This is really amazing actually, and validates some things I think a lot of players thought for a long time.

I was able to tune down by Rocco Street Chef deck to below 1080 so now I shouldn’t be hitting the ridiculous commanders any more.

There are some things you don’t put in error messages; guess the Arena developers just learned that the hard way.

I’m actually glad that they try to do some kind of weighting, although as the Reddit threads say, there are apparently a lot of mis-weighted cards. I’m wondering if I can use this to build a deck full of draft chaff and get myself matched against similar things.

Interesting, the laelia and etali’s favor deck runs a similar number of lands but I’ve never seen it fail to validate.

I’ve been experimenting with building low-weight decks for Standard Brawl. Some observations (which may not necessarily apply to Historic Brawl):

• As far as the maindeck goes, it looks like the lowest (non-zero) weight is 6 and the highest is 45.
• I don’t think the card pool is deep enough to build a coherent deck of all sixes, but I’d love for someone to show me I’m wrong.
• It seems like 0 is the minimum weight for the deck to “validate”. This is an issue because some commanders have negative weights. (No cards have negative weights when they’re in the maindeck.)
  • Honestly, it’s poor planning that exposed this bug; it was entirely foreseeable that sooner or later someone would submit a deck with a negative total weight, if only for laughs.
• Evolving Wilds has a weight of 9. Terramorphic Expanse has a weight of 0.

I assume there’s little or no human intervention in assigning weights. More likely they’re determined programmatically by observing the win ratios of decks containing the card.

Commander
1 The Mycotyrant

Deck
1 Blightreaper Thallid
4 Swamp
4 Forest
1 Deathcap Marionette
1 Skullcap Snail
1 Synapse Necromage
1 Soul Enervation
1 Deathbonnet Sprout
1 Placid Rottentail
1 Cankerbloom
1 Tendril of the Mycotyrant
1 Spore Crawler
1 The Skullspore Nexus
1 Akawalli, the Seething Tower
1 Bortuk Bonerattle
1 Nemata, Primeval Warden
1 Insidious Roots
1 Chalk Outline
1 Rubblebelt Maverick
1 Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler
1 Lively Dirge
1 Plaza of Heroes
1 Underground Mortuary
1 Faerie Dreamthief
1 Ichor Drinker
1 Snarling Gorehound
1 Bitter Triumph
1 Riveteers Overlook
1 Argoth, Sanctum of Nature
1 Screaming Phantom
1 Crawling Infestation
1 Tear Asunder
1 Command Tower
1 Uurg, Spawn of Turg
1 Blooming Marsh
1 Deathcap Glade
1 Festering Gulch
1 Haunted Mire
1 Jungle Hollow
1 Llanowar Wastes
1 Archpriest of Shadows
1 Coati Scavenger
1 Badlands Revival
1 Eerie Soultender
1 Fell Horseman
1 Terror of Towashi
1 Bringer of the Last Gift
1 Evolving Wilds
1 Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
1 Boseiju, Who Endures
1 Arcane Signet
1 Poison Dart Frog
1 Orochi Merge-Keeper

Total deck weight: 0
Maindeck weight: 360
Rares: 13
Mythics: 2

No card in this deck has a greater weight than 9. I had to cut lands just to get the deck weight up to 0 (would rather be running 24, replaced a couple with mana-producing two-drops).

I started looking at the low-weight commanders and The Mycotyrant caught my eye. Friends, it is low for a reason. There are not a lot of Fungi or Saprolings in the format. I decided to mash it up with the Insidious Roots combo deck that never really took off in Standard. Just try to keep things moving in and out of your graveyard. The list probably still needs some tweaking. I would have liked more removal, but didn’t want to run too many non-permanents, since we’re trying to Descend and then recur them.

One of the most interesting lines: cast Lively Dirge, burying a Coati Scavenger, get back the Scavenger and a random one-drop, then get back something else with the Scavenger’s ability.

I won a few games so I guess I can’t complain too loudly, but this didn’t really get me into the kind of match-ups I was hoping for. Still plenty of power on the opponent’s side of the board. But it’s not WotC’s fault if nobody else is out there playing decks like this; I’m sure the algorithm did the best it could. I feel like I had to wait a little longer than usual to find opponents, but still less than a minute.