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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.