MTG Salvation

Quote from AutobotVu »

spent prob 500-600 bucks this month lol but least i can make any deck i want in standard irl that would get me 1-2 deck lol its alot cheaper than irl and i can play with lots pro players without spending a ***** ton.

Since i can make any type standard i want I get more experience playing standard format.
I am usually a draft sealed player but this magic mythic event has turned me into a standard player.

Unless you are playing best of three it's really not worth it to buy in. I didn't spend 600 dollars like you did, but I have put down at least 200 dollars into the game and the issue is that the shuffler sucks, the rare wild card slog makes changing out of a bad decision horrible, and you end up playing people who care nothing about having fun and only want to play number games with burn or rush, along with control freaks. I mean, if that is fun for someone than all the more power to them, but no amount of money is going to make the experience better. Someone could literally have every card in the format in a playset and they will just get pidgeonholed into the same crappy position everyone else is in.

I've had more fun in Shadowverse and Force of Will than MtG and it's been this way for the past year at the very least. At this point I'm about to say MtG is a lost cause and just move on with my life.

Quote from cfusionpm »

I chose to spend a good chunk of money initially (the $99 gems pack) so I could build a tiered competitive deck. I have since used iterations of that deck to hit daily goals and grind the ladder, earning myself nearly 100k in gold along the way. I used 75k of that gold when RNA was released to get more cards and craft more decks. I don't intend on spending anything else moving forward, and I think that original purchase was a great help setting me on my path to "real" decks.

Do you play traditional or best of one? I think best of one is a mistake, but it looks like they are really going to try aiming for it.

My grinding deck at the moment is guild gates which can be built super budget without rare lands and still function. At least assuming plaza of harmony is uncommon. I think gruul is a hard match up for it due to all the power it can land, but after tweaks I've killed evd. Teferi decks with it easily so that is evidence in your favor.

Are you planning on playing that one deck forever? You keep saying it costed you 65 dollars, but the truth is that it didn't cost you 65 dollars: It costed you 65 dollars plus all the hours you spent grinding to get the base cards that you just showed in your own card pool, where as I can literally get the cards for the decks I want in paper, sell them via card sphere, and change over to any deck I want for the same or less. Then, when rotation happens you are starting over spending even more time and money than a person playing in paper would since you can not reclaim money and time invested in your prior standard.

I mean, you can spend all day pointing at your figure and in isolation it certainly can look cheaper, but it really isn't. Not at the levels wizards has been printing cards the last few years. Maybe if we were in Scars block times I could possibly see Arena being a bit cheaper, but at the end of the day it's a loot box style game that uses the drip feed method to encourage the purchasing of packs and stealths in the extra costs.

I know the game is expensive and I still play it so unless there is a really big point that is being made here I don't see what the use is in continuing for pages on end.

Actually, misfiring on rare wild cards is very bad. Remember, you only get one awarded every 5.75ish packs. Mythics are far worse, but they changed the mythic designs so that we are not looking at last standard with the scarab god. I made a mistake in my morning post on the lands: half of the lands in this case is half of those available from allegiance. This does not account for the check lands, so you lose 8 to 11 rare wild cards from the mana base right away.

I'm not sure where you are getting cheaper from. Things are pointing to being more expensive. The human brain has trouble with percentile chances and rationalizing them. I dont know if someone did the footwork on this yet and will need to look over the reddit again.

Quote from JaishivaJai »

Don't know if you missed my first response to you. If it would take you $100 in packs to build my deck on Arena, THAT'S STILL LESS THAN HALF THE COST OF BUILDING MY DECK IN PAPER!

Time is not money when that time is allotted for hobbies/recreation. The gold I get is through time I would have spent playing paper Magic, so actually it's just gravy on top of being able to play for free.

Right, if you enjoy the journey than it's fine. Also, I agree that if your deck is above a certain cost arena would make it cheaper, but for those who build mono color decks that are sub 100 dollars and make use of a lot of rares, that price is still higher than the cost in paper. Plus, it's not apples to oranges on the price per pack. If it takes exactly 100 dollars worth of packs to get all the rares needed to buy your deck, are you accounting for a percentage of those rare wild cards being used on the wrong cards? That's the part that really makes things interesting and throws a wrench in just about any direct comparison scheme. I can sell out of a bad choice in paper. I can't do that in arena.

Also, since I had the money to experiment I threw down 100 dollars on 90 packs of Allegiance. My numbers were a bit off as it looks like you get a few more rare wild cards than before. I got 9 guaranteed rare wild cards, got an extra rare wild card once per every 9-11 packs that just spawned out of the aether, and then I hit the vault, which was unexpected. I don't think the vault normally gets hit from the 90 packs and that adds a bunch of rare wild cards.

