MTG thread

Horseshoe Crab is the best card in Masters 25. It is the way and the light.

Hahahaha, foreign MTG pages can't even avoid leaking their own April Fools pages early.

Amusing "Jace re-banned in modern"

Aaand WotC already posted and are fixing it

Some changes that actually support LGSs coming with dominaria:

-Preordered Booster Boxes can be handed out at the end of the prerelease weekend, instead of having to wait for release, but only at WPN locations. Pretty handy for folks that have a decent sized event the saturday after set launch.
-The buy-a-box Promo is no longer available in booster packs, and only exists as a Buy-a-Box purchase. So if you want 6CMC Lightning Helix Enablers, you've gotta buy a box (or go to to TCGPlayer and pick them up for $3 as singles).

Kuro said:

Preordered Booster Boxes can be handed out at the end of the prerelease weekend, instead of having to wait for release, but only at WPN locations. Pretty handy for folks that have a decent sized event the saturday after set launch.

Click to expand...

Very nice change

Cards being exclusive to buy-a-box is so fucking hilariously dangerous for the game I can't even begin to comprehend why they would do such a thing. Like holy shit, they misstep even slightly here and print something even approaching constructed playable in to this kind of a slot and standard is hyper-fucked.

Does no one remember the shitfest that was Nalathni Dragon? There's a fuckin reason they haven't done anything like that since 94.

Theoretically, the buy a box card is ~three times the supply of any given mythic in a set. I assume, as we saw with Rabblemaster, if the buy-a-box promo is a strong card it will "mysteriously" find its way off store back-shelves and onto tcgplayer/ebay en masse.

You could pull Rabblemaster in packs though so there were other avenues to acquire it. This card exists only as the promo version.

That also means there is a standard legal card that exists only in foil, which I'm sure won't cause problems at all

How's that for a money draft?

Arena update is out. Ixalan + Amonkhet block constructed now. Still blind best of 1 games, so that sucks dick.

Whole thing is a clown show right now because no one has any cards, so it's just a bunch of pre-con garbage + 4 crafted removal spells slapping each other.

The servers are already back up? Wow. They said they'd be down for 8ish hours.

They are technically up, but the lag is so bad right now you're unlikely to be able to actually finish a match.

Since the NDA is officially dropped.. The changes to the wildcard vault are ridiculous. Removing mythic wildcards from the vault is dumb. Its like they purposefully misconstrued the community's request. A monkey paw style wish.
Everyone was saying the wildcard ratios were out of whack, uncommon and rares were the real bottleneck, and then to solve that they just removed most of the mythic wildcards you get.. feelsbadman

Oh, and to hide the fact they slowed down everyone's ability to make a real deck, they gave all the streamers extra packs! People watching them will think it looks fine, when thats not what everyone else goes through.

The economy is just pure ass rape as it stands currently with 0 ability to actually acquire any mythics other than pray you roll wildcards from packs instead of your 4th copy of star of extinction.

Yea, there's a bit of a riot on the beta forums over it, and rightfully so. I just hope it gets through to whichever dumb fuck manager made that decision.

Just go to add a card to your deck that you don't own, and it'll ask if you want to convert a wildcard (of the same rarity) into that card.
So, if you have 1x of a card and you go to add a 2nd to your deck, it'll give you that prompt. Alternatively, if you have 'unowned' cards turned on in the filter, it'll show cards you don't have even 1 copy of.

Well, they also just added a lot of stuff, specifically Amonkhet block and 10 preconstructed decks to start with, when the NDA was lifted today. I haven't had much time to play since then.
Before today, it was just Ixlan/Rivals available, and the games were kind of boring due to the format. Not many people had significant collections at lower ranks, so you just grinded games with some kind of budget aggro-ish deck. I'd play a few to finish the daily quests, then log off. It was more about grinding cards then anything.

Now, they have slowed down the grinding a bit. Technically, you get more/same overall cards, but it's more random single cards and boosters. They heavily reduced how many mythic wildcards you got, which you could change into any mythic you wanted. It was their version of 'dusting'. It's up to more random chance now. That creates a huge bottleneck towards getting specific mythics that you might need now, and the forums are having a huge argument over it. It was really, REALLY stupid how they announced it, too. "Based on your feedback..." It was like they purposefully ignored the whole community's actual feedback on the economy for the last few months and acted like we asked for this when it's practically the opposite of what everyone said.

As for the program itself, it's great. It's a smooth and polished looking form of magic. There are a few quirks you have to get used to (ex:manually tapping your mana before casting a spell, when the colors might be important) and of course some bugs (it's still relatively early in beta, overall) but the actual gameplay is generally very solid. Which makes these other issues even more frustrating. They could literally, FINALLY, have the perfect digital ccg if they didn't seem to be trying to shoe horn their outdated booster pack model that doesn't work as well for modern digital ccgs.

I still am of the opinion that they could give cards away very generously, to the point that even a casual player can practically complete a set within 3 months without spending much, get a huge playerbase and then charge for alternate arts, avatars, foils, special animations, skins, etc.. the way games like League/DOTA2/etc.. do, and make a killing. But, clearly the execs over there can't see the long term money in that route or think they'll make more trying to push packs on people.

Arena is gonna be stillborn unless they really, really fix the economy. Current implementation is a fucking joke.