Agreed, MTGA's accessibility is incredible. If you're just playing the constructed ladder it will match you up against people with "similarly powerful decks" whatever that means. I think it goes based on the number of rares/mythics in your deck, which is a decent enough guideline until people figure out the actual equation and exploit it. I've gotten decent games even with stuff like tokens decks. The rock deck I'm making with all the rares/mythics I have finds similarly powerful decks to play against as well so it seems like they're doing that pretty well.
With the card economy as nice as it is, I don't see myself ever buying an online card again from MTGO (although I quit that a long time ago).
The average playskill is laughable, if you do guilds drafts (fun set btw) you'll have a pretty easy time going infinite. Might be people getting used to the client and how clicking once can skip your main phase or whatever, but for now it's "profitable."
Also, I'll say the auto-tap lands thing is generally good. I use it out of laziness and it only screws up how I'd want to tap once every few games, and usually not in a game losing way.
careful with the autotap though, but once you know how it works you can still manually tap. it wont use colorless special lands otherwise or tap you out of colors. running a couple of duals makes it very convenient though.
Got tired of Legacy and you like drafts? Try my Paupercube What?
I've started playing Arena a bit recently since drafting paper doesn't consistently work with my schedule and I hate MTGO.
Man, this program is...very "in beta".
I get disconnected at the end of probably 95% of my games. I googled the problem and it seems I can fix it by fucking with the ports on my router but I'd really rather not potentially compromise my security to try to get Arena to be mildly less annoying. Also, it seems that the Arena development team's stance on the issue is that it's client-side and not on their end, so all the complaints people have been submitting have met with polite corporate "fuck you"s. That doesn't give me a lot of hope for it going forward, when real bugs start cropping up.
Also, it's really irritating that there doesn't seem to be a way to disable the auto-turn-pass feature, which makes it incredibly obvious when one player has an instant. Making decisions about whether to play around or into certain spells is now super easy because there will be a giant glowing neon sign that says, "I HAVE A RESPONSE" whenever your opponent fails to breeze through the steps and phases of their turn. There's basically no point to holding mana up and/or not running out your entire hand if you don't have an instant unless you're trying to dodge mass removal or something.
It does seem to be F2P friendly, at least relative to Hearthstone, but unlike that game you can't dust cards you don't want to make cards you do and the card pool is bigger, so making the decks you want is actually a bigger grind. If you made the same mistake I did and built a Standard deck that's now off-meta, you're kind of SOL because getting the rare/mythic wildcards is a sloooooooow process. Drafting lets you keep the cards (nice!) but drafting without paying money for at least an initial stockpile of gems is basically impossible (boo!) and the draft robots seem to have sub-Bestiaire level AI and avoid Boros and Dimir like the plague, meaning 80+% of your opponents are on one of those two decks (super boo!).
I haven't been impressed so far and I'm waffling on whether I want to keep going with it or pick up Gwent or Eternal instead. It does look pretty, though.
Against my better judgement, I started playing Arena this weekend. It feels kinda nostalgic to build shitty decks to play against other shitty decks.
That said, the economy is pretty ass and their solution to the Vault being shit is hiding it being shit (unless you look up the current value in your log - good job, you incompetent chucklefucks). And boy, this whole Vault thing is ass:
90 mythics = 1 mythic wildcard payout. Good riddance.Mythic — 1.1%
Rare — 0.5%
Uncommon — 0.3%
Common — 0.1%
Opening the Vault requires getting duplicates through packs/drafting: 900 common, 300 uncommon, 180 rare, or 90 mythic rares duplicates. Duplicates progress define value of 1 mythic = 2 rares = 3.3 uncommon = 10 common duplicate cards. Therefore, the value of a single Vault with 1 mythic, 2 rare and 3 uncommon wildcards is equal to 3 mythic wildcards. That way a single wildcard of any rarity equals 30 duplicates of the same rarity.
I might play it for a while for the novelty of it, but anybody who spends money on this (who isn't a content creator) is insane. Burning money is probably more profitable than this. Alot of people are in for a rude awakening sooner or later.
Throughout the entirety of closed Beta, they made absolutely ZERO attempts to improve the economy. All of their economy tweaks were designed to keep the same acquisition rates, and just present them in different ways that they hoped wouldn't "feel as bad". They are locked in on the card acquisition rates, and they are not going to change them.
With all of the new players on MTGA I'm surprised all of you are having such a hard time with staying at least even while drafting. If you don't have a bomb you can force dimir and win pretty easy. With daily gold payouts you can pretty easily keep to ~1 draft/day (where you get to keep all your drafted cards!) without ever putting money in. In the future when new players aren't so abundant I'm betting it will be much harder, but right now you get to just farm these noobs.
