Yep....... you would have to be beyond stupid to put a dollar into arena. Its just a mobile game, same predatory practices at play and absolutly no way of knowing if the service will still be active in 10 years time.
mythic uncommons i think they brainstomed how to get the mythic wildcards out of the hands of people and came up "make everything mythic in extra sheets even uncommons"
It's a P2W game, that's how it improves. They will intentionally and continually make the game worse while introducing increasingly expensive ways to counteract that worsening. They know this model well and won't deviate from it significantly.
Genshin Impact *proved* a playerbase can break a company intent on Gacha antics. It’s entirely doable. Just. Stop. Playing. We need to be like the D&D community. Cease all purchasing of WotC products, and Hasbro will get desperate enough to pander to us.
"Pay-to-win" This is how every P2W game like this evolved over time. I'm not exaggerating. If you are surprised, it's because this is your first time playing a P2W game more than a year. If you don't like this, don't play games which allow you to purchase stuff for cash which you could otherwise obtain through gameplay. That's what P2W means and it's all it takes for a game to turn bad.
@@themekahippie991 Ironically the discrepancy between the virtual and paper versions of magic make the virtual version much more expensive than the paper version. Quite the juxtaposition: the virtual version provides cards given time investment rather than money while the paper version requires the purchase of all your cards, yet the virtual version is more pay to win than the paper version!
Is funny bc I worked on a digital card game where we make "mythic" rarity cards easier to obtain than "rares" but because our mythics while good, were not the cards that shape the meta, they were the upgrades for already stablished archtypes, we shaped the metagame around rares and uncommons instead, so our players usually priorized get the rares as staples, and then craft the mythics around the rares they play in their decks.
I have hundreds of C and UC wildcards, barely get any others... we should be able to convert lower tiers into higher ones that isnt some roundabout way thru vault
If you buy out the standard set of those, and then keep opening those packs, you will build up your vault progress.... I still don't know what it's for though.
As a f2p player Rares and Mythics arent the only issue, I actually never have enough Uncommons to even build a budget deck. The only good thing with Arena's economy I see so far is that if you opened or crafted a card and it gets reprinted into standard you dont have to open it again but the fact we are getting so many more upshifted rarity cards without a single update to even the Vault is criminal.
The vault is a fucking lie. I play this game as a full time job and I don’t think a single vault I own has crept above 5%. Is it resetting every set release? What the actual fuck
I remember playing Magic Duels and how: 1. You only ever opened one copy of a mythic because you're only allowed to play one copy of a mythic in a deck. 2. You would always open new (copies) of cards with no dupes beyond the copy limits with a set card pool; you could absolutely grind the full card pool. The game had plenty of problems compared to other MtG sims, ragequits in Ranked being the worst. When the company forgets what things worked well? It just hurts the soul.
Even if you get an "all access" account for MTG Arena or MTGO, please keep updating us about situations like this. All access accounts are sometimes just a way to disguise how bad availability is or how much money they are really charging. Thank you for you videos! :)
Nevermind the fact that a bunch of the big score cards definitely don't deserve to be mythics. Looking at some of the effects some of them were clearly uncommons from when it was a separate product that were upshifted arbitrarily when folded in. Because some higher up decided that they all needed to be the same rarity.
the droprate is criminal but even worse is that ... WHY ITS ALL MYTHIC RARE ? WTF ??? WHY??? they literally made every card from the aftermath set mythic including the uncommons
It's pure greed. Yu-Gi-Oh has this problem as well, with rarity spikes from ocg to tcg and tcg to master duel, but somehow wotc has literally outgreeded komoney here
@@amiablereaperThe problem for wotc is komoney has always been this way. Yugioh players are used to komoney behaviours, the current ramp up from what once was, to what is at wotc is making the bigger pill harder to swallow.
The fact that they didn't put any of the big cards at lower rarity is wild already. Then they also have an extra year of sets in standard so we are forced to get the rares and mythics from up to 11 sets at once to build a deck that matches the current top 8 decks.
I would actually spent money on mtgarena if it wasnt so expensive. If 50 bucks would get me half the cards, and playing the other half, I probably do this every expansion. But dropping 50 bucks gets me like 7-8 random mythics and 1 wildcard..... This is a joke
6:18 -- This is, IMO, exactly why it was done this way.. To shift the economy and make people spend their mythic WCs... I'm always sitting at about 12-16 mythic WCs at anytime, while I might have 4-6 extra rare WCs at any time..
This isn't some big conspiracy, it's what anyone outside the insular communities of these P2W games will tell you. This is a P2W game, so it will continually get worse unless you continually pay more. It's really that simple.
@@themekahippie991i am f2p on arena and i have a lot of decks you have to play a decent amount of time and you have to be good at the game but you can play f2p
@@themekahippie991 whale food means nothing if i have competitive decks and i ve told you that i have them i have the same possibility of a whale to win a game
My biggest issue is the "newspaper" cards. I only play Standard and Limited so they're fucking useless for me to open outside of Limited. I fucked up and bought a box for the first time in over a year and got a pile of those. All the non Standard shit in the booster boxes is why I stopped buying them in the first place.
wtf? i opened 100 normal packs got 3 big score cards. opened 23 golden packs 11 this is the most expencive set they have on arena by far if you want to get all cards
18 packs from my promo codes I got at my LGS prerelease events plus I got the 3 free packs for the set dropping and bought 30 packs (+the 3 gold packs) using saved up gold on arena. I have literally 0 big score cards yet.
I remember back in the day when you'd go to a prerelease, and then a couple weeks later the set would be released, and a couple weeks after that the set would be released on MTGO. And then they trimmed back on the time frames... and as far as I know nowadays there's no real thing as a prerelease anymore, considering that when you go, you can play with the cards in ALL formats as of then. And WotC/Hasbro expect the sets to be ready on digital clients at the same time. If they gave us actual prerelease-to-release-date leadup time again, that would give Daybreak et al an extra week to get the cards sorted out on the digital clients, something that pretty much all game developers and publishers have to contend with. I mean, how often do you want to buy a game on day 1 just to find out it's buggy as heck because corporate decided it had to be out on day X and no later, even though it's not enough time to get it done properly, and so there's bugs galore? Give us actual prereleases back!
11:20 I just wanted to add that not all the face commanders get added, for the LCI release they added Xolatoyac, the Smiling Flood instead of Hakbal of the Surging Soul, the face commander. I think they should just add both tbh.
7:54 For specifics on this. You get *one* guaranteed mythic wildcard for every *thirty* packs you open, and one rare every 6 packs, except for when you reach 30 where you get a mythic instead. Arena's wildcard system is extremely bad.
MythWeaver Poq is gentle kind sweet baby compared to that K-unt Blood artist. Or her friend Vito. There are a million more problematic cards than Teysa of the Ghost Council or Grenzo
In my opinion one of the worst parts about it is that most of the big score cards are ASS in draft. Most of them serve specific niches that you just cannot find outside of an artifact themed set, and it pisses me off that they would make the big score cards more likely to appear in a format where people don't want them, and less likely to appear in traditional packs
The wildcard system as a whole just kills any and all desire I have to brew decks on Arena, and has forced me to rely almost exclusively on net-decking because I just can't risk wasting them, same for a lot of alternate formats which just have too high an initial investment to be worth trying out even thought I'd like to.
Lol fr. This made me relieved that I stopped playing Arena, and only use it these days for tutorials for new players. I feel like Wizards are constantly proving that to be a good decision
To be fair, Calamity is bugged but only if you're attacking a player defending a planeswalker or battle. Something about the selection on targets for the new token causing it to stop. So until they fix it, you can't run battles and have to hope they don't have a planeswalker. It has been reported on the bug report section several times on the Wizard's site though so I was equally surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Calamity + Lively Dirge really pushed the Vein Ripper + Push/Pull deck to the next level. It's so good now and if you get Calamity and a Ripper with Pull it's almost always lethal
its SO sad because they sabotaging themself :( more and more of my friends stop playing arena because it gets more expensive every year ... i had 10 people in my friendlist who often are online playing arena now its only 1 left ... everyone else stopped because "its to expensive" ... that were people who all did spend money in that game ... wizards is literally stealing money from themself
You don't understand how these games generate money. They don't care how many of you leave they make most of their money off the whales who don't care about the economy of the game.
Same. Literally everyone I knew who used to play quit over the cost. When new friends have tried it out recently, they quit as soon as they realize they can't build an actual deck.
