If they're past level 100, maybe they just want to give out cubes. Or don't care. Or want to show you their hand whilst knowing they will lose.
I still have no idea why I keep getting matched with people with the current card back who are taking the game seriously.
There is literally no reason to.
Just play garbage.
It's more fun. And helpful.
I am grinding my face into the rank floor playing a deck called "Cards I Want to Make Pretty." I'm pretty close to a fifth split on my Angela and I want her to look BEAUTIFUL.
I'm just having the worst time right now. Can't get above rank 35. Snapping when I have the nuts and losing nearly every time. I feel like my decks are all wrong, but the one I climbed to 60 with last season just isn't working.
I'm just having the worst time right now. Can't get above rank 35. Snapping when I have the nuts and losing nearly every time. I feel like my decks are all wrong, but the one I climbed to 60 with last season just isn't working.
She Hulk + Magik + Infinaut is kind of just a worse Shuri deck that is far more vulnerable to Aero IME, and I'm speaking from somebody who piloted something like that and a much more "standard" She Hulk + Dino moon girl list to infinite a few seasons back during the Deathwave era.
She Hulk + Magik + Infinaut is kind of just a worse Shuri deck that is far more vulnerable to Aero IME, and I'm speaking from somebody who piloted something like that and a much more "standard" She Hulk + Dino moon girl list to infinite a few seasons back during the Deathwave era.
Yep. I also cannot imagine playing a deck that relies on Magik with all the fucking Thanos running around.
What rank are you at? Thanos and Shuri are absolutely ubiquitous in higher ranks, I genuinely think that my percentage of bot matches is higher than my percentage of matches that aren't Thanos/Shuri/specifically tuned anti-meta clog decks.
Like, my "off-meta" matches are seeing Thanos Lockjaw Zoo with Mojo and Kazaar instead of Thanos Lockjaw Tech Cards and seeing Zola Shuri or somebody who actually blew 6k tokens on Sauron
40s, I haven't been playing much/climbing fast this season.
Yeah, I don't want to be rude or anything and mixing up decks can definitely be successful but I do think there's a vast gulf between low ranks and like, 70-80+ in terms of how much you need to care about what decks are meta, especially right now where there are two clear top decks and both of them rely on pool 4+ cards.
She Hulk + Magik + Infinaut is kind of just a worse Shuri deck that is far more vulnerable to Aero IME, and I'm speaking from somebody who piloted something like that and a much more "standard" She Hulk + Dino moon girl list to infinite a few seasons back during the Deathwave era.
Not everybody has Shuri tho and aero fucks over like, every deck lol
She Hulk + Magik + Infinaut is kind of just a worse Shuri deck that is far more vulnerable to Aero IME, and I'm speaking from somebody who piloted something like that and a much more "standard" She Hulk + Dino moon girl list to infinite a few seasons back during the Deathwave era.
Not everybody has Shuri tho and aero fucks over like, every deck lol
Aero loses to a lot of decks (including Thanos!) She's just very good against the specific decks she beats, and unlike Leech she lets you hook opponents in for all their cubes.
Like, my "off-meta" matches are seeing Thanos Lockjaw Zoo with Mojo and Kazaar instead of Thanos Lockjaw Tech Cards and seeing Zola Shuri or somebody who actually blew 6k tokens on Sauron
40s, I haven't been playing much/climbing fast this season.
Yeah, I don't want to be rude or anything and mixing up decks can definitely be successful but I do think there's a vast gulf between low ranks and like, 70-80+ in terms of how much you need to care about what decks are meta, especially right now where there are two clear top decks and both of them rely on pool 4+ cards.
Right, spool32 is talking about being stuck at 35, where it's not like that.
Like, my "off-meta" matches are seeing Thanos Lockjaw Zoo with Mojo and Kazaar instead of Thanos Lockjaw Tech Cards and seeing Zola Shuri or somebody who actually blew 6k tokens on Sauron
40s, I haven't been playing much/climbing fast this season.