As for the economy, I guess I'm not that huge into standard so I'm happy with my 1 deck that's about 80% of where I want it to be in terms of card selection. I could finish it, but I'm not willing to waste rare wildcards on the manabase when I only lose like 1 in 20 games because of it. I haven't gotten to play Abzan in modern/legacy in a long time and it's pretty great in standard, so it's a lot of fun.
If you compare the amount of money it takes to build a deck here with MTGO I'm guessing MTGA wins by far.
This is probably my favorite part of MTGA. You can click on a phase to have it auto yield for that phase, or hit control to bluff you have a response to something. It's so underused that you can so very easily mindgame people that you do have a spell. I'm guessing most opponents won't really notice, but for those who do it will absolutely make them misplay around your bluffed card (holding space auto-passes priority so you can bluff not having a card if you want as well).
What annoys me the most is the inconsistency of the phase auto-passing.
On MODO you set up your stops, and after some time, you get the flow of it and get to play without thinking too much.
On Arena, the phases auto-pass following certain fixed rules, but if you're not paying attention you'll skip phases and turns because you didn't realize you had no instants in hand.
After briefly stabilizing last week, a complete MTGO collection dropped another $1000 this week. That's $7000 total over the last month. Which is like, a lot. Seems to be concentrated in Vintage/Legacy staples at this point, but who knows if that will continue or not. "Arena Modern" is supposed to debut next year at rotation, and they have cards at least back through one of the Innistrad's already programmed (this is known from the Beta), so who knows what the future holds.
In other, related news, they also just updated the interface for MTGO, so maybe they're serious about this whole "double program" thing, at least for now. It's a pretty standard WOTC style mess.
I suspect thats WOTC leaving a backdoor in case Arena tanks. It's looking good so far (the community seems to like it and the pros do as well) but WOTC has an at best mediocre track record when it comes to digital anything really so who knows.
The writing is on the wall for MTGO, may as well not hold onto any cards in MTGO if you don't absolutely have to. Standard has a lot of hype behind it plus it's a pro tour format (Arena isn't quite there yet, although Sam Black has mentioned wanting to test for the pro tour on Arena)
What is happening with the masterpiece series in MTG Arena? Are these included or totally omitted? Maybe they will add them later?
Also, did WOTC ever explain why they dont include complete packs? 15 cards per pack...
Grinding in this game feels terrible.
Although there are bugs to work out the platform shows promise. If only MTGO was like this in some capacity instead of the shit show it is now.
I could see WOTC using the money from this game to create all the cards for MTGO and then and only then would they switch MTGO to this style of game play. So we're talking like 1-2 years depending on how committed they are.
Also, they really need better game designers. The UX just seems inferior to hearthstone. UX is the main thing blizz tends to get right and it's consistent throughout their games. I dont know how else to describe it but MTG Arena seems flat and lifeless.
Last edited by apple713; 10-30-2018 at 07:27 AM.
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why cards are so expensive...hoarders
This is the perfect time to buy into MTGO. They arn't going to kill MTGO and MTG arena will NEVER replace MTGO. What'll happen is that people will sell out of MTGO move to MTG arena. Then once WOTC is able to improve the interface for MTGO they will and ppl will move back to it. MTGO is the closest thing to irl mtg that will ever happen. Of course the interface is garbage but i'm referring to the things like trading and packs actually containing 15 cards.
Play 4 Card Blind!
Currently Playing
Legacy: Dark Depths
EDH: 5-Color Hermit Druid
Currently Brewing: [Deck] Sadistic Sacrament / Chalice NO Eldrazi
why cards are so expensive...hoarders
For quite a long time MTGO was the ONLY choice you had. That has changed and I can see that plenty of players moving to MTGA due to its superior interface, more players and evasion of secondary market insanity. For Legacy and Vintage you wont have many alternatives to MTGO, but these formats aside, I have a tough time justifying to go for MTGO tbh
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I do agree with Lemnear.
If hearthstone has so much sucess, it's due to its good interface.
MTGA has the good interface that makes everything easier for people and this is the Platform they will promote.
At one point in time, MTGO will go away. Not yet, but it's nearly sure...
Here's the thing though. WotC doesn't actually decide when MTGO will end. It will end, regardless of what WotC does, once the major bot chains decide it's a losing proposition.
I agree that resources was the issue. MTGA helps with that because it is a significantly smaller project to undertake than MTGO, (lower startup costs). Additionally, it will generate cash flows while they finish developing. There are tons of cards they need to program into MTGO with the MTGA code and they can work on it while MTGA is generating cash flows.
I dont see the F2P model as something ideal for competitive magic. I see MTGA catering to a casual crowd and MTGO, after its been remade, taking over.
Play 4 Card Blind!
Currently Playing
Legacy: Dark Depths
EDH: 5-Color Hermit Druid
Currently Brewing: [Deck] Sadistic Sacrament / Chalice NO Eldrazi
why cards are so expensive...hoarders
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