Magic the Gathering: Arena

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
Magic Arena review:

TLDR: like a lot of you, I’m always skeptical of “free to play” stuff. Games like Path of Exile and Warframe have disabused me of the notion that it’s always a rip off. But coming from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro? I hear they like to make money. The good news is that I’ve spent $5 -- and a lot of time -- on Magic Arena and I have, well, a lot more than I ever expected to have. That includes three or four “standard” decks that would have cost hundreds, maybe even $1000+, on paper. And a sundry of other decks at various levels of competitiveness. And I technically didn’t even need to spend that $5!

Arena is a lot of fun. It’s also a lot of aggravation in that the Best-of-One format pushes Magic itself in an entirely new direction. Stuff that sideboards have marginalized for the past 25 years has crept to the forefront.

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The client is fine: it messes up sometimes and is unclear at others. But Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO) is often the same. The candy-coating they put on it is something I appreciated MUCH more than I thought I would. Sound effects when dinosaurs enter play, animations for many rare and most mythic-rarity cards are great, although some are too literal to the card art for my taste. (Does Niv Mizzet the dragon mage have to look like a sleepy cat just because the card has him posed that way?)

I love just browsing though my collection and seeing the card art stretched across much of my monitor. Sure, I could do an image search for hi-rez art, but these cards are MINE:

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My only real criticism of the client is that I wish there were a way to say “ok, fine, you do you, I have no power to object, anyway” when an opponent is going through a long combo that does certain things like reveal cards. At least in the standard format which exists, that doesn’t come up too often, but it’ll need a fix going forward.

There are two kinds of currency in Arena:

*Gold, which you earn through daily quests (play X lands or Y red cards) and victories (it takes 15 wins to get all of your daily gold and individual card rewards, uncommons that have ~10% chance to get bumped up in rarity).

*And gems, for which you have to pay real money -- plus tax -- and after your one time starter package (the $5 one I spoke of above), it really only makes sense to get the $50 or $100 packages as they are more efficient in gems per dollar.

You can turn your gold into gems by spending 5K gold to enter a quick draft tournament which will give you 50 gems if you scrub out, up 950 if you go 7:0 to 7-3.

So there are basically two paths through Arena:

*You can spend your 1250-1500 gold per day (it’s mostly front loaded) on packs (1000 gold each).

https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... mtg-arena/

That means you’re opening 500 packs per year. In addition to the three weekly bonus packs you can earn (156), that’s 656 packs per year. And there will be more bonuses based on achieved “rank” on top of that (perhaps six packs per month for an average player). Wowsers! Granted, that’s a lot of time invested in getting those daily wins. But you should be able to reap at least 2/3rds of that much more casually given how the rewards are front loaded towards the first five wins.

*The other way is save up 5K gold to spend on quick drafts. (You pick cards vs. bots, play single game matches against human opponents who did the same)

http://magicarena.wikia.com/wiki/Quick_Draft

If you lose, for instance, about 100 gems per draft (5:3 record), going 5:3 in your weekly gold draft will fund SIX more drafts. Compared to cracking packs you’ll have the option of taking more rares, via occasional rare-drafting, or when an AI bot passes you something out of their own color. You will also get at least one bonus pack reward per draft.

OTOH, if you occasionally do worse than 5:3, you’ll often only end up with only two “free” drafts per week so it’s a risk/reward proposition. And while you’ll typically see more rares than just spending gold on packs, you’ll open fewer packs overall, and opening packs is what gets you the most wildcards.

Every time you open a pack (not in draft), it puts you one step closer to a free rare or mythic wild that you can redeem for any card in the game, no matter what set it comes from. These wilds are also sometimes in regular booster packs.

My path through the game was about 2/3rds drafting, 1/3rd cracking. I haven’t earned as many wilds as I might have otherwise, but I do probably have more rares, overall.

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The wildcard system has fundamentally altered the Magic experience:

On MTGO, you can play any and every bad deck you want because those cards typically cost pennies worth of event tickets.

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On Arena, everyone has at least one tier-1 deck (bought via wilds) and many can’t afford to play anything else! After all, a good rare card and a bad rare card cost the same “wild.”