I bought a few mythic boosters just for the big score cards. One of my boosters gave me a mythic wildcard for the bonus sheet slot, and a mythic wildcard for the mythic slot. I guess it's dumb luck, but it's also disapointing getting wildcards instead of actual cards
The economy is particularly bad for new players who dont have a long history of oppened packs to get cards from. I am new and am interested in playing pioneer. Standard is a casual side event at fnm in my area which doesnt always fire, and i know if i tried to play modern the cost and size of the cardpool would likely undoo me. Ive been playing explorer on arena trying to figure out what deck i want to build in paper, but the issue is each deck needs £80 or more of rare wildcards. I could try to open packs but its inefficnet because the cards are spread out from so many sets. In the end i just got a subscription to an MTGO lending service and am stuck playing open play/tournament practice as i dont want to spend £10 to play 5 best of 3s online, with decks im not super familiar eith and so will likely just 1-4 or 0-5 and grt no.prizing
Do all your quests , with the gold buy only boosters from one collection, eventually youll have almost all the collection and you will start getting wildcards instead ... then use them to get whatever you want
6:20 I started playing MTGA recently, I'm playing since LCI. You may not believe this, but currently I have 37 Mythic Rare and 5 Rare wildcards. I'm interested in playing Standard mainly, but every time I want to try out new color pair, I need to craft 12 rare lands - that's ~100 rares just for standard. Then there are staples for each color. Most extreme case there is 4C/5C ramp, which contains 40 rares and 5 mythic rares. I would like to jump into explorer (Arena's pioneer) too, and I need 25-40 rares for a deck, while only 2-5 mythic. Opening packs there is no way to go, so I grind Standard Events, and I hope for Rare wild cards from my packs. I wish there was a way to convert the Mythic Rares into the Rares, and other way around. 2:1 or 3:1 ratio would be fine. Or Wizards could give us just more wildcards/packs...
As a long-term Arena player, I'm personally glad that I get a ton more mythics to potentially spend my wildcards on (I'm currently sitting on 140-ish mythic wildcards without spending money on Arena in the last 5-ish years), but I can certainly see the frustration of not being able to (somewhat) reliably opening desired mythics when opening packs of Thunder Junction.
1:38 you don’t think it’s strange that shortly after we’re “allowed” to purchase mythics, all of the sudden the number of mythics is increasing in each set…
As free to play player, I have opened a single base set mythic in -20 packs so far. It’s beyond discouraging. Downright depressing. I’m level 13 on mastery pass, got a prerelease code, and the free inbox packs. Even mastery pass ICRs pull from big score list. I can’t keep up at all.
Don't open packs within the first ~4 months of a sets release if you wanna stay economic. Stockpile them till you have like 80-100. The mastery pass of the next set usually contains a lot of previous sets packs. I know it's hard seeing all the cool decks have fun in standard, but you're way more likely to find the mythic card you want from drafts or daily rewards rather than sifting through packs. And most importantly... DO NOT spend WC's on cards from new sets! I never spend mythic WC's on anything other than cards I'll forever use in historic. Spending a mythic WC for a "fun" deck is the #1 way to go broke.
@irou95 I've been a f2p player since launch and I'm sitting on 25 mythics and 30+rares. People just don't have enough patience. Like any other free to play mobile game it just takes time to get to where you want to be.
I think another adding factor is the fact that the pack you open will on average contain alot less rares and mythics then the new play boosters we get in limited. If you want alot of these super mythics, then you are probably better off rare/mythic drafting then you are opening packs. If they intend to keep these absurd inflation of mythics for future bonus sheets, then they need to turn the packs you open into play booster packs.
So perhaps that was the real and only reason to print these "big box" cards as mythic - to have a nice money grab for digital clients. Because on paper they just fill a fraction of a slot in a booster, so there "rarity" does not mean much anymore.
I only play standard and I have about 50 mythic wildcards. Most top decks don't use many mythics. My most expensive is a domain deck that needed about 35 rares, of which I was missing over 20. There's so many rare dual / tri lands.
Since thunder came out I've experienced an alarming amount of ppl playing only otj cards. Which isn't what I experienced with the other sets. Idk. Maybe I'm baised
I’ve opened 70+ packs now from OTJ and have opened zero Big Score cards from regular packs. I only opened them in the Golden Packs because I have the rest of the rares and mythics in Standard.
Not much different than paper magic. I’ve been playing since Neon Dynasty, and the amount of times i was barked at to go build a new deck by a disgruntled player is astounding, But at the same time, i had no other options. I STILL dont own enough cards, let alone GOOD cards to build another cohesive, functional deck. And with the way opening packs goes…… my options are 1. Test my luck at gambling 2. Trade all of my cards for 1 decent card 3. Ignore the other players So i did the obvious, i ignored the complaints and just kept doing me, Which eventually caused a rift between myself and the other players to the point i could tell they didn’t care what happened at the table. One day i sat down to play, they’re all talking about playing casual, And all of these obviously not casual decks come out and they all look at me like why do i have a problem? They power-crept me out of being able to play at the store, purposefully. The same people who invited me to play, ended up trying to get rid of me for not conforming to their standard of how much money one should spend on a card game lol So i just stopped playing there. You can’t tell me its a fair game when im playing a Gluntch deck, and across from me are Minsc And Boo, along with a Ramos deck. Yeah, it wasn’t gonna go well, So when i saw that, i just packed up my stuff and left. Nobody said a word when i got up, so i know they did it intentionally. It was a “ha you dont like that? Then leave” moment for them, which was pretty shitty of them to do to a new player.
You could have net decked a budget brew for a couple bucks. You would think you would catch the hint after two years. Maybe instead of making it all about you, have you considered what it would be like to play some guys same garbage pile deck for two years? You can always play draft instead of imposing the same deck on others for months on end.
I'm not going to deny that it sucks to be pressured out like that, but I do have a few questions. Why are you relying on opening packs to get new cards? For the price of like, 9 packs, you could actually just build a decent $50 budget deck. Would you rather have 9 packs of mostly draft chaff that don't interact in any way with each other and that no one will really want to take off your hands, or a $50 deck that's cohesive and functional? The reason the Arena economy gets hated a lot more than the MTGO economy is because at least in MTGO you can buy singles to get what you want, and that's assuming you aren't using any of the rental services. Why you wouldn't take advantage of this same ability to buy singles in paper magic is baffling to me.
@@Dynme because he chose to die on his hill and impose his frugalness on others. I’ve seen it done before. Dude gets offended because others tell him it would be great if he showed up with a new deck and they decide to punish everyone by playing the same deck over and over. It’s inconsiderate to do that in constructed especially after two years to the same play group. No wonder they busted out the tier one decks. Learn to draft or keep up with financial sinkhole that is constructed. Social interaction is a two way street. You can’t expect others in an LGS to bow down to the whims of you’re financial budget time and time again. I learned that as a teenager going to FNM’s it’s a luxury hobby. With all that being said, with some effort and sacrifice it’s not hard to have a bunch of fun budget brews that are cohesive.
I always have way more mythic crafts than rares so i end up with extra's i never use maybe having some of those rares be mythics isnt the worst for arena as far as crafting goes. The biggest issue i have with arena and always have is land rarity. When you need to drop 20+ rares on just lands to make a deck or two you want it feels bad. None the less its better than other online tcgs like hearthstone and master duel with its crafting system, ive made more decks on arena ftp in one standard rotation than i have in all the years i played hearthstone. They should make rare and mythic crafts interchangeable same with common and uncommon, think that would probably solve alot of problems
I went to prerelease mildly excited for the set. Opened on of those Big Score cards even! It was the Cornucopia. I don't think I'm going to keep playing MtG anymore. The only thing I enjoyed, prereleases, have become a bomb soup where every player gets 12+ Rare/Mythics and the one who opens the good ones just wins, there's not enough removal to deal with turn 4 Cat lady that poops a Meteor into turn 5 Cat lady that poops a Meteor into turn 6 revive Meteor Cat Lady with 2 +1/+1 counters
I am proud to say that I have played MTGA completely free-to-play on and off since it launched. I have a total of about 6 half-made decks. Sometimes they even win in historic, the only format I can play.
