MTGアリーナ: パイオニアマスターズが登場！

The last year has seen a lot of change across our formats, and the year to come promises even more. Just a few months ago Historic and Timeless were reshaped by Modern Horizons 3, then Standard had its first rotation as a three-year format. Rounding out the year, Magic: The Gathering Foundations will give Standard exciting cards that will remain legal for many years, and Pioneer Masters will complete Explorer’s journey to competitive Pioneer. Read on for more on how we’re thinking about each format and a bit of what’s in store for the future. Overview The chart below shows roughly one month of relative play rates for our six main formats. It captures data from the end of Bloomburrow through the launch of Duskmourn: House of Horror and is representative of the general state of play. Standard is by far the most popular format. Its population declines a bit as a set ages (the graph starts midway through Bloomburrow), and it bounces back when a new set comes out (the jump at the end is the release of Duskmourn: House of Horror), but it is always the clear plurality of play. Next comes Historic, followed by Brawl, both very close in population. Alchemy is a clear fourth, and then Explorer and Timeless both have about half of Alchemy’s population. This is fairly similar to last year’s version, with a few notable changes: Standard is a bit more popular than it was last year, Brawl is more popular than it was, and Timeless is new for this chart. Formats on MTG Arena The most obvious takeaway from the chart is that we have a lot of different formats on MTG Arena. Though some are more popular than others, each of these formats represents a lot of players and games every day, and each is some player’s favorite format. While we spend more of our development bandwidth on the more popular formats, we want to make sure that exciting and compelling things are happening in all our formats. In general, we want every format to be balanced, diverse, and fun. Balance is important so that you always feel like you have a fair shot at winning and that your decisions throughout a match matter. Diversity means both facing a wider range of opponents, which is refreshing, but also that you have a large number of viable decks and archetypes to play yourself. And fun is always vital. After all, any given player is going to lose about half of the games they play, so we want to make sure the play in each match is interesting and enjoyable. Balance, diversity, and fun are important in every format, but each format thinks about them a little bit differently and might reorder the importance of those values. For example, diversity is a key focus in Historic, where we want to ensure that players have the widest possible array of decks that feel viable to play. A casual format like Brawl, on the other hand, puts fun first. Each format is designed with a particular type of player in mind, and that helps us focus on their development and pick the right directions for their growth. Tabletop Analog Formats Many of MTG Arena’s players value playing Magic exactly like it’s played in person. Maybe they’ve been playing Magic for a long time, have large collections of physical Magic cards, or just generally prefer having the same experience in digital Magic that they do when playing tabletop. Whatever the reason, we know mirroring the physical Magic experience is important for these players, and that’s why we keep Explorer and Standard authentically matching tabletop play. Explorer Explorer is our home for tabletop-authentic, nonrotating play. It’s built to appeal to fans of Pioneer or anyone looking for a larger nonrotating format that they can play on MTG Arena and in person. Though Explorer does not have every card in Pioneer, it’s fairly close. Many of the top Pioneer decks are fully playable, and the Best-of-Three Explorer metagame sees a lot of Rakdos Prowess, Izzet Phoenix, Azorius Control, and Selesnya Angels, much like Pioneer. And we’ll take a huge leap forward with the release of Pioneer Masters this December. When we announced the Explorer format a bit over two years ago, we said that we wanted to include all the cards players would need to play competitive Pioneer decks and enough of the rest to let players build the Pioneer decks that excite them. When Pioneer Masters releases, we think we will have hit that goal. We scoured Pioneer play across Pro Tours, Regional Qualifiers, Magic Online play, and many other sources to ensure that we’re capturing the cards that players are using, and we put them all into Pioneer Masters. The recent Pioneer Regional Championships give us a great place to test this. Across Brazil, the US, Japan, and more, we had 1,473 unique cards registered in main decks and sideboards. After the release of Pioneer Masters, MTG Arena will have all but 29 of them. Out of the 176,664 total card copies registered, only 95 are among the missing cards, meaning MTG Arena will support 99.95% of Pioneer cards used in Regional Championships. We said from the beginning that Explorer was the first leg of a journey and we would be retiring that name when all the Pioneer decks players want to play are available. We think we have reached that point, but you’re a critical part of answering that question, too. So, in the coming months, we’re going to be watching the Pioneer meta, watching the Explorer meta, watching our play data, and listening to what players are saying to see if we’ve met that bar. We’re very interested to learn what you think. Standard Standard is the format that’s been on MTG Arena the longest, and it’s always been our most popular format by far. We tune it specifically for players who want a tabletop-authentic Magic experience, but, unsurprisingly, that’s popular with a wide range of our players. Standard is going through some exciting changes, and one of the biggest is right around the corner with Magic: The Gathering Foundations. Since it is legal in Standard until at least 2029, it will form a new backbone of the format for all players. It is also built to be a great set to excite newer players with all the tantalizing depth that Magic has to offer. This gives MTG Arena a great opportunity to tweak how we’ve been approaching new players, and over the next six months or so, we will be adapting our new-player experience around Magic: The Gathering Foundations, including pointing new players in MTG Arena toward Standard as their default play mode. Standard recently had its first rotation in a while, and its first rotation ever as a three-year format. While, overall, we’re seeing a lot of diversity and health, particularly in Best-of-Three, we did act recently to issue a Best-of-One-only ban on Leyline of Resonance. This is not a tool we use often, because, on its face, it goes against the goals of the format. It’s right there at the start of this section: Standard is for players who want a tabletop-authentic Magic experience, and a ban like this seems to make things less authentic. But online players clearly and strongly prefer to play Best-of-One. We give the same option set across all our formats, and with similar results: No matter the format, most players prefer to play Best-of-One. That means we have to compromise sometimes. In this case, we think banning Leyline of Resonance in Best-of-One makes the mode play closer to