Website and MTGA Assistant Updates May 2020

Here is the update summary for the website and MTGA Assistant for May 2020.

True Brawl Metagame

Last update we metagame data from MTGA Assistant but we needed some more time with Brawl, but not it is here: Brawl Metagame. All decks collected have a winrate of over 60% over the last 30 matches. This is an update we have been wanting to do for a long time as earlier we just grouped the most popular Brawl decks together. If you want a list of the freshest Brawl decks, bookmark our MTGA Assistant Bot.

More Social links

It was about time we got around to add Discord and Twitter to the profile pages, not only did we add them to the Community Team Pages, here is Team Aether as an example. This is a great way to create backlinks for Content creators and have a social link for your team. We still need to add the Community links within the MTGA Assistant extension, this is coming in the next patch

Ranking Ladder tweak

We are going to make some tweaks on the ladder based on our data from the last season. But for this update, we adjusted the refresh rate of the ladder from 60 minutes to 15 minutes on the website. This makes it easier to follow the placements. What we want to make for the next update is adding some rank decay to players that have not logged in and synced for a while. Meaning if you have a top Mythic placement but have not synced for a couple of days we will drop you to the bottom of the mythic results and grey out your result until you sync again.

News Team

We now have a news team and a channel in our discord server. The goal here is to serve relevant news on a daily basis to our users and have a frontpage you can check in on often and get fresh news from the world of MTG.

Other AetherHub updates

• Deck Writeup link on mobile fixed, this was a dead-link earlier.
• IKO cards and card images added together with new icons etc
• Deck importing from MTGA with Companions fixed, for now we ignore the companion and just import it to the sideboard.

What is next on AetherHub

Work is starting now to support Companions, we need to add a new board in addition to main, side and maybeboard and code this in everywhere it is relevant. Then we need to add support for this in MTG Arena import and export. We are also working on a reward system which also plays in tandem with the MTGA Assistant. 

MTGA Assistant Updates 

We have been quite busy with MTGA Assistant, with a new set and a new big patch a lot of new data has been added and Wizards changed multiple things in the logs caused several functions to break and not work correctly. Everything has now been fixed and we have added several new things. First, let us go over all of those small things that broke and some other small fixes we have done up until version 1.4.8:

• Bugfix introduced with Ikoria for Bot drafts fixed
• Adjustments to log parser according to Log updates from Wizards in new Ikoria Patch
• Bot Drafts bugfix: Ratings and comments now appear normally
• Bugfix: Deck Tracker BO3 Sideboarding improvement
• Bugfix: Traditional Draft event reporting to AetherHub fixed, IKO patch introduced a bug
• Draft logging improved, the interface for browsing earlier picks have been improved
• Bot Drafts bugfix: Basiclands now displays 4/4
• Bugfix: Other Sets on desktop had a chance of displaying invalid values
• Refactored the Collection system lowering memory requirements
• Desktop App and Draft UI improved
• Refactored code in the Collection system

And now over to the real news:

Deck Tracker Update

We now support deck tracking changes after sideboarding! This has been long in the waiting as Wotc finally decided to add these events to the logs. 

Mass-crafting Tool

Initially, I was thinking of adding a website tool that just outputs all cards of a certain rarity for a selected set on the AetherHub website. But I realized that this would be really clunky as MTGA only supports a maximum of 250 cards in a deck, and this is total cards, not unique card names. Seeing as there can be over 100 common cards in a set this would mean 400 cards just to cover all the cards in a set and the user having to manually delete the cards they already had, it just was not doable.

However including it in our extension is a perfect fit, as we can compare with your collection and only output the cards that you have not already collected. Since we have to output 4 of each card you are missing the 250 limit is reached fast. Another caveat we discovered was that if a card has older prints that you own MTGA will automatically fill out the deck with the older versions making it a bit clunky to craft the new ones.

Match logging for Play mode added

We have been logging Ranked and event games as those were the most important game modes as we look at them for grabbing decks for our metagame functions. Play mode was left alone since was not a priority until we got those things done, well now they are done and I had time to add this into the mix too. Several people have been asking for this and now you can look at your deck stats and see statistics for Play mode. Remember that if you delete a deck the statistics disappear too.

Brawl added to the MTGA Metagame

In the last patch, we introduced Standard BO1/BO3 and Historic to the metagame. We needed some more time to get Brawl working but now it is here. Earlier we used data from our brawl users to make the metagame data, which meant we got all kinds of decks. Now we only collect high win rate decks from MTGA Assistant making it a true metagame. 

More Options added to settings

We have added options to show and hide ratings during drafts for those of you who appreciate the collection tracker but do not want to see the ratings. Clear cache options have been added for ranked, events, and play mode, this way you can reset the deck stats if you want to start over. A clear system cache have been added as well, in case of errors in card images or draft ratings, you can clear the cache and the assistant will redownload the data the next time you start MTG Arena. 

Desktop App improvements

The desktop app will now pop up when you close MTG Arena to display stats from the game session which includes collection summary/changes and recently acquired card. Match statistics are going to be added here too in a future patch. A maximize button has been added to the window to make it easier to see all the statistics.

Set Collection Summary

The Set collection summary now displays percentages for each rarity in each of the sets, you can now go into detail and get more information on what you are missing in each of the sets.

What's next in 1.5?

Supporting Human draft with our draft tracker is something we want to do, and we think we will be able to deliver this in our next patch! We also want to bring back the loading screen stats with some more interesting information this time around, this broke after the Ikoria patch due to log changes.

We are also actively redesigning the deck on AetherHub to support companions. After this is done we need to update our deck exporter to support companions as well so this gets reflected in the metagame data. I am also hoping to get in match information in the end game summary screen but this might be for a later patch as I want to release the next version as soon as we get Human draft support up and running.