So from 90 packs I ultimately ended up with 26 rare wild cards due to the vault. At that volume of packs I ended up hitting 6 different rare lands for dual colors and I was able to get about 1/2 the rares needed for esper heroes: A three color deck that is a pretty good example of a typical Tier 1 deck in terms of rare usage. I'm not sure of the math on the percentage chance of hitting a card you need since a lot of it probably needs set up on an excel sheet.

But in paper I'm not buying packs. I buy the singles I need after playtest and am done. I have to spend at least 100 to 150 on packs alone to get most of the cards needed for a deck and that is assuming I bought the lands already.

Also, where are you getting draft is free on arena? You are paying 5k gold or gems for it. Aka, you are paying with time or money, and time is money.

I agree that you can have a much better experience with arena when you spend cards wisely and you will get more out of your decisions, but the base cost to achieve it is roughly the same mathematically. It's the same trick that advertisers used to do by providing rewards for posting advertisements on message boards.

Quote from JaishivaJai »

Here is direct proof that Arena is much cheaper.

Here's my current arena list, plugged into tappedout.net in order to find it's price.

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/06-02-19-auq-gruul-aggro/?cb=1549474864

Well well, look at that, $250 to $280 to buy one deck in paper! Surely I must have spent hundreds of dollars to get this deck because Arena CERTAINLY isn't cheaper right?

Oh wait, I've spent $65 to DRAFT (total expenditures ever on Arena) which ended up getting me enough cards for my deck. Not only that, I have another standard deck that is even more expensive.

Let's compare to paper Magic shall we? $65 dollars will get me about 4.3 paper drafts. with those 4.3 drafts I would have opened 13 packs, but let's be generous and say it's 20 packs because I'm good at drafting and should win some prizes occasionally. Do you truly believe I would have come EVEN CLOSE to building a standard deck by doing that?

"Well don't draft, just by the singles you need in paper!" Okay, so that $65 barely buys me my land base plus one Gruull spellbreaker.

If you can't make a standard deck on Arena for cheaper then paper, you must REALLY make A METRIC TON of mistakes when spending your wildcards. I mean even if you only get half of your wildcard expenditures correct, Arena STILL ends up being cheaper then paper Magic.

So there's my direct proof that Arena is much cheaper in fact. Where's your direct proof that it's more expensive?

Well, first mistake is not accounting for metagame impacting playable cards in the competitive meta. You get one rare wild card per 5.71 packs, and one mythic wild card per 13.33 packs. Across all five sets, there will only be a certain number of rare and mythics that are playable at a given point.

Let's assume that someone is new and has very little knowledge on the metagame, and they must buy up rares and mythics that match up to form a winning deck. How likely do you think that scenario is?

I think a smart player who has played the game will minimize the losses via cockatrice or a deck building app.

Honestly, I really want to see the data on the bad pull rates and misfire purchases if that data exists.

There are people paying 100 per set to get packs and miss firing. Also, keep in mind you play draft and probably limited, meaning you are one of the lucky ones that built up skill and experience. You can turn the tide with what some people would call complete jank, and know how to play on a level above the throng of freemium one vs one players. That makes a huge difference.

I can build a deck for 60 dollars in black on paper that wins pretty consistently with lower constraints on rares thanks to the secondary market. Everything costs the same on arena.

It's not really cheaper. What it does is kind of create this card buying communism where the rarity alone determines how much a card costs to get. This makes it expensive to make a mistake with a purchase and it is completely intentional. They do give more rares per dollar total, but keep in mind they moved to bigger sets to accommodate for this.

I'm aiming for standard plus and buying as much as I can of the sets that are rotating because of the distribution change. Also, while I see them selling older sets, I think they are going to merge some sets into one mega set, like SOI and EMN.

Paper magic I can strait up get the rares on the cheap and build whatever I want.

Well, going by how the acquisition of cards work, it looks like wizards now has a means to make all tier 1 competitive decks cost the same amount of money no matter what the meta turns out like. Basically, you can only earn a certain number of rare wild cards per day and the only way to go over that number is to buy packs. This leads to a situation where if someone plays a T1 deck in standard and wants to make it to the top of the ladder for competitive play, they would have to spend the money early to get all the wild cards needed for the deck OR save up a tremendous amount of wild cards for a single season, then wait until the meta pans out.

