What is actually the difference? As someone who doesn't play much commander, historic brawl on arena is 100 card singleton- is it just the fact its 1v1 that makes it different for you?
@danza71 BRAWL also only has a health of 20-25. Commander's starting life total is 40. In commander you also can best someone by what is called commander damage. If you take 21 commander damage from a enemy commander you also lose. So to summarize. Commander is just all around a different animal than brawl. Think of Brawl as "Diet" commander... Less cards when sets come out. Less players since commander is 4 players wich makes games way more interactive. Less life which incentives players to either play hard control or aggro instead of fun mid-range creature decks.
I think one of the big reasons why Commander isn't on arena already has mostly do due with the fact its a format they don't control directly, whereas they control every other format thats supported on arena. Also, if they did bring it to Arena, it most likely WOULDNT be Commander and they'd just make Brawl/Historic Brawl multiplayer supported which is infinitely easier than trying to mess with card pools and its a format they do control.
Commander players are the main cash cow for WotC/Hasbro. They understand they'll make more money selling paper magic to a wider audience than would play MTG Arena for commander.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it's just difficult to get a layout that works well. You need to figure out a way to display everyone's board in a way that's easy to understand.
I feel like everyone has quickly forgotten how long they dragged on about expanding outside of 1v1 in the 2023 extended roadmap during the Arena section. Granted they didn't literally say 'we're adding 4p to Arena', but they sure implied it heavily. They even touched upon how Arena may become some manner of core platform that others could be built off of.
I disagree they would announce Multiplayer coming to Arena far ahead, considering a massive change like Timeless being released came with basically no prior notice.
Timeless is "just another format" (no offense to anyone who plays on and enjoys Arena, especially Timeless), and all you'd have to do is basically make a list of what sets you can use and what cards you can't - with a new option for cards being Restricted. Implementing a new format on a digital client is relatively easy. Compare that to implementing some kind of multiplayer format, whether Commander, 2HG, or something else, and that is a much bigger undertaking. Even if WotC didn't officially announce something about it "right away", there'd be enough inspection and clues and such to suggest that it was something people were working on that at some point, they or Daybreak would have to come forward and say "yes, this is a thing we're working on. It might be a while until it's ready, but we're doing what we can to enable multiplayer play." So I don't see this as being the same thing.
I don't think they'd be able to hide the huge amount of resources dumped into redoing the entire game client. This isn't just adding in new cards or formats.
yeah I think many just think of kitchentable commander, but there is no rule 0, it can easily be jank vs cedh level stuff and then most ppl would just play in direct challenge against friends and not in the queue, meanwhile the queue would mostly consists of cedh/close to cedh games, balancing will be extremely difficult (also if anything i think we're gonna see 4 player historic brawl nothing they'd name commander)
I mean, they could pull a page from Canadian Commander and give a value to every card depending on rarity or power and match you with other players that queue with a deck that's in a range or +50/-50 card value. Let's say that my deck total card value is 500, it won't get paired with deck with 700 value, nor with deck that has a 200 value.
it would be rly nice, me and my friends not always find the time to come together and play, and play arena where we could do themes and stuff ... it would boost the sell of cards and wildcards on arena like CRAZY it would be money printing
Inniaz, the Gale Force has been on Arena for a while. I’d imagine they just used that already-existing logic. I also can’t think of a future-proofed way to write the card without targeting and a ton of extra text.
I love how you very obviously confused left and right in the beginning just to hammer home the later point of the cost of fixing mistakes in post production.
I was Just (in the last 48 hours) sent a rather lengthy (24 question) survey from the Arena Development Team mostly asking about how I felt about various multi-player formats on Arena.
@phangplaysmtg I've played Arena off and on since it came out. Like clockwork, if I quit for two months they offer me something free to come back. This time, was definitely different. The survey started off normally asky why I stopped and how I would rate Arena. Then the last 15 or so questions were very specific about "would I play a multi-player format in Arena," "multi player Brawl," "Commander," etc
@@MaleusMaleficarumyeah it was asking my favorite formats on arena and an option was "Pauper (Event Only)". Also asked about how I felt on elden ring and the civilization series 😳
I think as some other commenters have said that they’re working on the start of multiplayer brawl. It’s an existing card pool and format that’s easy to manage from WOTC, the difficulty is getting the client to handle that many interactions and program 4 player pods.
