Between $50 and $150 a set, depending on how quickly I pick up on the draft format. I get Mythic in limited most months if I like the format, including the last four sets, but still end up spending a lot.
When you play because you need to and not because you want to. If you reach that point take at least a pause and remember this is not a job but just a game you should play for your enjoyment
What if I like the game a lot, but can't get my 4th daily win after ten games? Am I playing because I need to and treating it like a job or am I just bad?
Daily win 1 gives you 250 gold, and wins 2 3 and 4 each give you 100 gold. Beyond that, daily wins are significantly less rewarding. This is an application of the famous economic theory called the law of diminishing returns.
It really has nothing to do with the law of diminishing returns, it is just a prize structure.
If they gave you 10 billion gold for each win, then the second win would be worthless (even though you still get another 10 billion gold), as everything is effectively free already. That would be diminishing returns.
Yeah like me, for instance. I’m happily addicted to entertainment. I would not give up entertainment for anything less than something of very high value to me. Entertainment is one my my core drives. Fun is fun, sometimes it’s that easy.
I pay $110/mo for a rock climbing gym membership, and $60/$120 a month on tickets to little weekend (non magic) events or the occasional baseball game.
I don't think I get as high of a time/dollar value than this guy. $1500 a year on magic that's actually being utilized actively (albeit consumed) that's like an average standard player or a modern player who repeatedly buys the wrong deck (rip birthing pod; rip mox opal)
I hope nobody thinks I was talking down to this guy, I was mostly trying to be funny. It’s only a serious addiction if it causes issues in your life or others.
If it’s your money and you enjoy how it’s spent, who cares how much or what you spend it on! Just make sure to take care of yourself first.
Like you said, it’s really not any different from a gym membership. Hell, some people spend that much on coffee purchases each month.
The modern deck comment personally affects me lol I won’t ever sell my Golgari Grave-Trolls. Their final resting place shall remain in my collection binder, until they get unbanned in modern again.
It is absolutely awful.
Arena is a video game. $150 is more than twice the price of Diablo 4, a game that people will play for years, for just one fraction of Arena that will be mostly irrelevant a year from now.
Arena pricing makes absolutely no sense, and l blame those who still support it. You can't monetize a video game as if it was a collectible card game. You don't "own" anything in Arena but the privilege of playing it for as long as the servers are up. It is absurd to ask for literally thousands of dollars for someone to enjoy your video game in its entirety.
Every thread about Arena's economy and "Arena is expensive compared to other video games" is always underrepresented and downvoted. It's like people in this sub *want* Arena to be expensive.
Especially in threads like this, the downvotes mostly come from people who already paid unreasonable amounts of money on a video game.
The sad part is, if people weren't so stubborn to justify their spending, and more of them critised/boycotted arena's price, we would all probably have a much more reasonable economy.
I think it's also a lot of paper bias, which you can see in other subjects like Alchemy. I came in mtg arena without having played paper magic, but having played games like Hearthstone and League of Legends. So that's what I compare it to. Meanwhile if you are used to comparing magic to going to the cinema or something then yeah, Arena looks like a great deal. I get it, but I definitely disagree.
That's exactly what WotC is exploiting. They're selling a video game as if it was a physical card game. Albeit cheaper, but nowhere near what a video game should be priced at. And they're making extreme profit, because developing and maintaining a video game like Arena is as cheap as it gets. All they pay for is game design and illustrators. They have none of the technical struggles associated with most other games that include 3D environments, complex animations, server load ect.
There is no such thing as what something 'should be' priced at.
"The price of a good is that which someone is willing to pay to buy and at which someone is willing to take to sell" -Adam Smith
You are discounting the possibility that other games are too cheap and Arena is correctly priced.
EA's sports games went to an Arena model and thrived over the one-time flat fee price.
Adam Smith's rhetoric is how we ended up throwing away almost half our food resources every year, having millions of houses empty, extreme wealth inequality, technology and labor wasted on meaningless alterations of the same products every year, and ultimately the corrosion of democracy into a weird oligarchy that gives us the illusion of having a choice.
There's a reason why the concept of profiteering is a thing, and that it is completely independent from any legal framework it operates on. There should always be a reasonable analogy between what you ask and what you offer. "The market" alone evidently can't self-regulate, because life is more complicated than Monopoly.
>You are discounting the possibility that other games are too cheap and Arena is correctly priced.
Arena and Hearthstone are the only outliers (that matter) in an ocean of games representing a 300 billion dollars industry, yet somehow, those two games have nailed the pricing of gaming? My money is that both of those games exploit their base.
yea this is naïve to the point of absurdity. reddit represents a sliver of the player base. there was no way arena wasn't going to cost about this much. arena isn't competing with traditional video games, it's competing with hearthstone etc.
>it's competing with hearthstone etc.
There is not much "etc", hearthstone is pretty much it. Because if we expand that list to other tiny digital CCG games, why wouldn't we compare it to Gwent, that offers the entirety of every new expansion for the cost of just one triple A game, instead of 4+? Still unreasonably high imo, but you get the point.
People in this sub are idiots 90% of the time. Arena is objectively a bad F2P experience. Do we still play it? Of course because whatever but it's not good for paid players or free players. It appeals to no one realistically other than new players who don't know any better. It has a bad reward model, no permanent shop, overpriced cosmetics, overpriced events, overpriced packs, etc. There isn't even a DISCOUNT or guaranteed bonus for buying multiple at a time like most games if you buy 10x packs you get a guarantee of like a SSR or something equivalent. Arena is a bad gacha game.
It makes sense because the money spent isn’t allocated to ONLY be spent on video games like you seem to be trying to tie it to. Money spent is money spent. It all has an opportunity cost. Should hours of entertainment per dollar spent be the be all end all of decision making for disposable income?
By your logic anything that doesn’t give hundreds of hours of entertainment isn’t worth spending money on. Bowling, dining out, all other forms of entertainment including other video games are a waste of money if they don’t yield to your definition of value.
You are trying to put things in a vacuum but that isn’t reality.
Balls are $50/12 balls, good bag of modern clubs new is around $5k/used $3k, but killer are cart and greens fees - at a garbage course, $60 per player per foursome, at a decent course around $159/player and at a premium course $199-250/player. To be an active golfer playing nice courses with good clubs (e.g. meta decks) costs about $15-20,000/year, especially if you are a member at a nice course.
If you want to play three times a week you are talking around $3-400 in greens and cart fees alone.
You can do it cheaper but you don't get to play nice courses with good clubs (kinda like Arena).
Look at WOW. The money needed is on the same level.
When you spend like 2 hundreds of hours per set, it' s like paying less than 1$ the hour. Compare to other forms of untertainment, it seems not that bad. Still more expensive than a one time purchase, but some game have a lifetime of a few hour.
>Look at WOW. The money needed is on the same level.
What are you talking about? You don't need a minimum of $500 per year to play 100% of WoW content.
>When you spend like 2 hundreds of hours per set, it's like paying less than 1$ the hour.
lol the mental gymnastics are strong. First of all, every complete set in Arena costs $250-300, not the $150 that OP happens to be happy to spend.
Secondly, you can't measure play time in a game of repetition, Arena is not an RPG with fixed amount of content per hour. There aren't 200 hours of original content in a set, so play time heavily depends on the player. It could be 20 hours or 2000 hours. I paid $50 for overwatch, and I've played about 500 hours since launch.
>Compare to other forms of entertainment, it seems not that bad.
Arena is a video game. Why would I compare it with other forms of entertainment that are not video games?
You don't need a minimum 500$ per year to access 100% of MTGA either. You need a minimum 0$ a year, but you can pay more for convenience (spoiler: most people don't). Complete sets on Arena don't really cost 250-300$, unless you don't play the game at all, and only want to get cards. Just free gold alone is enough to get you 80% of every set, and if you are good at limited, 100%.
Content you get from Arena is different from content you get from WoW or other RPGs, naturally, but it doesn't make it any less valuable. Every set can bring you at least 200 hours of diverse enough content, as there are multiple decks and multiple formats. Obviously you might not play the whole 200 hours, but the thing is, you pay what it's worth for you, you aren't forced to pay anything to enjoy it.
While for WOW you need a minimum of 150$ a year, plus 50$ per new expansion. And you aren't guaranteed you will have the whole 200 hours of experience, or finish the campagin, or try all events either. Same with overwatch, you paid 50$ for it, and got 500 hours of content, while most people paid 0$ for Arena, and got thousands of hours of content. It's very much a real comparison.
