I love combos. especially janky ones that tend to rely on multiple pieces to stack up to achieve a powerful result. I also mostly play brawl/commander where there is a massive pool of cards that can have a lot of interactions.

i was just playing a janky jhoira deck and had a pretty close match where i managed to string together a clutch handful of mana rocks and a paradox engine (would that I could use other enablers cause PE is kinda OP) but i was starting to get timed out from having to manually activate springleaf drum so I could keep fishing for the potential win while accumulating mana. luckily the enemy scooped when the timer was getting low and the lodestone golem came down making non artifacts cost more. I was just thinking, "god, if this timer stressing me out causes me to misclick or to skip to end of turn, i'm gonna be so ******". its not like I was repeating actions that did nothing, I was tapping a Wylie Duke (cursed mirror) and drawing into new cards and generating mana. eventually i would have hit aetherflux resevoir or some other win con.

I've just played a 45 minute match in which my opponent played a control deck with no win conditions and played it so slowly that they eventually lost to the 30-minute match time limit. This behavior in any paper event would result in a warning (IPG 3.3) and if the behavior continued and the judge believed it was intentional, a disqualification (IPG 4.7). Given the decklist, which I checked with The Stone Brain, a disqualification in paper would be inevitable. This is the **first** match I have ever seen any player's match timer go below 12 minutes. To me, this is a glaring red sign that the match timer and time control system do not respect how (honest, reasonably-paced, and fair) players actually play the game.

Remember that on Arena, we don't have to shuffle our decks to draw opening hand(s) and the vast majority of situations with many triggers/replacement effects/confusing continuous effects are handled automatically and instantaneously. So why are the match timers ~10 minutes per player longer than most in-person events?

As I commented below, the time control system for turns is ineffective and should be replaced. But with this comment I aim to point out that the time control system for entire matches is also inappropriately tuned and is much easier to fix.

The developers of the now-abandoned [Prismata](http://prismata.net/) apparently put a lot of effort into understanding and designing time control systems that reward both good play and good sportsmanship. They [blogged about time control taxonomy](http://blog.prismata.net/2014/06/17/the-solution-to-frustrating-time-controls/) after implementing it, though their taxonomy is strangely lacking byoyomi time controls, which is close to what MTGA uses today. The primary difference is that MTGA today does not seem to have a clear duration for the main time, and has an increment to the main time every time you take a game action.

Prismata's time control consists of two clocks, your "time bank" and your turn time (called the "increment" in the blog post). When you pass the turn, 20% of your unused turn time is added to your time bank and then your turn time is reset. On difficult turns, you can run out the turn time and go into your time bank. As a result, no unused time will be added to your time bank at the end of that difficult turn. If your time bank ever runs out, you lose immediately.

Having played Prismata for several years before it was abandoned, I can say empirically that that time control works incredibly well. The longest you ever had to wait to claim a win after a ragequit, on the slowest time control, was about two minutes. (On Arena, if your opponent has zero timeouts, you appear to have to wait approximately 4 minutes currently.) Prismata is a faster-paced game than magic and so the 20% number was appropriate. Some calibration would be helpful for the MTGA environment, to support both combo decks that need more time for one long turn and to support the mobile environment where legitimate crashes and reconnection time are a concern.

I recorded the amount of time I spent on my mulligan in my last 5 matches. The average was a bit over 16 seconds. The mulligan is the most difficult decision that usually has to be made before turn 3, so it's a good indicator that the turn timer should probably only be about 30 seconds long. Perhaps it could grow to 60 seconds on turn 4 or 5, or grow slowly over the course of the game. Either way, combine that with a 60 or 90 second initial time bank and use, say, 50% saving rate instead of 20%, and your typical combo loop of 3-5 game actions per point of damage will have access to approximately 2.25 minutes of time on turn 4. In my experience, this is plenty, although I've heard from others that they want to be able to click through their loop at less than the fastest possible rate (I have no idea why).