I've literally swapped to playing "Gates everywhere .dec" because I don't see a point in wasting my time buying relentless numbers of packs for wild cards. If they introduce an eternal format, than I'm going to spend my rare wild cards on things good in that format. Otherwise, spending wild cards wildly on things you think you need for a specific build is a recipe for disaster. The only cards I haven't felt bad about buying are the lands.

Also going to add that MTG A has made the games weaknesses far more apparent. Everytime someone gets land screwed or flooded in this game, or the shuffler decides it's a good idea to stick 10+ lands all on top, you get reminded as to why all the other card games now put resources outside the main deck. Force of Will is still my favorite game to play. MTG is sort of like "I feel like playing cards and this is the only thing in town that I'm able to do" kind of a thing.

Quote from idSurge »

Quote from Colt47 »

Quote from idSurge »

Quote from BestMagicGamer »

How is it so many of my opponents already have massive amounts of Rare and Mythic cards from the latest expansion? Without the option to dust cards, are people really spending $50+ on each expansion on Arena? I feel like I'm the only person playing who isn't dumping tons of cash into this game. I've bought the welcome bundle, but that's it. But everyone I play seems to have all the shocklands, 4 copies of each Mythic and Rare in their deck and some of the popular decks that include the newest expansion are super expensive with like 38 rares and 14 mythics. Guess I'm just surprised to see so many people spend a lot on this game.

If people didnt waste wildcards, and played since open beta, they could easily with planning get what they needed without spending money. You 'go infinite' in Constructed Best of One, for Gold, and then you buy packs at your leisure with 1000 gold.

I don't like the fact you can't take back a choice by dusting. That is a huge problem for the discovery aspect of the game when it comes to mid tier and lower level players. If someone wastes a wild card on a crap rare (which happens a lot) they have no way to change or reconfigure their decision. On top of which, it encourages people to horde wild cards even if they don't have any idea what to get, and the default filters do hide unobtained cards.

Trust me, I feel the same. I've burnt up way too many Wildcards already on decks that didnt work out.

On the upside, I've learned how to maximize my value on uncommon wild cards and build the most annoying deck concievable around oath sworn vampire and Reassembling Skeleton. Thanks to Judith, it actually has reach now and doesn't just make people cry when they see me in the grinding queue.

Quote from idSurge »

Quote from BestMagicGamer »

How is it so many of my opponents already have massive amounts of Rare and Mythic cards from the latest expansion? Without the option to dust cards, are people really spending $50+ on each expansion on Arena? I feel like I'm the only person playing who isn't dumping tons of cash into this game. I've bought the welcome bundle, but that's it. But everyone I play seems to have all the shocklands, 4 copies of each Mythic and Rare in their deck and some of the popular decks that include the newest expansion are super expensive with like 38 rares and 14 mythics. Guess I'm just surprised to see so many people spend a lot on this game.

If people didnt waste wildcards, and played since open beta, they could easily with planning get what they needed without spending money. You 'go infinite' in Constructed Best of One, for Gold, and then you buy packs at your leisure with 1000 gold.

I don't like the fact you can't take back a choice by dusting. That is a huge problem for the discovery aspect of the game when it comes to mid tier and lower level players. If someone wastes a wild card on a crap rare (which happens a lot) they have no way to change or reconfigure their decision. On top of which, it encourages people to horde wild cards even if they don't have any idea what to get, and the default filters do hide unobtained cards.

Thanks! Thank goodness they have this mode. It's not really great for grinding, but sometimes you really want to just play decks the old fashion way.

I'm actually having a lot of problems when trying to jump into the mythic and rare competitive league, because I feel without having a platform to playtest ideas out you can't accurately spend the rare slots and mythic slots well enough. You might just pick a bunch of rares that don't work well competitively together and are stuck grinding for a month just to recover from it, which is what happened to me going demir and now probably rakdos colors.

The issue is that if you want to play something other than aggro or jank midrange, you have to spend the money or just game on cockatrice until you figure out your setup. Meanwhile, when you open packs you don't get as many rares outright because they grant you wild cards, which are cards you get to use. Those cards are basically dead in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they are trying to build or aim for, and the default filters for the game are set so that only cards one owns are seen so they may not even actively realize there is a specific card available that does something they want.

I mean, I hate to break it to wizards, but the problem is that their game has gotten so money hungry due to the damn stakeholders they've made it so an average player would have to spend a huge amount of time and money just to make a deck in standard that burns out in one season! Their is no free mode 75 card format with best of 3, either, so free players get stuck in 1v1 vs grinders all day. I don't even want to get started on the control decks in those queues. My god, do you think someone wants to sit through a pile of garbage so you can enjoy playing your Teferi deck when the entire reason you and your opponent are there is to get packs and gold?