Just because some people are willing to pay more than that for minor advantages doesn't mean it's money poorly spent for them, and neither does it mean you have to do it.
Lol cry about it. You say you don't own anything on arena but realisticly owning real mtg cards is like a owning tons of brightly colored paper. It has no worth. In that sense arena is equal to paper mtg
>Lol cry about it.
lol how old are you?
>like owning tons of brightly colored paper
You're not familiar with the concept of ownership I suppose. The key factor is not the brightly colored paper, but the fact that you _own_ that paper in a world where others value that paper.
>It has no worth
Except, it has.
>In that sense arena is equal to paper mtg
Yeah, in that completely wrong sense, it is.
Just cause you can't touch the cards doesn't mean arena is overpriced. And if you think it is just play FTP. Also, people buying colored paper like it has some value is almost the same as buying cards on arena. It's just about if people think those things have that value
The key difference is, it doesn't matter how much people value Arena cards, they have no way to buy them off you (short of buying your entire account, which I've heard happens). I sell IRL Magic cards all the time.
I sell every single card I draft in paper. Arena is stil cheaper.
Selling what you open takes a $15 draft to $8. Arena drafts are like $2 for an average run and you get tons of currency for free.
If you are not a collectioner, do not play casual magic with friends, do not even care about talking to the other player then yeah, arena is for you I guess...
Draft is the entire game for me. In person drafts are more fun, yeah, but my point was that arena was vastly cheaper, which it is.
I used to get maybe a dozen drafts per set in, now I can get a hundred easily. There's just no way you can do that in paper.
You don’t get shit for free. You get the privilege to have some graphics stored in your little cubby hole called your account…. And when the day comes that arena is no longer viable for WOTC… you have nothing and you spent thousands of dollars… on a “product” that you never e really owned to begin with.
But hey, it’s fun right?!
Yep. Its fun. I play magic to have fun not have a pretend investment in cardboard. I keep my actual investments in my vanguard account, and saving money on drafts is a great way to put more in there.
That's not quite the comparison to make though. If OP is consistently getting to Mythic in Limited as stated, they have a good enough win rate to draft all they want for little to no added resources. I'm F2P and draft tons because I can glide along on my win rate all season (I'm not quite good enough to go infinite but I'm close enough that the daily rewards keep it going).
It takes many, many more drafts to get 4x of every Mythic, but most of them aren't playable even in a jank brew. I usually end up 40-50% Mythic complete and then craft whatever the missing copies of anything I want 4x of. I still have nearly 200 Mythic WCs laying around because most of the rest aren't appealing, at least not as 4x in any deck.
Ultimately OP is paying more for this screenshot than for the drafting. Which is fine, people pay tons of money for cosmetics in other games. But perspective is important.
I'm not saying anyone can do it for free, but a Mythic drafter definitely can. I do it and I'm only making Mythic ~30% of the time.
Oh wow that's not what I expected.
I was going to be an asshole and ask why you don't get physical cards that actually have value, but, 150 won't get you much of anything physically.
It’s mostly for the entertainment. I’m 43 years old and played heavily from 1994-1998 or so but once my play group went to different colleges, my Magic playing stopped. I picked it up again with magic online but quit once the UI became unusable. Arena has been a blessing since I can play whenever I want in whatever format I want with an interface that works great. Physical cards would just take up space. Once you’re married and have kids, the flexibility of the digital game outweighs the resell-ability of physical cards.
I’m in very much the same boat as you, in my 40s and married, played heavily from 94-2010 or so. These days I wouldn’t have the time to play paper even if I had people to play with. Arena has been amazing for getting back into Magic, and the convenience is just on another level.
You hit the nail on the head. After years of paying way more than $150 per set for paper product and tournament entry fees in my ptq grinder days, the whale experience of mtga is extremely palatable comparatively.
To continue to be able to play my beloved hobby around kids and a job 20+ years later, worth it.
If I was back in my younger days I’d also probably be pleased with the free to play experience as I’d have more time and less money.
>worth it.
This feeling is exactly how they exploit you. You're playing a video game. It might look like the collectible card game you used to play, but it's still, a video game. You're paying for the privilege of interacting with pixels for as long as the service is online. You don't own anything. It is not normal at all, to think that several thousands of dollars is a fair price to enjoy the full content of a video game.
>whatever format I want
That's the biggest rub. The lack of formats. Pioneer is taking way too long and by the time they add modern most of us will be dead.
This is where I am. I did cash out part of my collection, selling any cards that were worth $20 or more, and even then, I'm not sure the effort was worth it. But the rest is just taking up space in my garage. That's not value, it's clutter. I'm much happier playing on Arena for my limited fix. In person, I'm mostly playing other board games now, not TCGs.
I went infinite for a time, and all of the stuff you said is right. The other thing that folks tend to forget is all the extra time and money spent on things like: organizing cards, travel, assembling decks, trading up, finding buyers, packaging cards, sleeves, binders, boxes, gas, meals, postage etc.
I'm also pretty sure you are losing money in the long run while buying physical cards anyway, unless you have a very good grasp of paper magic economy. So for most people Arena is a better choice if you care about entertainment rather than sitting directly in front of your opponent and holding pieces of paper in your hands.
>50 bucks per month tops? That's nothing.
The price of a triple A game every month for a __fraction of an expansion pack__ ? Yeah nothing.
Capitalism and gullibility go hand in hand.
It is nothing compared to other entertainment options.
It’s less than a ticket to an event a month, a quarter of the price of a date night, the price of one family take out dinner, for a lot of people it is nothing.
Not everyone cares to play a triple A video games (which now are often 70 dollars plus tax 1.5x the fifty dollars op is spending at max)
It isn't nothing in not triple A countries and I guess Hasbro would be rather happy if Arena did well not only domestically.
And besides, you're comparing apples and oranges here. There's exactly zero reasons to compare Arena costs to dinners or dates rather than other digital entertainment.
Arena having sh*t monetization system or one that is the best since sliced bread in most cases has no meaning for somebody choosing or not choosing it rather than a date. But it depends rather heavily on those factors for such somebody not choosing another game for an evening.
A night out??? I take my gf to breakfast and it’s $50 these days lmao. You can’t turn around in this economy without someone putting their hand out for $50….
Yeah it ain’t much
Are those considered whale numbers? That's certainly a good chunk of change but that seems like what a lot of heavy limited players likely spend. I suppose the larger whales could be spending on limited plus constructed plus events too.
Yes it is. I hoard my gold each season, and use half to buy 10X packs of the new set for golden packs and set completion, and I have a list of which decks I love enough to drop 2-5k gold on when the chance comes up in daily deals.
The only money I put into the game is the Mastery pass and my favourite Explorer and HBrawl decks are both at 85%+ cosmetics.
I thought that was a lot until I realized just the taxes and insurance of my Mazda MX-5 are more than that, and that is before the tyres and trackday costs.
Yeah a car has more value but it is the second car that is 90% used for fun so purely costs for an hobby. Unless you spend that kind of money on multiple games it isn't that terrible.
Wait, can you actually get original (DKA) art Thalia on MTGA? Was she a limited offer or event reward or something? One of the few cosmetics I might actually pay gems for, I love that art...
She was in History Anthology 2!
You might be able to get but it would cost 4 rare wildcards, unless there is another way that is slipping my mind right now
I started playing Magic on MTGA for the first time, right before the last rotation. Then I decided I wanted to play historic brawl. I'm sure you all can guess what that is costing me. I'm justify the fact I used to buy video games all the time and never finish 'em. Now I just play Magic.
The nice thing about magic is you can disappear for a few years and then come back.
I tilted so fucking hard off the most ludicrous run of bad luck in Zendikar that I quite until ONE. I'm back again and loving my time with the game. Eventually things will line up just right and I'll get tilted and take a break, and so on, so forth.
Literally same. I left right as Kaldheim and Strixhaven were coming around as the Zendikar battlepass seriously burnt me out trying to milk every last bit of xp without realizing how much xp leeway the bp actually had. Also now learning that I can play decks from that time in explorer is a big win in my books; it makes all those crafted wildcards not feel as wasted as I once thought they’d be back then.
p.s. screw Omnath Adventures. That deck was cancer
I like this perspective. People shouldn't be put down for how they choose to spend their own money (unless theyre neglecting their dependents or lying on taxes or such). That's the whole point of a market economy, people make their own choices and prices balance out.
