Every Way MTG Arena Cheats You, Known or Suspected - Part 2 

Don't forget to check out Into the AM and with code DESTHREADS, save 10%: intotheam.com/DESTHREADS They're kinda like Arena except fun and they don't cheat you, lol.

Quit arena long ago due to trust issues. Even if none of it’s true, there is 0 control on our end and 0 transparency over their RNG. I’d like to shuffle my deck and cut my opponent’s, thanks.

The reason why arena is so insidious becomes more obvious when you factor in people like myself; I learned how to play Magic in 2014 while I was in the Air Force. I was stationed in Japan and away from my childhood friends for 8 years, none of whom play Magic. Sadly, the opioid crisis took a lot of my buddies from me while I was overseas. I came back to America in 2022 with no friends left or friends who just I grew up apart from. Magic is my FAVORITE game, my favorite hobby. And I have no one to play with. So I play.... Drumroll... arena. I hate it

I played yesterday and in 5 turns I managed to draw 8 lands 😂😂😂 like how do I have 2 Phyrexian Arena’s out and even the extra cards are lands bro 🤦🏻‍♂️ when this game wants you to lose it feels like it just mana floods the hell out of you.

Get fucking rid of hand smoothing all other Bull shit. Just completely randomize it, how fkin hard is that?

Arena has never cheated me. Of course, I’ve never played Arena. Even then, I’m sure they tried somehow.

I fucking knew Brawl matchmaking was bullshit when I got like 3 different Prismatic Bridge players IN A ROW.

I started in mono black, moved to blue, moved to every color combination including blue, to boros, to mono red. Mono red is just simple and effective. I've won so many games just using mono red where the max amount of mana I have is 1 5 mana card. Everything else is 3 or less, with a majority in the smaller mana costs.

i'm playing Bo1 standard in mythic 500-300 rank. i'm using a mono white humans deck with a red splash just for imodane's recruiter. i've faced monored 10 times today. i started second 100% of the times. definitely the bs is not turned off in mythic.

Man how about around the time of return to kamigawa arena started crashing like every single game that required an entry payment so i wtote an email when it would happen and after a few times they black listed my ass and said there was fishy activity on my account and they werent going to reimburse me for my gems or gold if tjeir game crahed....i wasnt even doing anything and my wifr as my witness will tell you it happened the most during drafts. If i would draft a bad ass deck i would get land screwed in wither direction or if i still managed to win matches then the game would freeze but it wouldnt look like it froze it would look like the opponent was just slow playing then youd have to restart the game to reenter and by the time you came back either you were disqualified or so far behind that you might haave well been disqualified..... Yet i still managed to somehow unlock 100% of the sets for free via quick drafts so fuck you wizards....pretty sure thats why they hate my account i don't pay for shit i just play magic

I just play it to kill time at work. I don’t spend any money on it, I don’t take it seriously. If I win, I win, if I lose, I lose, and trust me, I lose a lot. Not because I suck, but because I can tell the game is doing things to work against me that are impossible on a probability scale.

Dear God, I remember when I played a Grixis Reanimator deck for standard pre-DND set, this one guy I was curb stomping so bad, he tried to make me get bored and DC or something, I didn't. I stuck around, he used all his time outs and would run it down to the last 2/3 seconds. The fucking game decided to reward him for his bullshit and give him everything he needed to win in one turn.

Merry Christmas Des, thanks for continuing to lift the veil on WotC and their awful decisions. You're doing the Magic the Gathering community a great service.

Aside from the cheating from arena I just can't get over the fact that the digital only mode they tried to push was predominately rares and mythic rares. I would be all over supporting it if it was mostly commons and uncommons. As it stands it's just a massive greedy cash grab. So yeah won't ever touch it.

100% the game fucks u up. I play normal for 10 games, even when I don't get lands it seems normal. Then I go rank and suddenly no land 10 cards in a row even with draws and scry. Or I get 15 lands. All this not just 1 game. 10 games in a row. It's disgusting what they do.

adding this comment to confirm this is still happening, just played one of those 200+ card decks in mythic best of 1. Bots are still there. Gotta love 100+, 200+ card decks running monastary swiftspear.

