Everyone’s a critic, but some critics have easier jobs than others. 

It’s easy to see lots of things that Arena could improve or do better. Lord know the interface itself has taken many steps forward since the early days of Alpha play, and recently there has been a lot of focus on the bug and glitches that have newly plagued the game in recent days. I’m not here to dismiss those…it’s as annoying to me as it is to you to see that horrid DEFEAT screen for what is approximately 12 days after every match loss, and although I enjoyed seeing all of the great random postings of the potpourri of mana symbols sprinkled all over card art in the same way that Twitter sprinkles profanities about text. 

We could obviously talk for a while about the things that Arena needs or doesn’t need, and if you really want to see the current state of the game, Wizards printed a handy developer roadmap back in September. But there’s one thing that I haven’t heard talked about lately that’s not only necessary for the game, but I’m finding necessary for players to improve.

So…why isn’t there a match replay system in Arena?

After all, MTGO has it and that program has been held together with duct tape and bailing wire for years now. It really wouldn’t be that difficult to program…the game is essentially a sequence of set board states that could easily be replayed and reviewed. Games that are about a billion times more complex to replay (see Overwatch, where you can rewatch a twenty-minute match from the perspective of any of twelve human-controlled heroes or from a camera positioned at any point on the map within seconds of completing it) have them and they work well. But…why am I so concerned about the lack of replay now?

I’m concerned because I’ve found my play stuck in a rut lately, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have too. Part of it is the nature of the Arena beast, after all. It’s so easy to finish a match, take a sip of your lovely beverage, think “gg go next” and hit that “Play” button without thinking too much. And the ladder itself encourages you to do so especially at the higher levels of Mythic where rank decay is a thing (and probably a really bad thing, but that’s a different episode). But improvement doesn’t happen by just doing the same thing and making the same mistakes over and over again. I noticed when I would play on stream that I’d make a play that chat would question, and we wouldn’t exactly remember the board state at the time. Chat says, “You lost the game on play X”. I say, “I don’t know, and honestly I don’t think X would have made a difference because the game was already lost.” Since I’m streaming at the time, I can go back and look at the VOD and find out. But I’m in the minority and most players don’t have any way to check.

But this dilemma is only a symptom of a greater problem. As I mentioned previously, Arena itself is built to encourage you to jam matches. The ratings at the highest level of the game (as well as the level that gets you into upper-level tournaments) demand that you play lots of games.  At lower levels (think Platinum and Diamond), you can climb by playing slightly above .500 level Magic against a pool of people who have the time to play enough games in a season to reach a similar level. All of the rewards encourage an increase in the quantity of “take action X” rather than the quality of the games themselves. So the preferred method of play (as well as what some would argue is the optimal way to play) is to get a lot of games in. And this is not a great way to improve your Magic game. Cal Newport writes in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You about the value of deliberative practice: intentionally entering situations slightly above your current competence and ruthlessly evaluating your mistakes in order to improve. And the more that I’ve considered how to apply this sort of practice to my Magic game, I’ve come up with some good ideas that are helping me implement it, such as having a notepad next to my computer and recording the mistakes that I make. I’ve made it a point to immediately reflect after each day’s play session about what worked and what didn’t. But even then I’m fighting against the system itself and the way it wants to be played rather than a method of play that encourages or even allows for improvement in your play.

So are there current solutions? Not necessarily, but there are things that can help. As I mentioned above, write down on paper the mistakes you make and your impressions after a play session. Use a match tracker to record your overall record against certain decks and figure out what’s working well or not so well for you at your level. If you have the ability, review the video of your matches when there are questions about whether certain plays were available. Are there future solutions? There are, and they begin with an actual rating system that encourages quality rather than quantity (but that’s another article). But replays bring the value of streamer VOD to every player, and I have a difficult time seeing how such a feature would be nearly as intensive as something like adding an additional format to Arena. I don’t see a downside to a replay feature, so hopefully it’ll show up in a future update so we can change the focus of play from jamming matches to becoming a better player.