Lately I talked to someone who plays Pokemon online - there the online world was just to try out new decks and ideas, not a metagame which you are paying for in drafts or online. And I haven't invested money into Arena because I think that Arena is (for me) not built for paying money to play this "free" game online. It should decide whether it wants to be Magic, but online (paid) or free just to get new players into the game and have fun online.
Welcome to the yugioh TCG, where rarity bumping is the standard, and nobaody likes it. It gets to be absurd at some points. The two that always come to mind is the difference between Tearlaments Kashtira and Kashtiratheosis between the TCG and OCG. Both cards were common in the OCG, meaning that they were super easy to pick up. When they were released into the TCG, Tear Kash became an ultra and Theosis became a Secret rare. I think even Pressured planet Wraitsoth was a common in the OCG and became a Secret in the TCG. The downside to this is of course the price of the cards. Kashtira became a really expensive deck, and it was a very powerful meta strategy with a card that warped the game around itself.* Actually, that's not even the worst of it. The OCG's cards come in multiple rarities, which means that if you're a budget player then you can get the cheap ones, and if you have more moeny to spend then you can get the cool looking ones. The only upside to the rarity bumping is that these cards that were originally low rarity do actually look pretty fucking cool, but the downsides heavily outweigh the upsides. *Also, random side note, Kashtira actually wasn't all that good. It's entire claim to fame was straight up the single card that warped the meta around itself. Without that card it's just alright. It can honestly be described as the worst deck to ever be considered tier 1, which is still weird to say based on how individually powerful a number of the cards are.
I believe ever since MOM they've kept adding more mythics/rares through different means in drafts. Either through new mini sets or lists. Players noticed how hard it became completing collections, so they came up with the "2 rares opened per round" in drafts. But now it seems they've found new ways to screw the players over... (Can't forget the "only obtainable through WC's" cards they've recently come up with either. Is Dr. Evil leading WoTC?)
One of the reasons I got into Arena is that it truly was f2p-viable. I’ve been able to keep up with a few historic or standard decks each season that allow me to climb enough to support my jank addiction. If that starts to change, the game loses significant appeal for me; I don’t want to be stuck at the kiddie table or pay $200 every season. (By the way, 3 Big Score cards in ~100 packs for me)
The last set I played Arena with Like actually played played was Forgotten Realms (or whatever the first DnD set was) After that, I kinda just get on every so often... but then I just build shit and play against a friend or the training cpu bot
So I totally agree that the number of mythics in the set is unreasonable for your percentage change of opening some of them; I will play a bit of devil's advocate though, and mention that for only 300 more gold or 60 more gems you can purchase Mythic Packs that guarantee you opening a mythic rare. I don't know if you can still get Big Score type stuff out of them, but I feel like it still changes the "I need this mythic and have to purchase crazy amounts of packs to get it" equation somewhat. Good state of play takes nontheless, my dude
@@druffel46 Ok wow, I looked it up and yeah that's true. I posted this because I know I have literally never opened a mythic pack without getting one; either there's an element of collection completion to consider (mine is not super dense), or I just need to fly to Vegas
Ye I think its in case you just need those 1-2 Mythics in a set for collection but honestly just opening more standard packs seems more worth. Or I am also just not rich enough :p @@pencilsnake
I have been an occasional Arena economy defender, but rinsing out Mythic wild cards like this is genuinely heinous, and largely undermines the last of the good will I had towards Arena. I like drafting, and I think rewarding people for playing draft is good, but constructed is also good and should also be rewarding, and it was already probably too hard to build constructed decks.
And the fault of the mythic economy was just that fact that many mythics are legendaries and you only need 2-3 copies in your deck, while you often need 4 copies of any rares you want to build your deck around. So it's not even about how rare they are. They fucked up the system without fixing anything. The idea that these things were in this super legendary vault is nice, but there were better ways to approach this.
You dont need to craft them all, draft, get whatever you want to draft, then after you finish drafting craft the cards you are missing or intend to play with.
I'd drop over 1000 USD annually on Arena IF their economy was even in the same dimension as sanity. As-is, thousands of hours played--not one fucking cent spent. Not one gem purchased. I dump my money into real cards I have never played. I don't even play my colors in Arena because it just frustrates me to not have the cards I want. Instead I play on Arena a pile of junk unlocked for free totally opposite of the combo/control decks I'd pay big to be able to play. So many routes to fix it: personally, add another battlepass for $5 a month = unlock usage of all cards for the month. Not unlocked forever, not added to your collection, rented but its all of it. So people like me who are crazy deckbuilders who tinker more than they play = actually spend money on the game. Instead, nothing, I spend nothing, play a ton, bad review on steam, talking shit to the coworkers about it despite dumping 4+ hours every night. Someday I will have enough wildcards to build 1 deck the way I want. Client locks up and has more errors than Microprose's MtG game from 1996, which is to-this-day a better MtG video game.
I've been playing Arena since alpha, and the economy eventually killed my interest in playing most formats. I used to draft constantly and play quite a bit of constructed as well. These days, I just play Brawl, coasting off those wildcards I built up when I was still giving them money. Until things somehow get a little more fairly priced, I'm just not spending another penny on Arena.
I opened 149 packs of OTJ on arena and got 1 big score card. It was near the end of opening them and i hadn't seen one so i assumed you couldn't get them in the packs and thought you got them some other way. 1 out of 149...
When they announced The Big Score and said "Wow look these will all be Mythic Rares!!!!1" were we supposed to jump for joy? Why was that ever a selling point? Oh boy, no new cards for Pauper! Thanks!
Just don’t buy packs… draft, break even or better. I usually get 6-7 wins every draft. Sometimes I scrub out and only get 4-5 wins but only happens like 1 every ten drafts roughly. Then rinse and repeat. Boom free packs. Free gems. If you’re bad at drafting well practice, practice, practice! Remember drafting will improve your deck building skill and helps with combat math for when you’re playing standard, explorer, historic etc. drafting WILL improve your overall magic skill tenfold. Get to it. Don’t get discouraged and just grind it out. B4 you know it you will have all the cards you want for standard from drafting and then you will have all these wildcards you can use for the older sets if you missed a card here and there.
It's a P2W game, meaning you can pay to get something you would otherwise get for winning, in this case: cards. This encourages them to make playing normally suck, for the simple reason that people won't pay to bypass fun gameplay loops. This drives people away who aren't as brainwashed to P2W mechanics, increasingly shifting the playerbase towards whales and the gameplay loop towards terrible. MtG Arena is extra-egregious about it compared to other mobile TCGs, because they've started out populated by MtG players who're quite brainwashed to tolerating these mechanics to begin with. These issues you're having now will never get better; they will get worse. It's an intentional feature of the monetization; if you don't plan on dropping huge amounts of cash on this game, then it is not designed for you. You can leave now, or you can watch as they make the game worse and worse for you. Doing the latter will at least let you see the lifecycle of one of these games if you haven't seen it before. It shouldn't take too long; in only 6 years, their interface has already reached a level of bloat I've only seen out of a decade-old Korean P2W MMO.
I was just telling my homie this today. They are legitimately trying to split the player base so that only the teet suckingest shills and whales are left on arena, and everyone else just buys real cards. They are splitting the profits and arena is paying the price, but as long as it's only whales and shills on the client, it's not like it will matter.
Actualy didnt even recognized this, arena is "insane" in geting carda for realy long. There are basicaly two ways to thing about it. - part time game: play few games of arena a day, cycle past your compendium, basicaly free to play game. Expect to be able to build 1 new deck per few month. - try to play it more time. Useless, never be able to get more carda and more fun decks.
You come across some of this cards in draft quite a bit because they are quite bad for limited, rare drafing is giving me between 7 and 9 rares per event.