Yeah, I don't want to be rude or anything and mixing up decks can definitely be successful but I do think there's a vast gulf between low ranks and like, 70-80+ in terms of how much you need to care about what decks are meta, especially right now where there are two clear top decks and both of them rely on pool 4+ cards.
Right, spool32 is talking about being stuck at 35, where it's not like that.
I mean, if you're going to walk me into saying the mean thing, if you're not at the ranks in which the meta decks are common and where you see a much wider variety of much weaker decks, you can either advance by playing a meta deck to get the free cube equity and/or you need to make a focused effort on improving gameplay and snap discipline. Shifting between non-meta decks is only going to be beneficial in the placebo sense that you might force yourself to take the game more seriously or learn the new deck instead of sticking to a non-functional script with the old one.
E: The third thing you can do is exploit bots harder, which admittedly a she hulk deck helps a lot with.
milski on
I ate an engineer
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I mean, I have heard a lot of anecdata from reddit people and other social media spots saying they're absolutely inundated with Shuri/Thanos at mid to low ranks too. It might also be a little bit of an MMR difference, and also not knowing what absolutely inundated looks like. They might see it 1/5 games and think that's crazy where I would see it 4/5 games a LOT while climbing.
It's also randomly streaky. Sometimes I'll have a bunch of non Thanos games and then I'll be like "Did they all just wake up and decide to log on?"
Like, my "off-meta" matches are seeing Thanos Lockjaw Zoo with Mojo and Kazaar instead of Thanos Lockjaw Tech Cards and seeing Zola Shuri or somebody who actually blew 6k tokens on Sauron
40s, I haven't been playing much/climbing fast this season.
Yeah, I don't want to be rude or anything and mixing up decks can definitely be successful but I do think there's a vast gulf between low ranks and like, 70-80+ in terms of how much you need to care about what decks are meta, especially right now where there are two clear top decks and both of them rely on pool 4+ cards.
Right, spool32 is talking about being stuck at 35, where it's not like that.
I mean, if you're going to walk me into saying the mean thing, if you're not at the ranks in which the meta decks are common and where you see a much wider variety of much weaker decks, you can either advance by playing a meta deck to get the free cube equity and/or you need to make a focused effort on improving gameplay and snap discipline. Shifting between non-meta decks is only going to be beneficial in the placebo sense that you might force yourself to take the game more seriously or learn the new deck instead of sticking to a non-functional script with the old one.
E: The third thing you can do is exploit bots harder, which admittedly a she hulk deck helps a lot with.
Sorry, not my intention.
I just think that, ultimately I'm playing to have fun. And the least fun I've had in this game is putting together a meta deck and getting my ass handed to me repeatedly by mirror matches that I lose by a hair and meta decks meant to beat mine. I swear part of last season I was just getting matched up against anti-me decks or bizarre decks played by precogs who would play the weirdest shit to beat me.
At that point I had to do something different for a while or go crazy. Playing off-meta relieves a little bit of the pressure to win.
If the matchmaking does work across 30 levels, then it’s conceivable to get matched up with people grinding for Infinite while trying to get through the 40s/50s/60s.
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
Its not immediately apparent to me how rank/mmr/meta are affect each other. I can see a valid argument for higher MMR being correlated with higher rates of meta decks (i.e. Thanos, currently) but due what I've been hearing in this thread, rank is only loosely (if at all?, I'm still unclear about this) correlated with MMR. So, I could certainly understand some in lower ranks having the same issue with Thanos (if they have higher MMR) or lower rates (if, like me, they have low MMR). Maybe 1 in 5 or 6 decks I see is Thanos, maybe equal amounts Shuri, then some mix of Patriot or (weirdly) Destroyer today.
Even then, I can't get a handle on how the meta at my rank shifts so abruptly. Like I've been playing a mix of deadpool and surfer decks all season, and I've been just bouncing around rank 39-42ish, but just in the last day or so, I've "rocketed" up to rank 48, not changing my decks at all. (well I did try putting Bast in my deadpool deck, but that turned out rather dreadfully, so I took him out. Still thinking of how to use Bast well.)