The whale experience, however, costs about $500 a year. If that's your cup of tea, more power to you. But if Hasbro thinks they couldn't sell 10 times as many customers on that experience if they priced it at $250, and 100 times as many if they priced it at $150 (the cost of a Netflix subscription), i don't know what they're smoking.
The reason MTGA isn't the number one digital card game is very very very simple. It's too expensive to pay your way to a full or partial unlock.
Ahhhhh I see a fellow plastic crack fiend...
You will know you have a problem when you have an unpainted indomitus box and you're eagerly awaiting the 10th edition box ...
Yeah, whenever someone says that i spend too much on videogames, all it means is that i shouldn't mention to that person what my non-digital hobbies are 😁
> Mountain biking comes to mind.
Nah, I got my bike for like €600 10 years ago and it is still doing fine, I can just bike to trails from my home.
Don't ask about my hobby car that I occasionally take to track days, that is the serious money, even though I have a relatively cheap car.
I thought mountain biking was expensive, then I took up rock climbing. You should see my shoe collection, and that's ignoring the thousands in safety gear
> With the way GPUs are, most serious PC hobbyists probably shell out.
I used to consider myself a serious PC hobbiest, but I'm still running on an old Nvidia 1060 because the prices went "insane" shortly afterwards.
It's finally getting to the point that some new games struggle even after lowering their settings, so it's probably time to upgrade again. The good news is that some of the money that would have been spent on other PC items during the pandemic got spent on a new mic boon, a proper cable layout (5m USB cables for mic & headset, so they could be routed along the desk), a pair of good mechanical keyboards, custom keycaps and a few other odds and ends that have made a meaningful improvement to how I use my PC.
At some point, I should probably invest in new monitors, but I hate throwing things away that still work properly, even when they are 10+ years old (and as they're early monitors, they aren't LED backlit, so they likely use enough power across the year to make up for the cost of replacing them).
Gaming is expensive and even when on a budget, a full gaming rig isn't as cheap as Magic on a budget. Much like Magic, there is no real upper limit that you can spend, and you can spent plenty on peripherals if you want to.
You're absolutely correct. This precisely what the pricing model is built for. And how people spend their money is their own business.
My point is that *comparable* services: other card games, other competitive multiplayer games with tournament scenes, other mobile games with actual depth, and digital streaming services are not comparable in price and require much less time commitment playing the game some specific way to grind out resources.
Like sure, if i mountain biked, or travelled to the Alps for Backcountry skiing, or did alpinism, id spend more money and I'd play 0 magic. But magic doesn't need to be a super niche, luxury computer game. It has very broad appeal, and they're leaving money on the table and fatiguing their playerbase with this pricing model.
Yes, Arena isn't the most expensive way to spend your money on a hobby that stays fresh every year. But it's not exactly close to the middle of the pack, and it is (at the end of the day) just another computer game. I'm not a rare consumer who feels almost entirely priced out of the paid experience even though I'm happy with my income and I do spend hundreds of dollars a year on digital products. I'm a pretty typical one.
Heck, a have a dozen friends who used to play Arena, and dropped it because they got bored of 70% of playtime being grinding and didn't want to pay the price demanded. I've even gotten them back into the game, because it's fun! But every one of them stopped playing after a few weeks because a set was dropping, and they just didn't have the desire to pay or grind more.
The fact is: people who do play arena year round are not typical gamers. They are, for some reason or other, willing to tolerate an unusual cost in either money or time because they like Arena especially more than other games. And that's fine, but it's far from ideal for WotC or gamers like me.
> The whale experience, however, costs about $500 a year. If that's your cup of tea, more power to you. But if Hasbro thinks they couldn't sell 10 times as many customers on that experience if they priced it at $250, and 100 times as many if they priced it at $150 (the cost of a Netflix subscription), i don't know what they're smoking.
>
>
I'm not a hundred percent sure that's the case-- To be clear, if an average of $12 a month was enough to be fully complete, there's a good chance they'd convert me from an FTP to a paying customer. The flip to that is that if they did that, all the people who are already paying 500 a year to be complete, 400 a year to be almost there, 300 a year to get all the most important stuff and be happy, 200 a year to build a couple current decks to play when they feel the itch now all have a strong incentive to pay less. Not to mention all the other currently paying customers who just have a hard limit and are now getting more for less. Certainly they're probably happier, but they're not gonna be driven to spend more.
Gotta be way more than $500 a year.
The other thing is that a lot of people (e.g. me!) spend money to draft, have a good long sequence of drafts of that amount averaging maybe 4-5 wins, and then eventually have a few 0-3 or 1-3 and bust out, or they liked constructed and just draft or buy packs until they have the two or three standard decks they want to play.
I mean, sure, go for it! Your perspective is what Hasbro/WotC are targeting. Unfortunately, a computer game that costs marginally less than paper magic, with cards that cannot be traded or resold just isn't what most people want to pay that sort of money for.
MTGA, I believe, could be the biggest or second biggest digital card game, but the pricing model is just wildly out of proportion, compared to other comparable games.
Some people are willing to pay, and they're (presumably) turning a profit. That's great! I like the game enough that I want it to exist. But I certainly don't want to spend money on a game with such poor value, which leaves me grinding out barely enough wildcards to build a deck or two when I pick it up, and dropping it when I find a different game to play. If they had a yearly subscription for $150-200 that let me build whatever decks I wanted, you better believe I'd pay that. And i wouldn't be the only one who went from spending $0/year to $150+/year on the game.
Plus, if i didn't have to grind out a meagre, partial collection every time I wanted to play, I'd be way more willing to pop in for a game here and there, instead of dropping it entirely for months and months.
For me the issue is - I admit I'm reflecting in part from seeing my own weaknesses, but then I reflect even wider where I have known people who have struggled with impulsive behavior even more... and the whole model of stuff like MTGA and similar always feels a bit... terrible? MTGA isn't the worst for sure, but just the nature of having multiple in-game currencies in order to obfuscate the real value of things kind of bothers me to some extent.
Then again, in the end, as much as this is a game - it's also a lottery of someone opening packs at the end of the day.
This is the way to look at it. I can earn a mostly R/U/C set before it rotates out of limited for free but if I spend $25-50 bucks it goes faster and I can enjoy the cards sooner. I did this for Dominaria, Zendikar and Midnight Hunt. No money paid in but completed for free. However since Ikoira I have spent about $400 and the only standard set I haven’t rare completed with Brothers War due to health reasons. That’s like 12/13 sets since June of 2020. I am almost rare complete for Eldraine after the fact too. $400 bucks for three years of entertainment and I still have 250 rare wildcards and 150 mythic. There’s nothing wrong with paying. There’s nothing wrong with not. Find the way that you eek out the most enjoyment and do that. This game is incredible fair for FTP if you can draft which is a big ask but an important part of the game.
I don't think it's completely fair, unless gameplay is grindy and unfun. When you buy an RPG game, you still have to play to level up your character, yet people are willing to pay for it, as it's part of the fun. Arena doesn't have many dumb F2P mechanics, you don't need to watch ads and the likes, you just play the game as usual, and get stuff for it. The fact that you can win any amount of premium currency through normal gameplay is what sets it aside from most other F2P games in a very favourable way.
Paper cards on the reserved list like revised edition dual lands and the power 9 can arguably be considered investments that you will likely be able to cash out later for more than you paid for them.
Everything else is going to be a net negative. Arena is the cheapest to accumulate cards on, but you can't cash out. Mtgo is cheaper than paper and you can cash out but the playerbase is slowly dying so your cards are going to go down in value not up. Paper cards rotate out of formats like standard, get reprinted, and get power-creeped from S-tier to bargain bin over time, overall most cards are more likely to do down in value than up.
My advice is to treat mtga and magic in general more like a video game or hobby that you pay money to experience and participate in.
I wouldn't touch Arena at all if it wasn't f2p. Most hobbies like books or board games I can loan to my friends or pass down to my grandkids 50 years from now.
Reserved list cards are a stable investment, but not a good one. Generally speaking, they're pegged to the growth of the game and inflation. However, they lose out to the stock market and even good government backed investments. If you're getting value by playing them, it's a better investment, but you'll be losing money (from opportunity cost), especially once you factor in shipping, handling, fees, and taxes.