I don't think magic would necessarily die off if content creators couldn't profit enough to keep making fresh new decks on Arena, but honestly they provide so much free advertising for the game that they should get some kind of regular kickback if they don't already do.
well thank goodness draft boosters on arena have a higher chance of getting big score cards, big score being originally designed as a non-draftable miniset, hope I can grab a bunch of Sterling Hounds to synergize with my Simulacrum Synthesizer
If what you need to make your deck is 7 or 8 mythics, which I think is what you said in the video, then you *really* shouldn't be spending $150 on packs when you could just spend $40 on the mythic wildcards themselves. You could buy 4 for $20. Which in my mind is the important bit. No matter how they collate, whatever it is they do with packs, a mythic card will never cost me more than $5 on arena. The fact that I have to buy them in bundles of 4 is annoying, and I have to remind myself every time I cash in a wildcard that I'm essentially spending $5. Of course, it's actually slightly less than $5 because I also get mythic wildcards for free, but I always just treat each mythic wildcard as a $5 bill when I'm making my deckbuilding decisions. Which often means making unoptimized decks. But usually unoptimized in that there's a better card that can fill a slot, I never have to do without key pieces. It probably helps that I only play brawl, and once I have one copy of a card, I can put that card into any number of decks, and since I'm a brawl player, I only need one. To me, Arena feels a lot cheaper than paper, because I only need one Great Henge, if I didn't have one I could pick it up for $5, and then stick that in any number of green decks I want. In paper, I'd have to buy one copy per deck at $50, or keep unsleeving it and moving it around between decks, or use a proxy but unfortunately my playgroup doesn't like proxies. Which is a whole other issue that is *super* annoying to me, but if we're figuring proxies into a discussion of price then nothing can ever compete with paper, except maybe cockatrice because then you don't need to buy ink and paper. But it does sound like in the specific story you told about spending 150 euro on packs to still not get the mythics you need, it sounds like it would've been better to spend 40 or 60 or maybe 80 on the mythics, depending on what you need. I don't mean to come across as a wotc bootlicker but for me, the way I play, and the way i build decks, arena has been cheaper than paper, and allows me to brew more. That does come with the drawback of nothing I buy on Arena having any resale value, but that doesn't bother me because I've never viewed magic as an investment. If I want to invest, I'd buy stocks. Even when I played paper (which I still do from time to time but not as much as I used to), the financialization of it was ***so annoying***. And still is so annoying! Just recently, I was considering getting a scion of draco for my Jared deck, and then leyline of the guildpact and the card I wanted jumped from like $2 to $10! Which is another thing I prefer about Arena, I don't have to watch the market like an investor to get my game pieces. A mythic is $5 no matter what the market does in paper. It would have been nice to get the card I wany for $2 and then have it go up to $10, I guess, but that wouldn't mean I'd've made $8 profit. I don't plan on selling it, I plan on putting it in my jared deck and playing games with it. I think that's the main thing that makes me prefer the Arena economy to paper. I never have to have anxiety about whether I should wait for the price of a card to go down, or buy quick before the price goes up. Anyway I am kind of rambling and scattered, I'm not making an edited essay here, but I think the main point is that, in the case mentioned in this video, it would've been cheaper to buy mythic wcs for $20 per 4 wildcards, and that buying wildcards this way is at least in my experience cheaper than buying physical cards. Sure, some mythics are cheaper than $5 in paper, but a lot of them are significantly higher than that, and without running the numbers (someone else feel free), i would guess that it comes out to decks being cheaper on arena than paper. Especially singleton. Which is not to say the game is anywhere as affordable as I would like it to be, it's just always been expensive. Which sucks! I wish it was a cheaper and more accessible hobby. I guess I'm just not mad about it because I don't have the energy to be mad about it, if I didn't think it was worth my money I'd simply spend it elsewhere on other hobbies.
Spending money to ONLY get Mythic wild cards is absolutely not something I am going to do - having the rest of the cards from the set is also super important to me. That's also giving in to them. In short, damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is a closed system, where you can't sell out, trade or dust. It shouldn't be this stingy, no matter how hard you slice it.
I'm still pissed that showcases for cards from LCI like Amalia Benavides Aguirre and several cards from the Brothers War retro artifact schematic cards are just non existent even though they exist irl. It's bullshit.
it feels like this is them punishing us for having so much backlash against aftermath. like you dont wanna buy our shitty supplemental product instead by 5 times as many regular packs to get the cards.
The game's ICR actively punish you for set completion with 0 protections including all of the 'bonus sheets'. So even if you otherwise complete the main set's mythics you won't get bonus sheet mythics, just gems...
For me, the iOS Arena client has been crashing WAY more starting with the last few updates. I hoped Outlaws would improve things, but now it crashes at the start of every game, sometimes when I crack a fetchland, and sometimes when my opponent attacks. I've never seen the iOS client in such a bad state.
As light spender I can’t even understand the concept of “making a few decks I want to play” I have one deck and that’s about it other than the starter decks. 😂
Years ago I was excited to enjoy magic online. I instantly realized how hostile the game is. So I play regularly and never spend money. I spent 15 bucks back in the day and refuse to spend anything again.
They should definitely do more positive stuff for the players, including but not limited to giving you a full pack when just opening a pack, fix icr stuff, and stop giving phantom stuff for midweek. I also love your blanket!!
This happened because Hasbro saw the last Aftermath set bomb and didn't want that to happen again so they shoved all that shit into the big score spot in OTJ. it's a complete mess and why I stopped playing magic atm.
The funny thing is that the arena economy is so fucked that them being mythics is even kinda good actually. I mean, since almost every good land or deck defining card is rare or higher it's actually far easier to run out of rares than mythics. 😂 Like, you can't even spend mythic wildcards on rares. Which is not even predatory, just stupid. The arena economy in general is so haphazardly designed that it's not even good at making them money.
You know who's mostly to blame that Hasbro isn't putting more manpower in MtG Arena? People that pump 150€ in an hour into the shop to get artificially even-rarer-than-mythic-rare cards. Why should Hasbro change anything as long as people still spend loads of money. Sure they may complain, but that bit doesn't show up on the profit sheet at the end of the month. As long as people throw money at Arena despite its condition Hasbro has no reason to change it, they'll cut down until profits drop.
They literally printed mythic uncommons.
played my first draft today of the set and was like "ooh that mythic looks sick" and it was just a morbid opportunist...
They can’t hear our complaints over all the $$ they’re making.
Yep....... you would have to be beyond stupid to put a dollar into arena.
Its just a mobile game, same predatory practices at play and absolutly no way of knowing if the service will still be active in 10 years time.
Thanks for pointing that out.
That's not an Arena issue. Its the same as paper.
mythic uncommons
i think they brainstomed how to get the mythic wildcards out of the hands of people and came up "make everything mythic in extra sheets even uncommons"
It's a P2W game, that's how it improves. They will intentionally and continually make the game worse while introducing increasingly expensive ways to counteract that worsening. They know this model well and won't deviate from it significantly.
Genshin Impact *proved* a playerbase can break a company intent on Gacha antics.
It’s entirely doable. Just. Stop. Playing.
We need to be like the D&D community. Cease all purchasing of WotC products, and Hasbro will get desperate enough to pander to us.
@@themekahippie991I don’t pay shit, have every card in standard and win just fine.
@@victimizeakaboomsta8995 Why are you telling me?
The rare shifting is outrageous. How dare they make lightning bolt and counterspell rares. Regardless of these others.
Lmao. Putting autoinclude staples at Rare is ridiculous
Yeah that was a shock to the system when I tried Arena. Glad I left and found other games to play
@@KnicKnaclike disc golf?
@@drugsdelaney2907 Nah not during the winter in my state too much snow lol
Rarity and Legendary have become tools WotC use to ‘Balance’ the game.
And it sucks
"Its weird, its frustrating, and its confusing as shit"
Criminal. The word you're looking for is "its criminal".
Predatory.
Highway robbery.
Fitting for this expansion
"Pay-to-win"
This is how every P2W game like this evolved over time. I'm not exaggerating. If you are surprised, it's because this is your first time playing a P2W game more than a year.
If you don't like this, don't play games which allow you to purchase stuff for cash which you could otherwise obtain through gameplay. That's what P2W means and it's all it takes for a game to turn bad.
@@themekahippie991 Ironically the discrepancy between the virtual and paper versions of magic make the virtual version much more expensive than the paper version. Quite the juxtaposition: the virtual version provides cards given time investment rather than money while the paper version requires the purchase of all your cards, yet the virtual version is more pay to win than the paper version!
Wizards heard it was easier to get the mythics you needed than rares and fixed that shit right away.
Is funny bc I worked on a digital card game where we make "mythic" rarity cards easier to obtain than "rares" but because our mythics while good, were not the cards that shape the meta, they were the upgrades for already stablished archtypes, we shaped the metagame around rares and uncommons instead, so our players usually priorized get the rares as staples, and then craft the mythics around the rares they play in their decks.
@WildspeakerYT what game did you work on?
