Modern Brackets First Season Feedback

So, the very first season of Modern Formats with the Brackets System has finally concluded. This system brings back the league lock, so players can play within the bracket that is more appropriate to the level of their card collection.

In this post, I want to share my feedback after playing the first season under the new Bracket System in Modern.

With the Bracket System, players need to select between the six Brackets, which are based on the previous league tiers, Bracket I being Wood and Bracket VI being Champion. Since I've been playing in Champion for a long time, I decided that I will also go with the Champion Bracket VI this time to test the waters, even though I can also play with max-level cards in Bracket V. I am not sure if the number of players that is shown in the bracket is accurate. I saw some conversation on Discord that some of the liquidity bots may have been added to the count, inflating the number of actual players playing in each Bracket, though I'm not sure which Brackets and by how much.

Given that, we just have to trust that in Bracket VI, there were a total of 155 players that participated, and since it exceeded the minimum number of players needed to get the full reward pool, Bracket VI will have the full reward of 795,000 SPS.

After playing the entire season, I managed to reach a 3080 rating, which falls within Division 3; it is a much lower rating compared to the previous system, where I usually can get up to a 4.5k rating, but I also had to crawl my way up since the new system had resulted in players having their rating reset to 0. Thankfully, for each Division that a player advances, they get an advancement chest, which can contain some energy, which makes climbing not much of a problem. However, since you have to climb from a 0 rating, the reward points that you can get on the early levels are very low.

Another thing that has prevented me from having a much higher rating was the card restrictions on Bracket VI, which make all of my epic and legendary Conclave Arcana Rewards, as well as my Extra cards, unusable in battles, even though they were at levels that can help me win my battles. For example, I had a level 4 Rila Fen, which is a good counter against Resurrect abilities and also has Tank Heal, but because the minimum level for epic is 5 in Bracket VI, I can't use the card. Even though the only difference between level 4 and 5 is an additional magic damage.

Furthermore, midway through the season, the team implemented an update that reduced the cutoff for win streaks from 3700 to 3000, which I feel is kind of unfair because there were already many accounts that were past 3.7k rating before they did the update, and the only ones that would suffer from the change were players who have yet to reach the new cutoff. The team should have implemented the change after the season ended instead.

I also notice that there is so much training wheels for players who were under 2k rating because I could only face players under that rating when I was within 2.5k rating, but after getting into 3k rating, all I ever faced were accounts with more than double my rating, and not even once did I encounter a player 1k rating below me.

When it comes to liquidity, even Bracket VI, which exceeded the full reward requirements, still lacks the needed numbers to secure complete human-to-human matchmaking, so to compensate for that, liquidity bots were added, and they were all very strong and could use all the cards. The problem is it takes a minimum of 45 seconds before you can match to a liquidity bot, and it takes too long to select its team during battles, so compared to the previous system, I now have to allot more time playing the game.

Finally, when it comes to the reward, playing under the new reward system has only reduced my rewards compared to the previous system. Usually, I earned around 3.8-5k SPS per season, but on this new system, I don't even break 2k SPS, even though the staked SPS in my account did not vary much compared to the previous seasons.

I believe it was because many of the top players with millions of SPS inflated the total Reward Points in the bracket, which overly diluted the percentage of my Reward share within the SPS pool. The only way that I could have the same earnings is to win 100%% of my battles, which is impossible, or rent another 500k SPS, which can be costly.

Because of the state of Bracket VI, I decided to downgrade to Bracket V. I'm not sure if my SPS rewards will go up or down, but I think that the amount of Glint that I can get will probably increase, because leaderboard competition is not that difficult compared to Bracket VI.

Thank you, and see you on the next post!

This were assets that I edited using Adobe Photoshop and more of this assets were available in this post for anyone who likes to use them.