Who had on the arena sweepstake 'after our update you are now locked out of your account and we do not care' ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/...irely_useless/
Alchemy is still going well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/co...e_digitalonly/
You're right, but in fairness to him, Arena is succeeding in that, whether we like it or not.
I started playing Arena, idk, a week ago, and it feels like a substantially different game from real MtG. And some amount of fun is being had, though I can't say I'm interested in spending any money on it at this juncture.
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
I know that MaRo makes the claim that players feedback is different from wHaT wE tHiNk iT iS but I would like some player facing data to confirm that apart from Blogatog posts. The issue to leave Historic as-is (or as-was, whatever) is one of the biggest current issues on the Arena Bugs and Suggestions page and their social media is being swamped by players that hate it.
I get that message boards don't necessarily represent the majority but watching the occasional "whee I love Alchemy" posts get ratioed, and my own personal experience of much longer queue times in Historic Brawl, I'm not sure what else to assume except that people aren't really feeling it.
I think, certainly from my perspective what I think will be the ultimate decider is how frequent the changes to alchemized cards will be and how much they screw decks. Let's face it, wildcards in Arena have a substantial cost in time or money. This is not heartstone where there are no land cards and top rarities are restricted to either 1 or 2 of each card. This is MTG where a manabase can set you back 20 rares. So, when faced with a decision on how to use my wildcards, do I create a deck that is based on a certain card that, if the deck proves sufficiently popular, will be nerfed? This is a real concern here. Last thing they want is to empty Arena from all the players that have to make that type of choices to only keep those with money or time to spend. The MTGO'zation of Arena is not what they want, but it is very likely to be what they will get with this scheme.
One thing is for certain, looking at this year's festive schedule, they are going to push alchemy like hell, which means they are not about to reverse course on it.
I will say that it's really, really, really good that none of the new Alchemical swills is legal in Legacy.
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
Well, yeah, I mean - how do you implement perpetual effects in Legacy, or conjuring cards, or any of it at all?
I think the thing that's bugging me the most is that they don't even seem to think about *why* digital TCGs do this kind of randomization. They found out early in Hearthstone that when you take drawing land out of the equation your games play out very similarly. The RNG is there because they needed a way to keep a similar level of randomization, while having an alternative to the "draw land and play it" mana system of MTG. Since a ton of digital TCGs can skirt the mana issue in this way, they implement it in similar ways.
Alchemy just adds one more layer of RNG on top of that so you have all of the feelbads of random chance going one player's way and none of the upside involved in introducing that randomness. Imagine getting fucked on land while your opponent is just getting pure gas off of Tome of the Infinite in addition to just drawing normally. It's a very stupid situation to be in, and it ought to be opt-in across formats, not just jammed in because "all digital tcgs are doing it". Like if they wanted to go whole-hog with it they should have just had an Alchemy format that was also landless; it'd be derivative as hell, but it'd be honest, and maybe even tolerable.
Is it me or has arena been even buggier since they introduced alchemy?
I did their stupid sealed event just to drop out because my Jadar refused to make tokens after it did in the first game.
I've seldom had stability issues with the client. "Works on my machine", lel
I think adding named cards to a deck that's already Red is probably not the worst thing to play around, I mean you can plan for exactly what the card does and it's doing something Red already does. Some of these other effects where you're tutoring for random outside effects are more damaging to the game in terms of reasonably prepping for counterplay. Neither player really knows what Tome is gonna do, it could whiff horribly or give the player a huge advantage. The problem is it's being decided by luck, it's always going to roll in favor of one player and against the other. It's not a power level concern, it's just a stupid mechanic in a game that's already got enough rng.
That's why I keep comparing it to Mario Party/Mario Kart; it could be a banana peel or it could be a blue shell (and lol dammit, you're only supposed to get blue shells when you're behind, so it's worse than that) but whatever it is, neither player really gets to plan around it, you can either interact with Tome itself or you can't. Whatever pops out is whatever pops out, and someone's gonna feel bad, and we already know that that's shitty gameplay from all the other digital tcgs that tried to do things that way, so why Magic wants to replicate it makes no sense.
I think the opposite is true here and Magic's inherent randomness doesn't need another layer on top to "keep things interesting". We have to draw mana sources where most digital games do not; these other games can build decks that are pure gas. There's no mana screw in LoR or Hearthstone and mana denial is also near unplayable or non-existent, and with games like Hearthstone you also have hero powers which guarantee you'll at least be doing something on turn 2. Those games have to spam random effects in order to up the variance or else your matchups are essentially already decides.
Magic doesn't need this shit to keep the variance at an acceptable level, but the Arena devs either don't know that or don't care.
The difference is that Magic is (was) designed around random draws but deterministic effects.
That is just the mechanics of how card games work.
Unless the game is designed for "play this card and lets see what RNG does with it" most players are going to have a bad time.
The only players who enjoy true randomness are the ones that are so bad they can't win consistently without RNG.
On that note has anyone played the valve digital TCG Artifact?
The original version had a bit too much RNG but was pretty solid.
Sadly people were throwing a fit because they expected a freemium game and not something like MTGO.
It also didn't lend itself to being easily watchable on Twitch.
A few devs actually redid the game a while ago which was imo much better but I still kind of lost interest.
At this point I'm close to giving it another try.
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
I don't like your post.
First of all don't disseminate the "Magic players are people of bad hygiene standards" meme, it stopped being funny two decades ago and you're just gratuitously rude.
There are mandatory face masks since the covid outbreak, so you shouldn't be able to discern any mouth-breather even if they'd try to mouth-breathe you to death. Not to mention that it's not really empathetic to mock someone's health issue.
Also, unless you are an octogenarian or severely immunocompromised, there's not much reason for your germophobia, I guess you won't die from omicron induced runny nose. And there are several safe and working vaccines available to boost your antibodies, too.
Alright, before I need to start editing and/or deleting posts, lets leave it there. Thanks.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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