Howdy! Welcome to Daily Arena. I’m Joe, and today I’m going to talk about something that I think a lot of players feel is missing from Arena: the Kitchen Table Magic experience.

First, what is “Kitchen Table Magic”?

“Kitchen Table Magic” refers to the mode of Magic that most players actually play (something like 70%, according to WotC’s market research), and generally consists of a bunch of friends buying some sealed product and/or preconstructed decks, perhaps from a big-box store, and casually building decks and playing with them against each other. There tends to be some kind of self-regulation of the power level of the decks, as players aren’t playing with pools of cards large enough to build the kinds of decks you see in competitive Magic, and if one player in the group spends a bunch of money and builds a “broken” deck, other players can effectively pressure them to bring the power level back down through social means, up to and including refusing to play against a player that is trying too hard to “pay to win”.

One of the early selling points for Magic Arena was the promise of a “Kitchen Table Magic” experience, and indeed, this could be used as a flawed defense for a bad in-game economy. Unfortunately, the idea of support for a “Kitchen Table” experience flies out the window once you allow players to spend money on the game and build Tier-1 competitive decks much more cheaply than they can in paper. This results in a cascade of complaints from newer and more casual players about facing “net decks” and “decks full of rares” (Arena also needs to support competitive players that find joy in playing high-power Magic and in endlessly tweaking the 4-drop slot in a B/R Aggro/Midrange deck, etc.). I feel that what they are asking for (however indirectly) are support for more casual-friendly formats in the game.

The only way you’re going to have an effective casual-friendly format is to enforce it via card-pool or deck-composition restrictions (I think the idea of trying to use an algorithm to match deck-power-level is an ineffective stopgap in this regard).

What kinds of formats could WotC add to Arena to help sate this desire for a “Kitchen Table Magic” experience?

Formats with Deck Composition Restrictions

Singleton (and Brawl)

They already tested this in Magic Arena, a lot of people loved it, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing it again, either as straight Singleton, Brawl, or both.

Magic Duels Rarity-Restricted Constructed

One format that WotC already had available in a previous digital offering was a constructed format in which the number of any given card you could include in a deck was restricted based on its rarity. You could only have a single copy of any given Mythic Rare, two copies of any Rare, three copies of any Uncommon, and Commons allowed four copies as usual.

You still saw decks with fairly high power-level in this format, especially once the card pool was almost full-Standard-sized, but you ended up with more varied game play as, for the most part, the format’s “bombs” were restricted to only one or two copies in a deck.

Duel Deck Composition Constructed

The idea of this format is to restrict the total number of cards of each rarity that players are allowed to put in a deck.

Each deck should contain 1 Mythic Rare, 5 Rares, 11 Uncommons, and 43 Commons/Basic Lands.

This format rewards building around a theme while restricting the number of super-bomby cards that show up in any given deck.

Pauper/Peasant

Pauper restricts decks to only Commons, while Peasant allows both Commons and Uncommons. As people who play a lot of Pauper know, with a very large card pool, it can become quite competitive. With the Arena card pool, you’re going to end up with decks that play out more like really good Draft decks, and the power level will be a lot more even across players, since they only consist of cards that are easy for any player to obtain.

Preconstructed Decks

A format that either forces you to choose from a set of preconstructed decks, or randomly assigns you a preconstructed deck for each game, or for a fixed series of games would replicate the experience of Kitchen Table playgroups that predominantly play things like Duel Decks and Planeswalker Decks against each other.

Formats with Card Pool Restrictions

Sealed Deck

Sealed Deck, or MTGO-style Sealed Deck leagues, is probably the quickest, easiest way to get a “Kitchen Table Magic” experience outside of just playing with all preconstructed decks. Everyone gets a fixed number of boosters (6-8), builds their decks, and plays.

Large Pool Standard Sealed Deck

This is something I’d really like to see in Arena, and is based (shamelessly) on the Eternal Sealed Deck Leagues, with some tweaks.

Here’s how the leagues would work:

Each league would run for a month at a time.

When you join a League, you get 8 (15-card) boosters that you use to build a 40-card deck. The distribution of packs would vary based on what sets are in Standard.

Matches are Best-of-One.

The first 10 League games you play each week will count toward your standing on the League Leaderboards that run all month long.

After your first 10 Leaderboard games each week, you can continue to play – up to 20 additional Tiebreaker games will help improve your standings relative to other players with the same overall record. (So, for example, a 6-4 with 3 Tiebreaker wins will be ahead of a 6-4 with only 1 Tiebreaker win, but they’ll both be behind a 7-3 record.)

Each week of the League, you’ll get two additional packs that you can use to improve your deck, for 14 total packs by the end of the League.

If you join the League late, you can catch up in later weeks. You’ll get the packs you missed, and your limit on games that count towards the Leaderboard will increase. (If you join win Week 2, for example, you’ll be able to play 20 Leaderboard games so that you’re able to have the same total as everybody else. The only difference is that you’ll have fewer Tiebreaker games available to play.)

At the end of the League, rewards will be determined by final Leaderboard standings.

If you resign from a League, you are able to re-enter with a new set of packs; only your most recent run will count toward the Leaderboard.

Leagues cost 15,000 Gold or 2,600 Gems to enter.

For example, currently you might start with 1 pack each from KLD, AER, AKH, HOU, XLN, RIX, DOM, and M19 for your initial pool, and over the weeks add one pack each of M19 and DOM, then one pack each of XLN and RIX, then one pack each of AKH and HOU.

The prize structure would be based on Leaderboard standings percentile and could be something like this (reward boosters would be the 8-card boosters with Wildcards from the current set):

Above 99.95% – 20 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard + 1 Mythic Wildcard

Above 99.75% up to 99.95% – 17 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard + 1 Mythic Wildcard

Above 99.5% up to 99.75% – 15 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard + 1 Mythic Wildcard

Above 97.5% up to 99.5% – 13 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard + 1 Mythic Wildcard

Above 95% up to 97.5% – 12 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard

Above 87.5% up to 95% – 9 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard

Above 75% up to 87.5% – 8 Boosters + 1 Rare Wildcard

Above 50% up to 75% – 7 Boosters + 1 Uncommon Wildcard

Bottom 50% – 4 Boosters + 1 Uncommon Wildcard

It would also be great if there would be a different limited-time cosmetic awarded with each run, like a unique card back or something.

Standard Pauper Rotisserie Draft

I really like the idea of having 8 players doing a Rotisserie Draft of playsets of all the commons in standard. My work playgroup has done this a couple of times, and we ended up with nicely varied and interesting gameplay experiences. One issue is that this format seems to really favor aggressive decks, although that might be a side-effect of the Standard we were drafting, or even of the players.

Which of these formats would you most like to see supported in Arena? Are there any other “casual-friendly” formats you’d like to see?

As always, feel free to contact me with any criticisms, comments, etc., either here, on Reddit, on Twitter via @DailyArena, or on Facebook via the @DailyArenaMTG page.

Peace.

Joseph Eddy is a Father, Husband, Son, Brother, Software Developer, and Gamer. Magic is his favorite hobby, and he’s looking forward to seeing you all on Arena. He streams Magic Arena on a weekly basis (or more), but currently is unable to keep to a set schedule.