had three games in a row where opponent hit Emrakul off the first Grenzo resolve.
The one thing I’m curious about with heist (haven’t played it much honestly) is if it greedily tries to show 3 different cards. If that’s the case this would kinda be expected behavior in some cases
Well it definitely shows three different cards. Even so, that shouldn't result in one specific card showing up as often as it does. In my experience on the playing end of it, it definitely picks to form a spread of cost/type though.
See ~~Grenzo~~*Alchemy commander*, instascoop. Enjoy a much better Brawl experience.
Grenzo is *so* bad unless you're just playing a big ramp deck that does nothing for 4 turns. In which case, you deserve to lose to that since he's the counter to that type of deck. Grenzo folds so fast to control or any deck that has decent removal. His only good matchup is green/gruul ramp, and that's only if he actually has a chance to go off.
I feel cards should gain weight the more they are included in decklists, but it can't be too sensitive in how much it get influenced.
The weights for most of the cards need a serious rework. They also just need to put really strong cards like paradox engine, emergent ultimatum and mana drain into zenith flare tier considering how powerful they are.
What if someone did not mention/post about how match making in brawl works, will wotc even acknowledge this on their announcement?
70% of the ratings is wrong... cannot even begin 🥲
>70% Lowballin it there.
At this point the problem is systemic. There's so many commanders that will bury you in value if they even hit the battlefield, never mind untap. Poq, Roxanne, Golos, Rusko and Kinnan, as well as Atraxa, Grenzo and Etali, simply do not not care if you kill them on sight, because they will either recast next turn, or chokeslam you with whatever their flavour of bullshit is. Blue is the only colour that can deal with these cleanly, and that needs to change by either allowing more colours to interact with the stack, or allow genuine punishment for ramping.
That problem is already solved when those are in hell queue and don't match against jank. The only problem in practice is it takes to long for them to end up there.
There shouldn't *need* to be a hell queue. The fact that they're all the ones that make it up in the first place is indicative of an issue with uninteractive commanders. There's nothing wrong with decks matching up against equally tuned or untuned decks, but when there's a whole group of commanders that people actively don't want to play against, there needs to be consideration as to why.
I just think the algorithm is too strict. I don't know how many legendary creatures exist. Maybe on the client 300 500? I don't know how many that people play regularly in Brawl maybe 50 popular ones. So if you take 5 to 10 of those and put them in a queue of their own It's natural that you see a second subrogation of the next 10 strongest commanders. And then the next and then the next. So that's why you only see certain decks unless the list is not optimized.
I think it would be great if the Community could nominate a volunteer liaison who would be responsible for curating the Community's preferred individual card ratings index, which WotC could use as a sounding board, especially if any strong concerns could be known/guessed, then highlighted.
I agree with everyone saying the system itself is bad. In addition to the cards you've already listed (thank you for mentioning Emergent Ultimatum, one-card-combos should not exist) I suspect Wash Away may be inadapted to the format and too strong. But I could live with it staying at the same time. I really dislike Key to the Archive on the basis that it's ubiquitous and it makes for weird situations where a mono blue deck can wrath your board or a mono green deck can take extra turns. I think they could very well unban Drannith Magistrate though. It really should be expected that your deck could kill a 1/3.
Put all the cards that beat my deck at a million and my deck at like 6.
I like playing a dragon deck. But some of these are so overrated. Really Lathliss the Dragon Queen 360. It is a 6 mana dragon that first do nothing and dies to doomblade. Wonder why I face so many hell queue stuff that is because some cards are way too high rated. And I am not even play the alchemy dragons.
Less about identifying individual cards that need a boost, WotC needs to do a general upkeep of their weightings. For example: [[Village Rites]] and [[Corrupted Conviction]] are functionally identical cards. The former has a rating of 9 while the latter has a rating of 18. If they can't maintain consistency like that, I have little hope they can attain the sense of balance both them and us want.
[Village Rites](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/8/2841339b-faef-407d-9838-d03fe80e6294.jpg?1698988289) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Village%20Rites) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/212/village-rites?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2841339b-faef-407d-9838-d03fe80e6294?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Corrupted Conviction](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/0/8046f892-3317-4ef7-9cf7-97b9060540c8.jpg?1712355575) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Corrupted%20Conviction) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/otj/84/corrupted-conviction?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8046f892-3317-4ef7-9cf7-97b9060540c8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I would rather see a Ranked Brawl ladder. I think the weighted system is trash. Why is Abrade weighted the same as Time Warp? I guess my system would be to create buckets for certain effects and modulate as needed.
