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I began playing MTGO this summer, had for a long time believed that everything about it would be bad and that i would not like it. After playing for a couple of months i must say i love it. Some small annoyances, but still fewer than playing in paper :)
My questions are:
Why do you not play MTGO?
Have you tried? And if not, why not?
Never wanted toto put money into a digital product when iI could just buy paper.
This :smile:Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Same. As long as i have a community to play (And while i love eternal formats, i still love to draft, so yes i can find paper events), i won't put money into it (and anyway, MTGA is free to play).
I have several Vintage decks but no Legacy decks on MTGO. I'm 2-5 cards away from several Legacy decks, but regardless of what those few cards are, they're frequently far more expensive than the rest of the deck. My Miracles deck simply doesn't have 5 of its best cards in the sideboard because I don't want to pay for them.
Playing a match of Vintage on MTGO is something I need to set aside an hour for. Frequently, I'll wait five to ten minutes just to get paired (My record is dropping out of the queue after 32 minutes). If I play more than a match or two at a time, I start making mistakes because I'm so bored that I've fired up a movie in another window or even started cooking dinner in the other room. At least in real life, I can get some amount of entertainment value talking to the people around me, or to my opponent. At the very least, I can see that they're alive and at the table. When I'm waiting on MTGO, I don't know if my opponent is thinking, if they've left the computer, or if I've been disconnected.
When I play MTGO, it's because I already "own" the cards and I might as well. When I don't play MTGO, it's because I've found something better to do, which is often as little as watching episodes of The Office for the fifth time this year.
I only like Chaos Orb magic
I had several Modern decks, 1 Legacy deck, and 1 Vintage deck when I sold out. My main complaints were:
1. No security for accounts. You literally only need a password to empty an account and from all that I could tell, there's no route for getting back your collection since there didn't appear to be any records of trades or anything. I had a few thousand dollars on there and wasn't comfortable leaving it without even 2-step authentication.
2. Interface. I'm sure I don't need to tell most people on here, but the interface is atrocious. Not only were there tons of bugs in the software that could make you lose games, it felt like actual work to just play the game normally. Hearthstone for years had a much simpler and more effective visual display for the game that wasn't prone to bugs everywhere, and now MTG Arena is doing a pretty good job at it as well.
3. Incompetence. Cavern of Souls didn't work as stated for literal months. One deck in Standard for a while won by creating a bug that timed out your opponent because they couldn't select an acceptable option (and if you time out of a game completely on there you insta-lose the match). Submitting support tickets to get your entry pool back is almost as bad as just living with the loss. Also, incompetence in putting Legacy cards in the game that existed in paper for months without putting them on MTGO.
4. Price. I bought in at the beginning of Modern, which fueled most of the main archetypes and was pretty cheap. I was also able to almost go infinite drafting Vintage Masters so accumulated some eternal cards, but if I wanted to try out anything other than exactly what I had the prices for digital cards were still absurd. Wastelands were something like $75-100 each when I was on there, effectively pricing me out of any decks that played them. I can semi-justify paying ridiculous prices for a physical card that is on the reserved list, since that is an object that I can both play with or use however I like (I've painted on some, am planning to frame a few others, etc.). Digital objects should just not be that expensive. I never got into the expensive hat thing in TF2 or expensive costumes in DOTA. Digital objects shouldn't be that rare.
5. No ranked ladder or way to earn anything for free. Hearthstone nailed it with their daily quests (which MTGA is copying), you want to reward people for spending time in your client. Paying for every event that has a reward after already owning the requisite $1,000 deck is absurd. The only thing you could do with your complete Legacy/Vintage deck for free was unranked zone which usually had people on mono-color tribal. Either make me pay to play in tournaments, or make me pay to own the deck and let me join tournaments for free, but not both.
MTG Arena solved a lot of these problems for me. The interface is infinitely better, they have free rewards for playing daily, the economy is reasonable and you'll never have to pay insane prices for a chase mythic card. It doesn't have eternal formats, and that sucks, but the current standard format with the new guilds set is actually pretty entertaining, and so is drafting.
i think it is stupid virtual cards *CAN* be expensive like its paper counterparts. it's not like they are going to run out of these virtual cards. :rolleyes:
i can play for free with any virtual card i want on xmage.
Mac
The parallel collection aspect is a dealbreaker. Having thousands tied up in paper Magic doesn't make me want to spend even more money to play the same game in an online version, no matter how convenient or competitive it can be. The business model is a relic of the era of the Dotcom bubble; if it released four years later, post World of Warcraft, it might have had a more palatable payment, like a $30-$40 a month subscription fee or something.
But instead we have "digital objects" and they're here to stay both due to inertia and the fact that there are enough degen whales who will pay shit tons of money to draft/play with electronic cards.
Arena doesn't seem much better. The sets/formats all suck and it's only "free" if you enjoy playing shitty Standard decks for 3 hours a day.
Interesting that money were such a big thing, i guess it's hard for wizards to do anything about that now without upsetting people who see their online collections as something that has monetary value. But i sure can understand the argument if you are currently building your paper collection it feels bad to choose between an underground sea and MTGO. I maybe spent about 500-600$ on mtgo and see it as a sunk cost that will be a pretty low monthly fee if i continue playing for a couple of years, i try to see my paper collection the same way as i'm not in it for the money. Recent price-development makes that harder tho.
I don't actually know whats supposed to be wrong with the in-game interface, maybe a bit sluggish some times? Outside of games it feels like much could be done to make some things smoother tho. I definitely prefer the graphics over the wobbling animations of Arena but that might be age related :)
I've only experienced one small bug so far and that was in the deck builder, and i think the process for reimbursement where quite pain free.
Mac user.
No Mac support, no money to WotC for MTGO. Looks like their goofy Magic Arena is headed down the same pathway as well. PC or nothing. :(
I tried because Pauper support is better online.
Never got to the phase where I felt like I was playing my opponent's rather than wrestling to get the client to do what I wanted.
It’s difficult for me to justify paying that much money for something of which I already own a tangle version.
I used to be in the camp of "it's too much money to justify spending on digital cards when I already own the cards in paper" but then I got a job (about ~2 years ago) that afforded me a lot of disposable income and spending a few thousand on MODO to build every deck I wanted to play didn't seem like such a big deal anymore. Once I bought in, I got good enough playing Leagues and Challenges that I accumulated enough tickets to "go infinite" after the initial buy-in and I haven't spent any real money on MODO in a long while. It's convenient and fun to be able to play serious Legacy matches against people at any time of the day, and the Challenges provide a real tournament-like feel that I can't get very often with Legacy IRL (outside of the yearly GP and the few SCG Opens/Classics I manage to attend).
laptop died.
not going to buy a computer just for magic, when i can spend that money on magic.
work mac.
I play for the fun and interaction between people irl, and those two things are not available on MTGO. And spending (more) money on an already expensive hobby is a no go for me.