If you've been playing Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Premier Draft on Magic: The Gathering Arena, and you're wondering why you're getting bad opening hands and/or getting paired with players who are not close to the same rank as you, that's probably because of technical issues that the developers have just fixed today.
Today, Magic: The Gathering Arena had a maintenance downtime to get an update, and according to the patch notes shared at the game's official forums, the developers had to make adjustments on a couple of issues for the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Premier Draft: Ranked-based matchmaking and opening-hand algorithm.
"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," the patch notes said.
As for the opening-hand algorithm, they said that they intend for best-of-one formats to use a modified opening-hand algorithm which pulls multiple potential opening hands and chooses one, but Premiere Draft was operating contrary to that, so the latest update has fixed it accordingly.
I noticed these issues in my Draft games lately. As a Gold-ranked player, I was paired up against the #3 Mythic Ranked player in Limited format. And lately, I've been getting terrible opening-hands, as you can see in my Premier Draft stream last night:
In addition to these fixes, the latest patch notes also fixed several bugs in the game, mostly involving new cards from the latest set, Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. For more information, check out the full patch notes here.
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