What's new

This release ships a fully data-driven custom-format system. Anyone with the editor password can define new game modes from the web — no plugin update required — and every MTGA+ user picks them up immediately. The five legacy formats (Pauper, Historic Pauper, Standard Pauper, Planar Standard, Modern) have been re-expressed in the new system; everything you played before still works identically, only now it lives in a structure you can extend.

Custom game mode editor

Visit /gamemodes and unlock with the community password (ask in the Discord if you don't have it). From there you can:

• Pick a legality source. Either a raw Scryfall query (legal:standard, set:fdn or set:tdm, etc.) or a multi-select set/rarity filter pulled directly from MTGA's own card database — handy for Arena-only formats like Historic Pauper.
• Add post-processing rules. Per-rarity caps (max 4 rares, max 1 mythic), combined caps (max 4 rare+mythic together), a deck-size minimum/maximum, and sideboard scope (count sideboard for caps or not).
• Wire up your own Discord webhook. When someone hosts a public lobby in your mode, MTGA+ posts to your channel in addition to the shared MTGA+ #general channel. Format communities can run their own lobby announcements without us in the loop.
• Pick a match type. Determines whether the lobby uses standard MTGA decks or the rebalanced (Alchemy) variant of cards.

Submit completes immediately — the editor closes and tells you it's resolving in the background, since fetching ~30 pages from Scryfall can take 5–10 minutes for big formats. Hit /gamemodes a few minutes later to see the legal-card count populate.

In-game UI redesign

Format picker

The format spinner in the challenge view has been replaced with an inline searchable dropdown. Type to filter, scroll through results, click to pick. Universes-Beyond-friendly font sizes; doesn't pop up a separate modal anymore.

Server browser

The lobby browser filter is now a vertical checklist with a search field, Select All, and Select None — pick exactly the modes you want to see. Same UI in the in-game browser panel.

Omenpath / Universes-Beyond support

Cards with multiple printings under different names — Spider-Man crossovers with their Omenpath Magic-name equivalents, Adventure halves, modal DFCs — are now correctly resolved by both the legality and rarity-cap checks.

For rarity caps specifically: a mythic-flavored Cultivate counts as common because Cultivate has a common Arena printing, and a mythic-rarity Universes-Beyond reprint of a card with a regular common Arena printing also counts as common. This applies uniformly to every rarity bucket — no special-casing for commons.

Under the hood

• Card metadata pipeline. The plugin gates uploads of MTGA's SQLite card database on the installed MTGA build version (read from <install>/version) so older installs can never regress a newer DB. Uploads go through a signed URL straight to Cloud Storage, sidestepping Cloud Run's 32 MB request body cap (the gzipped DB is ~62 MB).
• Resilient legality resolution. Scryfall fetches now retry transient network errors with exponential backoff and a hard 10 s per-attempt timeout. Game mode definitions are saved before legality resolution begins, so a Scryfall blip can never wipe your editor work.
• Auto-update. Existing users on v0.14 will pick up this release on next launch and the bootstrapper will swap in the new DLL automatically.