Acererak combos specifically are a different breed of problem and I don't think MTGA should be trying to solve that problem with the timer. That combo requires 10 game actions (15 if anything is giving Arena a reason to ask you to manually resolve triggers) per single point of damage, or 200 (resp. 300) game actions to win. Existing Pioneer Lotus combo or Historic Lotus Breach decks are the next worst offenders IMO and in their worst case, need a bit over half of that to win. The workaround to the Acererak problem for now is probably to play a Greenbelt Rampager combo instead; it's the same combo, slightly less reliable that you'll have the colors of mana you need, but takes a quarter of the game actions to win. A longer-term "fix" for Acererak and similar combos is a loop recorder. I've discussed extensively why arbitrary combo detection is not feasible for MTGA but a loop recorder is fully within reach. To prove my point, someone has even implemented a simple external one and shared it on Reddit.

But first, I'd like to see motion to fix the timer, and a timebanking system is a much better match to how players actually play the game than a byoyomi system. This would disincentivize roping, and in the situations where players rope anyway, drastically reduce the amount of time required before a win can be claimed.

The combo problem can be fixed by Wizards of the Coast doing their job and banning the cards that enable the combos and change the rules so that it is impossible for someone to sit there playing solitaire.

Agree with The IT Guy#41932's take.

Acererak player here. Half the games that you would be able to combo off, you lose because you don't have time to do the full 20 damage with your loop before your turn ends.

@The IT Guy#41932 agree with this. There needs to be a fix. If new decks are available but they realistically can't be played on the engine, it makes no sense.

This issue is now more important then ever.

With the rise in popularity and good tournement result for decks like Relic of legend / Acerak combo players shouldn't have to suffer from opponent not conceding when there's an obvious infinite combo that would win the game but end up loosing due to the timer. It is litterally impossible to win a Bo1 game due to the time it takes to kill the opponent and in Bo3 if you win one game you'll end up with no time left for the following games.

This is also true with the addition of hidden strings to arena there is now the possibility to play UR Lotus field combo that generally wins by drawing their whole deck with Artist Talent. Although it is possible to win the huge amount of Artist talent trigger and the difficulty to find cards in your hand when all your spell in the gravetard have flashback (with Lier) makes it easy to miss click and hard to "speed run" your combo. I personally try to avoid playing Lier even if it'S the "correct" play to guarantee the win since the flashback interface make it so hard to play fast. This has cost me a few games already after just a couple of days since the printing of hidden strings.

I see 2 possible fix for this.
1. Add some sort of infinite loop system. This might be hard to implement since the opponent needs to be able to set a stop point somewhere in the loop.
2. The solution provided by OP would work if we increased the time gained by doing actions. I do agree that we might need to reduce the default "thinking timer" to compensate.

With respect to the roping out issue, it's annoying A.F. Especially when people intentionally or unintentionally leave a match before it starts, so you're left sitting through several rounds of timers before they blow up. But also, sometimes you get sore losers who hate losing and will just sit there running down timers, intentionally, and like clicking on something to move to the next step or phase **just before** their timer runs out so they then get a new timer to continue running down.

In my opinion, the start of game timer situation and some others could be reduced by **not giving people a "grace period"** if they already ran down one timer. During their last step, phase, or turn. Like if they fully ran down their timers to zero. When they move on to the next step / phase / turn they shouldn't get any "extra" "bonus time." Like at the start of the game, if they rand down a timer to zero last turn, currently it gives them a good 15-30 seconds *before* it starts a new timer on them.

IMO, if they ran it down last turn (intentionally or due to disconnecting [intentionally or otherwise]), it should **immediately start a new timer** as soon as their next turn starts. Only if they're actually present, and actually do active things should that timer go away. Otherwise, make them go boom and let me move on to the next match, not waste five minutes on unnecessary extra timers waiting on someone who's disconnected and not even there.

Why punish the person who's present and ready to play, making them wait for someone who's not present intentionally or otherwise? I feel like some people do it intentionally to make people concede the match in order to not waste time waiting for timers, and get "free wins," or whatever.

Agreed.
It's very annoying, and rude, when an opponent "bails" on a session simply because of defeat, and doesn't just end it. Having to sit through 4 time outs because they closed the game, or whatever sux.

It would also be great if we could BLOCK other players so we never have to play them again....J/S

Strong agree

If you either allow us to skip animations or freeze the timer while animations are shown that would also help.
If you resolve a minds desire with a stormcount upwards of 40 you only win if your opponent wants you to since your turn will be over by the time the animation ends and most often they show unsportsmanlike behaviour by abusing the timer instead of conceiding when they have obvioulsy lost

Nice! This is a good suggestion.