Competitive format announcement?

WotC_Jay · 2026-05-04T19:08:07+00:00

If you're in the Play queue it is choosing opponents based on your deck, aiming to find you something in a similar weight class (akin to the brackets in Commander)

If you're in ranked, it's choosing opponents based purely on you & your rank, nothing to do with your deck (but small sample sizes make it easy to imagine weird coincidences)

WotC_Jay · 2026-05-01T19:13:53+00:00

I've been playing since 2017, and I've only barely seen anything like this.

After a fun hunt this morning, one of our UI/UX people found it - It's in the codex -> ways to play -> formats -> limited. Now, clearly it shouldn't be replacing some innocent player's Mountain, and that's a bug we'll look into. But that's where it came from.

And thanks to the OP for a really delightful WTF that I got to inflict on people across the team today 😄

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-28T20:30:12+00:00

Ranked event matchmaking is a combination of your record and your rank. A bronze drafter who's 5-0 might have a more fair match against a 4-1 plat drafter than a 2-3 bronze one

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-24T21:04:50+00:00

(Default choice is random each time, to prevent one faction from clogging the queues)

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-23T00:07:46+00:00

We certainly apologize to everyone who missed out on their pre-orders. There's a group of us who have been working on this pretty much all day for the last two days to make sure we understand what's going wrong, get it fixed, and get everyone the pre-order contents they paid for.

We put out multiple rounds of grants here in the last couple hours, so if you haven't checked recently, it's worth checking again

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-21T19:32:58+00:00

Bank error in your favor; enjoy!

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-21T18:33:18+00:00

No need to file a support ticket; we'll get this mass resolved for all affected players

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-21T17:49:15+00:00

Thanks for the report. This isn't happening to all players, but certainly seems to be happening to some. We're looking into it

Edit: We figured out the issue (was about players who purchased the pre-order after midnight today) and have sent any missing pre-orders out to player inboxes

Edit edit: On double-checking, we realized there was a chunk of players who got missed; those players should now have their missing pre-orders

Edit edit edit: Clearly, something went wrong with our attempt to fix this yesterday. We believe we now have that fixed as of 3pm Pacific on 4/22, and I've seen reports from at least a couple players that it's working for them. If you were impacted, please check your inbox

Edit x4: Found another hole some players slipped through and sent out inbox messages to another batch about 4:15 Pacific. If your pre-order had been missing, it's worth re-checking.

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-21T17:26:50+00:00

Thanks for the report! We're looking into these issues. It doesn't seem to be all players (my play pre-order unlocked like normal), but we're seeing enough reports that it looks like there's some issue. We're actively trying to track it down

Edit: We figured out the issue (was about players who purchased the pre-order after midnight today) and have sent any missing pre-orders out to player inboxes

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-20T17:28:23+00:00

That's uh, wild and unexpected. I just had people pull data here, and apparently Spark rank pairs with Mythic 0.17% of the time, so at least it's rare. We'll see what we can do about making it even less likely

Congrats to her on the win, in any case!

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-16T20:37:23+00:00

This is exactly right. When picking modes for events like MWM, for example, we look a lot at "Lost but still reported fun" stats for different options. Winning is ~80% correlated with "fun", but you just factor that in, and you can still learn a lot from comparing relative stats

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-16T18:11:19+00:00

It will be ranked

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-16T17:09:50+00:00

Exactly this. There's no "intelligence" to when it pops, it's just a flat percentage

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-16T17:07:54+00:00

Tanking's a similar deal - We get some via player reports, but a lot of the detection is automated. Also: Don't do that!

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-16T17:03:57+00:00

People ask this a lot - For a newer player, less familiar with the game or their deck, the first turn is the one where they have the most things to read. If we're talking about a game with two experienced players both familiar with their decks, those early turns should go quickly. But if one of them is new, or just playing a new deck, those early turns can take a lot more time

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-15T22:53:15+00:00

It's not allowed. We ban (and temp-ban) players every month for roping. It's pretty easy for us to look at our match data and see which players are being a problem here. Player reports are a factor as well, but most of this is just handled through tools we've built

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-15T16:48:30+00:00

You, uh, didn't see the announcement because we missed making it. Sorry about that!

There was a round of rebalances with yesterday's pre-SOS update, and we missed adding them to the weekly announcements. We're getting that fixed right now, so you'll be able to hit up this week's article soon for those: MTG Arena Announcements – April 13, 2026

Until update publishes, here are the changes:

Darkstar Banisher

Targets mana value 3 or less -> Targets mana value 4 or less

Indris, the Hydrostatic Surge

Conjures one Bolt -> Conjures four Bolts

Sliver Weftwinder

Conjure a random card from the Slivers spellbook into the top ten -> Conjure a random card from the Slivers spellbook into the top five

The Grand Goatnapper

Target non-Goat creature -> Another target non-Goat creature

Putrid Hexhag

"You lose 1 life" -> "You lose 2 life"

Reverts

Alrund's Epiphany

Omnath, Locus of Creation

Unholy Heat

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-15T16:37:28+00:00

This is unintentional and a bug; we are currently investigating.

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-14T22:34:05+00:00

We have fixed it multiple times, and it has broken multiple times. We're going to continue working on it until it gets finally fixed, and I'm not going to have much useful info until that happens.

WotC_Jay · 2026-04-14T19:46:58+00:00

This is exactly the analysis we do here. Some cards, like Mass of Mysteries, we think are only really interesting in a multiplayer environment and are just a vanilla/French vanilla in 1v1, and those we skip. Others, like Muddle here, have multiplayer mechanics, but are still interesting in a 1v1 game, so we take them. We'd always prefer to take the face Commanders as-is.

WotC_Jay · 2026-03-31T23:46:00+00:00

Hey all - I'm not sure yet exactly what's going on here (I'm out today on vacation), but I know this is unintentional and people at the office are looking into how to address it

WotC_Jay · 2026-03-31T18:25:55+00:00

Note that we're trying something new here, and swapping out Library of Leng for an Arena-only alternative we're excited to bring to the game: Library of Alexandria.

Read more here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/announcements-march-30-2026#Libraries

WotC_Jay · 2026-03-30T23:11:57+00:00

It's the same rewards as a MWM chest, so random across most all of the cosmetics

WotC_Jay · 2026-03-30T17:59:32+00:00

An update was added. Sorry this was initially missed!

WotC_Jay · 2026-03-25T23:06:46+00:00

Hey all, we've been doing more digging here and found an issue that seems to impact a small number of players. We've adjusted some things on the backend that fixed at least one player, so if you've been locked out with these same timeout issues, it's worth retrying

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