@@Wells13555 oh a very small indie game called Causa, Voices of the Dusk, is on steam
@@Wells13555 it looks like I never answered, the game was called Causa, Voices of the Dusk, but iirc servers are down now it was like a 2020 project
I have hundreds of C and UC wildcards, barely get any others... we should be able to convert lower tiers into higher ones that isnt some roundabout way thru vault
If you buy out the standard set of those, and then keep opening those packs, you will build up your vault progress.... I still don't know what it's for though.
@@obadijahparks Vault gives wildcards, I don't know the exact numbers except that you get 1 mythic wildcard.
the reason we have so many wild cards is that we have 12 copies of reprinted commons so we dont need to craft commons anymore
Gotta drain all those wild cards before MH3 cards drops…
Is MH3 going to be on arena?
@@darksquirtle3041yeah it will
why would you even want mh3 if you can't play modern ?
As a f2p player Rares and Mythics arent the only issue, I actually never have enough Uncommons to even build a budget deck.
The only good thing with Arena's economy I see so far is that if you opened or crafted a card and it gets reprinted into standard you dont have to open it again but the fact we are getting so many more upshifted rarity cards without a single update to even the Vault is criminal.
They could also make it easier to see what historic cards are currently legal in standard.
The vault is a fucking lie.
I play this game as a full time job and I don’t think a single vault I own has crept above 5%. Is it resetting every set release? What the actual fuck
I remember playing Magic Duels and how:
1. You only ever opened one copy of a mythic because you're only allowed to play one copy of a mythic in a deck.
2. You would always open new (copies) of cards with no dupes beyond the copy limits with a set card pool; you could absolutely grind the full card pool.
The game had plenty of problems compared to other MtG sims, ragequits in Ranked being the worst. When the company forgets what things worked well? It just hurts the soul.
Even if you get an "all access" account for MTG Arena or MTGO, please keep updating us about situations like this.
All access accounts are sometimes just a way to disguise how bad availability is or how much money they are really charging.
Thank you for you videos! :)
Nevermind the fact that a bunch of the big score cards definitely don't deserve to be mythics. Looking at some of the effects some of them were clearly uncommons from when it was a separate product that were upshifted arbitrarily when folded in. Because some higher up decided that they all needed to be the same rarity.
the droprate is criminal but even worse is that ... WHY ITS ALL MYTHIC RARE ? WTF ??? WHY???
they literally made every card from the aftermath set mythic including the uncommons
It's pure greed. Yu-Gi-Oh has this problem as well, with rarity spikes from ocg to tcg and tcg to master duel, but somehow wotc has literally outgreeded komoney here
@@amiablereaperThe problem for wotc is komoney has always been this way. Yugioh players are used to komoney behaviours, the current ramp up from what once was, to what is at wotc is making the bigger pill harder to swallow.
Wizards of the Cost
Takesbro
Segreed Lair
I opened a little over 60 packs on Arena including one draft, and I only opened ONE Big Score card. That's it. That's freaking ridiculous.
U gotta keep gambling i mean buying packs...
The fact that they didn't put any of the big cards at lower rarity is wild already. Then they also have an extra year of sets in standard so we are forced to get the rares and mythics from up to 11 sets at once to build a deck that matches the current top 8 decks.
I would actually spent money on mtgarena if it wasnt so expensive.
If 50 bucks would get me half the cards, and playing the other half, I probably do this every expansion.
But dropping 50 bucks gets me like 7-8 random mythics and 1 wildcard.....
This is a joke
So THATS why WotC made a mythic rare, 3 cmc mana rock!
Yup
6:18 -- This is, IMO, exactly why it was done this way.. To shift the economy and make people spend their mythic WCs... I'm always sitting at about 12-16 mythic WCs at anytime, while I might have 4-6 extra rare WCs at any time..
This isn't some big conspiracy, it's what anyone outside the insular communities of these P2W games will tell you.
This is a P2W game, so it will continually get worse unless you continually pay more. It's really that simple.
@@themekahippie991i am f2p on arena and i have a lot of decks you have to play a decent amount of time and you have to be good at the game but you can play f2p
@@edoardosalvai2759 Yea, you can play F2P on nearly any P2W game. That just makes you whale food. What is your point?
@@themekahippie991 whale food means nothing if i have competitive decks and i ve told you that i have them i have the same possibility of a whale to win a game
@@edoardosalvai2759 grinding = feeding whales
You said you have to feed whales a decent amount of time.
My biggest issue is the "newspaper" cards. I only play Standard and Limited so they're fucking useless for me to open outside of Limited. I fucked up and bought a box for the first time in over a year and got a pile of those. All the non Standard shit in the booster boxes is why I stopped buying them in the first place.
wtf? i opened 100 normal packs got 3 big score cards. opened 23 golden packs 11 this is the most expencive set they have on arena by far if you want to get all cards
Mythic packs don’t include BIG either.
18 packs from my promo codes I got at my LGS prerelease events plus I got the 3 free packs for the set dropping and bought 30 packs (+the 3 gold packs) using saved up gold on arena. I have literally 0 big score cards yet.
The thing that is crazy still to me too is arena is 8 cards per pack as well...that will never be lost on me
I remember back in the day when you'd go to a prerelease, and then a couple weeks later the set would be released, and a couple weeks after that the set would be released on MTGO. And then they trimmed back on the time frames... and as far as I know nowadays there's no real thing as a prerelease anymore, considering that when you go, you can play with the cards in ALL formats as of then. And WotC/Hasbro expect the sets to be ready on digital clients at the same time. If they gave us actual prerelease-to-release-date leadup time again, that would give Daybreak et al an extra week to get the cards sorted out on the digital clients, something that pretty much all game developers and publishers have to contend with. I mean, how often do you want to buy a game on day 1 just to find out it's buggy as heck because corporate decided it had to be out on day X and no later, even though it's not enough time to get it done properly, and so there's bugs galore? Give us actual prereleases back!
11:20 I just wanted to add that not all the face commanders get added, for the LCI release they added Xolatoyac, the Smiling Flood instead of Hakbal of the Surging Soul, the face commander. I think they should just add both tbh.
I was mad they didn't add Carmen, Cruel skymarcher. She is my favorite commander and not even in the game
7:54 For specifics on this. You get *one* guaranteed mythic wildcard for every *thirty* packs you open, and one rare every 6 packs, except for when you reach 30 where you get a mythic instead.
Arena's wildcard system is extremely bad.
The one thing i want from arena at this point, is just historic brawl without alchemy. So tired of hearthstone in my magic.
I didn't want fake cards at all. Either make it work from the paper version or don't add the card.
Log in, queue into Brawl, see Mythweaver Poq, log off and go to bed
MythWeaver Poq is gentle kind sweet baby compared to that K-unt Blood artist. Or her friend Vito. There are a million more problematic cards than Teysa of the Ghost Council or Grenzo
I quit arena while it was technically still in beta I told myself I would come back when it's actually not super predatory and here we are years later
In my opinion one of the worst parts about it is that most of the big score cards are ASS in draft. Most of them serve specific niches that you just cannot find outside of an artifact themed set, and it pisses me off that they would make the big score cards more likely to appear in a format where people don't want them, and less likely to appear in traditional packs
The wildcard system as a whole just kills any and all desire I have to brew decks on Arena, and has forced me to rely almost exclusively on net-decking because I just can't risk wasting them, same for a lot of alternate formats which just have too high an initial investment to be worth trying out even thought I'd like to.
Me who prints my own cards: “wow I’m glad I just print my own cards”
Lol fr. This made me relieved that I stopped playing Arena, and only use it these days for tutorials for new players. I feel like Wizards are constantly proving that to be a good decision
That's what I do at this point. Nobody cares.
Hasbro does not deserve money.
Please Vince, please. Recommend people to leave the client. The power is yours.
I bounced a while ago, around the time Alchemy started. I don’t regret it.
Message received, we all need to take a shower. Thank you for your fine leadership Mr. Pleasant Kenobi.
To be fair, Calamity is bugged but only if you're attacking a player defending a planeswalker or battle. Something about the selection on targets for the new token causing it to stop. So until they fix it, you can't run battles and have to hope they don't have a planeswalker.
It has been reported on the bug report section several times on the Wizard's site though so I was equally surprised it hasn't been fixed yet.
