This is literal torture. The Mill Graveyard deck they put together is the worst deck of all time. Has zero synergy. There’s like 1 mill card in the entire thing and 1 card that can return a creature to your hand from the graveyard. Then they threw in some random dragons.

I was dumb and thought the Mill pack would include some new Mill tech, but this card just self mills with no board presence and then the game is over. Given how pushed the other packs are (I've gone against 3 warden of the groves, which take over the entire game immediately unless you have instant removal, which the mill deck does not have), it's very important to not take this pack if you want to complete event. Learn from my mistake!

#WOTCStaff

Here's an article I wrote about implementing the new Zurgo.

I hope you find all it interesting... and I'm happy to answer questions if I can.

Got my mossborn hydra up to the highest i've gotten it thanks to aftermath analyst, lumra, and bristly bill. guy blocks and the game was making me assign all the damage between creature and character. tried to download an autoclicker in the middle of the game but only got up to 5k damage assigned. pretty peeved i lost but still proud of big number.

Constructed Standard: either racing to kill in 2-4 turns, or getting some insane card draw engine going. Will these be competitive?

Immediately cast herald and then dipped

Just got smashed by [[Smile at Death]] + [[Equilibrium Adept]]. Everytime I killed the Adept it would come back next turn as a 3/5, “drawing a card” and usually a double striker. That was pretty powerful. Nice for my opponent for pulling it off!

• More achievements are on their radar, but nothing soon.
• Card styles will be applicable to all different printings of a card. (coming end of may)
• This will also help with store decks not recognizing different card versions for discounts.
• They want to implement more social features
• Friend groups, for example a group where "we play brawl but no counterspells", a group for your LGS, ability to join multiple groups etc.
• There won't be any dusting system, they want you to grow a collection not destroy it. "Dust from cards" is already present in the wildcard progress system.
• Daily rewards are frontloaded for the sake of more casual players
• Economy is in a pretty good spot, no major changes coming
• Longer standard (3 years) offsets the economic burden of more sets per year
• There may be a rework of constructed events in the future
• There will be an Arena Direct article in the coming weeks
• They will probably release at least one anthology this year
• Uncollectable cards (spellbook, momir) might be included in anthologies
• Brawl has gained popularity over time, that is why they are more consistently adding commander face cards
• There is stuff that will be coming for Timeless, they cannot say more
• No more new formats for a while
• They haven't made progress on deck testing since they talked about it 3 years ago. They want to tackle it. Maybe it will be integrated into friend groups system
• 4-player system will be a long process, real progress is happening but it will be a few years. New social features is a step towards it
• No elimination style tournament mode planned
• According to last numbers historic has 20 competitive decks
• Modern isn't on their radar
• Historic and (Historic) Brawl are digital formats, digital formats have alchemy cards. ALCHEMY CARDS ARE STAYING.
• Friend groups might support limited gameplay, e.g. draft with your friends
• No plans for converting wildcards into lower rarity
• They cannot say anything about UB Alchemy sets.
• Timeless constructed events are in consideration
• No plans for Arena on consoles
• They will definitely rename Explorer to Pioneer, probably August-September
• There will be a thing coming they cannot talk about that will also bring some deckbuilder improvements along

Hi guys,

I have been playing exclusively brawl for the last aetherdrift meta and wanted to share with you my findings based on 700 matches tracked using the untapped.gg companion. I have always entertained the idea that maybe we would be better off with a simple ELO algorithm instead of the card weighting system used and now after recollecting some data I feel it could deliver better experience overall but probably could be exploited easily by clever gamers.

My intention with this review is to create four grades (F,C,B,A) and then group the decks into each grade based on the experience I had. For me successful matchmaking should transfer to most decks having a 50% winrate and I will use this ideal as the basis for the grading.

Before jumping into grading, I wanted to explain a bit my deck building and current state of collection.

Deck building

I have been playing Arena since end of January so my collection is not yet the most curated or optimized. I like commanders and decks that can work with less optimal choices than the usual meta but still can deliver a nice competitive playing experience. Moreover I like fair and linear advantage, I want to win because I outvalued my opponent over time and not because of a single card. Obviously it is pretty hard to draw the line between a strong card and one that wins you the game outright, but in general I don't have mana drain, cyclonic rift, rivers rebuke, the one ring, defense of the heart, emergent ultimatum or rhystic study.

Probably my most unfair cards I have are Teferis Protection, Ragavan, Esper Sentinel and Temporal Manipulation. But still, in most decks the level of optimization is about building with what I have, try it out, and if I like it I redeem 5-10 uncommons, 5-10 commons, and maybe couple of rares/mythic, so they will be far from the optimal meta that you see in untapped.gg tier lists. With this in mind I will go directly into the grades and explain a bit each of the decks.

Grade F:

For me these are the decks where the matchmaking completely failed. The win rates were quite low and the power levels of opponents' decks seemed way higher than appropriate.