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You won’t get to jam your Wizards deck vs. Pirates very often.

There’s another difference between the two: MTGO doesn’t care if you play casually or not. Arena awards you with gold for wins.

The final thing is that there’s a vicious circle where Arena rewards getting quick victories for grinding gold. This encourages players to play Best-of-One rather than Best-of-Three (a new player can’t even do Bo3 draft without putting down real money first while it’s easy to get going in quick draft). The developers take this to mean that Bo1 is a better and more popular format, which causes them to put even more rewards there. Bo1 is now the only way you can move up in rank.

If you take a look at the list of the BEST DECKS in standard right now, you’ll see many that sideboard well for games two and three.

Those decks would look very different if engineered for Bo1. They might not even be numbered among the best decks. No one knows. Not even pros. It’s a new format, and a partially degenerate one: going first is vital for many decks, things that are traditionally bad are now good, and when it comes to just grinding out your daily gold, making someone quit is as valid as winning and there are a variety of toxic things you can do to achieve that, like “roping” (expending the timer needlessly), which works exceptionally well if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re playing a slow, grindy deck. They’ll just cut out and move on like sensible adults.

So if you’re someone who thinks “wow, I can have a bunch of standard decks for the first time in my life,” Arena is like an answer to a prayer from a dark lord of chaos.

Yes, you can have them, but unless you’re practicing for paper events (which may cost you your daily gold in entry fees on Arena), there might not be any point to having them because they’re the wrong decks and you’re in uncharted territory here! And you might not be able to afford the wacky decks you want to play because a Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and a Weatherlight are both worth the same mythic wildcard and you’d have to be half crazy to spend on the latter. And if you do, 1/3rd of the time you’ll feel terrible running your Weatherlight over someone playing a default “precon” deck while the other 2/3rds of the time you’ll get smashed by a T1 deck, because EVERYONE has one.

At any rate, this puts to rest the notion that Magic would be more fun if everyone had access to the best decks without restriction. Most players seem to like a little unfairness, at least if it’s on their side.

So what’s the point of playing, then? Well, to get more cards. I want them all.

If you’ve ever been into Magic in any form, shape, or capacity *and* lean towards OCD, I have to give Arena a hearty recommendation.

Otherwise, you might be better off giving it a pass unless you’re willing to be a whale and have more options going in and not being a slave to the grind.
 

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
After the closed beta they wiped accounts. As far as I know, everything is for-realsies now, and it's called an open beta only because F2P stuff typically keeps that designation until it's completely embarrassing. But at this point calling it a beta shuts up people who are demanding phantom drafts (where you don't get to keep the cards) and giant multiplayer games, neither of which is really anything I'm personally interested in but, more importantly, not really about what Arena is: collecting cards and brutal competition.
 

Agreschn

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
6,660
Subscriptor++
Magic Arena review:

Rich's wall of MTG text

Okay, at our friends' NYE party and a bunch of the attendees were talking MTG. They all play paper but it kinda piqued my interest.

Would Arena be a good way to learn and get back into it for low cost? Or MTGO? Or should I just forget about it and not bother as I'm not wanting to make it SRS BZNS?
 

onkeljonas

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8,703
I really liked playing MTG, but I've always found deck building incredibly boring. The same thing killed my enthusiasm for Warhammer/40k.
Putting a small band together for Mordheim is about the limit of my "deckbuilding" interest, beyond that it feels like I'm doing a lot of work just to start playing.

RTS games often feel the same - planning unit production etc... Just give me some units and let me fight.

Not having played MTG for a decade, I tried one of the digital versions a few years ago. It was fun enough to play the starter deck, but deck building is so integral to the experience that it quickly broke down for me.
 

Nekojin

Ars Legatus Legionis
30,355
Subscriptor++
I really liked playing MTG, but I've always found deck building incredibly boring. The same thing killed my enthusiasm for Warhammer/40k.
Putting a small band together for Mordheim is about the limit of my "deckbuilding" interest, beyond that it feels like I'm doing a lot of work just to start playing.