Calamity + Lively Dirge really pushed the Vein Ripper + Push/Pull deck to the next level. It's so good now and if you get Calamity and a Ripper with Pull it's almost always lethal
its SO sad because they sabotaging themself :(
more and more of my friends stop playing arena because it gets more expensive every year ...
i had 10 people in my friendlist who often are online playing arena now its only 1 left ... everyone else stopped because "its to expensive" ...
that were people who all did spend money in that game ... wizards is literally stealing money from themself
Just means they need you to spend ALot more. Wizards needs you 🤣
You don't understand how these games generate money. They don't care how many of you leave they make most of their money off the whales who don't care about the economy of the game.
Same. Literally everyone I knew who used to play quit over the cost. When new friends have tried it out recently, they quit as soon as they realize they can't build an actual deck.
I bought a few mythic boosters just for the big score cards. One of my boosters gave me a mythic wildcard for the bonus sheet slot, and a mythic wildcard for the mythic slot. I guess it's dumb luck, but it's also disapointing getting wildcards instead of actual cards
Also, out of 15 mythic packs, not a single Big Score card
The economy is particularly bad for new players who dont have a long history of oppened packs to get cards from. I am new and am interested in playing pioneer. Standard is a casual side event at fnm in my area which doesnt always fire, and i know if i tried to play modern the cost and size of the cardpool would likely undoo me. Ive been playing explorer on arena trying to figure out what deck i want to build in paper, but the issue is each deck needs £80 or more of rare wildcards. I could try to open packs but its inefficnet because the cards are spread out from so many sets. In the end i just got a subscription to an MTGO lending service and am stuck playing open play/tournament practice as i dont want to spend £10 to play 5 best of 3s online, with decks im not super familiar eith and so will likely just 1-4 or 0-5 and grt no.prizing
Do all your quests , with the gold buy only boosters from one collection, eventually youll have almost all the collection and you will start getting wildcards instead ... then use them to get whatever you want
besides some gampasses I never spent a buck on this app and sure at first I coulldnt build many decks but now I can do 2 per month easy
6:20 I started playing MTGA recently, I'm playing since LCI. You may not believe this, but currently I have 37 Mythic Rare and 5 Rare wildcards. I'm interested in playing Standard mainly, but every time I want to try out new color pair, I need to craft 12 rare lands - that's ~100 rares just for standard. Then there are staples for each color. Most extreme case there is 4C/5C ramp, which contains 40 rares and 5 mythic rares. I would like to jump into explorer (Arena's pioneer) too, and I need 25-40 rares for a deck, while only 2-5 mythic. Opening packs there is no way to go, so I grind Standard Events, and I hope for Rare wild cards from my packs.
I wish there was a way to convert the Mythic Rares into the Rares, and other way around. 2:1 or 3:1 ratio would be fine. Or Wizards could give us just more wildcards/packs...
How is grinding standard events more efficient than drafting?
As a long-term Arena player, I'm personally glad that I get a ton more mythics to potentially spend my wildcards on (I'm currently sitting on 140-ish mythic wildcards without spending money on Arena in the last 5-ish years), but I can certainly see the frustration of not being able to (somewhat) reliably opening desired mythics when opening packs of Thunder Junction.
1:38 you don’t think it’s strange that shortly after we’re “allowed” to purchase mythics, all of the sudden the number of mythics is increasing in each set…
Hope they ever update the client, the basics, the supported aspect ratios....
As free to play player, I have opened a single base set mythic in -20 packs so far. It’s beyond discouraging. Downright depressing. I’m level 13 on mastery pass, got a prerelease code, and the free inbox packs. Even mastery pass ICRs pull from big score list. I can’t keep up at all.
Don't open packs within the first ~4 months of a sets release if you wanna stay economic. Stockpile them till you have like 80-100. The mastery pass of the next set usually contains a lot of previous sets packs. I know it's hard seeing all the cool decks have fun in standard, but you're way more likely to find the mythic card you want from drafts or daily rewards rather than sifting through packs.
And most importantly... DO NOT spend WC's on cards from new sets! I never spend mythic WC's on anything other than cards I'll forever use in historic. Spending a mythic WC for a "fun" deck is the #1 way to go broke.
Most of us quit Arena like 2 years ago from all the content creator videos about it being predatory.
Not true at all. Arena is actually at an all time high player count.
Arena is the most generous f2p game I've seen. (As long as you're good at draft)
@@irou95 have you played warframe?
@irou95 I've been a f2p player since launch and I'm sitting on 25 mythics and 30+rares. People just don't have enough patience. Like any other free to play mobile game it just takes time to get to where you want to be.
I'm interested again because commander might come to arena.
I think another adding factor is the fact that the pack you open will on average contain alot less rares and mythics then the new play boosters we get in limited.
If you want alot of these super mythics, then you are probably better off rare/mythic drafting then you are opening packs.
If they intend to keep these absurd inflation of mythics for future bonus sheets, then they need to turn the packs you open into play booster packs.
So perhaps that was the real and only reason to print these "big box" cards as mythic - to have a nice money grab for digital clients. Because on paper they just fill a fraction of a slot in a booster, so there "rarity" does not mean much anymore.
I only play standard and I have about 50 mythic wildcards. Most top decks don't use many mythics. My most expensive is a domain deck that needed about 35 rares, of which I was missing over 20. There's so many rare dual / tri lands.
Since thunder came out I've experienced an alarming amount of ppl playing only otj cards.
Which isn't what I experienced with the other sets. Idk. Maybe I'm baised
You have heard of Power Creep? Well let us introduce you to Economy creep...
I’ve opened 70+ packs now from OTJ and have opened zero Big Score cards from regular packs. I only opened them in the Golden Packs because I have the rest of the rares and mythics in Standard.
Vihaan is the only commander Im excited to build and I was also bummed he’s not on arena. Treasure agro seems very fun and different
Not much different than paper magic.
I’ve been playing since Neon Dynasty, and the amount of times i was barked at to go build a new deck by a disgruntled player is astounding,
But at the same time, i had no other options.
I STILL dont own enough cards, let alone GOOD cards to build another cohesive, functional deck.
And with the way opening packs goes…… my options are 1. Test my luck at gambling
2. Trade all of my cards for 1 decent card
3. Ignore the other players
So i did the obvious, i ignored the complaints and just kept doing me,
Which eventually caused a rift between myself and the other players to the point i could tell they didn’t care what happened at the table.
One day i sat down to play, they’re all talking about playing casual,
And all of these obviously not casual decks come out and they all look at me like why do i have a problem?
They power-crept me out of being able to play at the store, purposefully.
The same people who invited me to play, ended up trying to get rid of me for not conforming to their standard of how much money one should spend on a card game lol
So i just stopped playing there.
You can’t tell me its a fair game when im playing a Gluntch deck, and across from me are Minsc And Boo, along with a Ramos deck.
Yeah, it wasn’t gonna go well,
So when i saw that, i just packed up my stuff and left.
Nobody said a word when i got up, so i know they did it intentionally.
It was a “ha you dont like that? Then leave” moment for them, which was pretty shitty of them to do to a new player.
You could have net decked a budget brew for a couple bucks. You would think you would catch the hint after two years. Maybe instead of making it all about you, have you considered what it would be like to play some guys same garbage pile deck for two years?
You can always play draft instead of imposing the same deck on others for months on end.
Loser!
Have you considered buying singles?
I'm not going to deny that it sucks to be pressured out like that, but I do have a few questions.
Why are you relying on opening packs to get new cards? For the price of like, 9 packs, you could actually just build a decent $50 budget deck. Would you rather have 9 packs of mostly draft chaff that don't interact in any way with each other and that no one will really want to take off your hands, or a $50 deck that's cohesive and functional?
The reason the Arena economy gets hated a lot more than the MTGO economy is because at least in MTGO you can buy singles to get what you want, and that's assuming you aren't using any of the rental services. Why you wouldn't take advantage of this same ability to buy singles in paper magic is baffling to me.
@@Dynme because he chose to die on his hill and impose his frugalness on others. I’ve seen it done before. Dude gets offended because others tell him it would be great if he showed up with a new deck and they decide to punish everyone by playing the same deck over and over. It’s inconsiderate to do that in constructed especially after two years to the same play group. No wonder they busted out the tier one decks. Learn to draft or keep up with financial sinkhole that is constructed.
Social interaction is a two way street.
You can’t expect others in an LGS to bow down to the whims of you’re financial budget time and time again. I learned that as a teenager going to FNM’s it’s a luxury hobby.
With all that being said, with some effort and sacrifice it’s not hard to have a bunch of fun budget brews that are cohesive.