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
The opponents you face appear to be largely based on your MMR.
Win a lot, and you see a whole bunch of optimised decks.
Lose a lot, you get bots, no matter what rank you are.
Rank also seems to divide players such that you can't play people who are more than 30-40 ranks above you.
It's noticeable as you won't see the infinite card back for the season until you get past 70, even if you are flooded with players who have the infinite card back for last season.
I refuse to believe this game is actively rubber-banding your matchmaking between optimized decks and bots - and any experience otherwise is just anecdotal - and you can go see what reddit thinks of matchmaking based on anecdotal evidence.
A developer has specifically mentioned that you will not match with infinite players until rank 70 - but that's the only actual rank floor I'm aware of
They don't show you the mmr - and they never will - so it's all kinda handwavey
Since matchmaking is based on MMR, it's going to actively rubber-band.
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
MMR existing does not mean that it rubberbands you aggressively between terrible players/bots and highly skilled players like it's Mario Kart. MMR systems can have different implementations, but you would generally expect a game where you play as many games as Snap and where individual games are not important compared to aggregate results to have a pretty high confidence in your MMR pretty quickly, meaning you should drift around skill brackets pretty slowly and not oscillate wildly.
It would also make absolutely no sense to make bots tie into the MMR system just to rubber band them back up whenever they lose; that defeats the purpose of an MMR system actually letting players rank drop if they are playing less skillfully. Even if pity bots did exist, they would (presumably) be thrown in as a straight cube injection irrelevant to MMR.
Since matchmaking is based on MMR, it's going to actively rubber-band.
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
Just to clarify, MMR is just based on win/loss, correct? Whether you gain 8 cubes or 1, winning a match would affect your mmr the same, or no, or that we don't know?
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Since matchmaking is based on MMR, it's going to actively rubber-band.
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
Just to clarify, MMR is just based on win/loss, correct? Whether you gain 8 cubes or 1, winning a match would affect your mmr the same, or no, or that we don't know?
My understanding is that MMR takes into account cubes, but they have also indicated that players rank gain tends to lag MMR so I assume the system isn't perfect.
Since matchmaking is based on MMR, it's going to actively rubber-band.
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
Just to clarify, MMR is just based on win/loss, correct? Whether you gain 8 cubes or 1, winning a match would affect your mmr the same, or no, or that we don't know?
My understanding is that MMR takes into account cubes, but they have also indicated that players rank gain tends to lag MMR so I assume the system isn't perfect.
That seems a really weird way to do it. If they do make MMR based on cube gain, then that would effectively correlate rank to MMR. Also, that would seem to make balancing it hard, because I thought the whole idea behind MMR was to keep your win/loss rate close to 50%.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Since matchmaking is based on MMR, it's going to actively rubber-band.
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
Just to clarify, MMR is just based on win/loss, correct? Whether you gain 8 cubes or 1, winning a match would affect your mmr the same, or no, or that we don't know?
My understanding is that MMR takes into account cubes, but they have also indicated that players rank gain tends to lag MMR so I assume the system isn't perfect.
That seems a really weird way to do it. If they do make MMR based on cube gain, then that would effectively correlate rank to MMR. Also, that would seem to make balancing it hard, because I thought the whole idea behind MMR was to keep your win/loss rate close to 50%.
The idea behind MMR is to have you play against equally skilled opponents. Skill in Marvel Snap is, to a large degree, about cube management. Weighting MMR based on how many cubes you earn is a reasonable thing to do, the same way that you wouldn't rank somebody as the best poker player for having the highest hand win% if they were doing so by seeing way too many hands out and losing money.
Additionally, "wouldn't MMR just correlate to ranked" is a question you can ask about other games as well, and the thing is that MMR gains change based on how well-matched the game thinks you are and rank change doesn't. There is a reason games use hidden MMR in place of your publicly visible league rank in almost every game with a ladder in existence.