RTS games often feel the same - planning unit production etc... Just give me some units and let me fight.

Not having played MTG for a decade, I tried one of the digital versions a few years ago. It was fun enough to play the starter deck, but deck building is so integral to the experience that it quickly broke down for me.
I'm in a similar state as you. I never played Mordheim, but I was involved in Necromunda and Blood Bowl leagues several times. Much more manageable than Warhammer and/or 40k.

Likewise for the RTS and CCG games. It's a bit of an information overload, and is exhausting.
 

krimhorn

Ars Legatus Legionis
39,846
Subscriptor++
Would Arena be a good way to learn and get back into it for low cost? Or MTGO? Or should I just forget about it and not bother as I'm not wanting to make it SRS BZNS?
I got back into Magic lightly with Duels of the Planeswalkers and when I started going to drafts last year it wasn't much of a curve to pick back up on the stuff that DotP was missing. Arena is DotP plus mechanics that DotP glossed over. It'll tap lands for you but let you turn that off (and pick the color to use from dual lands), it'll automatically proc triggers but give you the appropriate choices (including whether to use the triggered ability if it's a "may"), has actual Planeswalker cards and provides a pause for all required priority changes. It's a solid product (that I haven't played enough of) and I'd say is probably the best way to get one's feet wet again.
 

krimhorn

Ars Legatus Legionis
39,846
Subscriptor++
*The other way is save up 5K gold to spend on quick drafts. (You pick cards vs. bots, play single game matches against human opponents who did the same)
Eww. No wonder it seems like every draft that I've watched had everyone with several first-pick cards. I mean, sure, it's a good way to guarantee (especially if the bots are bad at actually analyzing and selecting a good deck) you get some of the better cards if they're not in the packs you crack but it's definitely not draft "balance" at that point. Might as well just do the sealed process. Do they have an actual draft where the pod members are all pulling from the same packs?
 

KallDrexx

Ars Tribunus Militum
2,040
I really liked playing MTG, but I've always found deck building incredibly boring. The same thing killed my enthusiasm for Warhammer/40k.
Putting a small band together for Mordheim is about the limit of my "deckbuilding" interest, beyond that it feels like I'm doing a lot of work just to start playing.

This is why I really wish I knew people around me that I could play Keyforge with. The idea of collecting decks instead of cards is intriguing.
 

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
I mean, sure, it's a good way to guarantee (especially if the bots are bad at actually analyzing and selecting a good deck) you get some of the better cards if they're not in the packs you crack but it's definitely not draft "balance" at that point. Might as well just do the sealed process. Do they have an actual draft where the pod members are all pulling from the same packs?

The bots value cards the same way that human players value them on MTGO which is where they pulled their data from. (I'm not sure how this is going to work going forward for future sets where they only have internal playtesting data?.) And they have GOOD data. For now. For a time you could try to really force a color and get away with it on Arena but now the bots have personalities that make them want to force certain colors or archetypes. So you really have to stay open and try to take the best cards out of each of the first four picks as you settle into something open.

So the bots currently WILL value "money" rares and sometimes, but not always, draft them out of color. You won't get too many shocklands passed to you in Ravnica. OTOH, if you're drafting Dominaria, you will get stuff like Steel Leaf Champion (a constructed playable) passed to you even fifth pick, because human players will often pass that as well due to the mana requirements

femme_fatale-steel-leaf-champion-15241151980.png


In M19, I saw one draft where there was pick five through seven be Isolate and double Suncleanser because yeah, bots are working as intended.

Of course, bots are easy to make conspiracy theories about. Personally, I think Golgari is the safest bet for drafting Ravnica (conventional wisdom says it's pants and that the bots undervalue Dimir) but other people with data think Selesnya is where to be:

https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... ena-draft/
 

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
I didn't really mean for this to be a thread since the current Magic one works just fine for deeper discussion. I just wanted people who didn't read that thread to at least be apprised about the game and that it didn't cost an arm and a leg to have a serious collection of cards.