I always have way more mythic crafts than rares so i end up with extra's i never use maybe having some of those rares be mythics isnt the worst for arena as far as crafting goes. The biggest issue i have with arena and always have is land rarity. When you need to drop 20+ rares on just lands to make a deck or two you want it feels bad. None the less its better than other online tcgs like hearthstone and master duel with its crafting system, ive made more decks on arena ftp in one standard rotation than i have in all the years i played hearthstone. They should make rare and mythic crafts interchangeable same with common and uncommon, think that would probably solve alot of problems
I stopped playing Arena at Strixhaven for this reason. The entire game is a raw example of consumer exploitation. Fuck WOTC
I went to prerelease mildly excited for the set. Opened on of those Big Score cards even! It was the Cornucopia. I don't think I'm going to keep playing MtG anymore. The only thing I enjoyed, prereleases, have become a bomb soup where every player gets 12+ Rare/Mythics and the one who opens the good ones just wins, there's not enough removal to deal with turn 4 Cat lady that poops a Meteor into turn 5 Cat lady that poops a Meteor into turn 6 revive Meteor Cat Lady with 2 +1/+1 counters
I am proud to say that I have played MTGA completely free-to-play on and off since it launched.
I have a total of about 6 half-made decks. Sometimes they even win in historic, the only format I can play.
Lately I talked to someone who plays Pokemon online - there the online world was just to try out new decks and ideas, not a metagame which you are paying for in drafts or online.
And I haven't invested money into Arena because I think that Arena is (for me) not built for paying money to play this "free" game online. It should decide whether it wants to be Magic, but online (paid) or free just to get new players into the game and have fun online.
Welcome to the yugioh TCG, where rarity bumping is the standard, and nobaody likes it.
It gets to be absurd at some points. The two that always come to mind is the difference between Tearlaments Kashtira and Kashtiratheosis between the TCG and OCG.
Both cards were common in the OCG, meaning that they were super easy to pick up. When they were released into the TCG, Tear Kash became an ultra and Theosis became a Secret rare. I think even Pressured planet Wraitsoth was a common in the OCG and became a Secret in the TCG.
The downside to this is of course the price of the cards. Kashtira became a really expensive deck, and it was a very powerful meta strategy with a card that warped the game around itself.*
Actually, that's not even the worst of it. The OCG's cards come in multiple rarities, which means that if you're a budget player then you can get the cheap ones, and if you have more moeny to spend then you can get the cool looking ones.
The only upside to the rarity bumping is that these cards that were originally low rarity do actually look pretty fucking cool, but the downsides heavily outweigh the upsides.
*Also, random side note, Kashtira actually wasn't all that good. It's entire claim to fame was straight up the single card that warped the meta around itself. Without that card it's just alright. It can honestly be described as the worst deck to ever be considered tier 1, which is still weird to say based on how individually powerful a number of the cards are.
I believe ever since MOM they've kept adding more mythics/rares through different means in drafts. Either through new mini sets or lists. Players noticed how hard it became completing collections, so they came up with the "2 rares opened per round" in drafts. But now it seems they've found new ways to screw the players over... (Can't forget the "only obtainable through WC's" cards they've recently come up with either. Is Dr. Evil leading WoTC?)
One of the reasons I got into Arena is that it truly was f2p-viable. I’ve been able to keep up with a few historic or standard decks each season that allow me to climb enough to support my jank addiction. If that starts to change, the game loses significant appeal for me; I don’t want to be stuck at the kiddie table or pay $200 every season.
(By the way, 3 Big Score cards in ~100 packs for me)
The last set I played Arena with
Like actually played played was Forgotten Realms (or whatever the first DnD set was)
After that, I kinda just get on every so often... but then I just build shit and play against a friend or the training cpu bot
So I totally agree that the number of mythics in the set is unreasonable for your percentage change of opening some of them; I will play a bit of devil's advocate though, and mention that for only 300 more gold or 60 more gems you can purchase Mythic Packs that guarantee you opening a mythic rare. I don't know if you can still get Big Score type stuff out of them, but I feel like it still changes the "I need this mythic and have to purchase crazy amounts of packs to get it" equation somewhat. Good state of play takes nontheless, my dude
I will look into it.
They don’t guarantee mythic rare tho. They just have a higher chance
@@druffel46 Ok wow, I looked it up and yeah that's true. I posted this because I know I have literally never opened a mythic pack without getting one; either there's an element of collection completion to consider (mine is not super dense), or I just need to fly to Vegas
Ye I think its in case you just need those 1-2 Mythics in a set for collection but honestly just opening more standard packs seems more worth. Or I am also just not rich enough :p @@pencilsnake
If they would just put in a trade system for wildcards. X commons make 1 rare or mythic or whatever they decide it would help quell so many people
I have been an occasional Arena economy defender, but rinsing out Mythic wild cards like this is genuinely heinous, and largely undermines the last of the good will I had towards Arena. I like drafting, and I think rewarding people for playing draft is good, but constructed is also good and should also be rewarding, and it was already probably too hard to build constructed decks.
And the fault of the mythic economy was just that fact that many mythics are legendaries and you only need 2-3 copies in your deck, while you often need 4 copies of any rares you want to build your deck around. So it's not even about how rare they are. They fucked up the system without fixing anything. The idea that these things were in this super legendary vault is nice, but there were better ways to approach this.
I love the idea that people congradulated them on abandoning an aftermath style disaster for being hopelessly anti-consumer and they pull this.
Its insane how many mythics I am needing to craft, as a free to play Timeless player, I am going to need to draft for a loooong time to keep up
You dont need to craft them all, draft, get whatever you want to draft, then after you finish drafting craft the cards you are missing or intend to play with.
I'd drop over 1000 USD annually on Arena IF their economy was even in the same dimension as sanity. As-is, thousands of hours played--not one fucking cent spent. Not one gem purchased. I dump my money into real cards I have never played. I don't even play my colors in Arena because it just frustrates me to not have the cards I want. Instead I play on Arena a pile of junk unlocked for free totally opposite of the combo/control decks I'd pay big to be able to play. So many routes to fix it: personally, add another battlepass for $5 a month = unlock usage of all cards for the month. Not unlocked forever, not added to your collection, rented but its all of it. So people like me who are crazy deckbuilders who tinker more than they play = actually spend money on the game. Instead, nothing, I spend nothing, play a ton, bad review on steam, talking shit to the coworkers about it despite dumping 4+ hours every night. Someday I will have enough wildcards to build 1 deck the way I want. Client locks up and has more errors than Microprose's MtG game from 1996, which is to-this-day a better MtG video game.
I've been playing Arena since alpha, and the economy eventually killed my interest in playing most formats. I used to draft constantly and play quite a bit of constructed as well. These days, I just play Brawl, coasting off those wildcards I built up when I was still giving them money. Until things somehow get a little more fairly priced, I'm just not spending another penny on Arena.
I opened 149 packs of OTJ on arena and got 1 big score card. It was near the end of opening them and i hadn't seen one so i assumed you couldn't get them in the packs and thought you got them some other way. 1 out of 149...
When they announced The Big Score and said "Wow look these will all be Mythic Rares!!!!1" were we supposed to jump for joy? Why was that ever a selling point? Oh boy, no new cards for Pauper! Thanks!
Just don’t buy packs… draft, break even or better. I usually get 6-7 wins every draft. Sometimes I scrub out and only get 4-5 wins but only happens like 1 every ten drafts roughly. Then rinse and repeat. Boom free packs. Free gems. If you’re bad at drafting well practice, practice, practice! Remember drafting will improve your deck building skill and helps with combat math for when you’re playing standard, explorer, historic etc. drafting WILL improve your overall magic skill tenfold. Get to it. Don’t get discouraged and just grind it out. B4 you know it you will have all the cards you want for standard from drafting and then you will have all these wildcards you can use for the older sets if you missed a card here and there.
I dont want to draft. Stop telling people that don't want to draft to "just draft". What a stupid response. Please stop.
It's a P2W game, meaning you can pay to get something you would otherwise get for winning, in this case: cards. This encourages them to make playing normally suck, for the simple reason that people won't pay to bypass fun gameplay loops. This drives people away who aren't as brainwashed to P2W mechanics, increasingly shifting the playerbase towards whales and the gameplay loop towards terrible.