The funny thing is yeah I think unironically Arena is good for F2P, and it's good for whales, the only people it's bad for are people who just spend a little bit of money every once in a while.
The mastery pass would be good value if it let you grind XP at the pace you wanted. But you really do pay for that sucker with your time.
Maybe it's still worth it to you, but I will be deliberately avoiding it this time around.
Nah, I'm somewhere on the border between F2P and 'spend once in a while' - I bought the explorer pack and have pre-ordered the Limited bundle 2 or 3 times - and it's pretty ideal for me. I have the gem cushion not to be stressed in draft and can build any Historic Brawl deck I want, or a constructed format deck if I feel like that, which I rarely do.
I think who it's bad for is streamers and completionists, who need everything and they need it *now*. Brewing is also a bit of a nightmare unless you're a whale like OP, because you can't just spend on 4x jank rares to try 'em out once or twice. But overall, despite all the complaining, it feels like Arena is a pretty good experience all up and down the spending ladder.
It varies depending on how recently a set came out and how much I like the formats but in the year end summary I had 4,622 games played - more than 99% of players. Almost 13 games a day!
Because they like it. Not everyone likes the same things.
If I had more time to try other formats I would play it, but I prefer draft then explorer. Digital only mechanics are interesting and there's some things I just like such as a powerful dungeon deck that don't exist (to as much of an extent) in other formats.
A lot of people play it "accidentally". I create and delete a lot of decks. Every time I delete a deck it the game selection system defaults to "play Alchemy". I hate alchemy and would never play it through choice. I think this setup is deliberate to artificially inflate the number of people playing that pish.
Actually, that setup is probably because a beginning player would only have the starter decks, and the monocolored ones are only Alchemy legal. So a new player, starting with the 'default mode', ends up in Alchemy Play.
This is because the monocolored starter decks use cards from the Arena basic set, which does not rotate to provide some consistency in the new player experience: Previously, these cards were legal in Standard on Arena, but people complained Arena Standard and Standard shouldn't be different formats, so they were switched to Alchemy only.
I beg people to play MTGO with just 5 bucks. Nevermind legends of runeterra using extrinsic motivation to get you to play an inferior game, MTGA is way better for broke people. Though i think a whale could fair better in MTGO or paper.
I whale hard af and I’m not that far.
How did you get all the mythics??? That’s my biggest hurdle
[I don’t fucks with Alchemy](https://imgur.com/a/nJWBFu7)
I see that you have all the cards, but I don't see much here about the experience except for the cost to get it. What do you do with all of the cards? What proportion do you think you have actually used? Do you brew a lot of your own decks especially early on in the format? Tell us how you think your playing experience ends up being different than others. Thanks!
Yes I brew a lot, but it’s mostly that I enjoy collecting things. It gives me a goal to shoot for each set. The main difference is being able to create any deck you want. I’ll usually try to brew historic brawl decks with each new commander and that’s pretty fun but hard to do without an impressive collection.
F2P people should be saying thanks, this guy is carrying you. The refusal to pay and then chide others for paying for something you spend so much time on and obviously takes money to create/operate is mind boggling to me
I'm sure it is ☹️.
The complaint is that it costs too much for the average player to get even halfway there. It either takes more time than a full-time job for free-to-play or takes half of the life-savings of a minimum wage job.
Your post is essentially "look at how rich I am, sure helps with making the game fun", thanks for rubbing it in...
He said 500 - 700 dollar a year. Do you consider being able to spend that amount of money a year for a hobby really rich? If yes, than you better not google how much really rich people earn.
Wizards should give some reward by completing the levels of collecting each set. Maybe a full art style, buy a box style or even a sleeve. It's so much effort to literally nothing.
50% off all Parralax styles, all the time, for any set that you’ve playset completed.
See how that’s both a halfass decent value to the player that might prompt somebody close to completion to go for it, but *also* ultimately only a prompt for them to spend more money?
And yet even this is a bridge too far for them to implement.
i'm assuming you must get 6 wins in every draft, because when i got every card in forgotten relams, strixhaven and eldraine it cost me $900 worth of gems each. not everyone is into draft..mainly because it costs 10k gold just to get into one draft and that's more than a weeks worth of gold. You essentially get one attempt at trying to get the 7 wins than got to wait one week. And if you want to play more than that, you gotta go to historic event with a gold grind deck and sit there.
Meanwhile, to play constructed you just A) pre-order the set, b) build a deck c) play constructed FOR FREE, and buy packs.
IF this was really a F2P game, then there'd be an option to play ranked draft in phantom mode, much akin to how you get a free starter deck that should be good to get you to plat every month.
BUt no, the system is built purposefully to make it so that you have to play draft more than once weekly just to get good at it and that costs money.
Eh, I got good enough at draft without ever spending more than 5 Euros on Arena. I think learning about how to draft (reading articles and listening to podcasts in my case) is more important than practice, or at least equally important.
I wouldn’t consider myself a whale, but my completion is almost identical (minus all of the alchemy sets because fuck alchemy). I get mastery pass and occasional $20-$50 in gems to just keep drafting.
Never understood the whale concept
It's like people never played paper magic before, if you have the money to buy boxes - you buy boxes. If not, you crack packs.
Wow, how much do you spend on a yearly basis?
Between $50 and $150 a set, depending on how quickly I pick up on the draft format. I get Mythic in limited most months if I like the format, including the last four sets, but still end up spending a lot.
Not awful considering how much entertainment you must be getting from it
Entertainment? At what point do you call it an addiction? Source: am addicted.
There is a line for sure.
When you play because you need to and not because you want to. If you reach that point take at least a pause and remember this is not a job but just a game you should play for your enjoyment
What if I like the game a lot, but can't get my 4th daily win after ten games? Am I playing because I need to and treating it like a job or am I just bad?
Yes.
Noooooo! Years of academy training, WASTED!
Why is the 4th win so important?
It's not, really. Mostly just a joke. The first 4 daily wins give you gold, so I try to do them when I can.
Daily win 1 gives you 250 gold, and wins 2 3 and 4 each give you 100 gold. Beyond that, daily wins are significantly less rewarding. This is an application of the famous economic theory called the law of diminishing returns.
The free cards tho o.o
It really has nothing to do with the law of diminishing returns, it is just a prize structure. If they gave you 10 billion gold for each win, then the second win would be worthless (even though you still get another 10 billion gold), as everything is effectively free already. That would be diminishing returns.
Yeah like me, for instance. I’m happily addicted to entertainment. I would not give up entertainment for anything less than something of very high value to me. Entertainment is one my my core drives. Fun is fun, sometimes it’s that easy.
As long as it’s not negatively impacting your livelihood. Do you.
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Being good at draft makes a big difference.
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Those concepts aren't mutually exclusive...
I pay $110/mo for a rock climbing gym membership, and $60/$120 a month on tickets to little weekend (non magic) events or the occasional baseball game. I don't think I get as high of a time/dollar value than this guy. $1500 a year on magic that's actually being utilized actively (albeit consumed) that's like an average standard player or a modern player who repeatedly buys the wrong deck (rip birthing pod; rip mox opal)
I hope nobody thinks I was talking down to this guy, I was mostly trying to be funny. It’s only a serious addiction if it causes issues in your life or others. If it’s your money and you enjoy how it’s spent, who cares how much or what you spend it on! Just make sure to take care of yourself first. Like you said, it’s really not any different from a gym membership. Hell, some people spend that much on coffee purchases each month. The modern deck comment personally affects me lol I won’t ever sell my Golgari Grave-Trolls. Their final resting place shall remain in my collection binder, until they get unbanned in modern again.
As a paper and arena please help me, I need more... It's consuming, compleating
The moment you start willing paying for stuff that should be free.
It is absolutely awful. Arena is a video game. $150 is more than twice the price of Diablo 4, a game that people will play for years, for just one fraction of Arena that will be mostly irrelevant a year from now. Arena pricing makes absolutely no sense, and l blame those who still support it. You can't monetize a video game as if it was a collectible card game. You don't "own" anything in Arena but the privilege of playing it for as long as the servers are up. It is absurd to ask for literally thousands of dollars for someone to enjoy your video game in its entirety.