They may add multiplayer to Arena, but I doubt they'd officially call it Commander. They already don't call modes in Arena what they're called IRL because there's not card parity. Explorer is ostensibly Pioneer, as an example. I do like Arena as a way to play quick games, but I don't know if in its current state Arena is where I want to play Commander. It would need a server browser with filtering and rules etc, beyond just raw matchmaking. I think they could make something work for sure, but WILL they? I doubt it. I also think that even with the existence of TTS that WOTC should make their own similar program for playing digital Magic MANUALLY. I don't have a big card collection, but if they made an evergreen app like TTS where you could buy, sell, and trade cards I bet they'd make a lot of money from that selling digital Commander Precons at the very least. Or maybe I'm a total moron. That's been known to be true too.
Comparing arena to other ccgs like hearthstone is logical, but if you're talking about building a multiplayer client, it's probably better to look towards Autochess games like TFT and Underlords, which are very good at putting multiple players into one group where you can cycle through and look at other people's boards.
I would assume that the wording on the card would not influence how the actual card operates. I have limited coding experience, but I don't think the text on the card would actually affect how the code runs. Even if the code has to follow some sort of "player to your right" logic, the text on the card could still say "the opponent's library" instead. This probably means we will be getting multiplayer at some point hopefully.
Honestly, playing commander without being able to talk with your opponents would just not be worth it for me 😅 like, the human interactions and the politics are literally what makes commander games for me and what makes it a lot better than the other formats. If not, playing against one opponent or three are basically the same thing
It would definitely be different, but I would still give it a try and have high hopes a rudimentary language will develop through Arena's stock emotes and card hovering
It's quite a while ago like about a year or more, when they once said that they plan on implementing multiplayer, but it's something for the far future and not high priority.
Arena has gotten so much better. I’ve luckily been playing since War of Spark and now just from doing daily’s and not dropping a single dollar on it I can make nearly any(brawl) deck I wanna make. Now I def couldn’t do that with 60 card decks cause of the wildcards needed. But at this point I have all the best rares and Mythics available on the client. If you play brawl it’s been a great experience. Just do your daily’s get packs when new sets drop and you’ll have a great library to build atleast singleton decks at a high level.
Yeah, I've been playing Arena since Guilds/Allegiance and as soon as they made a (Historic) Brawl queue I immediately left Standard. Doing dailies and being pretty deece at Draft has been sufficient to stay F2P the whole time and have several (H)B decks (and regularly making new ones, thanks to my annoying habit of getting quickly bored of them lol). I don't even remember the last time I bought packs that weren't on sale.
My theory is that originally the first iteration of the card was made for a silver border set, and players switched hands. Maybe it was for Unfinity, hence the name. They must have had in the files and someone thought of a creative way to implement it in Arena with some tweaks.
The upside I can see to Commander on Arena is that Wizards could include an Arena code in the Commander precons to add the deck to your account. I feel this is likely future-proofing for *a* more-than-two-player format, most likely once they do sort out how to allow the politics in-game civil, and what best way to display each player's board. Whether that format is Commander, 2HG, Emperor, or just a multi-player free-for-all, only time will tell. Official Arena 4-player Dandan? :D
There are cards that show up in the Momir format in Arena that aren't craftable cards on the client, so I don't know WHAT to expect. There are days I'm just glad the client works with minimal bugs, lol. *Thanks for the Content!*
Sometimes when you search for a match you will get stuck there endlessly, even though it says it "found an opponent". You have to manually close the game and THEN also wait a few minutes for the game to fix itself so as not to throw you once again into that broken queue. I don't know whether you have encountered this bug yourself, but for me it's like that close to once a week and it's been this way since I started playing Arena, which is somewhere like M19 - Guilds and Allegiance. It's not gamebreaking, unlike e.g. that Kunai bug patched soon after NEO released, but it's still SO annoying.
No no no no it can’t be the complicated code. Part of the way they sold us on Arena was Specifically that MTGO code is old and hard to change and update, but the new Arena code is cutting edge, easy to update and upgrade. So don’t go there.
I am extremely impressed with how well Magic actually works on Arena and MTGO. It's such a complex game with so many actions and interactions.. I can't even imagine how difficult it must have been when they started programming MTG to make it actually work in the digital environment.
At least MTGO and Arena are post 2000, so somewhat modern. Look at Shandalar (the MicroProse game). Some of the font choices are not great and the AI can be sometimes dumb, but the way the gameplay itself is programmed is flawless. If you don't want to download the game, you can look at e.g. the Yt vods of Benjamin Wheeler's streams of this game. I've been bingewatching them whenever I can, that game is fascinating.