Laughing Jasper Flint (8-18 30% winrate)

Moxfield deck

So this is an outlaw tribal that aims at stealing stuff but does not have a true wincon. It has a decent balance of removal and thanks to Jasper it has draw but from other decks. I feel this deck was paired with too strong decks and rarely had a chance.

Krenko Mob Boss (11-19 37% winrate)

Moxfield deck

This one is just a typical Krenko deck with some optimization, but very far from having all good goblins needed to be able to work without Krenko, so most of the time I could not recover from Krenko removal. Opposite decks were in general quite strong, which is expected because of the 1080 commander weight Krenko had. All in all I cannot blame opponents for killing krenko on sight but something like an ELO would have progressively matched this deck to something more appropriate.

Tatyova (8-13 38% winrate)

Moxfield Deck

Here I just put everything synergetic with landfall and some interaction and that was it, usually was very slow and did not work very well. I guess the 360 weight of Tatyova made me match to stronger decks that I could handle.

Arcades (5-13 28% winrate):

Moxfield Deck

I have a commander deck of Arcades so wanted to test him in Brawl but did not work well. Once Arcades is removed it is very hard to come back and generate value. Matchmaking felt like it could have dialed down power levels to have a chance but also the dependence to its commander is its biggest weakness.

Grade C:

Here are decks that had a bad winrate or too good of a winrate. The high winrate decks are technically just as big of a failure as grade F but from a user experience perspective nobody is actually complaining about a 70% winrate even though it should not happen in a fair matchmaking system.

Delney Hare Brawl (35-13 73% winrate):

This is a meme deck of 60 hare apparents and 39 plains using Delney to double the triggers. I like to play this one when I don't want to think or just have 30 minutes to get daily wins and creature based daily rewards. This deck gets paired most of the time with other decks with low removal and by turn 5 the game is over with 6 hares and 20 tokens. I feel this deck should be paired against stronger decks but it does not because of the low weight of commander and hares.

Anim Pakal (128-54 70% winrate)

Moxfield Deck

This is one of my most optimized decks, very low curve and very effective, usually by turn 5 the advantage is overwhelming. It only struggles with dimir and azorius control decks with meta commanders (Tasha, Rusko). Considering the sample size 70% winrate is a total failure of the matchmaking, it seems that the 720 weight for anim pakal may be too low.

Glarb (49-73 40% winrate):

Moxfield Deck

This one is one of my favorite decks and it is really frustrating to have a low winrate with it. I have invested a lot in optimization but it seems I need more of the landfall key pieces that need rare wildcards and I rarely have them. My guess is that Glarb is categorized as a 720 commander and feel it should be lower. This is another example where I feel an ELO MMR would have brought me to 50% but I get paired regularly against ragavans and Atraxas among other strong decks. Maybe it is harder to pilot 3 colors and I feel maybe 5 Games have been lost due to wrong mana decisions but still would love to be able to enjoy this deck with a 50% winrate instead of a 40%.

Balmor(8-12 40% winrate):

Moxfield Deck

Honestly here after I changed the deck to have mostly low curve battle tricks and card draw sorceries it went 3-3 but before that I was being obliterated by strong decks due to the 1080 score of Balmor.

B Grade:

These are the decks were the matchmaking is working fine but could be better with a system that strives towards a 50% winrate.

Gitrog Ravenous ride (27-19 59%):

Moxfield Deck

Usually if Gitrog hits and you can sacrifice some high power creature for cards and ramp this deck wins. The deck can survive without Gitrog but if it gets removed it can come back if you drop a bomb like Ghalta or Yargle and Multani. This commmander seems to be less popular and the amount of players that do not block for lethal to save their value engine don't realize the advantage even one hit can have, especially if you draw 5+ cards and put 3 lands in one play.

Vnwxt (22-15 59%):

Moxfield Link

The amount of players that ignore your critters to get to max speed is astounding. Once in max speed a brainsurge becomes very hard to overcome. And I don't even have good wincons, so the games can go longer because I am countering everything and hitting for 3 every turn. MVPs for this deck have been Unctus and Cavalier of Gales once at max speed.

Fynn the Fangbearer (15-10 60%):

Moxfield Deck

I wanted to build Fynn so that I could explore the hell queue since it is a 1800 commander, but since the 99 are so unremarkable outside of a Fynn deck I suspect I did not get paired against Ruskos and Teferis of the space. Out of the meta decks available this is by far the one that neeeds the least rare and mythics wildcard so you can get pretty close to optimal without the investment.

Ragavan (11-6 65%):

Moxfield Deck

For the same reason as Fynn, I build this Ragavan deck to explore the hell queue, but in similar fashion the 99 were not super strong so I did not get paired to super meta decks. Honestly the winrate of 65% is misleading because there were 5 autoconcede but the rest that stayed felt like a good match.

A grade:

Here are the decks where I felt the matchmaking was fair and decks oscillated towards 50%.

Mendicant (10-8 56% winrate)

Moxfield Deck

I wanted an artifact deck and got Mendicant in a mastery pass pack so gave it a try and works quite well, especially at max speed. Most games here were fair and lasted 10 turns and had a lot of fun copying artifacts in the process.

