Continues being brutal. 19 games on the Ladder. Start rank L11, end rank L11. So exactly a 50% win rate.

Evened out with a streak off 3 wins earlier at the start (up to Rank 13 after recovering losses) then a series of win one, lose one then then 4 straight losses and the 1 win to be back where I started.

Don't think the deck is so bad to be fair but losses to on curve humans, artifact hate, an ulamog ultimate, BW allies, Mardu with double licensed integration, a rakdos deck life gainer relying on enchantments.

The good news in a way with my hated mill archetype is I think these were all wins this time mainly with fast Aggro despite some of the matches having Tutelage online.

One change possibly is the haste bird. Good enough but at times you need a blocker. Similar with scrapheap but he is normally making up for it. Also in a few matches the recursion of haunted dead was telling despite the 2 cards return cost. In particular the token can crew. I have also found the Fleshbags doing good work when they show up.

EDIT: scratch swapping the bird. It has helped me close out two games. Both times it's a return from graveyard at haste of course on landfall. This is also why having a map can help as you can fetch and play a land to trigger the return. Together with scrapheap and Unwanted dead it can be useful to bring stuff back from the yard and can help if flooded.

Anyway I guess try more tomorrow.

It's bloodbath out there on the ladder now. Everybody is trying to get to rank 40 before the time runs out and are bringing their best deck. Took me 2 hours to gain 3 ranks with a shamelessly netdecked, tryhard deck from CGB. 3 more to go, but I think I'll say f--- it.

Yeah steam ladder tends to go nuts around this time, you can sense the panic and desperation when you get matched up with a 37 haha, we become savages

Most boring and easy to build for aggro meta since release. I won't even get back to 40 for this season because honestly I just don't care. First time not at 40, but my playtime is barely making double digit hours per couple months here. I'm just plain bored of the game. Which is fine I have tons of hours in it. But yeah this meta atm is just purely tepid. Anyone can win now deck builds are almost all built around rushing.

I'm genuinely surprised by the number of times CGB is paired against über-low ranked players on xbone. On iOS, I rarely get a match with someone under level 35. Perhaps it's easier to fudge your ranking on iOS, because the standard of play doesn't seem that high at all.

I would not doubt it. Steam is pretty tryhard now, and matchmaking is usually not too bad. I usually play for hours on the last couple weeks, but eh I just don't have it in me. Creativity in deck builds is at an all-time low atm. IDK what else to say. You see the same **** every match. Always some kind of red attached to combo color. Almost all high rollers are dead as are the sappers and any kind of major counter decks. They just cannot win consistently bar a keen build here and there.

The artifacts have only added to the mess, and the constant red agenda push with each new season has made everything feel like it's just not very fun anymore. It can be, especially if you are just starting out. But I have played way too much of this game over the past year or two. Not really sure how much I will be able to play the new expansion. It looks okay, but there is nothing new. Patch notes are as ordinary as ever.

When this game started I was really hoping it was going to go somewhere. Instead it's just stuck in second gear. No new modes, 2HG still kind of just sucks, and the whole meta is probably the most boring it has ever been. People are literally afraid to play certain colors and ranges at this point.

But this is typical Stainless and low budget as ever. We knew what to expect. I at least thought we would have a new mode by now. What a downer.

Oh no, i was trying to get a daily quest and couldn't get a second win. Now I'm rank 39 and can't find a match

#nightmare

LOL, 39 is such a gross number to end on too. You better get back to 40 or keep it at 38 lmao.

At any rate people do need to realize it is okay. You can have every season at 39 if you please. It doesn't matter. It's an arbitrary number based on nothing really considering the meta.

Not to mention for no other reason than incompetence we all have a zero on the first season.

Your first good post!

Oh man i almost lost to a rank 3 fat stack of 81. Mulled to six and kept a two lander in a Bant tempo deck, couldn't get a forest to save my life and he has spirits out en force including Avacyn. Luckily Eldorado Displacer shows up with Reflector Mage and a quiver full of Essence Flux and our hero gets back to 40. I force quit the game and won't touch it until the Egyptians are ready to come out.

I can't wait to play with that glory ringer 4/4 hasted dragon. That's just our kind of Magic.

I haven't played in so long but my new deck is winning a lot. I just don't think I have a 40 chase in me anymore lol.

While there are decent levels of skill and different decks, aggro is at least something like 75% right now in US servers at any time. More if you get bad luck. It's so boring that I just generally lost all interest in even playing. So many of my favorite decks became useless over the season and the last one that I couldn't even sit down to play the game much.

I guess the hours rack up and you don't even notice sometimes. For me the extra 10-40 hours or so it would take to get back to 40 with my favorite decks is just not worth the time. Since I basically know what is going to kill me and how, the whole thing becomes pointless even when I'm mostly just listening to new music foremost during Magic sessions. It hurts not being able to make the decks you want because of the card pool. I'm not quite sure how it got this way, but every new season is just kind of meh IMO. A few cards at best I can add to my favorite decks, and they still have problems consistently beating some **** aggro deck that took some dude 10m to build.