MTG Arena has a demonic habit of giving you 2 lands and nothing else.

In constructed, I always get the same three types of opponent decks: Lifegain, Discard or _"Oops, all removal"._ But when I choose my _"screw that, I'll just beat you in two to three turns"_ deck, I get a huge variety of opponents playing fair, interesting, fun decks that do not deserve to be beaten before they played any relevant spell. Either way, it's not fun to play. Maybe that's intentional so that people prefer limited, which costs money to play.

As someone who solely plays Pauper on Arena, the biggest way I feel cheated is by not being able to use my Wild Cards to redeem cards of equal OR LOWER rarity. If I want to "waste" my non-common WCs on commons, I should be able to

I have gotten to mythic every season for the past 5 expansions, and from my experience, the hand fixing is turned off once you hit mythic. The amount of bullshit droughts and floods that happen literally stops once you hit mythic. I use a 5 color atraxa deck with loads of mana fixing, and the second i hit mythic, I lower the amount of fix it cards because they become dead cards.

I hate how many times the shuffler is completely broken. No matter what my opponent or I have the exact answer to threats.

Female mtg player myself, but haven't been able to play paper mtg in along time,too poor to afford cards

Having Itlimoc in my opening hand multiple games in a row playing elves when I only have 2 in the deck after crafting the second one was really nice (not for my opponent)

Matchmaking is rigged everywhere. In ranked too.

Its gotten so ridiculous for me. I crafted a deckt at first I was so successful with playing a real variety of opponents. Well it starts to figure out my weaknesses and now i see every deck with those cards. I had a match someone double casted breach the multiverse into Etalti and top decked my chimil and they still lost but the next 4 matchea get mana flooded. I get strong starting hands but my opponent is so perfectly on curve and nothing I can do. Or im I turn away from winning and my opponent 'luckily' top decks the one spot removal to beat me. Or im sure we have all seen matches where the script seems broke. My opponent is playing a counter/mill deck so im waiting to see if maybe I can sneak something but they just do nothing to mill me, they are just programmed to wait for me to cast something to be countered

Just got off a game in Bloomburrow constructed where my opponent would let their timer run almost all the way down before resolving anything. I didn't see any option to report or anything. Is there any option to do so?

Considering how much rigging there is in Magic Arena, and as someone who never cheats, suddenly cheating in magic arena becomes very attractive.

Awesome video again! But I don't get using a bot for dailies... just go to historic and make decks for those days... it takes no time at all honestly like less than 10 - 15 minutes. Cast Creatures ... make a ramp small creatures deck. Kill 20 creatures, make a deck that kills creatures. Ect.

To be clear, hating WOTC is not a politics thing, I'm far enough left to comfortably refer to myself as a socialist, have read Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx, the works. Even I hate WOTC. (more than I hate large corporations in general) Their business polices are psychic, they wield minorities like a weapon in there virtue signaling crusade, they close there eyes to the reality of the demographics who play their game rather than either accepting them or taking real steps to change them, and do their best to wring as much money out of what should be a fulfilling source of enjoyment to the active determinant of what people actually like about their products.

It's funny i stumpled upon this particular video because i just recently went through a 3 day (10game/day) 5W/25L spree where about 80% of my loses are mana screw related, and almost the same amount were played against quick decks, or decks where the opposing player literally got everything in there hand to counter every card i was barely able to play within the first 10 turns. I did somehow manage to win one match with 4 mana on the board the entire time, i'm taking that as a Pity-Win and knowing full well that's arena's way of saying "Oh look, you finally won, keep playing" casino tactics. That was my 10th match on the 3rd day, i turned off the game and stayed off of it for a few days. What's aggravating are the literal trolls this game produces that will flat out say "This game isn't rigged, i win almost all the time and have all the mana i need to have and all the cards i need to have" to which is say "So what the fuck do you think is happening to the player going against you with FOUR MANA on the board the entire time." For clarity, i run Rin and Seri, because who doesn't love cat's and dog's. I have 35 lands, with around 10 MR's and 10 Draw Cards mixed in as either solo effects or extra effects. I have around 3 board wipes and around 10 more "Delete" cards. So someone explain to me how this has me running

