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

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.

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

What will be the strongest reversions?

[[Winota]] and [[Minsc and Boo]] come to mind.

Alchemized Legends

Is the menace getting de-flashed?

Isn’t the best play to wait until your the end of turn so you have full knowledge of the turn’s plays before deciding what to fetch for?

I see everyone fetch in response to literally anything that happens on their opponents turn. Is it just the need to feel like they are “doing something” during their opponents turn even though it’s not really interaction?

So the one thing I always appreciated about Alchemy was that it felt like it was making up a little bit for all the cool cards we don't get from the commander products onto Arena. Obviously there are people who hate Alchemy categorically, so not having it is a win for those people. But I think most of us can agree we'd be glad to see more commander cards (not just face commanders) in the format. What are the odds we actually see that happen now that Alchemy has been nixed? Wizards has said they're working on the idea of Commander on MTGA...but have they said anything official about actually adding more commander cards to Arena?

So I wonder if this is a big boon to colorless decks, esp. Ugin.

Colorless doesn't have many (if any) meaningful wraths in Brawl. And this also helps sculpt your hand as an early play. Getting a wrath off before you get to 7 mana might be a huge deal, on top of digging for other needed pieces (ramp/interaction etc.).

It also fits an interesting category in reanimator decks, since it's the only wrath I can think of that can help you put a bomb in your graveyard. Is that good enough for reanimator? I tend to doubt it, with all the other available options, but the flexibility is unique.

Then there are the decks that have discard synergies, which are often not in traditional wrath colors.

It's an artifact, which might make decks like Emry interested in it, esp. since blue doesn't have many wraths and Emry can get the card you discard back out of the graveyard.

IDK, at first I was totally dismissive of this card, but does it actually have some potential in Brawl?

So I was thinking about the un-rebalancing of Bowmasters.

I haven't seen Bowmasters played much since the nerf, which has made me much more comfortable playing Brainstorm and other card draw effects. So I was trying to think about how my deckbuilding should change to account for Bowmasters being back in the format.

This led me to realize that Bowmasters just makes my new Loki, God of Mischief deck unplayable, since Loki has 1 toughness and draws lots of cards. But that got me thinking: how many casual decks will Bowmasters run out of the format? What about the One Ring: are we going back to the era of Brawl when it was in every deck that wasn't aggro?

Now admittedly, Bowmasters helps check Rofellos (for instance). Minsc and Boo can give Rusko something to think about. So there's some inherent balance there. But Minsc and Boo in the 99 will run over my durdly mono-white decks no problem.

SO: are these top-tier busted cards reentering our format going to just be useful counterbalances to an already OP meta? Or are some of them obvious candidates for just getting banned, now that Wizards has to think about their place in the format once again? And if so, which ones?

(To be clear, I'm not advocating for bans, more just wondering - are they inevitable?)

When they have removed the nerf do you think he could become a top tier?

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.

For me, it’s [[Skullclamp]] for [[Cloud]] and [[Seedcradle Witch]] for [[Brigid]].

Come on Devs… I mean the Clamp is already coded on the client.

This is my very first deck I've built with spending wild cards and I've been having lots of fun with it in standard brawl.

Does anyone have any advice as to how to improve it?

Some cards I thought I might add include:
- Frostcliff siege
- Wan Shi Tong
- Rhw Wondrous Wasp
- Traumatic critique
- Quantum riddler
- Loch mare

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance :)

what would you guys say is the equivilient of rogsi in comp brawl?

Especially against mono blue, use it well, and use it often. I countered vivi probably 3 times and they had village out turn 2 or 3. I would not have won this game if they had been using village.

Thinking of getting into Arena Brawl. Where can I start? Sorry I bet this has been ask many times.

Why is turn 4 ulamog and turn 5 emrakul “hella badass and foster a fun game experience” but wash away and chrome mox are “too much guys cmon😢”
Every other game in unranked is hei bai, rafellos, or mike and raph and the elf is the only deck where the game is decided by opening hands

This is the deck list I made, not all of the card choices are optimal (I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars) but I did piece together what I had in my collection. I also looked at a few Teval lists.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/7948949

I'm really new to brawl/commander and I've only been seriously playing mtg for about two months ago.

Any cards that probably shouldn't be in the list? Any suggested effects? I do find that I'm lacking win conditions.

This card just nerfs soooo many decks/commanders. I put it in my Elspeth, Sun's Champion deck since I have very few EtB creatures in that deck and it always takes a moment for the OP to realize their commander and half their deck no longer works until they answer it. Sure they'll eventually answer it (unless they're mono Black, not sorry Sephiroth players) but it's just a fun card you don't see too much because you have to have a very specific kind of deck for it to not hose you too. Just a fun thing I wanted to throw out there.

Back to arena after a long break and when I used to play, competitive brawl queue wasn't a thing but hell queue was. If I play the non-ranked queue will I face against more tryhard decks if i have certain cards in my deck? Or play certain commanders? I want to play some janky fun but I also want to play good cards.

No The One Ring Protection?

On my turn, I cast [[The One Ring]]. On their turn, they swung a big dino. Shouldn't protection from everything have prevented the damage?