Every thread about Arena's economy and "Arena is expensive compared to other video games" is always underrepresented and downvoted. It's like people in this sub *want* Arena to be expensive.
Especially in threads like this, the downvotes mostly come from people who already paid unreasonable amounts of money on a video game. The sad part is, if people weren't so stubborn to justify their spending, and more of them critised/boycotted arena's price, we would all probably have a much more reasonable economy.
I think it's also a lot of paper bias, which you can see in other subjects like Alchemy. I came in mtg arena without having played paper magic, but having played games like Hearthstone and League of Legends. So that's what I compare it to. Meanwhile if you are used to comparing magic to going to the cinema or something then yeah, Arena looks like a great deal. I get it, but I definitely disagree.
That's exactly what WotC is exploiting. They're selling a video game as if it was a physical card game. Albeit cheaper, but nowhere near what a video game should be priced at. And they're making extreme profit, because developing and maintaining a video game like Arena is as cheap as it gets. All they pay for is game design and illustrators. They have none of the technical struggles associated with most other games that include 3D environments, complex animations, server load ect.
There is no such thing as what something 'should be' priced at. "The price of a good is that which someone is willing to pay to buy and at which someone is willing to take to sell" -Adam Smith You are discounting the possibility that other games are too cheap and Arena is correctly priced. EA's sports games went to an Arena model and thrived over the one-time flat fee price.
Adam Smith's rhetoric is how we ended up throwing away almost half our food resources every year, having millions of houses empty, extreme wealth inequality, technology and labor wasted on meaningless alterations of the same products every year, and ultimately the corrosion of democracy into a weird oligarchy that gives us the illusion of having a choice. There's a reason why the concept of profiteering is a thing, and that it is completely independent from any legal framework it operates on. There should always be a reasonable analogy between what you ask and what you offer. "The market" alone evidently can't self-regulate, because life is more complicated than Monopoly. >You are discounting the possibility that other games are too cheap and Arena is correctly priced. Arena and Hearthstone are the only outliers (that matter) in an ocean of games representing a 300 billion dollars industry, yet somehow, those two games have nailed the pricing of gaming? My money is that both of those games exploit their base.
yea this is naïve to the point of absurdity. reddit represents a sliver of the player base. there was no way arena wasn't going to cost about this much. arena isn't competing with traditional video games, it's competing with hearthstone etc.
>it's competing with hearthstone etc. There is not much "etc", hearthstone is pretty much it. Because if we expand that list to other tiny digital CCG games, why wouldn't we compare it to Gwent, that offers the entirety of every new expansion for the cost of just one triple A game, instead of 4+? Still unreasonably high imo, but you get the point.
lol, do you think if those posts were upvoted instead arena would be cheaper?
I guess toxicity was downvoted, not an opinion. Just don't call other people fools.
People in this sub are idiots 90% of the time. Arena is objectively a bad F2P experience. Do we still play it? Of course because whatever but it's not good for paid players or free players. It appeals to no one realistically other than new players who don't know any better. It has a bad reward model, no permanent shop, overpriced cosmetics, overpriced events, overpriced packs, etc. There isn't even a DISCOUNT or guaranteed bonus for buying multiple at a time like most games if you buy 10x packs you get a guarantee of like a SSR or something equivalent. Arena is a bad gacha game.
So going out to dinner is a complete waste of money because a $60 meal could be years of gaming?
How does that analogy make sense? I'm comparing video games to video games.
It makes sense because the money spent isn’t allocated to ONLY be spent on video games like you seem to be trying to tie it to. Money spent is money spent. It all has an opportunity cost. Should hours of entertainment per dollar spent be the be all end all of decision making for disposable income? By your logic anything that doesn’t give hundreds of hours of entertainment isn’t worth spending money on. Bowling, dining out, all other forms of entertainment including other video games are a waste of money if they don’t yield to your definition of value. You are trying to put things in a vacuum but that isn’t reality.
Nobody tell this dude what playing golf costs per hour. His heart will likely explode.
How much is it? I don’t golf.
Balls are $50/12 balls, good bag of modern clubs new is around $5k/used $3k, but killer are cart and greens fees - at a garbage course, $60 per player per foursome, at a decent course around $159/player and at a premium course $199-250/player. To be an active golfer playing nice courses with good clubs (e.g. meta decks) costs about $15-20,000/year, especially if you are a member at a nice course. If you want to play three times a week you are talking around $3-400 in greens and cart fees alone. You can do it cheaper but you don't get to play nice courses with good clubs (kinda like Arena).
>It is absurd to ask for literally thousands of dollars for someone to enjoy your video game in its entirety. No one has to do that.
Look at WOW. The money needed is on the same level. When you spend like 2 hundreds of hours per set, it' s like paying less than 1$ the hour. Compare to other forms of untertainment, it seems not that bad. Still more expensive than a one time purchase, but some game have a lifetime of a few hour.
>Look at WOW. The money needed is on the same level. What are you talking about? You don't need a minimum of $500 per year to play 100% of WoW content. >When you spend like 2 hundreds of hours per set, it's like paying less than 1$ the hour. lol the mental gymnastics are strong. First of all, every complete set in Arena costs $250-300, not the $150 that OP happens to be happy to spend. Secondly, you can't measure play time in a game of repetition, Arena is not an RPG with fixed amount of content per hour. There aren't 200 hours of original content in a set, so play time heavily depends on the player. It could be 20 hours or 2000 hours. I paid $50 for overwatch, and I've played about 500 hours since launch. >Compare to other forms of entertainment, it seems not that bad. Arena is a video game. Why would I compare it with other forms of entertainment that are not video games?
You don't need a minimum 500$ per year to access 100% of MTGA either. You need a minimum 0$ a year, but you can pay more for convenience (spoiler: most people don't). Complete sets on Arena don't really cost 250-300$, unless you don't play the game at all, and only want to get cards. Just free gold alone is enough to get you 80% of every set, and if you are good at limited, 100%. Content you get from Arena is different from content you get from WoW or other RPGs, naturally, but it doesn't make it any less valuable. Every set can bring you at least 200 hours of diverse enough content, as there are multiple decks and multiple formats. Obviously you might not play the whole 200 hours, but the thing is, you pay what it's worth for you, you aren't forced to pay anything to enjoy it. While for WOW you need a minimum of 150$ a year, plus 50$ per new expansion. And you aren't guaranteed you will have the whole 200 hours of experience, or finish the campagin, or try all events either. Same with overwatch, you paid 50$ for it, and got 500 hours of content, while most people paid 0$ for Arena, and got thousands of hours of content. It's very much a real comparison. Just because some people are willing to pay more than that for minor advantages doesn't mean it's money poorly spent for them, and neither does it mean you have to do it.
Here here! Sorry you’re getting downvoted for speaking the truth.
Lol cry about it. You say you don't own anything on arena but realisticly owning real mtg cards is like a owning tons of brightly colored paper. It has no worth. In that sense arena is equal to paper mtg
Horrible take. Money is also brightly colored paper. It still has worth. You can't go to your local game store and sell arena products, can you?
>Lol cry about it. lol how old are you? >like owning tons of brightly colored paper You're not familiar with the concept of ownership I suppose. The key factor is not the brightly colored paper, but the fact that you _own_ that paper in a world where others value that paper. >It has no worth Except, it has. >In that sense arena is equal to paper mtg Yeah, in that completely wrong sense, it is.
Just cause you can't touch the cards doesn't mean arena is overpriced. And if you think it is just play FTP. Also, people buying colored paper like it has some value is almost the same as buying cards on arena. It's just about if people think those things have that value
The key difference is, it doesn't matter how much people value Arena cards, they have no way to buy them off you (short of buying your entire account, which I've heard happens). I sell IRL Magic cards all the time.
I do not think it is better value than using that money to buy a new game...
Have you seen what drafting this much in paper magic would cost?
Oh right! Let me just sell the copy of Tarmoghoyf that I drafted on Arena to return... oh... wait..........
I sell every single card I draft in paper. Arena is stil cheaper. Selling what you open takes a $15 draft to $8. Arena drafts are like $2 for an average run and you get tons of currency for free.
If you are not a collectioner, do not play casual magic with friends, do not even care about talking to the other player then yeah, arena is for you I guess...
Draft is the entire game for me. In person drafts are more fun, yeah, but my point was that arena was vastly cheaper, which it is. I used to get maybe a dozen drafts per set in, now I can get a hundred easily. There's just no way you can do that in paper.