If you're interested in starting up on Arena, some quick things you should know:

*The New Player Experience where you unlock a deck each day (and have a daily mission playing cards in those exact colors and then get a free pack for that featured set) lasts about a week and a half, after which they then dump another six free decks on you at once, but there no more daily bonus packs after that -- then you have to buy them via gold.

*For your first 50 games you're in the kiddy pool matched against other new players

*Weekly reset (for your free three weekly packs) is Sunday. So if you start playing on Friday, make sure you grind out 15 wins at all costs, lest you miss out on a weekly bonus pack (these are separate from the new player experience)

*Type in these codes into shop panel for free stuff (case sensitive): "PlayRavnica" (3 packs) and GAMEAWARDS (lots of cards, this expired the 16th, but I haven't seen any confirmation online as to whether or not it still works :/ )

*The $5 intro bundle is a great source of gems, a fantastic deal, but if you don't want to get started drafting immediately, you probably don't need the M19 packs that come with it so you might as well hold off on spending cash and be a true "free to player."

*You can spend your wild cards on cards you own by trying to add an extra copy of that card to a deck, or, on cards you don't own by going to the sort collection screen and toggling "unowned cards" on to select them for duplication

*It can be tempting to look at one of the top decks in paper magic and try to build it as soon as you can. Unless you have experience with playing it, though, you might not know how it actually runs or if you'd have fun with it, let alone to how it works in the Arena meta which focuses on Best of One matches.

*Something you might not realize at first: when the opposing player is looking through a graveyard or hovering over cards or lands, they flash with an outline. So you can tell if a player needs to read what your cards do or is paying particularly close attention to something, which might reveal information about what they're going to do.


Helpful websites:

https://mtgarena.pro/

Articles:

Can you go infinite?: https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... -infinite/

Going Optimal: https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... mtg-arena/

Mono colored decks: https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... gro-guide/

Two colored decks: https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... lor-aggro/
 

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
*Something else to keep in mind, common wildcards are probably more rare than uncommon ones (since you don't automatically generate them by opening packs, plus all your individual card rewards for wins are base uncommon) and if you want to play in pauper events, keep that in mind.

*Drafting is probably the best way to get hot commons for constructed since they tend to be solid in both formats. OTOH, since only one or two sets are draftable at a given moment, you might have to be patient.

*"Traditional Draft" (best of three, higher buy in, higher rewards, rank isn't involved) is just the latest set. Ranked draft, best of one, rotates through available sets every two weeks or so and it WILL eventually go back to Ravnica so don't think you have to buy gems to draft it; just hoard your gold until it comes around. Yeah. :/

*I didn't understand this myself going in: I concluded, before seeing the event calendar, that they were gouging us just to draft the most current cards. Maybe a little, but not really in the grand scheme of things. I like the calendar rotation. It mixes things up while keeping the community on the same page while making games fire faster.

*Friends don't let friends play Momir basic. The format is really tiny on Arena, it's solved, and a dead end; just watch a video if you're interested.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdIvnT8FQD4

*re: bots, that video shows some late rares going around in almost every pack but each of those rares is justifiable as something to be passed, imho

P1P2 Worldshaper
P1P3 Release to the Wind
P1P4 Kumena's Awakening (LSV would first pick it but a lot of people wouldn't)

P2P2 Nezahal (maybe first bot was just the wrong colors)
P2P5 Mastermind's Acquisition (I'd probably rare draft it in that slot for Ali's chromatic black deck but I can imagine a table of people doing the right thing passing it that far)

P3P2 Shaper's Sanctuary (bot in wrong color or just saw a removal spell instead; I can see a humans freely passing it though)

It looks to me like the bots are recreating human behavior fairly accurately. Or at least behavior from MTGO where niche rares truly are worthless, compared to Arena players where the only way to get a card is to actually GET it. If/when they base Arena picks on Arena players alone, I'm guessing that Mastermind's Acquisition might get snapped up by a bot imitating ME. :eek:

Also not saying that's a tremendous video or anything (I've been watching a lot of Rivals that was posted this week to see how current people are approaching it), but I still learned a few things from it. I didn't actually know how Bishop of Binding truly worked. But I just thought of the AI discussion when I saw what was in the packs.
 