The other day, I had the client crash as I was starting a BO1 draft match. A dozen attempts to log back in with high-speed internet failed. When I was finally able to log in, I had (surprise, surprise) timed out and lost the match. Did the client check whether both players were there to decide on their opening hands? Nope. Did it say, "Hey, this person was logged out at the start of the match. Let's issue a Draw."? Of course not. Is it secure enough to prevent someone from tricking the server into thinking I'm still logged in and preventing me from logging back in? Apparently not. I can't even report my opponent because I never got to the point of seeing their username. The fact that this has happened at least a dozen or so times makes it seem like a sanctioned exploit or known bug that they refuse to fix. Otherwise, WotC doesn't really have an explanation or justification. Their best excuse is, "We suck at programming!"?

I really am used to the cheating happens. Mana screw you, bad draws, opponents with perfect curve. But they have a ranked mode where you have to win at least 50 percent to make progress and they clearly rig that and thats horrible. I know there will be a winner and a loser but the amount of games im like 90% going to win and lose out of nowhere is horrible

Using bots to get daily's might be the quickest way, but I manage to get my daily's in about 30 minutes. I use a G/R land destruction deck. It has 1 cost mana dorks, draw spells, and land destruction. I literally named it "Turn 2 or scoop". I start a game and immediately scoop unless I go first plus have a mana dork and Stone Rain. Turn 1, cast a dork. Turn 2, Stone Rain opponents first land. Almost everyone scoops after that. If they don't then I beat them down with mana dorks and acidic slime. If they get salty and time me out I repeatedly hover over all my lands to mock them.

When the soup is too hot, I know WOTC ( i knew it, i knew it lol) say: Oh sorry, its a bad bot or program ai. sorry if you had a bad mtga experience, in the meantime, money comes flowing and they don't care.

I'm so happy that I left this dead, trash, bullshit game. I wish that I could have every minute of the 16 years I spent playing this game back.

Every game developer or studio that claims they are "managing" matchmaking or massaging the randomized elements in a competitive environment are not doing so for the benefit of the player experience; it is to game player engagement. What I mean by that is, they are trying to manipulate experiences such that the players' ratio of satisfying moments to disappointing moments is balanced towards getting them to perpetually play more.

Explains why my Torens deck sees Removal.Dek every game

A decent, informative video suddenly ruined by some unnecessary political rambling. Shoud've cut that out before upload, people came for what was in the title, not...whatever that was.

Good video, do you know if the shuffler is “rigged” in similar ways in magic online

I think that is good to pit hell que commanders with each other. If you chose a cheese commander should play other cheese. Although, I do also play against the same brawl commander so yah that sux sometimes.

I keep having games that seem to be orchestrated, to many nin land perfect draws for both me and my opponents. Too many perfect curves into game changing bombs that makes the game feel soulless, like someone is guiding how it plays out, like the winner is decided at the dice roll.

I like playing elf decks and noticed a lot of soul warden decks in ranked or un-ranked so I put Rampaging Ferocidon in with my elf's haven't seen a life gain deck since.

What is the first match after you log in, in constructed like?

I have found the logins to opossing players seem to have statements,insults,threats and statements of confusion and frustration. Some names of opponents are hidden inuendos and utterly messed up names. The way they describe the impossibility or improbability of cheating, makes it sound like their servers and network is super hard to hack. Its stupid how much money people have pumped into this app and no laws or rules checked on that. Used to be there were laws against fixing matches involving real world money transactions....

Glad someone is talking about it. I am starting off brand new pretty sure my decks that I build are trash but im getting paired up with these crazy deck builds and combos with cards I've never seen before. It's really really frustrating and I have no idea what card or why im getting these tougher matches.. except maybe my spark rank 2? IDK anymore.

I can't speak for everyone obviously, but I'm a woman, and regularly if I'm playing a casual game of magic in someones kitchen, it's with at least one other woman. Sure we are a rarity at card shops, but it wouldn't surprise me if the numbers were higher for MTG Arena since you don't have to deal with being hit on for being the only woman in the room.

