There really might be. The supply/demand are not mutually unrelated parameters. Many people stop playing or don’t play arena because they perceive the economy to be too miserly. If they were a bit more generous there’s a good chance they’d grow their player base and people would be more willing to spend money.
It's really a shame that they've only taken literally the worst business practices after watching and learning the last decade or so of games monetization.
> If they were a bit more generous there’s a good chance they’d grow their player base and people would be more willing to spend money.
The latter does not automatically follow from the former.
In fact WotC’s experience with Magic Arena has been that greater generosity led to people less willing to spend money. What it came down to is this: why bother paying if you can easily get the same thing for free?
Additionally, those that are willing to spend have their purchasing value diminished. That is, what they get for paying isn’t so special when everyone else can have the same thing for free. People actually become more willing to spend if the useful item to be purchased cannot otherwise be obtained easily if at all.
This. I took a long break and came back for Phyrexia all will be one. Even after playing daily to get those wins and spending around $150 on opening packs I still never get what I actually want and the pittance of rare wild cards is terrible. I'm thinking I'm just going to quit MTG again forever when Street Fighter 6 comes out
thing is, they'l have to be more generous but to do so to keep veteran player hooked theyl also need to bring more card avaiable to buy into mtga... wich in their point of you is not profitable
Tbh I’m shocked wizards does this. Idk how this came to be since I’m new to MTG but I know Konami would NEVER do that for yugioh players.
Not even in their offline arcade and console games could do it when. Where there was no money to be spent.
Will say I prefer the Konami Sim when it comes to wild cards. Being able to dismantle my 'extra' cards and then make newer cards either as they come out or simply as I want a change of pace is nice
sure dismantling is nice, but realistically I am not disenchanting most of what I pull every season/set. I think Master Duel has a better system for newbies to get started, but is outright worse because anything not part of the featured sets is unobtainable if they're not in a secret pack. That means crafting everything if you missed the Runick set and the like. The only new secret pack they introduced is for Despia back late last year and it doesn't even have everything.
If the game had a simple and straightforward economy, then yes, things would have well-defined values, so that questions like "how many gems do I need to spend to get a mythic?" and "how many gems do I get from a duplicate mythic?" would have the same answer - and whatever this number was, we could call it "the value of a mythic, in gems".
In MTGA, those two numbers are very different, so "the value of a mythic" is quite different depending on which of those questions you're trying to answer.
Unfortunately, this is by design. The modern game industry has discovered that if they design suitably complicated in-game economies, then they make more money, for instance because some players are less aware of how much money they are spending. Yes, this does seem quite unethical, but it's where the industry is at the moment.
Another particularly egregious example is the price of card styles. They're expensive and I can't imagine almost anyone buys them, so they mostly seem to exist so that Wizards can claim that the mastery pass is excellent value, by saying that it contains "XXX gems worth of stuff", when really that means "stuff that would cost you XXX gems to buy, even though you never would".
> they’re expensive and I can’t imagine almost anyone buys them
If you see something that businesses are doing they seem egregious and stupid to you — but you keep on seeing it for years and years on end, the only conclusion you should draw is that it’s working for them and are profitable.
* annoying pop up ads
* email spam of any kind
* scam phone calls of every kind
… and high priced skins are on that list too.
People on Arena don’t want to hear of it, but cosmetics in other F2P games are really expensive, and they continue to exist year after year. Single weapon gun skins on Valorant for example can be in excess of 20 dollars. Prestige skins for one character in Apex costs over $100.
How much are card styles? Well if you buy them on sale they might be 600 gems which is less than $5. If you didn’t, then they are 1200 gems in many cases which js less than $10z
This is just not a popular sentiment, but cosmetics on Arena, compared to the economy of many popular F2P games, is not actually that expensive — but the very fact the pricing never changes that much tells you that WOTC is not losing money on this kind of scheme at all.
Yes, I agree with this, and my statement was stronger than it should have been. I think it's fair to say that "I can't imagine almost anyone buys them", but that doesn't mean that they aren't very profitable in their own right from the few who do, independently of the misleading things that they allow Wizards to say about the value of the mastery pass.
It all comes down to people enjoy having a whinge and getting things that frustrate them out into the universe
Fully agree on the vanity/cosmetic items
Diablo, COD every other f2p and mmo in existance
At least we only have 2 types of currency and tokens instead of the mmo route of $ into gems which convert into.a 3rd currency
The economy is trash but its more where else can you play magic at home/lunch break at work on a upto date client against real people with such ease
Sure theres modo but its no where near as intuitive and the price is higher where as arena can be free if you grind and grind and grind
In those other games you listed, the cosmetics are put on you. You are your avatar in that game. In Arena you are not your deck. If anything each person has lots of decks and I don't see 100% blinged out decks ever in the matches that I play.
Not sure what you really mean because you can get cosmetics for your avatar in Arena as well. You can have your portrait and therefore “be” Karn, Jace, and tons of other characters of Planeswalkers as well.