I really liked playing MTG, but I've always found deck building incredibly boring. The same thing killed my enthusiasm for Warhammer/40k.
Putting a small band together for Mordheim is about the limit of my "deckbuilding" interest, beyond that it feels like I'm doing a lot of work just to start playing.

This is why I really wish I knew people around me that I could play Keyforge with. The idea of collecting decks instead of cards is intriguing.

http://www.thecrucible.online

You can register ownership of Keyforge decks on the official site, then link to that ownership on The Crucible. It will allow you to play Keyforge online with your own decks against others.
 

Starbuck79

Ars Legatus Legionis
29,291
The new Event, Momir's Madness is silly fun.

You start with 60 lands in deck. Every turn, if you discard a card, you can tap mana to summon a random creature of that Mana Cost. Basically it's a fun way to see creature cards.

Draw cards are super handy because they let you ramp longer. There is also some logic in skipping a turn casting so you will have extra cards to discard.

Tendershoot Dryad, or anything else that creates creatures usually breaks the game.
 

richleader

Ars Legatus Legionis
20,635
It's fun until you get into staring contests where if someone else makes an Impervious Greatwurm, you HAVE to make one too (it's the only creature at 10 mana) to block theirs, and for as many times as they make them (until they get bored of making them and STOP), otherwise it's all luck.

If you've never done it before, it can be kinda cool, but since you can't really play it against friends or with Jhoira's vanguard (the same thing but with spells as well; this stuff has been on MTGO for 10 years now, at least), it's fairly limited. :/
 

Nitestorm

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
6,596
The new Event, Momir's Madness is silly fun.

You start with 60 lands in deck. Every turn, if you discard a card, you can tap mana to summon a random creature of that Mana Cost. Basically it's a fun way to see creature cards.

Draw cards are super handy because they let you ramp longer. There is also some logic in skipping a turn casting so you will have extra cards to discard.

Tendershoot Dryad, or anything else that creates creatures usually breaks the game.

It's even more interesting on MTGO when you have full access to every creature ever printed. :devious:

Of course getting a Leveler at 5 mana is always a fun way to lose. :mad:
 
The new Event, Momir's Madness is silly fun.

You start with 60 lands in deck. Every turn, if you discard a card, you can tap mana to summon a random creature of that Mana Cost. Basically it's a fun way to see creature cards.

Draw cards are super handy because they let you ramp longer. There is also some logic in skipping a turn casting so you will have extra cards to discard.

Tendershoot Dryad, or anything else that creates creatures usually breaks the game.
Thankfully GRN added some other 9 drops, otherwise the format was just "Who can get to 9 in the correct way to make sure that you can kill the other person's Zacama"
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA1fSJhKsnQ

I enjoy watching Mythic players troll each other.

The ranking stuff right now is in a weird spot: I'm still in gold for constructed, and I'll probably close out the season there since I'm not really trying to push, but:

If I want to play one of my better decks (BG with all the fixings, Jeskai Drakes, etc.), I'll probably get a more favorable matchup in ranked than in unranked because the deck strength matching algorithm in unranked will probably put me up against Jeskai Control or Turbofog, while in ranked there is no such weighting and I'm much more likely to face burn or History of Benalia decks.

OTOH, if I pull out a mid-tier deck, Dredge, Mono Blue, Mono-Green, etc. in unranked, I'll immediately get a mirror match because of the deck strength weighting.

Part of the reason I like my Abzan Legends list (ramp a tiny bit, play a four drop legend, blast non legendaries away with Urza's Ruinous Blast) is that it's feels the most agnostic to the algorithm and I can literally be matched against anything, especially other diverse things.

*I do wish there was a way to tip someone for having a cool deck. Like when you see someone trying to combo Rite of Belzenlok with Song of Freyalise, you want to go THANKS, cool deck bud! Players should get a certain amount of "props" tokens to spend each day on other players.

*It's funny that the only people who get to play whatever they want without real consequence right now are people playing in Ranked Mythic (until your mythic rank number gives you an invite to an event), as that's the only place where truly random stuff can happen as there isn't an incentive to dominate AND there is no strength weighting.