Is there a lifegain hack ? I was just playing a game and the opponents life started to increase for no reason. There were no cards in play (including lands), in graveyard etc. that would cause them to gain life. Nothing had gone into exile without going on stack. No life gain counters… I could not find a cause.

Matchmaking is rigged in all formats. Stopped playing this bullshit almost 2 years ago. Unfortunately, I unnecessarily burned a few thousand bucks before this happened.

Is there someone who don't know that mtg arena is totally rigged? They inforce something like a 50/50 win ratio, they even pick matches where some 100 standard decks beat u in 4 turns with perfect draws.

WotC: 30 to 40% of out players are female Me: if that's any indicator, the only woman I saw covering MtG on youtube was trans... And even she gave up years ago. So...

I think most magic players will agree if they can just make it full random the actual target audience for the game will respond positively and profits will increase. I'm a new player just this year and I got heavily addicted but now I'm seeing all these guiding hand codes and it feels artificial. If I lose to a random cool deck I may want to spend to get those cards. If I'm vsing the exact same few decks due to weighting I get bored and don't see many cool cards. Randomise everything and turn off assistance like how it is for mythic etc.

I love how mtg arena advertises on this video. Well played WOTC.

I came back after months and got mythic after that I always lost lol plat 3 was the end of the line

Stopped playing for 3 years. Played for 1 week. Went from lowest bronze and now I'm #1420 mythic. Drafting. Never play constructed.

I've been paired up with the same person many times playing this game and I've come across a few 200+ cards in their deck where I only have 60 maybe 70 lol but I'm trying to look for someone to help me make a deck to be better at the game, my worst competitor is the control deck I think

Gets mythic with an off meta azorius soldiers rush deck 2 years ago. Proceeds to sit in bronze and terrorize noobs for the next 2 years :D Cant be assed to play enough games to climb out but also cant be assed to totally give it up.

So glad I somehow found this video. I have been telling people some of the same things that your telling people hear, randomly in comments of content creators. Usually the creators are will defend wotc to some degree, and the people in comments default to the “it’s a skill issue” towards me. You absolutely have to love ignorant people. They would fight to the death to defend the abusive jailer that stabs them in the back daily. It’s like they took a page from government playbook and it works like a charm eh?

I'm inclined to believe you on Bo1draft. Everyone was talking up Khans of Tarkir draft (I was playing when it was in paper), so I was really look forward to it. Three-color decks are the norm in the draft format and...time after time...I saw people just 1,2,3 all colors - all basic lands - on turn 3. I saw 4-5 color decks with no fixing just go Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest then drop multicolor bombs over and over. Like, every draft run, multiple games...they made it look easy. Kind of soured me to Khans of Tarkir draft, TBH.

I had to relegate Arena to daily achievements, or else it would completely ruin Magic for me. I'm getting 1st turn thoughtseized in 90% of the games, I'm always matched against Yorion decks, I'm rarely matched against Rakdos after I started getting a good win percentage against them. I hoped I could use Arena for IRL tournament practice/brewing but it's terrible, after a while I couldn't figure out if I had losses because I was doing something wrong, I had bad luck or, I got screwed by rigging.

Life is too short to play garbage games.

actually saw a whole lot of the things you listed in the first video....still going on in 2024.

Based AF just became my favorite RU-vidr

No physical property, no reselling of anything, no way to convert to physical medium of recoup investment. Not actually magic the gathering either considering that if any player did almost anything that arena does in a real game they would be banned for cheating instantly. Why would you play this?

My how the turn tables have tide

IP tracking is nuanced cuz some small groups of people play the same game in one house, so that'll be multiple same IP connections as well. So filtering out multiboxers based on this criteria might just cut out much more people who weren't multiboxing.

Played the 2500 gold standard event to try to farm gems, and after playing 100 plus games in 2 days with one bo1 deck never losing more than 2 games in a row over the whole 100 with over 70 wins... play the event and lose 3 games straight and all 3 on the draw .... random, i call bullshit and suspicious to me

Multiboxing cant be fixed if me and my roommate both wanna be arena players

Amen brother

all online games are weighted somehow these days.