how Best-of-Three plays, where the card is currently not a significant factor. We may well run into similar situations in the future; a larger Standard environment probably makes them more common. In any case, we will keep Standard on MTG Arena focused, providing a great experience to players looking for authentic tabletop Magic as much as possible. Digital Formats Digital play patterns are different from physical play patterns. For one example, while relatively few players play 50 games of Magic in person each week, that’s fairly common on MTG Arena. That high rate of play means we want to prioritize things a bit differently. Format diversity becomes even more important, for example, so players still get variety in their opponents and feel like they have a real choice in which deck they want to play. This is part of why we use different tools to balance the digital formats, like rebalancing cards. Simply banning a card usually removes at least one deck from an environment, sometimes multiple. Rebalancing, when done well, lets us keep the cards and archetypes players enjoy viable and playable, just at an appropriate power level. Alchemy Alchemy is our rotating digital format, and it’s built to provide a fluid, diverse meta. It is targeted at players who play a lot of games each week, so variety is especially important. Overall, variety in Alchemy has held up well. While the top deck in Standard has been fairly static over the last year, the most popular deck in Alchemy has changed every three to four months. Mono-Red is strong in Alchemy, like it is in Standard, and since it’s possibly too strong, we’ll be making some changes shortly. Beyond that, we continue to see a lot of diversity in the decks people are playing. In Best-of-One Alchemy, the top three decks make up only around 12% of the metagame, which is half of Standard’s 24%. One loud topic in Alchemy this year was Heist. While our data never showed the deck as being too strong, it did get very close to being too popular for a bit. That’s cooled down a bit now, and, overall, we’re fairly happy with how Heist played out. It is an interesting mechanic that made for a fun thematic deck that many players enjoyed but kept a very fair win rate. That’s pretty much the target we have for any new set mechanic. There may be a card or so that might be overtuned, but we think the mechanic itself works well. Finally, with the release of Magic: The Gathering Foundations and moving Standard to be our new-player format, we’ll focus Alchemy on catering to those high-volume, digital-first players who love the variety and the pace of change we originally intended for the format. As mentioned in the State of the Game article, we still have work to do behind the scenes to improve our capabilities there, but we’re excited by the opportunities in the Alchemy space. Historic Our main nonrotating digital format is Historic, a place where we focus on keeping the widest array of decks possible balanced and fun options for players. Like all our digital formats, it is aimed at high-volume players, so this diversity is important. The release of Modern Horizons 3 back in July was a big shake-up for the format, and for a bit, it hurt balance and diversity. The original Boros Energy deck was clearly too strong for the format, and it quickly became over-represented as well. After rebalancing several of the cards in the deck, we’ve been very happy with the results. The rebalanced Boros Energy deck is still one of the strongest and most-played decks in the format, but instead of dominating, it’s now a peer among several other powerful decks, like Mono-Green Elves, Izzet Wizards, and a few different takes on Mono-White. This is what we’re aiming for with each rebalance: leave the deck strong and viable, but on a fair level. We aren’t always able to hit that mark, but we’re learning more each time. Historic is the most diverse format on MTG Arena, and it is currently the most diverse it’s ever been. The top three decks are just under five percent of the metagame, indicating that people are playing a wide variety of different decks. We expect Pioneer Masters to contribute to the format without major disruptions. Timeless Timeless is the format where we prioritize the widest possible spread of cards you can play and Magic experiences you can have on MTG Arena. Currently, every card on MTG Arena is legal and only three are restricted. It still seems crazy that a format where you can play four Dark Rituals in a deck hasn’t collapsed, but when every deck is packed with crazy tricks, somehow it works out. Timeless remains a place where nothing is fair and yet everything is balanced. Like Historic, Timeless was shaken up by Modern Horizons 3, but not in the way people expected. Before the launch, everyone was worried about Timeless being overrun with Rakdos Scam and the pitch elementals, but in the end, it’s an innocuous one-drop cat and some energetic friends who ended up finally giving Show and Tell some real competition for most played Timeless deck. Modern Horizons 3 looks to have been very healthy for Timeless, leading to a broader and more diverse metagame. The range of decks being played is really surprising, especially for a format with so few guard-rails. Brawl Though Brawl is no longer our youngest format, it is still growing very quickly. Last year, its play was around Alchemy’s, but Brawl is now right below Historic in terms of play rate. While the relationship has been pretty stable for a while, it wouldn’t be surprising if Brawl overtook Historic in the next year. Brawl is a casual Commander-style format that aims to let players use the widest array of commanders possible. We want players to be able to bring whatever commander they like and get a fair, interesting match. Giving players a fair match no matter their commander means we need to look at your deck, figure out how strong it is, then pair you with someone else of matching strength quickly. It’s a challenge, and it takes some compromising. And we’re always working to improve how well we can do this, particularly in terms of how quickly we can respond to new cards and meta shifts. But overall, we’re very happy with how well the system is working. In most cases, we do serve up a fair, fun match quickly for any commander a player wants to bring. Since this is a growing format, we’ll continue to explore ways to support players who enjoy it now or want to get started. We’ve seen positive results with the preconstructed deck sales and think there are more opportunities to create content specifically for Brawl players in a variety of ways. Conclusion MTG Arena’s core goal is “fast, fun Magic for everyone, anywhere” (more on that in the State of the Game article), and that “everyone” means we have a wide array of different players we want to support. It’s an aspirational target. We have designed the spread of main formats we do support to cover as many players as possible, but we know that there will always be players who wish we supported an additional format or set of cards. We think the current spread of formats presents a good variety of options, especially with the new content each will receive in the next year, but we will always keep looking for ways to provide more Magic to more people in more places.

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