@2:03 Probably not a hot take on Alchemy any more. Its cool they are design testing cards (using similar game mechanics but with a twist). Unlike internal play testing for new mechanics, WotC can get a much larger sample size. eg: was Specialised too wordy and silly? Should Draft and Seek exist as card advantage and can Draft / Seek be too pushed? The last and most important aspect is WotC card design teams able to roll back a card effectively. Like the changes to Dragon's Rage Channeler and Orcish Bowmasters are probably lessons well learned if designers act on them moving forward. Overall we should look Alchemy cards and talk about how there is a safe space to test full card releases. Does Tajic Legion's Valor feel fair? (As you dont get blue and in a meta which is about exile, the indestructible is a manageable interplay. Plus you can always block the creatures that are generated when you size up with a green X commander. Thankfully Tajic doesn’t have ward). However cards like Mythweaver Poq and Rusko Clockmaker feel gross. They can be your commander and behave like a banned cards, Golos, in how they ramp too easily and too hard. I do like the concepts of Raddic Tal Zealot and Crucias Titan of the Waves as more fair card advantage vs of these other pushed cards. Crucias does ramp but the treasure is different than the more permeant ramp a fee land or Midnight Clock are. What some people are responding to how piss poor Alchemy, is the lack of refund policy. If within day 7 or day 14 of announcements, WotC agreed players could get free wildcards for a changed card (keeping that nerfed card and getting the corresponding number of wildcards), I’m sure more players would welcome Alchemy updates than the initial rejection. We will never know though. Alchemy could be good. It really could have been if WotC wanted to manage it. They don’t historically know how to manage a good thing.
So the only qualm I have with the theory of "player to your right" is just a roundabout way to refer to your singular opponent is: why expose that workaround to the player? It doesn't benefit them to not just hide the actual code execution behind the text of a card as long as the outcome is the same. That said, I would love Arena commander! Hell, I might spend money on Arena if it had commander (F2P player atm). Maybe buy myself and my friends some wildcard bundles so we could get started crafting pet cards immediately instead of having to work and earn them while also worrying about keeping our cash cow decks competitive.
I'm fine with digitally unique cards, there are just some things that can be done online that can't be replicated in physical, but I hate Arena having cards with the same name as physical cards, but that do different things. That complicates things for people who play both and then have to keep up with the differences in what those cards do in different places.
They should have the changed text highlighted in a different text color. I feel like that’d solve most problems. Make it obvious what’s different, you know?
@@davidhower7095 I don't see any good way of have the same card doing different things, if you play Arena, and that's what you're mostly familiar with, you won't know what's good in physical and won't know what to look for when building a deck. I'd much rather they leave cards alone so it's just a non-issue. If they have to ban things, ban them.
@6:55 Arena knows what an opponent is in cards. As in there are cards that specifiy "an opponent" on arena right now. Now being unable to "reuse" that part of code for Juggle the Perfomance would mean that the developers are incompetent in their implementation. Now I don't believe the mtga developers are incompetent. I think the card might be something that's been in internal pre alpha prototype testing for commander arena and no one caught on what actually is on the card when releasing it.
I'm ok with them trickling new stuff for historic brawl, since it's 100 card and a great substitution for EDH. I just hope we get enemy fetches, most of the tutors, and some important mana rocks eventually. That, plus multiplayer would be absolutely great.
received an email for a survey from wizards yesterday regarding commander coming to arena basically asking my opinion if it'd be a good option, though it doesn't mean they're conclusively going to add it on arena it does seem they're considering it.
I miss the challenges from the other digital clients, the year-dated ones that I think evolved into arena but I'm not sure because I quit for a few years I really wish they'd bring it back, and if they really are serious about bringing the pro events back then they can copy the most complicated board states from those events for new challenges
I thought I read in one of the latest newsletters that they are working on bringing Commander to MTGA in it's entirety. I may have been mistaken though.
I still think Arena is too expensive and the performance is still disappointing. I love draft the most but if human pod drafts weren’t enough to bring me back then Alchemy and Commander won’t do it either.