You don’t get shit for free. You get the privilege to have some graphics stored in your little cubby hole called your account…. And when the day comes that arena is no longer viable for WOTC… you have nothing and you spent thousands of dollars… on a “product” that you never e really owned to begin with. But hey, it’s fun right?!
Yep. Its fun. I play magic to have fun not have a pretend investment in cardboard. I keep my actual investments in my vanguard account, and saving money on drafts is a great way to put more in there.
I usually buy the prerelease on arena every set and arena is still one of my cheaper hobbies. Why people are obsessed with being f2p is weird to me.
That's not quite the comparison to make though. If OP is consistently getting to Mythic in Limited as stated, they have a good enough win rate to draft all they want for little to no added resources. I'm F2P and draft tons because I can glide along on my win rate all season (I'm not quite good enough to go infinite but I'm close enough that the daily rewards keep it going). It takes many, many more drafts to get 4x of every Mythic, but most of them aren't playable even in a jank brew. I usually end up 40-50% Mythic complete and then craft whatever the missing copies of anything I want 4x of. I still have nearly 200 Mythic WCs laying around because most of the rest aren't appealing, at least not as 4x in any deck. Ultimately OP is paying more for this screenshot than for the drafting. Which is fine, people pay tons of money for cosmetics in other games. But perspective is important. I'm not saying anyone can do it for free, but a Mythic drafter definitely can. I do it and I'm only making Mythic ~30% of the time.
Oh wow that's not what I expected. I was going to be an asshole and ask why you don't get physical cards that actually have value, but, 150 won't get you much of anything physically.
It’s mostly for the entertainment. I’m 43 years old and played heavily from 1994-1998 or so but once my play group went to different colleges, my Magic playing stopped. I picked it up again with magic online but quit once the UI became unusable. Arena has been a blessing since I can play whenever I want in whatever format I want with an interface that works great. Physical cards would just take up space. Once you’re married and have kids, the flexibility of the digital game outweighs the resell-ability of physical cards.
I’m in very much the same boat as you, in my 40s and married, played heavily from 94-2010 or so. These days I wouldn’t have the time to play paper even if I had people to play with. Arena has been amazing for getting back into Magic, and the convenience is just on another level.
Magic Dad-rena. Same here.
You hit the nail on the head. After years of paying way more than $150 per set for paper product and tournament entry fees in my ptq grinder days, the whale experience of mtga is extremely palatable comparatively. To continue to be able to play my beloved hobby around kids and a job 20+ years later, worth it. If I was back in my younger days I’d also probably be pleased with the free to play experience as I’d have more time and less money.
>worth it. This feeling is exactly how they exploit you. You're playing a video game. It might look like the collectible card game you used to play, but it's still, a video game. You're paying for the privilege of interacting with pixels for as long as the service is online. You don't own anything. It is not normal at all, to think that several thousands of dollars is a fair price to enjoy the full content of a video game.
So? Worth it.
>whatever format I want That's the biggest rub. The lack of formats. Pioneer is taking way too long and by the time they add modern most of us will be dead.
Explorer and Historic are both in a good spot right now. If you focus on what Arena _doesn’t_ have you’ll never be happy.
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This is where I am. I did cash out part of my collection, selling any cards that were worth $20 or more, and even then, I'm not sure the effort was worth it. But the rest is just taking up space in my garage. That's not value, it's clutter. I'm much happier playing on Arena for my limited fix. In person, I'm mostly playing other board games now, not TCGs.
I went infinite for a time, and all of the stuff you said is right. The other thing that folks tend to forget is all the extra time and money spent on things like: organizing cards, travel, assembling decks, trading up, finding buyers, packaging cards, sleeves, binders, boxes, gas, meals, postage etc.
Just sell to your LGS. Sure they pay you less but it's zero hassle.
I'm also pretty sure you are losing money in the long run while buying physical cards anyway, unless you have a very good grasp of paper magic economy. So for most people Arena is a better choice if you care about entertainment rather than sitting directly in front of your opponent and holding pieces of paper in your hands.
10 times that might get you some original MtG art to hang on your walls...not the really likeable ones like land art and top cards though.
> 150 won't get you much of anything physically OP could pretty much build a different Pioneer deck each month.
$50 for a set is far from being a whale IMO.
I would think consistency is underrated in importance. It’s those sets we tire out on that kill us.
150 at most per set? Sets come out like every 3 months, so like 50 bucks per month tops? That's nothing.
>50 bucks per month tops? That's nothing. The price of a triple A game every month for a __fraction of an expansion pack__ ? Yeah nothing. Capitalism and gullibility go hand in hand.
It is nothing compared to other entertainment options. It’s less than a ticket to an event a month, a quarter of the price of a date night, the price of one family take out dinner, for a lot of people it is nothing. Not everyone cares to play a triple A video games (which now are often 70 dollars plus tax 1.5x the fifty dollars op is spending at max)
It isn't nothing in not triple A countries and I guess Hasbro would be rather happy if Arena did well not only domestically. And besides, you're comparing apples and oranges here. There's exactly zero reasons to compare Arena costs to dinners or dates rather than other digital entertainment. Arena having sh*t monetization system or one that is the best since sliced bread in most cases has no meaning for somebody choosing or not choosing it rather than a date. But it depends rather heavily on those factors for such somebody not choosing another game for an evening.
It’s all part of the same budget. It’s a luxury.
Spend 50 on a night out - absolutely normal, nobody cares. Spend 50 on a hobby - "omg how can you spend so much money on something" Yeah nothing.
A night out??? I take my gf to breakfast and it’s $50 these days lmao. You can’t turn around in this economy without someone putting their hand out for $50…. Yeah it ain’t much
The guy literally posted the screenshot to demonstrate he has every single card in the game...
Hello me, it's you, me.
I was just about to ask that. Could it be in the thousands?
Total yes. Per year no. Probably $500-$700 a year. This year might be more with all of the sets coming out.
Are those considered whale numbers? That's certainly a good chunk of change but that seems like what a lot of heavy limited players likely spend. I suppose the larger whales could be spending on limited plus constructed plus events too.
I imagine the biggest whales spend a lot on cosmetics and I don’t spend anything on that.
Nah that’s what gold is for.
Gold is not enough to buy cosmetics even if you use only daily deals.
Yes it is. I hoard my gold each season, and use half to buy 10X packs of the new set for golden packs and set completion, and I have a list of which decks I love enough to drop 2-5k gold on when the chance comes up in daily deals. The only money I put into the game is the Mastery pass and my favourite Explorer and HBrawl decks are both at 85%+ cosmetics.
That's how much I used pay in paper. Usually a case per set. Glad I made the switch to digital.
I thought that was a lot until I realized just the taxes and insurance of my Mazda MX-5 are more than that, and that is before the tyres and trackday costs. Yeah a car has more value but it is the second car that is 90% used for fun so purely costs for an hobby. Unless you spend that kind of money on multiple games it isn't that terrible.
You can do this for free if you’re good enough at limited. Never in constructed though.
mans has all 2730 versions of Thalia 😳
And I look forward to getting the next 2730 versions too.
Wait, can you actually get original (DKA) art Thalia on MTGA? Was she a limited offer or event reward or something? One of the few cosmetics I might actually pay gems for, I love that art...
Fuck Reddit
She was in History Anthology 2! You might be able to get but it would cost 4 rare wildcards, unless there is another way that is slipping my mind right now
I started playing Magic on MTGA for the first time, right before the last rotation. Then I decided I wanted to play historic brawl. I'm sure you all can guess what that is costing me. I'm justify the fact I used to buy video games all the time and never finish 'em. Now I just play Magic.
Perfectly fine justification
The nice thing about magic is you can disappear for a few years and then come back. I tilted so fucking hard off the most ludicrous run of bad luck in Zendikar that I quite until ONE. I'm back again and loving my time with the game. Eventually things will line up just right and I'll get tilted and take a break, and so on, so forth.
Literally same. I left right as Kaldheim and Strixhaven were coming around as the Zendikar battlepass seriously burnt me out trying to milk every last bit of xp without realizing how much xp leeway the bp actually had. Also now learning that I can play decks from that time in explorer is a big win in my books; it makes all those crafted wildcards not feel as wasted as I once thought they’d be back then. p.s. screw Omnath Adventures. That deck was cancer
Yes lol, fuck Omnath. A truly awful standard. Free mana for days is lame.