*I'm kinda irritated that my DCI number got reset about 10 years ago so I don't have a leading zero. :eek:

*Was watching a streamer who was still in bronze for limited beating up on people in a draft. Must be nice. I went 0-3 in a rival's draft with a decent merfolk deck today. :eek: I guess after reset at the end of the month I won't have to rely on luck since almost everyone I'm currently matched against is dead-even in making correct picks and solid enough plays?

*I swear, I have never been as bad at magic as in Rival's draft though. WTF. I can't get it together.
 
People are segregated with other new players for their first 50 matches no matter what game type you pick.

From then on, Ranked play puts you against other people in the same rank while Unranked play is some kind of aggregate score between your identity and player history combined with the deck strength weight of whatever cards you bring. And, of course, you can only be matched vs. people currently looking for a game and it has to match you, eventually, although rarely you can end up in an empty "draw" after a failed matchmaking session.
 
Posting this on its own because I keep forgetting, but they really need to have a [CARDNAME] pop up when someone plays Unmoored Ego.

Image.ashx


You don't know what they're searching for. In the about five times it's been played against me, I think it's whiffed like 4 times, but possibly all 5 times, and it's just creepy since they're taking forever to look through your deck and you can only wonder WTF it is they actually looked for when it's all said and done.

I don't think any of those players actually won, either, it was just a random inclusion in UB and not one of those Expansion/Explosion brews that wants to mill you out in a hilarious way.
 

NaraVara

Ars Tribunus Militum
1,598
Subscriptor++
there are a variety of toxic things you can do to achieve that, like “roping” (expending the timer needlessly), which works exceptionally well if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re playing a slow, grindy deck.

Uf! People do this in Hearthstone as well and it is extremely annoying. There is a Hearthstone card that forces everyone to only get 15 seconds per turn (excluding animation effects) as long as it is in play, and half the time it's put down I actually feel a sense of relief rather than the anxiety it is supposed to prompt.

What's worse is that there even seems to be a lot of non-intentional time-burning that's annoying to deal wiht too. A lot of people seem to be really indecisive. I guess something about having your opponent being a faceless entity across the internet rather than a person across the table looking at you expectantly discourages people from just getting on with it and making a decision.
 
there are a variety of toxic things you can do to achieve that, like “roping” (expending the timer needlessly), which works exceptionally well if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re playing a slow, grindy deck.

Uf! People do this in Hearthstone as well and it is extremely annoying. There is a Hearthstone card that forces everyone to only get 15 seconds per turn (excluding animation effects) as long as it is in play, and half the time it's put down I actually feel a sense of relief rather than the anxiety it is supposed to prompt.

What's worse is that there even seems to be a lot of non-intentional time-burning that's annoying to deal wiht too. A lot of people seem to be really indecisive. I guess something about having your opponent being a faceless entity across the internet rather than a person across the table looking at you expectantly discourages people from just getting on with it and making a decision.

The whole time-wasting thing is a scourge across the internet in every game that allows this sort of thing. I play MTG 2015 on my phone a lot, and I've actually come to recognize a couple usernames for people that do this frequently and will just refuse the match before it begins. It would seem to be a relatively simple thing to do to keep track of the time it takes per turn for every player and then enforce some sort of consequences if people routinely take their full allotted time per turn. Maybe couple this with the ability of players to report others for slow play?

I dunno...there's definitely a way to correct it.
 
The easiest coping mechanism is to give the OP the benefit of the doubt and just assume that they're disabled or trying to look after a gaggle of kids at the same time as getting in a game, etc.

I have come across people who actually do think that planning your moves ahead of time and even watching the board state unfold leads to worse decision making and the best thing to do is to leave and come back and view everything with fresh eyes, as a Magic-The-Puzzling, every turn disconnected from the last or the next. Naturally, these people also like to play lifegain decks or merfolk or anything with lots of triggers. :facepalm:

But it's really Wizard's fault. The meta they created is "get 15 wins as soon as possible!" and there are limited ways of going about that. Most of us crash in, volume decks, hoping to win fast or concede and move on to the next. It's not smart but it feels fair.