@13:56, I dont think that is a nightmare scenario. You need to improve deck management (more decks, tabs to sort decks and of course changes in one app is changes to your server side decks and not some kind of local change). If 2 apps allows developers to make a more robust client (having 256 tokens, then doubling said unique 256 tokens should take a few milliseconds than the current ‘dial up’ model we have). Really we should embrace this, cause MTGA was first released with a questionable abilities (Brian, the Professor, covers what MTGA alpha/beta limitations were and that explains why MTGA feels sluggish when you are wanting to make big numbers). Even the simple thing of looping FOR(i=999) is not possible on MTGA but we do this all the time with Magic proper. (I do not want to see 1000 animations either lol)
They have Brawl on Arena. I don't see how this Alchemy card signals 4-player commander coming to Arena. They would do some sort of anouncement and stream to showcase that cause it would be a major update. It's just some alchemy card, it's not a premonition.
I think the cleanest way to get around hexproof or protection in a 1v1 format is just to have the text “from the library of an opponent” on that card. In a game of 1v1, there is literally no concept of a “player’s right”. Left and right are both the same so when I see the word “right” on a card that is allegedly meant only for digital 1v1, it’s as weird as if the cards Call the Coppercoats or Aeon Engine had been introduced to Alchemy.
@@ilyafoskin Inniaz exists on arena already, so the "player to your right" has been coded in for a good bit now and the card in paper has only been in jumpstart which is supposed to be 1v1
Why would the verbiage presented on the card have anything to do with the way the cards works? Even if they had to do weird programming that affected the “player on the left” the rules text could easily read “your opponent”. They’re not connected at all.
Hey PleasantKenobi, unfortunately this card isn't a hint for anything. Considering that this particular card isn't even the first card that is written in this way. Look up "Gutmorn, Pactbound Servant". One of its abilities says: "Whenever a player discards a card during your turn, *they choose another player.* That player conjures a duplicate of that card into their hand. It perpetually gains 'You may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast this spell.'" Why would it ask players to choose another player if in a 1v1 game each can only choose the other player? This card is from Alchemy: Innistrad, which makes it a loooot older than Juggle the Performance. Hopefully we get commander soon, but this seems more like future proofing than a teaser.
I don't think the textbox has anything to do with how the card is actually programmed. Meaning, of course they should match each other, but the textbox is likely just, well, text, while the card's actual mechanic implementation resides somewhere else entirely. So who knows how they implemented this "behid the curtain". I woudln't make too much assmptions. Is the text a hint? Maybe, could be. Does it have to do with how they actually "coded" the card? Not necessarily.
I'd like commander on arena cuz it'd be nice to sit back and let the computer remember all the triggers and do all the math, I'd probably only play with friends or with folks from discord though cuz talking is an important part of the game. And I'd still primarily play cockatrice though cuz arena is so expensive.
6:49 I doubt it. Wouldn't it otherwise just say: "from the library of the other player into their hand"? And I assume that cards probably do not have to abide by their text. What I mean by that is that even if "player to their right" is a necessary wording for this card to work properly in the code, the card itself could have been granted a different visual text.
It’s futureproofing. Even if Arena never gets 4 player, all cards on the client need to be able to function should that ever happen. Like, what if you brought a proxy of it into a rule 0’d commander game? Who is “the other player”?
Tech guy here. The wording shown doesn't affect how the code works, so I see two possibilities: 1: Future-proofing effects that should affect your opponent without targeting them. 2: That might just be the most readable way to phrase it given the current keywords. I'm leaning towards the second option. Best way I can think to phrase it is "library of their opponent", but "their opponent" has never appeared on a card before. The wording of "an opponent" fails to specify that it's player-relative... and I'm not sure if "an opponent" is synonymous with "target opponent" which would make giving yourself hexproof and casting Juggle kinda broken. Citation needed plz.
Theory: they're working on a new client to replace both Magic Online and Arena that will handle all existing formats, but don't want to scare people off from spending money in the existing clients yet. Because of course they won't let you transfer a collection. You'll get some sort of credit to spend in the new one, and it just won't go very far.
Playing a client like untapped with friends on a discord call shows me my 2 biggest gripes with MTGA. 1- it's cumbersome and difficult to get and find cards. I can't just dissolve a card for card fairy dust to build another one like in hearthstone and their search features are trash. 2 - I find the client cumbersome. I find the client doesn't understand what I want to do with combat tricks and occasionally I've encountered bugs where it just doesn't work. I don't mind the lack of a social environment per say or the other issues people bring up. But when the free bootleg clients do it better why would I want to be involved? Hell, spelltable is infinitely better. I want to like arena. I do. Because I miss standard. But it's just not for me.
