Arena fixes errors in pairing and starting hand

If you're playing Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Premier Draft in Magic: The Gathering Arena, and you're wondering why you're getting bad opening hands and / or pairing with players who don't have the same rating as you, know that it is probably because of technical issues that developers just fixed today.

Today, Magic: The Gathering Arena had a maintenance downtime to obtain an update and, according to patch notes shared on official forums of the game, admitted that there was a mismatch in the game and the starting hand algorithm. There were gold-level streammers being paired with people in the mythical among the top 100 in the world.

Developer’s Note:

As some of you may have noticed, there were certain scenarios where you were being matched against somebody with a much higher (or lower) Rank than yours – this should address that issue. Regardless, players were still being properly matched on their current W/L record (Ranked draft formats use both your rank and your win/loss record when searching for an opponent).

We intend for best-of-one formats to use a modified opening-hand algorithm which pulls multiple potential opening hands and chooses one; Premier Draft was operating contrary to that, and we have fixed it accordingly. To stave off any conspiracy theories, it was previously using our best-of-three opening hand rules (which pulls one, and only one opening hand).

Premier Draft was only seeing 1 opening hand and not multiple as it should be in the best-of-1.