Brawl Deck Weight Matchmaking System - Best Commanders and Cards • MTG Arena Zone

Table of Contents

The Initial Discovery
Card Weights
What Does This All Mean?

Since the inception of Brawl (now Historic Brawl) in MTG Arena, Wizards of the Coast has devised a system where players are matched with each other according to the relative strength of their Commander and the cards that constitute the deck. However, while people over time figured out what Commanders were deemed strong and not due to the patterns in matchmaking, what determined their power has been kept a secret – until now.

MTG Arena’s matchmaking and hand smoothing system has always been manipulated to some degree so players get an overall more balanced experience when playing the game. Brawl in particular, while not competitive in nature has a serious imbalance in power levels from deck to deck, so this was the system that MTG Arena settled on. Players deemed the strongest Commanders the “hell queue”, which consisted of Commanders such as Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy.

Let’s find out how this all works!

The Initial Discovery

A reddit user attempted to play their a simple Treasure Hunt deck for Brawl, which consisted of Roalesk, Prime Specimen as a Commander. Suddenly, it wouldn’t let them!

To find out what happened, the user got the game log and saw this message:

errorType: DeckWeightTooLow, DeckWeight: -333, MinDeckWeight: 0

Which meant, the deck had such a low rating that it wouldn’t let them queue. This promoted further investigation from the community.

Card Weights

User schlarpc then datamined the weight values of all cards in the game by writing a script, which is added up and then value used for matchmaking with other players. This also revealed a Commander’s rating, which varied from 1800 tier (the presumed hell queue) all the way down to the -360 tier.

Each card has an assigned weight for (Historic) Brawl (weight_hb_99) and Standard Brawl (weight_sb_99), with a separate rating if thy are assigned as a commander (weight_hb_cmd and weight_sb_cmd). While the exact formula is not known for matchmaking, we presume Wizards of the Coast adds the weight of all cards up and matches players accordingly.

Brawl Deck Weight Spreadsheet

What Does This All Mean?

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So what does this all mean? With the knowledge now out in public, players can also manipulate how they craft their deck, avoid certain Commanders, or make their deck weak or strong enough to be matched accordingly. For instance, Opt‘s weight value is 27 (highest rating being 45) in the game and Sleight of Hand is only at 9.

For reference, here are the strongest Commanders in the 1800 rating tier, which means just including them all skyrocket your deck’s weight and most certainly will have them versus each other:

Whether this will affect how Brawl is played remains to be seen, only being a few days after the aftermath. In the past, the hidden MMR for players was also temporarily available in the game log files before Wizards of the Coast hid them away again. Although with this revelation the weights may be not available going forward starting with the new cards, these ratings look largely static and will serve as useful references.