The idea behind MMR is to have you play against equally skilled opponents. Skill in Marvel Snap is, to a large degree, about cube management. Weighting MMR based on how many cubes you earn is a reasonable thing to do, the same way that you wouldn't rank somebody as the best poker player for having the highest hand win% if they were doing so by seeing way too many hands out and losing money.
If you equate skill to cube management, then it seems very weird to me that skill is directly tied to your opponents play. If I snap on a turn, and my opponent retreats, I get one cube. If I snap, and my opponent stays in, then playing my "awesome card" my opponent retreats next turn, I get two cubes. So, am I more skillful in the second scenario than the first? I played the exact same way in both scenarios?
This could be how they measure it, but then it seems weird that they have two systems (rank and MMR) that are correlated tightly? Like you've said that the devs said that MMR lags rank gain, which seems to indicate that they want MMR to reflect rank gain, so why not just use rank gain, if skill is so largely based on cubes. I have to assume that there is something else that the devs want to measure outside of cube management?
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Also the "can't face Infinite unless you're rank 70" is just wrong. Here in the mid-60s, I've definitely faced this month's Infinite card back. So unless they're giving it to bots, then they're lying.
All in all, the matchmaking is too damn arcane and they should just... fucking tell us how it actually works.
As I said, literally every game in existence has an MMR system as the "real" controller even with a rank system, and most of those games don't have cube management or whatever.
In any competitive game, your skill and ability to win is based on your opponent's play as well. That's what MMR is for. In theory, the system would shake out such that beating an opponent who has good cube management skills and thus higher MMR results in a relatively similar gain to beating out an opponent who has bad cube management skills and a lower MMR, the same way that me beating Kasparov would have a lot more impact on my FIDE rating than me beating my cats would.
As I said, literally every game in existence has an MMR system as the "real" controller even with a rank system, and most of those games don't have cube management or whatever.
In any competitive game, your skill and ability to win is based on your opponent's play as well. That's what MMR is for. In theory, the system would shake out such that beating an opponent who has good cube management skills and thus higher MMR results in a relatively similar gain to beating out an opponent who has bad cube management skills and a lower MMR, the same way that me beating Kasparov would have a lot more impact on my FIDE rating than me beating my cats would.
I agree that your ability to win is based on your opponent's play, but I don't see how your skill is based on your opponent's play? What I'm saying here is exactly that cube gain provides a weird dynamic that seems to get in the way of assigning skill. Or at least, seems like (to me) a backwards way to do it. I am familiar Elo ratings and FIDE ratings, and the thing it doesn't do is make a differences based on whether your opponent concedes on turn 5 or turn 10 (the closest analogy I can think of to something like retreating). Like I could understand if they factored in when you snapped in your games (snapping early and winning would indicate to me a higher skill than snapping later and winning), but your cube gain is something different still (again, depending on whether your opponent accepts your snap or not) which is not something that you have (much) control over.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
As I said, literally every game in existence has an MMR system as the "real" controller even with a rank system, and most of those games don't have cube management or whatever.
I don't know what you mean by this.
MtG:Arena (constructed) only puts certain ranks against each other and there are marked differences between the metas in each of Gold/Platinum/Diamond.
Higher MMR will force you into the next rank by beating down on all the fun stuff in Gold.
Which grants better season rewards.
In Snap, higher MMR seems to just give tougher opponents, stymying progress to season rewards and granting no benefits.
As I said, literally every game in existence has an MMR system as the "real" controller even with a rank system, and most of those games don't have cube management or whatever.
I don't know what you mean by this.
MtG:Arena (constructed) only puts certain ranks against each other and there are marked differences between the metas in each of Gold/Platinum/Diamond.
Higher MMR will force you into the next rank by beating down on all the fun stuff in Gold.
Which grants better season rewards.
In Snap, higher MMR seems to just give tougher opponents, stymying progress to season rewards and granting no benefits.
