Brawl Format Commanders Too Repetitive
don’t ever want to be one to complain. I want people to play magic as much as the next person. If your check my account, I play more than 95% of people. I support the game in both paper and virtual. I have loved this game for quite some time.
I say all that to follow it with this. The status of historic and normal brawl in arena is awful. For anyone trying to be creative or just get into the game, some of the recent 5 color commanders have become so normalized and repetitive that’s is so discouraging to even play the formats. It seems like half of not more of the games are against either Go-Shintai, Jodah, Golos, or Prismatic bridge. With the existence of Kenrith and Slivers as well it can be too much. While I find most of these cards to be fair in their own rite, the sudden flood of them all over the past dozen sets along with the the ability to simply find a common deck list makes things, to be blunt, not fun anymore.
Even as someone with deck building experience, it’s not about trying to make something different or obscure work, it’s about not wanting to play against the same decks over and over so constantly, and I feel like that’s all that’s been promoted as of late.
An example of this is last weeks midweek magic event. The selections were Selesnya tokens, Grixis with heavy interaction, Raven Man discard, and Jodah. The decks weren’t even remotely balanced. Jodah was clearly favored with proper resources curve, and interaction. Raven man nearly wasn’t even a sustainable deck with how quickly it fizzled out, but both of those points are shadowed by the sheer probability that you’d be playing against a Jodah deck. In the 12 games it took me to clear 3 wins with the Selesnya token deck, I played agains an astonishing 12 Jodah decks. I don’t think this is just from a player preference but from a common understanding that the deck was favored so heavily to win. Again, this kind of took the fun out of the event and as a deck builder who tries to be innovative it was quite honestly disappointing.
It’d be amazing to see perhaps cycling bans on some of the clearly more frequently used commanders to get people into using other decks as well as reduce the number of times people need to face off against the same decks over and over. Maybe even midweek events or temporary events that exclude the more common commanders altogether. Just food for thought from someone who thoroughly enjoys MTG.
Thanks!
Freddie Bonds V
-
Pastapockets#87184 commented
Historic brawl allows players to spend less overall wildcards in the long run because as you craft useful 'staples' in various colours you gradually start needing less and less cards to cobble together new decks. WOTC hate this because it means you're less likely to spend money on gems and things. If you play historic brawl, wizards hate you. They want your exprience to be bad. This is why Hbrawl continues to be left out to dry as a format. All of this because the Arena team is too incompetent, lazy, and worthless to include actual multiplayer, something that already exists in MTGO and even unofficial things like the tabletop sim plugin.
Have no faith in Arena devs. Hate Arena devs. Mock Arena devs.
-
Aszbhar#33836 commented
As I recall, it took me nine games to clear my three wins in that Midweek Magic event, playing with the Raven Man deck. My first five games were all against Jodah. Of the remaining games, one was against the token deck and not once did I match against another Raven Man deck.
In every single game, it felt like I was fighting from underneath, with the Jodah deck, by far, the most difficult to play against, although I did manage to win one of the five games I played against it, with my other two victories coming against Grixis.
I usually continue to play the midweek events quite often whilst they are still available, even well after achieving the three wins. However, once I was done with this one, I promptly ignored the event for the rest of its duration, because I came away from it with a very distinct impression of unbalance between the decks, which definitely made it somewhat less than fun to play.