I'm calling it, there will be an Arena that is just for multiplayer formats like commander and 2HG... once they get the budget and staff count they deserve.
So the text of the card has no effect on the effect in hame. Writing it this way has no technical afvantage. Its like how a tittle of a book doesn't determine what's inside but normally the title is written with regard to whats inside
Why don't they just add every single eternal keyword and weird interaction into the client? Truly, it can't be THAT complicated? I mean...I once coded a histogram from some parallelized data generation, and that only took many months. Surely 30k card interactions are easy. Actually, I imagine that they're slowly working on laying groundwork for just expanding to legacy/vintage by adding all of those interaction for old mechanics. It's just extremely complex. When your weird card game is complex enough to be Turing complete, it's probably going to take a while to put it all in a vidya gaem.
I know everytime i take a survey I mention I want multiplayer to come to arena... it would be a lot easier to get my paper card group to join if they had commander
The major issue I have with alchemy cards is that they are a way for wotc to fuck the players. Look at fragmented reality. I bought those cards with wildcards. And some support cards to go with too. I played that card in the NO ban only restricted format of timeless. I never play alchemy. I don't want to play alchemy, I won't be playing that format. It is fine that it exists, but not my jam. Anyway. I now cannot play the deck I built with that card because it no longer exists. So there goes 4 rare wildcards for just the card they changed and the other wildcards for the cards I got specifically for that deck. If the economy didn't suck so much I wouldn't have a problem with alchemy cards existing. Or if the events were better, but there isn't even a timeless event at the moment to grind. I play one format at a time. I played brawl for about a year. Now that timeless is the closest thing to legacy/vintage I'll be playing this almost exclusively. That's just how my tism/adhd works.
since multiplayer games are not possible with arenas ui looking like it does right now (and let's face it, hasbro is not going to dump money into redesigning it) there is no real reason for a wording like "player to the left/right" to exist other than usage of already existing parts of legacy codebase or lazy card design. there much cleaner rules-wise solutions like counting players by turn order.
@11:33, here here! Its is a HARD sell, even if money is no object, to convince someone from Magic to play MTGA. For my friends and I: it is a social game first and foremost. What the cards are doing and how we change rules (accepting mana weaving, add casual free mulligans) are secondary to having a conversation. So not being able to chat, praise, laugh, etc with your opponent is absurd. Why would someone want to sink ~1.0kusd into MTGA when you are playing a faceless, silent player.
Yes, I want commander in Arena, it’s the primary format I play, everything wrong with Standard and such is 2x so in Arena, and if anything I welcome the attention redirection of every kill spell in the game. Cause that’s just what Brawl is Arena, everyone just plays Black and fill the deck with every kill spell first to kill everything, your commander, your board pieces, your fucking hand, THEN maybe there’s their commander mechanic’s, and that’s it. So yeah, I want commander so now those assholes have to worry more about that being pointed at them, or at the very least that fuck themselves over making sure my commander doesn’t last a phase.
Ironically I just filled out a survey why it's been so long since I logged into Arena. Edit: Agree with you about the rebalance Alchemy cards. It's why I stopped. Rereading cards I thought I knew was frustrating.
How would you word Juggle the Performance without saying "player to their right"? Because it effects both players, I think this might just be the simplest way of wording it consistent with standard templating.
I don’t have a problem with Alchemy existing- I have a problem with those cards being legal in formats that aren’t alchemy. If they can keep alchemy cards away from the formats that I play, that would be ideal.
*The thing about alchemy is that I wanted to play to play magic on arena, I didn't want to play magic arena.* I certainly didn't want to play hearthstone.
For a greedy company such as hasbro its should be a no brainer to implement commander (or like 4 player historic brawl or whatever) to Arena. Commander players are the most profitable base for the game and would absolutely bring them into Arenas more smooth and shiny client.
Just give Arena a PvE roguelike. It'd be much easier to do, it'd make a bunch of money, it'd attract new audiences, and it'd have the potential to be enourmously diverse and fun.
My biggest issue with Arena is how shitty the cards look. I'm sure if its the font or the formatting or the colors, but it just looks bad. It looks like someone tried to poorly photoshop a magic card together from newspaper clippings. I really can't over that and how hand-holdy it feels to play. Idk, part of what makes MTG fun for me is the fact that it exercises my brain a little bit. I have to think about interactions, consider how my cards affect the board, add up damage on my own, ect. When all that is done for you it kinda feels brainless. Like I feel so little investment in the board state because all the interactions happen automatically. I'm sure not everyone feels this way but its what has kept me from really diving into Arena.