People who are too egotistical for the volume approach (I CANNOT LOSE, I ARE GENIUS!) have to go about it another way and even though UW control is not winning major tournaments, it DOES get volume people to concede just because even winning against UW control gets in the way of volume: you could win 3 games and lose 2 in the same amount of time it takes to dally with Teferi. And roping just a smidge as a UW player can encourage concessions just a bit quicker! It's very likely that the slow players get 15 victories before an average volume player achieves theirs so it's not a dumb thing to do and it's thus encouraged by the daily quest that Wizards set up. So I don't blame the players, I blame WOTC.

It's gotten so that the people who REALLY want to play UW control in unranked have to throw in some early bad cards like Surge Mare in order to convince people they're doing anything but the traditional Teferi/Settle/etc. thing, even though they ARE doing the Teferi/Settle/etc. thing, only 10% worse.
 
I do have to say that the most salty people on Arena are the Dinoboys (and girls?).

45979600564_97bc08e9d8_o.png

That one roped me for a full 4x timers during my attack step instead of just letting the game end.

I was favored to win that matchup going into it, but there were several turns when bad draws nearly did me in; it wasn't a pointless game for either one of us to play out.

OTOH, if I spent EVERY single rare and mythic wildcard I had on Ripjaw Raptors, Regisaur Alphas, Zacamas, etc., red-green lands that don't go in any other deck, currently, and the deck still sucked? Yeah, I'd be pissed too, and it was WOTCs fault for over-promising on dinosaurs.
 

Nekojin

Ars Legatus Legionis
30,355
Subscriptor++
Posting this on its own because I keep forgetting, but they really need to have a [CARDNAME] pop up when someone plays Unmoored Ego.

You don't know what they're searching for. In the about five times it's been played against me, I think it's whiffed like 4 times, but possibly all 5 times, and it's just creepy since they're taking forever to look through your deck and you can only wonder WTF it is they actually looked for when it's all said and done.

I don't think any of those players actually won, either, it was just a random inclusion in UB and not one of those Expansion/Explosion brews that wants to mill you out in a hilarious way.
They were probably writing down your deck list. They didn't care so much about exiling some of your cards, as much as knowing what they were up against (and, just as important, what they WEREN'T).

there are a variety of toxic things you can do to achieve that, like “roping” (expending the timer needlessly), which works exceptionally well if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re playing a slow, grindy deck.

Uf! People do this in Hearthstone as well and it is extremely annoying. There is a Hearthstone card that forces everyone to only get 15 seconds per turn (excluding animation effects) as long as it is in play, and half the time it's put down I actually feel a sense of relief rather than the anxiety it is supposed to prompt.

What's worse is that there even seems to be a lot of non-intentional time-burning that's annoying to deal wiht too. A lot of people seem to be really indecisive. I guess something about having your opponent being a faceless entity across the internet rather than a person across the table looking at you expectantly discourages people from just getting on with it and making a decision.
Off topic, but did they ever fix that dragon's timer management? There was a cheap cheat using him where the player who had him would essentially run down the timer, and play a bunch of cards in the last few seconds, so that the card animations would spill over into the opponent's turn, effectively leaving them no time to actually do anything.
 

NaraVara

Ars Tribunus Militum
1,598
Subscriptor++
Posting this on its own because I keep forgetting, but they really need to have a [CARDNAME] pop up when someone plays Unmoored Ego.

You don't know what they're searching for. In the about five times it's been played against me, I think it's whiffed like 4 times, but possibly all 5 times, and it's just creepy since they're taking forever to look through your deck and you can only wonder WTF it is they actually looked for when it's all said and done.

I don't think any of those players actually won, either, it was just a random inclusion in UB and not one of those Expansion/Explosion brews that wants to mill you out in a hilarious way.
They were probably writing down your deck list. They didn't care so much about exiling some of your cards, as much as knowing what they were up against (and, just as important, what they WEREN'T).

there are a variety of toxic things you can do to achieve that, like “roping” (expending the timer needlessly), which works exceptionally well if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re playing a slow, grindy deck.