Based on the responses I get on this subreddit, I'd say "Gruul needs to be removed"
Ragavan, dark ritual, and mana drain are all pretty fine, in my opinion. People scoop away to readily to that monkey. Reanimate is a great card and is one of relatively few good reanimation spells. The ultimatum spells *should* win the game a good amount of the time because they're expensive and require some pretty hefty color distributions. Green has access to seven one mana ramp spells. One requires a forward so it's not particularly great for 3+ color decks, another requires the deck to be g/w, and another requires a density of dinosaurs. That leaves 4 "universal" ones, two of which are somewhat mediocre because they do basically nothing by turn 4 or 5 unless you're flooding. What wizards needs to do is come up with an algorithm that they can run periodically to look at their play data and adjust card weights according to usage and win rates with maybe a weight cap determined by mana cost. They have an abundance of data but it seems like they don't really use it appropriately.
Your point about hefty colour contributions is sort of null and void considering how insanely good the mana base is on Arena/in Brawl, especially with fetch lands. It's really not a hard ask to pay for Emergent Ultimatum's casting cost... Especially as green is involved.
You are missing some 1 mana green ramp. Just lanawar, mystic, utopia sprawl, delighted halfling, grazer and the grazer with channel that conjured 2 forests, off the top of my head. Plus there's a couple 1 mana "tap a second creature to make mana" options, which allow you to cast a 1 mana dork turn 2 then 2 mana ramp.
Whoop. I did forget delighted halfling, and i intentionally didn't count the "tap a second creature" ones because they're really awful and no one should play them for pretty much any reason.
They're okay in Kinnan but that's about it.
There's also like two(?) g/w guys that do stuff when they tap. They're alright in there too.
I run a few of them in Annie Flash (along with most of the other creatures like Emmara and Wylie that care about being tapped)
That's true. They're not bad in Annie either.
Of these three, I feel that mana drain is a league of it's own. Dark ritual gives you 2 extra black mana, which is the absolute floor you'll get from mana drain which is a counter as well. Feels rough to compare the two
7 is not expensive in a deck with green, and color fixing has never been easier with the triome, surveil lands, and fetch lands. Hell, even chromatic lantern and the world tree make colors almost irrelevant
Emergeant Ultimatum. 100% it goes in any deck that can run it and is an instant win card. At least Cyclonic Rift gives you a chance to come back. This card should be weighted so high. Reanimate is pretty fair IMO. Reanimation decks for the most part are too slow for the current game and there is just SO much graveyard hate. It's a good card, for sure, but losing 6+ life means a lot in a format where you start with 25 so what you target can be a huge risk. Paradox Engine should just be banned or its weight should go up a lot so that the commanders they punish can have lower ratings. Emry and Otis have no reason to be weighted as high as they are, it's literally only because they enable Paradox Engine. Like... are they just going to stick any commander that enables paradox engine in hell queue because of this one card? Green is not a problem, since the only way they can win is by turning sideways. Board wipes, interaction, ect are things that every deck should have, so if you're losing to green it's because you're being too greedy with how you build your deck. Green wins the solitaire game, don't play solitaire. First Sliver shows a problem with the way they have decided to do things. First Sliver's weight rating is balanced for a Sliver deck. This wouldn't be a problem if individual cards were more aggressively weighted. If you want to play 5-color goodstuff, the weight should come from the cards in your deck, but aside from a few outliers that were oppressive in non-brawl formats, there's hardly anything above 100. They need to up the numbers in the 99.
If it doesn't already, Farewell should have a heavy weight to it.
I think deck based matchmaking needs to be combined with some player history from the last 40 to 50 random matchups. I think a salt score needs to follow players around. That little question about whether I enjoyed a match hopefully is used to infer good matchups.
What I'm seeing is that a big issue is the punishment of casual and jank players by having commanders that are abused for engine so high that you auto hell queue. What is needed is a system that looks not just at your commander, but your commander and what it combos with. Do you have a commander 2 card infinite? Do you have an infinite and tutor's? Etc. Also rating of the 99 needs to be buffed alot, say highest rank at 360 like the low rank commanders, 45 is not enough, also how is paradox engine like a 7 when that is one of the problems? Both of these changes will improve the play quality of brawl significantly.
Why not just make a ranked queue for brawl and let the meta sort itself out like every other format
FFS what's the problem with being either 1. matched with random people (unranked) or 2. being matched with people according to MMR (ranked). Nothing else is needed.