Arena matches based on MMR but generally uses rank as a boundary marker, the same as Snap does.
Posts
I am grinding my face into the rank floor playing a deck called "Cards I Want to Make Pretty." I'm pretty close to a fifth split on my Angela and I want her to look BEAUTIFUL.
Time to shake things up!
Here's an idea I just scrolled past on twitter.
*tries it*
Well at least we know it can beat itself!
Yep. I also cannot imagine playing a deck that relies on Magik with all the fucking Thanos running around.
Edit: 57 actually, forgot I ranked up a few days ago.
E:
Yeah, I don't want to be rude or anything and mixing up decks can definitely be successful but I do think there's a vast gulf between low ranks and like, 70-80+ in terms of how much you need to care about what decks are meta, especially right now where there are two clear top decks and both of them rely on pool 4+ cards.
Not everybody has Shuri tho and aero fucks over like, every deck lol
Aero loses to a lot of decks (including Thanos!) She's just very good against the specific decks she beats, and unlike Leech she lets you hook opponents in for all their cubes.
Right, spool32 is talking about being stuck at 35, where it's not like that.
Shuri Zero x3
Spider-Man Lockout x2
Discard
Thanos Lockjaw
Nimrod Destroy x2
Unknown x3
I mean, if you're going to walk me into saying the mean thing, if you're not at the ranks in which the meta decks are common and where you see a much wider variety of much weaker decks, you can either advance by playing a meta deck to get the free cube equity and/or you need to make a focused effort on improving gameplay and snap discipline. Shifting between non-meta decks is only going to be beneficial in the placebo sense that you might force yourself to take the game more seriously or learn the new deck instead of sticking to a non-functional script with the old one.
E: The third thing you can do is exploit bots harder, which admittedly a she hulk deck helps a lot with.
It's also randomly streaky. Sometimes I'll have a bunch of non Thanos games and then I'll be like "Did they all just wake up and decide to log on?"
Sorry, not my intention.
I just think that, ultimately I'm playing to have fun. And the least fun I've had in this game is putting together a meta deck and getting my ass handed to me repeatedly by mirror matches that I lose by a hair and meta decks meant to beat mine. I swear part of last season I was just getting matched up against anti-me decks or bizarre decks played by precogs who would play the weirdest shit to beat me.
At that point I had to do something different for a while or go crazy. Playing off-meta relieves a little bit of the pressure to win.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
I find that one hard to do even with Shuri if you're trying to win because you often need to hide your shit behind Armor/Cosmo.
The real way to win that is play Lizard and Polaris to different lanes and then retreat on 4.
I suppose you could go Goblins/Daredevil/X deck too.
Dissin' Your Fly Girl
Kill 'Em All
Go Kick Rocks
The Wong Trousers
Identical Hand Twin
Fisky Business
Even then, I can't get a handle on how the meta at my rank shifts so abruptly. Like I've been playing a mix of deadpool and surfer decks all season, and I've been just bouncing around rank 39-42ish, but just in the last day or so, I've "rocketed" up to rank 48, not changing my decks at all. (well I did try putting Bast in my deadpool deck, but that turned out rather dreadfully, so I took him out. Still thinking of how to use Bast well.)
Win a lot, and you see a whole bunch of optimised decks.
Lose a lot, you get bots, no matter what rank you are.
Rank also seems to divide players such that you can't play people who are more than 30-40 ranks above you.
It's noticeable as you won't see the infinite card back for the season until you get past 70, even if you are flooded with players who have the infinite card back for last season.
A developer has specifically mentioned that you will not match with infinite players until rank 70 - but that's the only actual rank floor I'm aware of
They don't show you the mmr - and they never will - so it's all kinda handwavey
You lose, you drop MMR, you play bots/less experienced players, you make eight cubes, you gain MMR, rinse/repeat.
It's just a matter of how long a timeframe the MMR is averaged across.
And the Devs said as much before with that sacrificial player to maintain MMR comment.