Melek (14-16 47% winrate)

Moxfield deck

This deck is basically a storm voltron control deck with as few creatures as necessary to beef up Melek with the graveyard. Overall matchmaking was pleasant and most games I felt I had a chance to win.

Solphim (8-6 57% winrate):

Moxfield deck

So I got Solphim in a pack and decided to build a burn deck around her. Due to the non-combat damage limitation it is not as strong as Torbran but have had great matches with this deck. Fond memories include dealing 18 damage to the face of an opponent in a single turn or top decking a lightning bolt with no cards in hand against an azorius control deck that was at 2 life and Solphim was in the oblivion of the command zone costing like 10 mana.

Conclusion:

All in all it seems like the overall grade based on this analysis would be around B- give or take, but I just can't shake the feeling that ELO would make the experience more pleasant. The biggest problem with pure ELO matchmaking based on the history of a deck is that the deck can be changed, and changing 10 mediocre cards with 10 potential game changers would be very abusable on the long run. But it is a pity because right now it feels like you are muscled out of playing certain commanders with high scores (Glarb, Balmor, Krenko) unless you build the absolute optimal deck for that commander.

I am aware that the validity of this analysis rests on the quality of my deck building, but rest assured I built all decks presented here with the intention to win with the resources I had available, and I hope the variety of winrates and decks exposed can convince you that the matchmaking is probably more relevant to the variability of the winrates than my skill to build winning decks.

I hope this post can serve the community to have a better discourse about brawl MMR and also hope WoTC starts taking Brawl more seriously, because if untapped.gg is to be believed, Brawl is the second most played format in Arena and represents 1/6 of all games played.

I know it’s a pretty old deck now, but I mostly play for fun and it still got me to Mythic rank pretty easy only have problems with heavy removal decks.

I’m wondering if anyone has any cool cards I might not be utilizing in my deck as of now.

The dudes doing the heavy lifting for me are Valley Flamecaller Iridescent VineLasher Mageband Lizard and Hired Claw

I have Laughing Jasper Flint and Hearthborn Battler in there as well but they don’t do as much as the other cards, I’ve also been utilizing Viashino Pyromancer as a pretty good combo with Valley Flamecaller

What cool cards did you guys upgrade that deck with?

Edit: Gev Scaled Scorch is another heavy hitter for me obviously.

My big gripes, really hoping maybe they consider this for the next stream they do (maybe you can pass these along u/wotc_jay?):

• Delete multiple decks at the same time (this is so overdue and widely requested)

• Redeem all button for the orbs page. Some people don't buy the mastery pass until end of season, and then have to slog through clicking the awards over and over again.

• Import deck issues. I'll export a decklist from Archidekt, and get a "card name not recognized" warning (Example here being "Virtue of Persistence // Locthwain Scorn" as a direct copy from Archidekt), after getting that error, you have to close out that menu, go back to your decklist, edit it, and then try again, hoping that there's no other cards with this issue. Why not instead have it ask "Card not recognized, would you like to import the rest of the deck?" so we can avoid having to slog through all of it again. This is especially painful for mobile users.

• A better remove card solution for decks on mobile. Accidentally tapping a card on the sidebar and having it automatically remove is so annoying and can sometimes lead to not even knowing what accidentally got removed.

What other quality of life issues do you guys have? Share em here!

I wanted to hold off on making a post about this before TDM cards come out and I can update the list. But I already came up against a mirror match, so somebody already copied it or just had the exact same idea. Anyway, I wanted to make a post about it myself before somebody else does.

I already played this to mythic last month, but I started late so didn't get high enough rank to merit a post. Now I played some and was going to probably make mythic today until I came up against the mirror I mentioned at Diamond2.

So to the actual strategy

It's all about looping [[Fear of infinity]] by discarding it to whatever and getting it back to your hand with all these enchantments.

-Huge card advantage due to having infinite discard fodder and cyclers like [[Artist's Talent]]. -Life gain from [[Dredger's Insight]] -[[Insidious roots]] can provide literally 200power on one turn which you can haste with [[Bitter reunion]]. You can also keep looping after hasting those mana dorks if you don't have lethal -Just [[Monument to Endurance]] is enough to win if you come up against strong graveyard hate and sideboard offers more discard wincon through [[Cryptcaller's chariot]]

Popping off turns can take up to 5 minutes and easily draw your whole deck on turn 5 or 6, so [[Feldon's cane]] is there for you to get an extra deck if you are running out of cards.

Pretty complicated deck to play but so much fun. Positive winrate against ALL non-mouse decks. Probably mostly because people don't understand the deck yet. They spend their enchantment removal on the wrong stuff and/or help me by forcing me to discard etc.

Low landcount only really affects the mulligan because of the insane amount of cycling milling to find those lands. Any more lands and you'll be flooded, trust me. Bo1 is really a cheat with this deck, because hand smoother has so much value here.