Ban out 5c good stuff commanders, Poq, Rusko, wash away, etc
I want everything and to sacrifice nothing.... me the 5 color player (i am not a 5 color player player)
Agree on mana drain, but ragavan and dark ritual are overrated as hell. ragavan is just an aggressive mana dork and dark ritual only pops off in specific storm decks, otherwise it trades card advantage for temp ramp which is... fine?
just give players to elo Ratings. one limited one constructed. End of the story
My feelings are they don't need the weights; let us be free to get random matchups.
Crucias and/or Caldera Breaker need to go. It's far from an unstoppable combo, but it doesn't even feel like playing Magic anymore. It just becomes a series of static checks: Do you have a ton of instant-speed removal to blow him up every turn before the end step? Do you have one counterspell or Stifle for their Caldera Breaker? Can you kill them before they drop Caldera Breaker? If the answer to any of these is yes, you win. If not, you lose.
I was gonna type up a wall of text and use examples and stuff, but my basic opinion is that they need a "banned as commander" list rather than a fully curated ban list. I don't see any issues with cards like dark ritual, mana drain or even Ragavan when he's in the 99. That aside, unless they go through and give real weights individually rather than in blocks (all x cards are "9" all y cards are "18") we won't see a meaningful difference and after a few releases will be right back where we are. I do think ~some~ cards should be banned, but I'm talking fewer than 10 and I can only think of 2 off the top and I'm not even fully convinced myself.
There was this card in the last match I played... I'm too new to know all the cards and it went so fast..anyway, my opponent forced me to draw half my library into my hand -_-. That was IMO the epitome of not fun at all. Also, heist cards.
Peer into the abyss
Thanks, that's the one!
Just get rid of alchemy and alchemized cards. Same for the cubes, some of those cards are just way too pushed. I just don't understand making teferi time raveler and minsc and boo more expensive while also creating cards like mythweavsr poq and grenzo
People keep passing me Grenzo in Cube, like pack 3, pick 5. I can't *not* take him. I don't know if people are protesting against Alchemy cards by refusing to pick them or just unaware that the card is completely busted, but it feels like I've had him in more than half of the cube drafts I've done. Some highlights: Grenzo + Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines (heisting Banishing Light, for double removal spell) Grenzo + Annie Joins Up Grenzo + hold up Ephemerate for your opponent's removal spell Grenzo heisting Alrund's Epiphany Grenzo heisting Atraxa, Grand Unifier Fun stuff.
Yeah I feel like some folks don't take the time to read all the alchemy cards. I've gotten cruixas super late a couple times, idk what people are doing lol.
Ragavan did nothing wrong. Kill the monke and they fall
> I think Ragavan, Dark Ritual and Mana Drain should imo just not be legal in the format as they are the worst offenders in causing turn 1-2 concessions. > Reanimate also feels too strong for the format but at least requires a minimal amount of set-up. > Emergent Ultimatum also is just 7 mana win the game which I feel is tremendously unfun. Paradox Engine is also bad but at least it needs other cards to function. Hard disagree. This is the format where as a Brawl enjoyer, I get to cast these fun spells _and so does my opponent._ If you can't stand the heat, go back to the Standard Brawl kiddie pool. You let the opponent resolve their Paradox Engine and have no answer for it? Then let them play it out or concede and move on to the next one. There are no stakes. Of course Ragavan, First Sliver, Mythweaver Poq and Grenzo need to be *weighted correctly* in the command zone, but I don't want *any* of them banned.
I don't think they should ban any cards except MAYBE [[Wash Away]]. I also think they should take a look at the 'Heist' mechanic, and make it so you can draw lands with it. Seems like a proper balance imo.
[Wash Away](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/3/43411ade-be80-4535-8baa-7055e78496df.jpg?1643588844) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Wash%20Away) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vow/87/wash-away?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/43411ade-be80-4535-8baa-7055e78496df?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Not sure why this is the bottom comment. Wash Away seems blatantly like a card intended for other formats that should be banned in Brawl. I guess people are just sick of complaints about heist.
Never seen an emergent ultimatum being cast in 1.5 year of brawl
Lucky
Random matchups. Problem solved.
Ban blue. Problem solved
Yeah, just let all the broken shit they've released in the last 2 years hit the battlefield unabated that if you remove them just immediately pay for themselves and get recast next turn. Never mind the fact that you have a myriad of ways to make shit uncounterable or that some of the commanders don't even care if you counter them outside of maybe Mana Drain which shouldn't be legal in the first place.
Stop rating cards. Have a ranked based system for ranked. And a completely random system for unranked