Adding social Features to MTGA Assistant with Teams and updating the Metagame

Having a social aspect beyond a friendslist is something I have wanted to have for a long time, and with us expanding into making our own MTG Arena Extension this is something we now can finally do. Adding ranking ladders for our users to compare and compete was the first step, now we open up for having our users make their own custom ranking ladders with their friends, LGSes or their playgroup. It is also a nice way for content creators to connect with their users by having their community be part of their Team. If you have not seen the Ranking ladder yet, it is available to view both inside the extension and on our website:

We have been testing this out with our team members for the last month to great success. You use AetherHub to create your team by putting in a name and description, and as soon as this is done you will get your own landing page. Check out our own Team Aether page for an example. Members can go to this page and apply for a membership to the Team, you will have to confirm new members. You can also give members an admin role where they can manage applications too. You will get a notification on the website each time anyone signs up. Team Aether is open for anyone who wants to join so if you want a team to join feel free to apply, our team has a wide variety of members and several streamers. You can leave the team the team at any point if you want to join another or create your own.

When you are part of a team and have the MTGA Assistant extension synced to your AetherHub account a new ranking ladder will appear in addition to the global ones:

You will also have a Team membership attached to your username on the global ranking ladders for others to see. clicking on it will bring them to the Team Page where they can read the description and join the team if they find it interesting. It was important for us to have a system where you approve members, you might want to have a small group with only your friends playing and not accept anyone else into the team.

We have several members and Twitch streamers at the top! Well done guys

We think this is a fun way to connect with others, it can be a great tool for promoting your Magic Team, have others join in and connect with your community. We are adding more functions to teams going forwards, like discord and social links for the team. We would like feedback on what people would like to see next. There are many ways to go about expanding upon this feature but we want to make sure we do it right and do not waste development time on dead ends. Which brings us to our next section, what else is new in version 1.3.4?

What Metadecks can I build?

No need to wonder about what tier 1 decks are available for you any longer. The MTGA Assistant will now tell you exactly how many wildcards you need to build the decks without you having to click the Compare button on each and every deck. We do this by not only sending the deck statistics to the extension when you open the Metagame page but now also the full decklist of each and every one of the meta decks. The extension then compares this with the data you have locally in the game, and as with the other features of the Assistant except for Teams, you do not have to log in with any AetherHub account. This is available for everyone to use and you do not have to register or make any kind of account. 

The meta decks are from recent tournaments and are the same you can find on our Major Event Page. We plan to change this up a bit since we now have the ability to collect decklists from within the Extension. This will make us able to cover both BO1 and BO3 formats for Standard and Historic, and this is what we will be focusing on going forwards. To make this happen we need a larger userbase as we do intend to only pull the winning decks and not all decks which would be a crapload of useless data. We have some interesting incentives for this too with some planned prizes for people who win events. More on this when we are completed our deck collector.

AetherHub Premium now available

For those of you that have an AetherHub Premium account, we have now extended the no-ad policy from our website into MTGA Assistant. So no more ads in the extension if you have AetherHub Premium. We keep all ads away from windows that interact with the gameplay such as the Deck tracker and Draft helper and have them on summary windows like shown above, down in the left corner of the menu. This helps us to earn some revenue so we can continue to make and expand the website and the extension, we are also planning to have prizes for both the ladder and for users doing well in events as a reward for us collecting metagame information. More on this coming this week! As the ranked season resets in April and you will have the whole month but we want to get the word out beforehand.

MTGA Assistant Whats next?

There are a lot of plans for the extension but the next stretch right now is completing the deck collector, the extension part is ready but there is code to be made on AetherHub. With that comes a reward track, with some really cool prizes, redeemable MTGA codes that you can work towards by winning events so that we can get a nice meta deck summary. This will some time.

We also plan to expand the desktop feature in the next version, right now clicking the MTGA Assistant icon just brings up a description on how to use it. We want to bring in a lot of the features you see in the extension so that you can browse the collection and look at stats without having to start the game.

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