Ive drawn 20 lands in a row 😂

I have some guy trying to argue with me about there not being any data I referred him to your first video and I haven't heard from him since.😂

When wotc quits arena

I agree that Arena needs to stop cheating on matchmaking and card draw. It's pretty insane. We play a card game with inherent randomness. People have loved it long before Arena existed so what are they trying to fix? All it does is raise suspicions. We also do need some rating system like Arpad Elo's system for chess. However, it may be problematic in Magic. Elo's systems is predicated on an assumption that a rating difference of 300 points equates to a 99% probability that the higher rated player will win. If the lower player wins, a maximum adjustment up and down of both player's scores of 30 points will happen. If the higher rated player wins, he'll get a small uptick in rating, perhaps even a fraction of a point. I could play 100 games against Magnus Carlsen and the only way I'd win or even draw a game is if he fell asleep from boredom and overstepped the time limit. By contrast, I might beat the best Magic player in the world as they flooded or got mana screwed and I drew on a perfect curve. The difference is obviously the randomness. While the World Champion Magic player is going to pound me regularly, there is still randomness in the game and that makes Elo a bit more problematic. Perhaps if the assumption is changed to something like the 300 point higher rated player should win 70% of the time (or whatever it is objectively) then the score adjustments could be made. It's likely the up/down increments would need to be smaller. Lets say 21 points maximum and not 30. It might also be that one comes up with a different set of assumptions and scoring. For example, an assumption that equal players will win 60% of the time on the play 40% on the draw and one then uses their individual rating to adjust that up or down. Or start with an assumption that any two players have a 50% chance of winning and you bump their probability up or down based on rating. The difference would determine how much you'd gain or lose based on the game. An unrated player could simply start at a fixed number. A lot of ways this could be done. A lot of them better than the current system. In any case: "Let Mulligans happen!" should be the rallying cry. Stop stacking the deck. Stop stacking the competition. Just make it a competition.

HASBRO needs money the CEOS made bad decisions and their just games lol

MTG Arena is the most toxic game that i've ever played in my life.. is sick how much is rigged... and i ve played at least 10 games by day for years, cause magic is the most clever game.. but arena spoils it

It's definitely rigged. I got 550 documented best of 3s in ranked with mono white humans and mono red aggro (2 decks that want/need to go first) and my overall go-first-rate (for both decks combined) is 19%! My midrange and control decks have 50%. The whole game experience got way worse since spring 2024 tho, its either i have 100% god draw and annihilate my opponent 2-0 or the other way around. And then the game asks if i liked it or not, wtf? 😂 i think its time to quit

hard decision to make, but i'm not going to play mtga anymore.

people seriously don’t know the games are rigged?!?! lmao u can tell they want win/loss ratio to be around 50% after probably about 100 games played

Theres no way that there is that many female causal players on arena. The female players ive met in real life are into magic fully or not at all

All I know is if one of my 13+ children want to play at a mtg event and actually win money and be famous...cuz that's how it works...they can't and wotc knows how they ruined future players on arena

Nice content! Can't support MTG Arena game is full of poor programming, cheats, 3rd world programmers, and spiteful gameplay. Would like to elaborate on the shuffler but any non-streamer, i.e. doesn't just just rim jobs them and cherry picks content gets it...

Or my cash back HASBRO

So over the last few days, since work's been slow, I put a lot of magic arena. I did notice a lot decks over 100 cards over 200 cards. Specifically, funny enough when i had done a ton of games playing Timeless Mill. I would end up versing these 100 card decks. And they were just like 100 cards of decent stuff but also just random choices. The 200 card decks were a bit interesting. None of these having Yorion is the companion by the way. It would make sense for a deck to be that big and also have Yorion. Because why not.