MtG Arena is extra-egregious about it compared to other mobile TCGs, because they've started out populated by MtG players who're quite brainwashed to tolerating these mechanics to begin with. These issues you're having now will never get better; they will get worse. It's an intentional feature of the monetization; if you don't plan on dropping huge amounts of cash on this game, then it is not designed for you. You can leave now, or you can watch as they make the game worse and worse for you. Doing the latter will at least let you see the lifecycle of one of these games if you haven't seen it before. It shouldn't take too long; in only 6 years, their interface has already reached a level of bloat I've only seen out of a decade-old Korean P2W MMO.
I was just telling my homie this today. They are legitimately trying to split the player base so that only the teet suckingest shills and whales are left on arena, and everyone else just buys real cards. They are splitting the profits and arena is paying the price, but as long as it's only whales and shills on the client, it's not like it will matter.
Actualy didnt even recognized this, arena is "insane" in geting carda for realy long. There are basicaly two ways to thing about it.
- part time game: play few games of arena a day, cycle past your compendium, basicaly free to play game. Expect to be able to build 1 new deck per few month.
- try to play it more time. Useless, never be able to get more carda and more fun decks.
Having distribution and availability problems on a digital client is insane to me.
You come across some of this cards in draft quite a bit because they are quite bad for limited, rare drafing is giving me between 7 and 9 rares per event.
Any chance you are gonna upload the decklist for Annie Flash?
I don't think magic would necessarily die off if content creators couldn't profit enough to keep making fresh new decks on Arena, but honestly they provide so much free advertising for the game that they should get some kind of regular kickback if they don't already do.
well thank goodness draft boosters on arena have a higher chance of getting big score cards, big score being originally designed as a non-draftable miniset, hope I can grab a bunch of Sterling Hounds to synergize with my Simulacrum Synthesizer
If what you need to make your deck is 7 or 8 mythics, which I think is what you said in the video, then you *really* shouldn't be spending $150 on packs when you could just spend $40 on the mythic wildcards themselves. You could buy 4 for $20. Which in my mind is the important bit. No matter how they collate, whatever it is they do with packs, a mythic card will never cost me more than $5 on arena. The fact that I have to buy them in bundles of 4 is annoying, and I have to remind myself every time I cash in a wildcard that I'm essentially spending $5. Of course, it's actually slightly less than $5 because I also get mythic wildcards for free, but I always just treat each mythic wildcard as a $5 bill when I'm making my deckbuilding decisions. Which often means making unoptimized decks. But usually unoptimized in that there's a better card that can fill a slot, I never have to do without key pieces. It probably helps that I only play brawl, and once I have one copy of a card, I can put that card into any number of decks, and since I'm a brawl player, I only need one. To me, Arena feels a lot cheaper than paper, because I only need one Great Henge, if I didn't have one I could pick it up for $5, and then stick that in any number of green decks I want. In paper, I'd have to buy one copy per deck at $50, or keep unsleeving it and moving it around between decks, or use a proxy but unfortunately my playgroup doesn't like proxies. Which is a whole other issue that is *super* annoying to me, but if we're figuring proxies into a discussion of price then nothing can ever compete with paper, except maybe cockatrice because then you don't need to buy ink and paper. But it does sound like in the specific story you told about spending 150 euro on packs to still not get the mythics you need, it sounds like it would've been better to spend 40 or 60 or maybe 80 on the mythics, depending on what you need. I don't mean to come across as a wotc bootlicker but for me, the way I play, and the way i build decks, arena has been cheaper than paper, and allows me to brew more. That does come with the drawback of nothing I buy on Arena having any resale value, but that doesn't bother me because I've never viewed magic as an investment. If I want to invest, I'd buy stocks. Even when I played paper (which I still do from time to time but not as much as I used to), the financialization of it was ***so annoying***. And still is so annoying! Just recently, I was considering getting a scion of draco for my Jared deck, and then leyline of the guildpact and the card I wanted jumped from like $2 to $10! Which is another thing I prefer about Arena, I don't have to watch the market like an investor to get my game pieces. A mythic is $5 no matter what the market does in paper. It would have been nice to get the card I wany for $2 and then have it go up to $10, I guess, but that wouldn't mean I'd've made $8 profit. I don't plan on selling it, I plan on putting it in my jared deck and playing games with it. I think that's the main thing that makes me prefer the Arena economy to paper. I never have to have anxiety about whether I should wait for the price of a card to go down, or buy quick before the price goes up. Anyway I am kind of rambling and scattered, I'm not making an edited essay here, but I think the main point is that, in the case mentioned in this video, it would've been cheaper to buy mythic wcs for $20 per 4 wildcards, and that buying wildcards this way is at least in my experience cheaper than buying physical cards. Sure, some mythics are cheaper than $5 in paper, but a lot of them are significantly higher than that, and without running the numbers (someone else feel free), i would guess that it comes out to decks being cheaper on arena than paper. Especially singleton. Which is not to say the game is anywhere as affordable as I would like it to be, it's just always been expensive. Which sucks! I wish it was a cheaper and more accessible hobby. I guess I'm just not mad about it because I don't have the energy to be mad about it, if I didn't think it was worth my money I'd simply spend it elsewhere on other hobbies.
Spending money to ONLY get Mythic wild cards is absolutely not something I am going to do - having the rest of the cards from the set is also super important to me. That's also giving in to them. In short, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is a closed system, where you can't sell out, trade or dust. It shouldn't be this stingy, no matter how hard you slice it.
I'm still pissed that showcases for cards from LCI like Amalia Benavides Aguirre and several cards from the Brothers War retro artifact schematic cards are just non existent even though they exist irl. It's bullshit.
it feels like this is them punishing us for having so much backlash against aftermath. like you dont wanna buy our shitty supplemental product instead by 5 times as many regular packs to get the cards.
If they increase the number of mythics in a set, they clearly need to increase their presence in booster packs
The game's ICR actively punish you for set completion with 0 protections including all of the 'bonus sheets'. So even if you otherwise complete the main set's mythics you won't get bonus sheet mythics, just gems...
It's not any better irl magic, got a collectors box yesterday, every card was damaged. Worst part is I pulled really good.
Here i am on the other end of the spectrum, 130k gems and 70k gold available. All i ever spent in real money was a 10er for the starter deal
It's really hard to go even in MTGA drafts when you automatically lose two games to mana flooding and mana starving.
For me, the iOS Arena client has been crashing WAY more starting with the last few updates. I hoped Outlaws would improve things, but now it crashes at the start of every game, sometimes when I crack a fetchland, and sometimes when my opponent attacks. I've never seen the iOS client in such a bad state.
lmao that opener A+
I'm playing the hell out of limited, but that does mean I'm way behind the curve on standard content.
As light spender I can’t even understand the concept of “making a few decks I want to play” I have one deck and that’s about it other than the starter decks. 😂
Years ago I was excited to enjoy magic online. I instantly realized how hostile the game is. So I play regularly and never spend money. I spent 15 bucks back in the day and refuse to spend anything again.
You would expect to at least have all the Legendary creatures from a set available for Brawl. Just madness.
They should definitely do more positive stuff for the players, including but not limited to giving you a full pack when just opening a pack, fix icr stuff, and stop giving phantom stuff for midweek. I also love your blanket!!
This happened because Hasbro saw the last Aftermath set bomb and didn't want that to happen again so they shoved all that shit into the big score spot in OTJ. it's a complete mess and why I stopped playing magic atm.
>"look at these bad business practices from Wizards" * infinity
>still forking over cash
The funny thing is that the arena economy is so fucked that them being mythics is even kinda good actually.
I mean, since almost every good land or deck defining card is rare or higher it's actually far easier to run out of rares than mythics. 😂
Like, you can't even spend mythic wildcards on rares. Which is not even predatory, just stupid. The arena economy in general is so haphazardly designed that it's not even good at making them money.
Arena was built during a time when we still had the traditional booster pack model.
You know who's mostly to blame that Hasbro isn't putting more manpower in MtG Arena? People that pump 150€ in an hour into the shop to get artificially even-rarer-than-mythic-rare cards. Why should Hasbro change anything as long as people still spend loads of money. Sure they may complain, but that bit doesn't show up on the profit sheet at the end of the month.
As long as people throw money at Arena despite its condition Hasbro has no reason to change it, they'll cut down until profits drop.
Judging by most any other games, if it's incredibly hard and expensive to get the cards you want, then it's working as intended.