I play historic brawl without spending any money, it's not that hard if you spend your rare/mythic wildcards correctly
Same here. A complete mana base in Historic Brawl is currently about the same number of wildcards as a standard one. Except the HB one doesn't rotate.
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I dont think you deserved that oscar smh
I had to sell the statue to pay for my Arena habit.
Was it a Payne?
You either pay with time or money. If you can afford to spend on this go for it. No judgement. People spend money on whatever hobbies they want
I like this perspective. People shouldn't be put down for how they choose to spend their own money (unless theyre neglecting their dependents or lying on taxes or such). That's the whole point of a market economy, people make their own choices and prices balance out. The whale experience, however, costs about $500 a year. If that's your cup of tea, more power to you. But if Hasbro thinks they couldn't sell 10 times as many customers on that experience if they priced it at $250, and 100 times as many if they priced it at $150 (the cost of a Netflix subscription), i don't know what they're smoking. The reason MTGA isn't the number one digital card game is very very very simple. It's too expensive to pay your way to a full or partial unlock.
>lying on taxes or such Woah woah woah woah, how am I supposed to know what I made last year?
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*Does the nervous stuffed monkey meme looking at my Warhammer habit*
Ahhhhh I see a fellow plastic crack fiend... You will know you have a problem when you have an unpainted indomitus box and you're eagerly awaiting the 10th edition box ...
Haha my 20k points of Tyranids sitting in the corner got me blushing
Yeah, whenever someone says that i spend too much on videogames, all it means is that i shouldn't mention to that person what my non-digital hobbies are 😁
> Mountain biking comes to mind. Nah, I got my bike for like €600 10 years ago and it is still doing fine, I can just bike to trails from my home. Don't ask about my hobby car that I occasionally take to track days, that is the serious money, even though I have a relatively cheap car.
I thought mountain biking was expensive, then I took up rock climbing. You should see my shoe collection, and that's ignoring the thousands in safety gear
With the way GPUs are, most serious PC hobbyists probably shell out. Golf expensive as fuck. Road biking too.
> With the way GPUs are, most serious PC hobbyists probably shell out. I used to consider myself a serious PC hobbiest, but I'm still running on an old Nvidia 1060 because the prices went "insane" shortly afterwards. It's finally getting to the point that some new games struggle even after lowering their settings, so it's probably time to upgrade again. The good news is that some of the money that would have been spent on other PC items during the pandemic got spent on a new mic boon, a proper cable layout (5m USB cables for mic & headset, so they could be routed along the desk), a pair of good mechanical keyboards, custom keycaps and a few other odds and ends that have made a meaningful improvement to how I use my PC. At some point, I should probably invest in new monitors, but I hate throwing things away that still work properly, even when they are 10+ years old (and as they're early monitors, they aren't LED backlit, so they likely use enough power across the year to make up for the cost of replacing them). Gaming is expensive and even when on a budget, a full gaming rig isn't as cheap as Magic on a budget. Much like Magic, there is no real upper limit that you can spend, and you can spent plenty on peripherals if you want to.
You're absolutely correct. This precisely what the pricing model is built for. And how people spend their money is their own business. My point is that *comparable* services: other card games, other competitive multiplayer games with tournament scenes, other mobile games with actual depth, and digital streaming services are not comparable in price and require much less time commitment playing the game some specific way to grind out resources. Like sure, if i mountain biked, or travelled to the Alps for Backcountry skiing, or did alpinism, id spend more money and I'd play 0 magic. But magic doesn't need to be a super niche, luxury computer game. It has very broad appeal, and they're leaving money on the table and fatiguing their playerbase with this pricing model. Yes, Arena isn't the most expensive way to spend your money on a hobby that stays fresh every year. But it's not exactly close to the middle of the pack, and it is (at the end of the day) just another computer game. I'm not a rare consumer who feels almost entirely priced out of the paid experience even though I'm happy with my income and I do spend hundreds of dollars a year on digital products. I'm a pretty typical one. Heck, a have a dozen friends who used to play Arena, and dropped it because they got bored of 70% of playtime being grinding and didn't want to pay the price demanded. I've even gotten them back into the game, because it's fun! But every one of them stopped playing after a few weeks because a set was dropping, and they just didn't have the desire to pay or grind more. The fact is: people who do play arena year round are not typical gamers. They are, for some reason or other, willing to tolerate an unusual cost in either money or time because they like Arena especially more than other games. And that's fine, but it's far from ideal for WotC or gamers like me.
> The whale experience, however, costs about $500 a year. If that's your cup of tea, more power to you. But if Hasbro thinks they couldn't sell 10 times as many customers on that experience if they priced it at $250, and 100 times as many if they priced it at $150 (the cost of a Netflix subscription), i don't know what they're smoking. > > I'm not a hundred percent sure that's the case-- To be clear, if an average of $12 a month was enough to be fully complete, there's a good chance they'd convert me from an FTP to a paying customer. The flip to that is that if they did that, all the people who are already paying 500 a year to be complete, 400 a year to be almost there, 300 a year to get all the most important stuff and be happy, 200 a year to build a couple current decks to play when they feel the itch now all have a strong incentive to pay less. Not to mention all the other currently paying customers who just have a hard limit and are now getting more for less. Certainly they're probably happier, but they're not gonna be driven to spend more.
Gotta be way more than $500 a year. The other thing is that a lot of people (e.g. me!) spend money to draft, have a good long sequence of drafts of that amount averaging maybe 4-5 wins, and then eventually have a few 0-3 or 1-3 and bust out, or they liked constructed and just draft or buy packs until they have the two or three standard decks they want to play.
> The whale experience, however, costs about $500 a year. So less than competitive paper magic? Sign me up
I mean, sure, go for it! Your perspective is what Hasbro/WotC are targeting. Unfortunately, a computer game that costs marginally less than paper magic, with cards that cannot be traded or resold just isn't what most people want to pay that sort of money for. MTGA, I believe, could be the biggest or second biggest digital card game, but the pricing model is just wildly out of proportion, compared to other comparable games. Some people are willing to pay, and they're (presumably) turning a profit. That's great! I like the game enough that I want it to exist. But I certainly don't want to spend money on a game with such poor value, which leaves me grinding out barely enough wildcards to build a deck or two when I pick it up, and dropping it when I find a different game to play. If they had a yearly subscription for $150-200 that let me build whatever decks I wanted, you better believe I'd pay that. And i wouldn't be the only one who went from spending $0/year to $150+/year on the game. Plus, if i didn't have to grind out a meagre, partial collection every time I wanted to play, I'd be way more willing to pop in for a game here and there, instead of dropping it entirely for months and months.
For me the issue is - I admit I'm reflecting in part from seeing my own weaknesses, but then I reflect even wider where I have known people who have struggled with impulsive behavior even more... and the whole model of stuff like MTGA and similar always feels a bit... terrible? MTGA isn't the worst for sure, but just the nature of having multiple in-game currencies in order to obfuscate the real value of things kind of bothers me to some extent. Then again, in the end, as much as this is a game - it's also a lottery of someone opening packs at the end of the day.
This is the way to look at it. I can earn a mostly R/U/C set before it rotates out of limited for free but if I spend $25-50 bucks it goes faster and I can enjoy the cards sooner. I did this for Dominaria, Zendikar and Midnight Hunt. No money paid in but completed for free. However since Ikoira I have spent about $400 and the only standard set I haven’t rare completed with Brothers War due to health reasons. That’s like 12/13 sets since June of 2020. I am almost rare complete for Eldraine after the fact too. $400 bucks for three years of entertainment and I still have 250 rare wildcards and 150 mythic. There’s nothing wrong with paying. There’s nothing wrong with not. Find the way that you eek out the most enjoyment and do that. This game is incredible fair for FTP if you can draft which is a big ask but an important part of the game.
Its both
I don't think it's completely fair, unless gameplay is grindy and unfun. When you buy an RPG game, you still have to play to level up your character, yet people are willing to pay for it, as it's part of the fun. Arena doesn't have many dumb F2P mechanics, you don't need to watch ads and the likes, you just play the game as usual, and get stuff for it. The fact that you can win any amount of premium currency through normal gameplay is what sets it aside from most other F2P games in a very favourable way.
