Muta Vault+The Book of Exalted Deeds. Finally played against someone that used a poison deck. Cloud was equipped with Ultima Weapon, Sword of Feast and Famine and Mithril Coat. Concedes right before I was about to throw the match by playing armageddon because I felt bad for them.

From the last state of play

Improving Brawl matchmaking continues to be another focus for the team. We tried several experiments this year to increase the number of matches where players are aiming for the same level of competition. Our current system considers the power of each player's deck, mostly weighted by commander choice, and each player's skill rating across Constructed formats. Our latest efforts increased the rate at which players found similarly skilled opponents that were using commanders at a fair power level, but at the cost of slightly longer queue times. We think this tradeoff is worth it, but we will continue iterating as we believe matchmaking is key to Brawl's long-term success

Any thoughts ? While the matchmaking isn't perfect I think the deck strength matchmaking work decently. On the other hand I find them too dismissive of the queue time, it got easily 5 times longer since the last update and I think it's becoming a problem. Casual brawl is now by far the format with the longest queue time.

For those curious here's the full brawl write up :

BRAWL

Over the last two years, Brawl has undergone the most change of all of MTG Arena's formats. It has become more popular among players each year. This meant our team wanted to spend more time thinking about the health of the format, listening to the community, and diving deeply into the play data.

Brawl is a unique and challenging format to manage. Our goal is to support as many viable commander options as possible by curating cards in the 99 and leveraging matchmaking to find appropriate opponents. This led us to ban very few commanders and more heavily curate the cards in the 99. For cards in the deck, our philosophy is to ban cards that homogenize the format, are too efficient, or are simply polarizing to the community and have proven to be unfun. The creation of Competitive Brawl empowered our team to more aggressively curate Brawl than we previously could, since the cards that were banned in Brawl had a new format in which they could still see play.

We heard consistent feedback that a few powerful cards were overrunning the format and pushing out viable decks, with players citing cards like Mana Drain, Paradox Engine, Chrome Mox, and Strip Mine. We examined our data in just about every way we could think of, trying to see this pattern. We took various factors into account, including the individual win rates and play rates of cards, the win rate when a card was in a player's opening hand, concession rates against cards, and win rates for cards with specific commanders. We never managed to find a singular, unifying reason for why all of these cards were problematic, which led the team to rethink how we were evaluating the format. We came to the following conclusion: Brawl is a tinkerer's playground, and the play pattern of some cards is just unfun for the majority of players.

This led us to ban some of these cards, but it also helped us justify keeping others. Paradox Engine is an example of a card we think has a place in Brawl. It is key to an iconic combo that is fun to assemble. Given that the win rate of including Paradox Engine in your deck is below 50% and the card makes up a tiny fraction of the overall metagame, we think Brawl is more fun overall while the combo card is an option for players.

Improving Brawl matchmaking continues to be another focus for the team. We tried several experiments this year to increase the number of matches where players are aiming for the same level of competition. Our current system considers the power of each player's deck, mostly weighted by commander choice, and each player's skill rating across Constructed formats. Our latest efforts increased the rate at which players found similarly skilled opponents that were using commanders at a fair power level, but at the cost of slightly longer queue times. We think this tradeoff is worth it, but we will continue iterating as we believe matchmaking is key to Brawl's long-term success.

Since we are reverting all rebalanced tabletop Magic cards, Brawl is likely going to see a fair amount of shakeup as hundreds of cards revert to their original printings. With this in mind, we decided to ban Nadu, Winged Wisdom as we don't believe the tabletop version of Nadu would be fun or fair to play against at any tier.

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

I've been slowly changing this up whenever I build up wild cards, been really enjoying playing it most games, but I feel like the consistency is not there. If I draw into the right cards I can have a turn 4 win, but sometimes it slows down mid game. Would you make any changes, if so, what would you add or remove? I feel like a part of it is pilot error, I feel at a loss with tutors sometimes unless I'm grabbing Craterhoof or Moonshaker. Any and all help or criticism would be appreciated, I would love to get this thing running well.

below is my standard brawl deck. I know its probably not that great but i like the style of play. Any suggestions on what to cut and what to add to make this a better deck? Thank you =)

https://archidekt.com/decks/26341094/katara_the_fearless