I think we are at the point where each color needs their best cards. The last season and this one have kind of been unfair to certain colors and builds, so we have this slanted meta where some colors and combos just cannot function very well at the 1-4 mana meta that is so important to winning right now.

I'm not really asking to bring big creatures or counters back to rule everything, but there are normally great Magic builds in paper that are simply nowhere to be seen in Duels atm. It sucks. I haven't taken a look at the new cards but I doubt they are going to change the meta to the point I get excited.

All in all I surely got my money's worth out of this game. But it's dragging on, and they kind of ruined 2HG. It was so fun in 2014, I have no idea how it got so bad.

It depends on what personal goals you have for playing Magic Duels. It's worth recognising what type of player you are. I'm fairly competitive, but my real interest lies into trying to find unusual builds that might surprise other players. So I got to level 33 with a Grixis control deck which seemed to be competitive at that level, but then got bored of piloting the deck. Similarly, I have all the cards to make a Tier 1 Mardu vehicles deck, but I'm not that interested, so have never built it.
I've spent the last couple of weeks trying out some decks that interest me, but my level has dropped to around 20-25, as the more marginal builds find it hard to compete consistently at the higher levels. I'm happy with that, though!
My favourite match-up is against a good player with a 'mystery deck'. It might not be Tier 1, but it's more fun for me. My favourite game recently was against a mono-Wastes deck playing Walker of the Wastes. Not a card you see much, but quite effective if you don't have answers for it. It was a pleasure to lose against that deck, because I didn't know what was coming.

This season (the 2nd one I play on Duels) was rather easy to climb to 40 for me. But I have to say that I got access to the wohle
card pool, which is necessary to build the right deck to reach the LVL40.

Last season, when I started with Duels, I had not access to all card's, I've managed to get to LVL32 but then was stuck there
and ran out of time when I eventualy got access to the whole card pool to build stronger decks...

What I experienced this season:
Getting up to 20 was not much pain and goes quite fast, even with some "experimental" decks, it is doable in a reasonable time.
The way from 20 to approx. 30 (+/-) was for me the biggest pain, it took a good ammount of time.
Then from 30 to 40 was again relative easy to do, in this range of the ladder I tend to play aggro decks, just because the matchups are
normaly fast decided.

I haven't played in a few days, not much time really, but I'm sitting on R40 and the Last times I played I faced some pretty good decks, but by now the decks I have are pretty tuned and can usually win.
At the start of the season while I was trying stuff out, I found getting Past R20 something was tough until I put together the pre-build of my showdown deck and then I breezed straight to R40.
I guess the large player base means more full-collections and more net-deckers. Some good players too, not to mention a fair share of cheaters/quit-to-preserve-rankers.
But, while testing the pauper decks in the deck-building contest, I was surprised to get some pretty positive results and not lose as many ranks as I expected (ended up in the mid 30s). Getting back to R40 wasn't too hard, although some days its hard to break even, other days its a walk in the park. I do get the idea sometimes, that player level changes depending on what time of the day I play.
I kind of wish they'd release an android version, so I could restart the unlocking-grind, it would be interesting to play D-card decks vs a spike ladder...

My observation (I'm on Steam):

Rank 1-10: Janky decks and innovation
Rank 11-35: Competitive
Rank 35-40: Janky decks and innovation

This has been going on since I played on Origins. When the season starts, everybody makes the decks they have in mind. Eventually, players hate losing so they use their best deck or copy from the net. Once they reached 40, they're sick of their goto decks and start building crazy decks again.

When I made the move from ps3 to steam back in dotp2014 season I can attest the competition got steeper. Tring to get quick gold with RB Burn/vamps and I got slapped down 8 ranks in 15 games from decks with to much lifegain. The PW decks aren't a problem, I just ignore the PW and beat face. It's the Humans, ramp w/ lifegain, and energy/lifegain. Random three color Mythic goodstuffs running around with Heart, Harvester and Skysoverigns are problems too.

I'd agree from the limited experience. Rank 11-35 is very competitive. Depending which way you look at it from a time perspective Aggro is still the best type of deck as the win / loss time is arguably lower, at the same time I will soldier on past turn 5 or 6 when it's either mid range or control in nature as it can make the matches tense and enjoyable.

For pure grind though I would play hard AI over versus. Normally I leave my competitive versus for organised tournaments or of late 2HG when available (IOS).

In steam though I am so far from complete that going versus makes more sense. It's also rewarding in a way to actually earn gold and open whereas I am always a day 1 total collection in iOS.

It seems you have a 50% chance of winning even at 20-30 in Steam with some Pauper decks...