I'm not sure if they were listening to their player base or just listening to the money. With Alchemy being unpopular and requiring extra art + dev time I can't imagine they had any incentive to keep it going if no one was buying in.

I have to imagine once Pioneer gets the full card pool play may go up a bit?

Are there any major decks that are actually missing cards? I figured that they had added pretty much all tournament-relevant cards. But I think the bigger thing for online Pioneer would be more support for paper Pioneer to spur interest in the format.

Wow legitimately cannot believe they're ending Alchemy, I thought they'd double down forever on that regardless of how much the playerbase hated it. It's refreshing that they're beginning to listen. It was probably one of the reasons I stopped playing Arena sadly.

Side benefit: Scryfall will no longer continue to get cluttered by all the nonsense Alchemy versions and "rebalances"!

Standard is clearly king on Arena, I didn't expect to see it at 50% of the constructed queues. Pioneer and Timeless are basically nonexistent :-/ I have to imagine once Pioneer gets the full card pool play may go up a bit?

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

Pretty good list IMO. However, if competitive minded players move to the ranked queue, that will leave all of the players who love playing these commanders in unranked, because unranked will be the only place to play them. I'm not sure if that will see an even higher percentage of the queue playing these commanders.

Does anyone have any experience with the unranked matchmaker in brawl recently? I haven't played it in a while but I'm curious what someone with a high MMR and a weak commander and deck strength gets matched against. If that equals seeing Ajani 50% of the time then that would not be fun at all.

Arena gets all Standard legal cards but supplementary decks and sets only sometimes. For instance, the Edge of Eternities Commanders are on Arena but none of the other cards from the commander decks were added. Arena did get Lord of the Rings and Modern Horizons 3 but never received any other supplemental sets (though they haven't really printed any new ones lately so that hasn't mattered).

based purely on the launch page for mtgo, yes. They're both up to date.

Still both are getting all the new cards and such?

Online is built on decades of spaghetti. You can buy sell and trade digital cards from every era of the game and play any format. It's not pretty.

Arena only has cards from the past 10 years or so. It's pretty but there is no card economy. You grind to earn currency or use real money buy packs of trading cards that you can't actually trade with people. It's pretty and has animations.