Every way arena cheats you; Other commander players are abusing the matchmaker. Other competative players are abusing the turn timer. Other players are abusing the draft queue. Other non-competative players are abusing newcard rigging. Seems like the root of the issue iant the game. Agree with deranking though. Thats a great way to ruin any attempt at a FUNctional matchmaker. Dont care to watch the rest of the video tbh, but id suggest you just play with your friend group. Or make friends if you dont have enough

Anybody know the math on having 19 leylines 16 lands 4 fragments 21 other cards and not drawing the combo in an opening hand of 7 cards? The more i played and won with the deck the more often it seemed i wouldnt get the combo. Once it happened 20 times in a row, 14 of them on video. Yeah I know it's not a fun deck. I play it to quickly grind out daily wins and tournaments. My more fun decks like heliod combo I can't truly go infinite on so I wind up losing to control decks. reanimator I get tired of all the sudden seeing cling to dust and tormods crypt main board. Next time a new historic deck comes out with a high win percentage I'm going to document all the games to see how far I can go before they bring out the hate.

Never draw the cards I have 4 of always draw the ones I have 1 and 2 of. And I never played more decks with 250 cards in standard till I played mill. Game is trash. Would never put money into it

❤ Any video dogging on the crazy left, deserve a sub ❤ wasn't expecting it here but hay, nice surprise

Not sure this was brought up, but apparently Arena is still coded for vancouver mulligans. I noticed it lately after a lag/glitch where it gives you 6 cards and after a long second ads a seventh out of 54 remaining. I wonder is it just laziness or the code is so messed up they just couldn't patch it up when london mulligans were introduced.

is this exclusive to just arena? because i watch a few content creators in mtgo and i swear to god their rng is completely predictable dog shit

I'm very interested in the good AI that has learned to play games optimally. Magic is a complex game and I want to know how it is trained. If you have any info please comment.

Game is pathetic. You can even see the deckpile do odd and very sus "shuffle" or animations out of nowhere with nothing being cast. Game has nothing to do with mtg with that moneygrubbing system and should be sued. Has as much with mtg as if i made a game calling it world of warcraft and instead of orcs and humans it would be smurfs and fraggles. Blizzard wouldnt mind... right?

Anytime I put a planeswalker in my deck I rarely had it dealt to me so I quit building decks with planeswalkers.

I had an A.I. chat bot tell me they do the bad matchups on purpose. After playing over a hundred tournament games with the geist leyline deck i predominantly saw 6 deck archetypes. In order ur Wizards, control mostly blue white but all with board wipes, decks with sheolreds edict and hand disruption, soul sister types, retrofit foundry artifact decks and mono green stompy. And if the matchmaking isn't rigged why are they collecting data asking if I had fun or not?

This game is so scripted every event is fake, match making is only in base of youre deck, TRASH

I've recorded 3,000 games now. I'm on the draw 84% of the time. I get mana screwed or flooded 68% of the time. My opponents show mana issues 3% of the time. On mtgo it was right around 50% of the time I was on the draw.

I'd love to see a video about magic online so bad Besides WOTC letting stuff power creep into formats it doesn't belong on blatantly manipulating the secondary market and devaluing collections to just abandoning the original online version of the game to make something far worse and not even fixing the client rigging matchmaking rigging the shuffler and banning stuff after they get as much money as possible with no repercussions for their actions is all the reason I have been slowly downsizing my collection they claim not to shadow ban yet when I try to buy tickets on my primary account just for it to say error try again later for over 5 months yet allows me to buy on other accounts seems a helluva lot like shadow banning to me

After reattempting to repost the original video on Reddit they just called you a fear monger yet all the stuff you said has been proven to be true except stuff you said was just theory

Ok about black and female players didn't wotc straight up give a woman a honorary spot on the pro tour several years ago all in the name of diversity without her ever actually having to earn it how's that fair only a matter of time before wotc gets involved with LGBT stuff and BLM

Haven't played arena for over a year, if people are saying it wasn't rigged obviously dumped mommy and daddy's money into the game, it's terrible, they had a good idea and made the most rigged pile of shxx ever made, the community is also EXTREMELY TOXIC. Fxxk arena, I'd rather just buy the cards, and play with friends.

If it wasn't rigged, why do they ask you if you have fun after a game you either massacred your opponent or got massacred?