Since its release, Brawl has steadily been growing in popularity and is now the second most played Constructed format on MTG Arena. Like our players, we have been giving Brawl more attention as we look to enhance the experience.

One of our key learnings is that Brawl is not one thing to all players but supports a wider audience than other formats. Some players are drawn to the format to showcase decks and express themselves, while others show up for a competitive, high-intensity game of Magic. As we kept iterating on matchmaking algorithms and banned lists, we realized we could not support these two audiences well with a single format. The time had come to split competitive and casual play, allowing players to self-select their experience and enabling us to better steward the format for both groups of players.

What Is Ranked Brawl?

Ranked Brawl is a ranked Constructed format featuring most of the same rules as Brawl but with a different banned list philosophy and a matchmaking system designed to promote competitive play. Like Brawl, decks contain 100 cards and include one legendary creature, planeswalker, Vehicle, or Spacecraft as your commander. Other than basic lands, only one copy of any given card can be in the deck (unless otherwise stated on the card) and cards must match the color identity of your commander. Players start with 25 life. Unlike the normal version of Brawl, there is no free mulligan in Ranked Brawl, like other ranked formats.

Matchmaking for the format considers a player's Constructed rank and rating to find an opponent of a similar skill level. Completing matches will affect a player's rank and ultimately contribute to their season reward eligibility. Unlike Unranked Brawl, deck composition is not a factor for matchmaking.

When Will Ranked Brawl Be Released?

Ranked Brawl will be released on June 23! Players will be able to access the new format both from the "Ranked" and "Brawl" play tabs in MTG Arena.

Going forward, we will begin adding Ranked Brawl Metagame Challenges to the schedule and may explore Qualifier Play-In Weekends if the format is popular enough. Like with the introduction of Timeless, we want to watch how any new competitive format performs for a while before saying it's ready for the stress of high-end competitive events.

Banned List Philosophy

We ran several experiments over the last few months to evaluate what would make a competitive and diverse Brawl format. A huge thank you to all the players who engaged with and gave feedback on these events! Your excitement and insight helped shape our direction here. We started with no bans at all, then slowly expanded the list as individual commanders fell outside of a reasonable win rate compared to the rest. The final banned list ended up being fairly short, containing only ten commanders.

What about non-commander cards though? How do cards in the 99 of decks affect win rates and deck diversity? Across all experiments and reflected in the large data set of Unranked Brawl matches, we have found that cards in the 99 do not have as much of an impact on win rates as commanders do. No matter how powerful a card is, you still need to draw it from your large deck. This was surprising, so we dug deeper!

We looked at both the overall win rates of individual cards and the win rates of those cards when they appeared in a player's opening hand. We saw some cards with high variance if drawn early, but overall, nothing that stood out as unfair for this format. Cards like Mana Drain may feel impactful when used at the right moment, but the data tells us it has a lower win rate than ramp cards like Noble Hierarch.

Based on this trend, we are starting with almost every card being legal to include in the 99 for Ranked Brawl. This isn't an absolute, and we will ban cards if we see a clear problem, but we haven't seen the evidence yet. Ranked Brawl metagame balance will be defined by banning commanders above a certain power. Conversely, Unranked Brawl will have more bans in the 99 for cards players generally agree are less fun to play against and get in the way of rich deck building. Unranked Brawl will have fewer commanders banned due to matchmaking pairing similar commanders against each other.

Ranked Brawl Banned List

The following cards are banned in Ranked Brawl:

  • Ajani, Nacatl Pariah
  • Nadu, Winged Wisdom
  • Lutri, the Spellchaser
  • Oko, Thief of Crowns
  • Old Stickfingers
  • Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
  • Rusko, Clockmaker
  • Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student
  • Wrenn and Six
  • Tajic, Legion's Valor

With the addition of competitive Ranked Brawl to MTG Arena, we will now grant wildcard refunds for any future bans in both Ranked Brawl and Unranked Brawl after this release. For future Ranked Brawl bans, players will receive one (1) wildcard for each crafted banned card they have a copy of in their collection, similar to how bans work for restricted cards in Timeless. We will not be issuing any wildcards for the initial banned list.

What About Unranked Brawl?

We love how Unranked Brawl is a space for players to express themselves through creative and thematic deck building. We believe that by introducing a Ranked Brawl queue with a different banned list philosophy, competitive-minded players will migrate away from the Unranked Brawl queue and create more room for friendly play. We will continue to actively monitor how play in Unranked Brawl responds to the release of Ranked Brawl to ensure that we're still seeing the kinds of fun play and deck-building freedom we want to create there.

We will continue to iterate on Unranked Brawl's matchmaking to assist players in finding opponents of similar power levels to their commander and deck. Our goal is to increase the number of matches players have within their commander power-level tier while maintaining fair and enjoyable play. With the release of Alchemy: Strixhaven, we released a major change to this system that removed player rating from matchmaking to improve the number of matches players would play within deck-power bands. This worked, but we underestimated the effects player rating had on creating fair and fun matches in Brawl. Skilled players' win rates skyrocketed while new players were getting crushed. We quickly modified the settings again to account for player rating, but to a lesser extent than before. We have since updated these matchmaking settings four additional times to further dial them in and plan to keep experimenting in this space to better optimize the friendly play experience of the Unranked Brawl queue.

We will also continue to monitor the format and engage with the community about additional bans that might be needed, optimizing for fun and deck diversity. For example, we are currently examining free counterspells that are challenging to play around. We would love to hear more player feedback on whether those cards are too much for Unranked Brawl.

Modified Ranked Brawl Limited-Time Event

From June 2–15, we will run a limited-time Ranked Brawl event for players to test out the new format ahead of its official release on June 23. This event will have no entry fee and will follow the banned card list above.

Oh, and We've Got Achievements!

To celebrate the release of Ranked Brawl, we are adding three new Core Achievements that reward two new player titles for playing Ranked Brawl games.

Ranked Brawler I

  • Play 25 games of Ranked Brawl
  • Reward: Reward Track progress

Ranked Brawler II

  • Play 100 games of Ranked Brawl
  • Reward: "Do you pay the one?" phrase emote

Ranked Brawler III

  • Play 450 games of Ranked Brawl
  • Reward: "Jubilant Brawler" title

Looking Forward

We're very excited about the growth of Brawl play on MTG Arena, and we're very happy to bring this new option to players. We will continue to monitor both formats and develop new play experiments that utilize commanders as time allows.