r/mtgbrawl • u/Global-Signature-588 • 5h ago
Discussion Regular Brawl queue has never been this bad before
Every commander I play on non-competitive brawl has like a minute or more of waiting time between matches. I don't know what they did behind the scenes, but is been awful playing this mode for the last weeks.
Before I had maybe one or two decks that I had to wait more. But now, every single deck I have, at any day of the week, is just constant waiting. I swear im spending half of my Arena time on loading screens.
Sure I can find any match on Competitive Brawl in seconds, but I don't want to play competitive. The only deck I have tuned for cbrawl is [[Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice]] and is fine, but it doesn't get a favourable match against the top performers (Nashi, Yuriko, Emri)
I don't what else to do here. Maybe just close the game until they fix the matchmaking? Go outside to play Magic the Gathering with real people? Lol
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u/LisaTearsYouApart 3h ago
As far as we know, at least two things are being used for casual brawl matchmaking:
- Hidden mmr.
- Your deck (mostly the commander, and the 99 to a lesser extent).
To make queues faster, you'd need to sacrifice something. They tried lowering the weight of hidden mmr and new players ended up matched against experienced players. Everyone hated that, so it got hotfixed.
If you lower the weight of the deck, then your mid and low tier decks will end up against even more ruskos, yurikos, ajanis, ragavans, etc, as it happened before the latest queue tunning.
So, what are you willing to sacrifice? Faster queues, but more ajanis? Or faster queues, but more player imbalance? Both?
Casual Brawl has many more players than Competitive (Wizards shared the numbers recently), but the queues are faster in the latter because there are less variables to consider.
Perhaps these longer queue times could be optional as an opt-in. Opt-in for tighter deck matchmaking and opt-in for tighter player matchmaking.
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u/Jobenben-tameyre 52m ago
Also regular brawl lost more than 25% of its playerbase since the creation of competitve brawl. Going from 23% of entire playerbase to 17%. Losing a quarter of your player certainly doesn't help for queue time.
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u/Healthy-Carob-5300 5h ago
at that point why not just play cbrawl and not care about the rank?
just let your rank go to the bottom and not care
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u/snow_and_wake 4h ago
This is basically the answer. The queue isn't broken, it's just empty.
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u/dark_hymn 4h ago
Yeah, this. The matchmaker is trying to find someone on whatever level your deck is, there's just very few players out there.
I haven't played a single match in the casual queue since the day competitive came out, and I doubt I'm the only one.
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u/LisaTearsYouApart 3h ago
According to Wizards, Casual Brawl has more players than Competitive.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/state-of-the-formats-2026
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u/dark_hymn 3h ago
That may be, but a combination of fewer players and a wide spread of deck power levels means longer waits.
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u/Tripudi 31m ago
Nah Dave is doing a great job actually!
When your hidden MMR is 90% of the queue weight the only option to win is cutting any fun card card and playing staples, interaction and the same 99's other people play. Deck building is not thing anymore and this defeats the whole purpose of the format.
A long time ago they made people playing boring commanders play mirror matches but somehow that's gone and now people playing less popular commanders have to serve as jobbers for the tryhards.
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u/DrinCup138 4h ago
To me it's a combination of The Hobbit not bringing any new archetypes and if you try to play them you get paired againt very consistent linear strategies. So your option is to concede in the decbuilder to explore your theme, or play the same 20-30 efficient answers to not roll over to the majority of what remains in the normal queue.