(I also open every bot game with 'Hello, I'm losing!' or as soon as I realise, because they are all always pity bots ending my losing streaks.
Never see them otherwise.
Had two in a row yesterday because I retreated from the first.)
It would also make absolutely no sense to make bots tie into the MMR system just to rubber band them back up whenever they lose; that defeats the purpose of an MMR system actually letting players rank drop if they are playing less skillfully. Even if pity bots did exist, they would (presumably) be thrown in as a straight cube injection irrelevant to MMR.
Just to clarify, MMR is just based on win/loss, correct? Whether you gain 8 cubes or 1, winning a match would affect your mmr the same, or no, or that we don't know?
My understanding is that MMR takes into account cubes, but they have also indicated that players rank gain tends to lag MMR so I assume the system isn't perfect.
That seems a really weird way to do it. If they do make MMR based on cube gain, then that would effectively correlate rank to MMR. Also, that would seem to make balancing it hard, because I thought the whole idea behind MMR was to keep your win/loss rate close to 50%.
The idea behind MMR is to have you play against equally skilled opponents. Skill in Marvel Snap is, to a large degree, about cube management. Weighting MMR based on how many cubes you earn is a reasonable thing to do, the same way that you wouldn't rank somebody as the best poker player for having the highest hand win% if they were doing so by seeing way too many hands out and losing money.
Additionally, "wouldn't MMR just correlate to ranked" is a question you can ask about other games as well, and the thing is that MMR gains change based on how well-matched the game thinks you are and rank change doesn't. There is a reason games use hidden MMR in place of your publicly visible league rank in almost every game with a ladder in existence.
If you equate skill to cube management, then it seems very weird to me that skill is directly tied to your opponents play. If I snap on a turn, and my opponent retreats, I get one cube. If I snap, and my opponent stays in, then playing my "awesome card" my opponent retreats next turn, I get two cubes. So, am I more skillful in the second scenario than the first? I played the exact same way in both scenarios?
This could be how they measure it, but then it seems weird that they have two systems (rank and MMR) that are correlated tightly? Like you've said that the devs said that MMR lags rank gain, which seems to indicate that they want MMR to reflect rank gain, so why not just use rank gain, if skill is so largely based on cubes. I have to assume that there is something else that the devs want to measure outside of cube management?
All in all, the matchmaking is too damn arcane and they should just... fucking tell us how it actually works.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
In any competitive game, your skill and ability to win is based on your opponent's play as well. That's what MMR is for. In theory, the system would shake out such that beating an opponent who has good cube management skills and thus higher MMR results in a relatively similar gain to beating out an opponent who has bad cube management skills and a lower MMR, the same way that me beating Kasparov would have a lot more impact on my FIDE rating than me beating my cats would.
Dukes of Hazmat
Whats Goin’ On
Que Sera Sera
Shuri UCBS
I agree that your ability to win is based on your opponent's play, but I don't see how your skill is based on your opponent's play? What I'm saying here is exactly that cube gain provides a weird dynamic that seems to get in the way of assigning skill. Or at least, seems like (to me) a backwards way to do it. I am familiar Elo ratings and FIDE ratings, and the thing it doesn't do is make a differences based on whether your opponent concedes on turn 5 or turn 10 (the closest analogy I can think of to something like retreating). Like I could understand if they factored in when you snapped in your games (snapping early and winning would indicate to me a higher skill than snapping later and winning), but your cube gain is something different still (again, depending on whether your opponent accepts your snap or not) which is not something that you have (much) control over.
UCBS?
I don't know what you mean by this.
MtG:Arena (constructed) only puts certain ranks against each other and there are marked differences between the metas in each of Gold/Platinum/Diamond.
Higher MMR will force you into the next rank by beating down on all the fun stuff in Gold.
Which grants better season rewards.
In Snap, higher MMR seems to just give tougher opponents, stymying progress to season rewards and granting no benefits.
Arena matches based on MMR but generally uses rank as a boundary marker, the same as Snap does.