MTG: Arena

It definitely feels like a misguided attempt to bring Magic in to a digital format. Their demand that you mass open packs to try and build your collection is just asinine with a card pool as large as magic, especially given that close to 90% of cards in every sight are literal filler and will never be relevant to the game outside of draft.

The only silver lining is that draft is cheap, and a good way to build your collection if you are decent at it.
I've gone 'pseudo infinite' in competitive draft the last few weeks. I'm mostly breaking even, or maybe a tiny loss of gems for a bunch of packs. I think it's working out to under .25 cents a pack. I'm opening the vault 1 or 2 times a week as well. I've got most of the top tier decks made now, and probably spent $100-150 total (not sure, as I spaced it out over multiple smaller payments) in the last few months.

That said, I still think the economy is shit, especially for newer players. For every person doing as well/better than me, there's someone who can't even get 2 wins in draft. Plus, them giving out 1x of every kaldesh/aether revolt rare and 4x of the top played cards was a huge help. If they did the same thing for older sets when the game is live, that would help a lot, but I have a feeling they weren't planning to do that. Like, whenever you start an account, you get 1-2x of every rare from the 3-4 oldest sets in standard. This would help players catch up, and then when you are an 'enfranchised' player, it's a lot easier to keep up with new sets. I'm starting to save up wildcards for m19 myself, for example.

They need to let people pick a challenger deck to start building from is what they need, that's the only reasonable way to have F2P people be even semi-competitive.

How do you forfeit a game in arena?

Siddar said:

How do you forfeit a game in arena?

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Press 'esc' then select 'Concede Game".

Seriously though, this game in its beta has the same problem Heathstone developed a few years in. I'm playing in the only free, casual format at a relatively low level with starter decks and am running into nearly complete meta decks. That means I can't get win bonuses nearly at all and, thus, can't build my collection.

How do they not recognize this game is trash?

The correct thing to do is take all of the great graphical and gameplay upgrades they've made with MTG:A and slap them on the foundation of MTGO. Anything short of that will just be a massive failure.

They keep claiming their matchmaking will fix the f2p vs paid thing, but I'll believe it when I see it. Back when I was playing hearthstone you saw 99% meta decks at rank 25 constantly, and it never got any better, so I don't expect much will change here.

They need to let people pick a challenger deck to start with or the f2p crowd is just going to run in to a brick wall of paying players and ragequit, and a game like this lives and dies on its player base.

ronne said:

They keep claiming their matchmaking will fix the f2p vs paid thing, but I'll believe it when I see it. Back when I was playing hearthstone you saw 99% meta decks at rank 25 constantly, and it never got any better, so I don't expect much will change here.

They need to let people pick a challenger deck to start with or the f2p crowd is just going to run in to a brick wall of paying players and ragequit, and a game like this lives and dies on its player base.

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It just makes no fucking sense.

I played through my 3 daily quests in less than an hour, and after the initial packs opening (which yielded random shit not in the meta), I'm left to unfun gold grinding with sub-par decks. There is no motivation to play at all besides the fact that Magic has the best CCG rules of any game in the history of games. It is simply my love of the complexity of Magic interaction that has me even trying to stick around. If they can't get someone like me to want to stick around during the beta, they are in big trouble.

if you can't win in hearthstone without a meta deck then you probably just suck. Same thing with Magic.

bleedat said:

if you can't win in hearthstone without a meta deck then you probably just suck. Same thing with Magic.

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Okay resident internet forum badass, share your non-meta MTGA deck that you are currently using to crush everyone. We'll wait.

Pro tip: nowhere did I say I can't win single games, I'm saying that the reward structure makes the grind unbearable and that fact, combined with a prevalence of meta decks in lower ranks, makes MTGA suck.

ronne said:

They keep claiming their matchmaking will fix the f2p vs paid thing, but I'll believe it when I see it. Back when I was playing hearthstone you saw 99% meta decks at rank 25 constantly, and it never got any better, so I don't expect much will change here.

They need to let people pick a challenger deck to start with or the f2p crowd is just going to run in to a brick wall of paying players and ragequit, and a game like this lives and dies on its player base.

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hearthstone kind of fixed it by filtering your opponents at low ranks (I think pre 20?) by collection size as well as rank. I know when I go into wild at rank 25 or whatever, I only play some kid with newbie cards maybe once or twice in a 10 game set. Usually the matches are against people who clearly have large collections.

This seems like something MTGA should have copied day 1, but it being WotC, I would assume the feature would come sometime a few days short of never.

Probably 30- 40% of the games that I play on MTGA are against that mono-red deck with Rekindling Phoenix/RR2Chandra/Hazoret etc. that was all over the top 8 at the last pro tour. I don't have a great match up against it with the deck I'm playing but I can beat it. Ran into one guy playing a 185 card deck and a couple other interesting homebrews, but mostly it's pretty meta stuff. Makes sense though as people just want to win. I'm enjoying the game but the grind for ftp players will be real. You get rewards for up to 15 wins per day and if you don't have a competitive deck that's many hours of play to achieve. Even with a top deck that wins a lot you're still looking at two hours+ to get that many wins, and that's being optimistic assuming you don't get a lot of slow players.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the rewards for wins are front loaded and then diminishing. You get 250 coins for your first win of the day and 25 for the 15th.

Also, for anyone comparing to Hearthstone, the comparable gold sink is draft, but dailies in MTGA reward 500-750 and it takes 5000 to enter the only gold draft. Compared to Hearthstone which ranges from 40-100 (with the average being something like 55) for a 150 entry fee, the difference in daily reward gold is massive. I understand a MTGA draft gives you way more cards, but only getting one draft every 7 or so days as opposed to every 3 days really is a massive psychological deterrent. Grinding one mode non-stop for 7 days is just a drag.

Angerz said:

hearthstone kind of fixed it by filtering your opponents at low ranks (I think pre 20?) by collection size as well as rank. I know when I go into wild at rank 25 or whatever, I only play some kid with newbie cards maybe once or twice in a 10 game set. Usually the matches are against people who clearly have large collections.

This seems like something MTGA should have copied day 1, but it being WotC, I would assume the feature would come sometime a few days short of never.

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Comparing WotC to Blizzard when it come to video game design is like comparing artwork your kid did to a masterwork painting.

Remember all the crap WotC shoveled out prior to Arena was early 90s quality being release in 2010 era.

More wipes pending. Actual live launch is uhhh, nebulous. Given their rate of progress and how much work it still needs I'm skeptical of it being this year even.

Just in case you thought this game wasn't complete trash, the Thursday update with Core 2019 completely fucked gameplay. Everything takes a ridiculous amount of time, it feels like you're playing on a dial-up connection, and to top it off there are huge bugs including one where you can't target yourself for draw spells.