Uf! People do this in Hearthstone as well and it is extremely annoying. There is a Hearthstone card that forces everyone to only get 15 seconds per turn (excluding animation effects) as long as it is in play, and half the time it's put down I actually feel a sense of relief rather than the anxiety it is supposed to prompt.

What's worse is that there even seems to be a lot of non-intentional time-burning that's annoying to deal wiht too. A lot of people seem to be really indecisive. I guess something about having your opponent being a faceless entity across the internet rather than a person across the table looking at you expectantly discourages people from just getting on with it and making a decision.
Off topic, but did they ever fix that dragon's timer management? There was a cheap cheat using him where the player who had him would essentially run down the timer, and play a bunch of cards in the last few seconds, so that the card animations would spill over into the opponent's turn, effectively leaving them no time to actually do anything.

I gave up on Hearthstone a few months in honestly. It felt to me like there was too much of a barrier to entry to being able to build a coherent deck that actually let me express any creativity.
 
I didn't see that solution coming at all.

On the one hand, it's fine for people like me, mostly. I'll probably be way more likely to grab Thousand Year Storm's that fly around the table in draft.

But for people who can't accept that their lucky mythic open isn't worth more than a terrible mythic open, this isn't going to put out the fire under their ass. I don't get their perspective in that if you already have 4x Teferi, enjoy your life and move on, the 5th copy shouldn't be worth $20 just because it's worth many times that in paper. But some people will never be able to abide that so I guess there's no point trying to cater to that.
 
Honestly probably the best option they had; I like that it enforces filling out the collection FIRST. That was one of the main sticking points for plenty of people; people would just buy playables and then grind out for infinite whatever the replacement for 5th card was. This way, you are always working to open something you don't have (And any early feels-bad openings are fixed later by feels good openings being more likely) and should help with the cost of rare lands.
 

CanSpice

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,147
duplicate protection is coming and Bo3 may not be dead after all?

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2019-01-14

This is kind of similar to how it works in MtG:puzzle Quest. In that game, you pick ten cards to be in your deck, and then for game purposes you have a 40-card deck with four of each card in it. This means that having two copies of the same card is useless, so if you get a duplicate you get it converted into "orbs", which can then be used to craft new cards. Get a common dupe you get 10 orbs, uncommons are more, and mythics are 500 (these numbers depend on which set your dupe is in). It seems to work fairly well, hopefully it works well for Arena as well.
 
Does anyone have a list for that GW non-tokens (mostly) deck that's not-quite-everywhere now? I can't seem to find anything just googling. Shalai, various angels, Adventurous Impulse, etc.

I've run into it and I've seen a lot of [rank up!] streamers face it, but can't really get a full view of the card list because a lot of the games are blowouts, one way or the other.
 
I've come to loath the voices of almost all the commonly played planeswalkers except Karn's. (It's sad that I think I've seen any of the Huatli's one time, Jace never.) It's not the actor's fault, it's just that they're either saying crap that doesn't make sense or is ripped from bro t-shirts from the 1990s (looking at you Vraska).

OTOH, they should get the Vraska and Vivien actors together to record some Madden style play by play commentary, just trash talk to give to players.

Stuff like

*You used the talk feature. No one asked you to do that. You're playing French Jeskai Control in unranked? Do you think saying "hello" to every opponent makes up for that?

*You just said "Nice" in response to your own play. What happened to you as a child? Did your ancestors come up with smallpox blankets?

*Cool deck. Maybe you should play it in Best-of-Three gold challenges like other people are doing! It did win a pro-tour!

*We're instituting a new feature in the next patch! Anyone playing with a Nexus of Fate in their deck only gets matched vs. other players with Nexus!

*He's at two life. You have Wizard's Lightning. Stop pretending you drew land just for lulz!
 
On the subject of Planeswalkers, how do I get one? Do they come randomly as a card in a pack? I ain't spending money.

I would also like to express additional frustration at the cheesiness of a couple cards which I seem to come up against quite frequently. There's a white card which exiles all attacking creatures for like 3 or 4 mana. Incredibly powerful for such a cheap cost.