RE: Arena
The game itself seems like it's put together well enough. The shortcuts have they have implemented to try and improve the flow of play for casual matches actually work pretty well, but if you want to play for real you can just turn full control mode on and it works just like MTGO does.
You can't currently buy packs at all, so everyones card pool is basically ass. Matches are boring as everyone is basically playing booster box sealed at this point, and in a tribal/creatures matter block it's not surprising that the massive over-statted dinosaurs are the best. I think the actual "best" deck you can build in this is a b/g midrange pile but it requires a pile of vraskas/contempts/jadelight rangers etc that 99% of people aren't going to have.
I think the idea behind their current economy is probably fine? The wildcards seem to flow pretty freely, even so much as you just get them randomly as rewards after a match. The vault thing took I think 10 packs to fill for me, and paid out half a dozen wildcards. The biggest issue right now is actually uncommons, as the packs they use online contain only 1-2 of them, so I'm constantly not able to have actual playsets of uncommons right now, where as the rares/mythics you tend tend to be more scarce.
Only real problem with Arena right now is the only way to play is blind best 1, which is fucking aids for a MTG format. It was aids in hearthstone too, but it's even worse here. They even have a modified mulligan system in place where it tries to always give you hands that are closest to your average number of lands in an opening hand. This fucks up deck building pretty badly, as currently the way the math works you basically run 22 lands or 26 lands, an no other number is is correct due to the way it handles the opening hand averages. It also massively favors aggressive strategies that can operate fully off 2-3 lands. It's a shitty fix to try and make a fucking awful match format slightly more tolerable.