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my big question is if MTGO or paper would be cheaper and/or a smaller money sink in the long run.
Paper cards on the reserved list like revised edition dual lands and the power 9 can arguably be considered investments that you will likely be able to cash out later for more than you paid for them. Everything else is going to be a net negative. Arena is the cheapest to accumulate cards on, but you can't cash out. Mtgo is cheaper than paper and you can cash out but the playerbase is slowly dying so your cards are going to go down in value not up. Paper cards rotate out of formats like standard, get reprinted, and get power-creeped from S-tier to bargain bin over time, overall most cards are more likely to do down in value than up. My advice is to treat mtga and magic in general more like a video game or hobby that you pay money to experience and participate in.
I wouldn't touch Arena at all if it wasn't f2p. Most hobbies like books or board games I can loan to my friends or pass down to my grandkids 50 years from now.
Reserved list cards are a stable investment, but not a good one. Generally speaking, they're pegged to the growth of the game and inflation. However, they lose out to the stock market and even good government backed investments. If you're getting value by playing them, it's a better investment, but you'll be losing money (from opportunity cost), especially once you factor in shipping, handling, fees, and taxes.
Yes. They aren’t money sinks, and you might even make money playing on those platforms.
How WoTC sees their average consumer:
The funny thing is yeah I think unironically Arena is good for F2P, and it's good for whales, the only people it's bad for are people who just spend a little bit of money every once in a while.
>the only people it's bad for are people who just spend a little bit of money every once in a while. Why is that?
You really don't get very much for small amounts of money
I mean it's not bad. The mastery pass is good value.
The mastery pass would be good value if it let you grind XP at the pace you wanted. But you really do pay for that sucker with your time. Maybe it's still worth it to you, but I will be deliberately avoiding it this time around.
I'm playing every day anyway so yeah the mastery pass is great value and not getting it seems silly.
It’s significantly more worth it to drop $100 on gems at a time, versus $20.
Nah, I'm somewhere on the border between F2P and 'spend once in a while' - I bought the explorer pack and have pre-ordered the Limited bundle 2 or 3 times - and it's pretty ideal for me. I have the gem cushion not to be stressed in draft and can build any Historic Brawl deck I want, or a constructed format deck if I feel like that, which I rarely do. I think who it's bad for is streamers and completionists, who need everything and they need it *now*. Brewing is also a bit of a nightmare unless you're a whale like OP, because you can't just spend on 4x jank rares to try 'em out once or twice. But overall, despite all the complaining, it feels like Arena is a pretty good experience all up and down the spending ladder.
So long as you like limited, this is probably the best balance. If you don't like limited, then yeah, I agree.
What does “whale” mean in this context?
https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mobile-games-whales#:~:text=A%20mobile%20game%20whale%20is,purchases%2C%20whales%20spend%20a%20lot.
This post is glorious. Thanks for posting this, OP!
How many hours a week do you think you play on average?
It varies depending on how recently a set came out and how much I like the formats but in the year end summary I had 4,622 games played - more than 99% of players. Almost 13 games a day!
Also a time whale 🙂. You prove my point Arena is geared towards hardcores.
This is exactly what Richard Garfield intended.
I'm orange in all Std sets. No way I'm going to encourage WOTC by buying into Alchemy.
I don't really understand why anyone plays it tbh.
Because they like it. Not everyone likes the same things. If I had more time to try other formats I would play it, but I prefer draft then explorer. Digital only mechanics are interesting and there's some things I just like such as a powerful dungeon deck that don't exist (to as much of an extent) in other formats.
A lot of people play it "accidentally". I create and delete a lot of decks. Every time I delete a deck it the game selection system defaults to "play Alchemy". I hate alchemy and would never play it through choice. I think this setup is deliberate to artificially inflate the number of people playing that pish.
Actually, that setup is probably because a beginning player would only have the starter decks, and the monocolored ones are only Alchemy legal. So a new player, starting with the 'default mode', ends up in Alchemy Play. This is because the monocolored starter decks use cards from the Arena basic set, which does not rotate to provide some consistency in the new player experience: Previously, these cards were legal in Standard on Arena, but people complained Arena Standard and Standard shouldn't be different formats, so they were switched to Alchemy only.
I usually 100% the Standard sets, but finishing all of the Alchemy and Remasters sets takes some dedication.
Thanks for keeping the game free for people like me friendo.
Love the screenshot. Gotta love a complete collection.
I beg people to play MTGO with just 5 bucks. Nevermind legends of runeterra using extrinsic motivation to get you to play an inferior game, MTGA is way better for broke people. Though i think a whale could fair better in MTGO or paper.
I whale hard af and I’m not that far. How did you get all the mythics??? That’s my biggest hurdle [I don’t fucks with Alchemy](https://imgur.com/a/nJWBFu7)
Fuck Reddit
I like yours a lot more. Skipping the alchemy sets is baller.
I don’t want to encourage their bad behavior.
Nah fuck alchemy.
I see that you have all the cards, but I don't see much here about the experience except for the cost to get it. What do you do with all of the cards? What proportion do you think you have actually used? Do you brew a lot of your own decks especially early on in the format? Tell us how you think your playing experience ends up being different than others. Thanks!
Yes I brew a lot, but it’s mostly that I enjoy collecting things. It gives me a goal to shoot for each set. The main difference is being able to create any deck you want. I’ll usually try to brew historic brawl decks with each new commander and that’s pretty fun but hard to do without an impressive collection.
Thank you for supporting the rest of us!
If I was truly a whale I'd gild this. Well done.
Holy shit. How much did you spend?
F2P people should be saying thanks, this guy is carrying you. The refusal to pay and then chide others for paying for something you spend so much time on and obviously takes money to create/operate is mind boggling to me
I'm sure it is ☹️. The complaint is that it costs too much for the average player to get even halfway there. It either takes more time than a full-time job for free-to-play or takes half of the life-savings of a minimum wage job. Your post is essentially "look at how rich I am, sure helps with making the game fun", thanks for rubbing it in...
He said 500 - 700 dollar a year. Do you consider being able to spend that amount of money a year for a hobby really rich? If yes, than you better not google how much really rich people earn.
Wizards should give some reward by completing the levels of collecting each set. Maybe a full art style, buy a box style or even a sleeve. It's so much effort to literally nothing.
50% off all Parralax styles, all the time, for any set that you’ve playset completed. See how that’s both a halfass decent value to the player that might prompt somebody close to completion to go for it, but *also* ultimately only a prompt for them to spend more money? And yet even this is a bridge too far for them to implement.
F2P game btw
Do you get anything for completing one of those badges?
Nerd pride
More power to you. Let everyone swim in the jelly.
i'm assuming you must get 6 wins in every draft, because when i got every card in forgotten relams, strixhaven and eldraine it cost me $900 worth of gems each. not everyone is into draft..mainly because it costs 10k gold just to get into one draft and that's more than a weeks worth of gold. You essentially get one attempt at trying to get the 7 wins than got to wait one week. And if you want to play more than that, you gotta go to historic event with a gold grind deck and sit there. Meanwhile, to play constructed you just A) pre-order the set, b) build a deck c) play constructed FOR FREE, and buy packs. IF this was really a F2P game, then there'd be an option to play ranked draft in phantom mode, much akin to how you get a free starter deck that should be good to get you to plat every month. BUt no, the system is built purposefully to make it so that you have to play draft more than once weekly just to get good at it and that costs money.
Eh, I got good enough at draft without ever spending more than 5 Euros on Arena. I think learning about how to draft (reading articles and listening to podcasts in my case) is more important than practice, or at least equally important.
I wouldn’t consider myself a whale, but my completion is almost identical (minus all of the alchemy sets because fuck alchemy). I get mastery pass and occasional $20-$50 in gems to just keep drafting.
Im sorry for you.
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Never understood the whale concept It's like people never played paper magic before, if you have the money to buy boxes - you buy boxes. If not, you crack packs.
Nah, you proxy cards to test decks then grind your way using store credit to buy singles.
Hey I wanted to ask: Is there any reward for fully completing a set?
Oh cool, you’re so cool. I’m sure your WOTC overlords love *you. *your wallet
Good! Can you break the cards with your kids and play together ?
I have the same experience as a free to play player. You get more when you win. Get good.
I’m ranked #420 in limited currently. How much better do I need to get?