I know that the cool thing to say about MTGO is that it looks like the Windows solitaire application and Notepad.exe held together with duct tape, but I made the switch from Arena to MTGO back in 2020 and never looked back. I, too, found that Arena just didn’t look right, and sure, MTGO looks like Minesweeper launched in Windows98, but MTGO feels a lot more like Magic to me. I’ve made friends through MTGO, like Vince says, just through the chat function. And the play just feels a lot smoother: the couple of times I’ve played Arena since I got into MTGO I’ve really missed the ability to right-click on a repeated triggered ability and say “Yield to all instances of this ability,” or to save my opponent as the target for my Blood Artist, etc.
Unfortunately I believe commander in arena would be terrible if it's not handled properly... I don't think anybody wants to: 1) spend hundreds of wildcards on past sets that are currently not on arena, just to have a viable deck 2) play top tier cEDH all the time the latter point bothers me a lot. Enforcing a casual format like the one you can experience in the real world is not going to be easy
You’ll never convince me Alchemy cards aren’t dogwater lol. I’ll play Brawl, Timeless or Historic (formats obviously based off of real paper formats) and get railed by a card that didn’t exist in paper so how tf an I supposed to play around that . They should be their own little dumb format imo and that should be the end of it imo. Don’t even get me started on “rebalancing” cards too. Overall annoying af.
Rebalancing mistakes in design for digital is one of the best things about having a digital client. Your argument about paper vs alchemy is totally meaningless. It’s like saying you got beaten by a card that’s not legal in your format, like a legacy card somehow appearing illegally in your game of modern. The pool of cards is different on the digital client and there are cards that are legal in the digital formats that aren’t in the paper format, because they don’t exist in paper. It’s the same as any other format, you have to learn the cards within that format in order to succeed and play at a competitive level. That said, the issue I have with Alchemy is that the cards tend to be obnoxiously good, or not worth using. They really need to rebalance them more often when a broken or pushed design is warping the metagame.
It’s complaints like yours and a few that I’ve seen around the universes beyond I just don’t understand. Just read the new cards jeez, it’s no different then a new card coming out in standard. It’s a card game, what the card does is on the card, therefore reading the card explains the card.
I don't mind alchemy cards in alchemy (or historic) I just don't want to face Jarsyl that has no place being in any format. Or the pre nerf pirate ramp thing. The cards are destined to fail, if they are good I don't want to play against them, if they are bad no one plays them. And they are NEVER good in a traditional way always some kind of "perpetual" inevitable you lose condition that is busted on curve and in the lategame. And don't get me started on the removal that banks excess damage what a joke of a card, actually the "fury" of alchemy
Honestly, what might be the easiest fix is to have a separate "multiplayer app" that is optomized for it, but uses the same login/card collection etc. It's just a separate client to handle the tricky bits that they can build from the ground up. Is it the best solution? Probably not, but considering the dev time they dont seem to want to pay for, it might be the type of thing we end up seeing.
No, it is not a hint. It's just the shortest way to word it. People complain about cards having whole books in the text box, and when they use the shortest way to describe an effect by saying "player to your right/left", people assume it's for 4-player, when it's in fact just the shortest and most effective way to write it. Think Inniaz. It was released in a 1v1 format, but use the exact same wording as Juggle. Is Innoaz a hint at commander on arena? no. Is Juggle one? no.
Man, I hear you but as someone that does not play any Arena, seeing Alchemy cards being referenced or discussed like real cards really does leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Well, how do you implement Commander if a player wants to play a pw6 deck and they just know they're gonna be facing pw9 decks 90% of the time? You may separate it into casual and ranked, but how do you decide which cards are banned in casual without a huge amount of internet people throwing feces at you? Do you give cards 'weight' and then give commander deckbuilding a 'weight capacity'? And then there's the fact that all the social and politics aspects of it would be very difficult to implement without opening the floodgates to trolls and bullies. Imho, those are the biggest reasons for why Commander on Arena is actually a looming question mark.
Would I play commander on Arena? Fuck yes I would. My worry would be the lack of "fun" decks like on MTGO. One of the last times I played on MTGO was a commander game where another player did a combo that exiled all but 10 cards or something. How the fuck is that fun?