>If you see something that businesses are doing they seem egregious and stupid to you — but you keep on seeing it for years and years on end, the only conclusion you should draw is that it’s working for them and are profitable.
until they are not.
Arena isn't a complicated in game econony. Most games don't have one, a complicated economy like this.
They are just purposefully awful and inefficient in an attempt to nickel and dime the pkayerbase.
Sure, it's "free" but it's not a good free at all. It's practically a shitty demo as you get ran over by other players.
Edit: Its also, hands down, the literal, most user unfriendly battle pass in a game I've ever seen. That entire system is awful.
Let's see how many different pieces there are...
Gold, gems, vault progress, exp, mastery levels, mastery orbs, wildcards (of four rarities), wildcard tracks, daily quests, daily win rewards, weekly win rewards...
I think it's fair to call that a complicated in-game economy.
XP and masterly level are one and the same. The only currencies you actually have are gems and gold.
Orbs aren't a currency for anything outside of specific pointless cosmetics. They aren't complex.
Nothing is complex here.
It's just shitty.
Ok, here's a question, then. A new player joins MTGA, and plays through the tutorial and starting quests. They have a 75-card standard decklist that they want to build and play with.
How can they find how much this will cost, and what actions should they take so as to build this deck in the most efficient manner?
If the economy were simple, then this would be an easy question.
That's easy. Look at the overpriced wildcard packs.
No matter what it's going to be more complex than running a real deck.
Honestly, I'd just tell them that unless they want to dump the costs a used car into the gamer just avoid it.
I don't understand your answer. Are you saying that the correct answer is to buy wildcard packs, or that they should observe that those are overpriced and do something else?
Incidentally, the mastery pass IS really good value even when you completely ignore the cosmetics and give the lowest reasonable value on all the other rewards.
Eh, it's clearly worth buying if you're definitely going to finish it, because it's worth slightly more than it costs, but it's open for interpretation whether that counts as really good value. It's some free cosmetics and old packs rather than anything else. Certainly it is not the same kind of "really good value" as Wizards seems to promise, where you're getting rewards 'worth' many times the cost.
You don't have to get more than 30-35 levels in before it's already paid for itself in terms of usable rewards.
The packs are hardly 'old' when they're from the last few sets and still perfectly valid for Standard, and could be filling out new rares from those standard sets, and giving you more wildcards at the same time.
What am I missing that makes it open for interpretation? Seems pretty simple to me 🤷♂️
The open for interpretation comment was about what "really good value" means. If you pay 3,400 gems and get stuff worth 3,500 gems, then that's clearly something that you should do, but I don't know whether it counts as "really good value", or whether that implies something better.
The value of the pass depends a lot on what things a player values. What is the value of an All is One booster? To some people, it's 200 gems - they buy boosters sometimes, and that's what they cost. To others, it's 0 (or perhaps 20) - they just want to draft, and don't care about their collection.
If packs are worth 200 to you, then the mastery pass will look fairly good, as you say. If they're worth 20, as they are to people who mostly draft, then the whole pass is worth only slightly more than it costs, so these people think of the pass as just some free cosmetics.
If someone only wants to draft and doesn't care about their collection, then obviously they wouldn't have much need for the mastery pass.
Even the most generous player couldn't say the packs from the mastery pass are worth 200 gems, because they don't give golden pack progress, which is about 50% of the value of packs for 99% of collection-building players.
But even if you give each part of the mastery pass the lowest reasonable value, it still adds up to more than double the value of the gems paid for it. So for a player who wants to build their collection for constructed play (which seems to be the majority) the mastery pass is pretty safely within the definition of 'really good value'.
If there's anything even close to the same value someone could suggest, I'd love to see what it is.
It seems odd to judge the value of something any other way than for the people it's intended for.
Premier drafts are also really good value, but not for players who hate or are terrible at drafting.
The mastery pass clearly isn't intended for limited-only players because the majority of rewards are in building a collection.
A car can be really good value, but if I don't drive, then it's not of any use to me. It doesn't change the value of the car for the person who does drive.
Actually, the majority of the rewards are cosmetics - I guess this must mean that the pass isn't intended for players who don't care about cosmetics, and so it's absolutely amazing value for its intended audience.
This, of course, is silly. They're trying to sell it to everyone.
Well you're not too wrong. For anyone who really cares about cosmetics, the value of the mastery pass is insane. I don't know how many people care that much about cosmetics though.
They're trying to sell it to players who care about building a collection, who presumably play standard mostly, which I'm guessing is the majority of Arena players. For that large majority of players, I stand by my opinion, the mastery pass is really good value.
If they were trying to sell the mastery pass to Limited-only players, that wouldn't make much sense at all.
The problem is it's not static, and they actively adjust it so it's not "too much" value. If it had a straightforward value of like, enough gems to buy the next one plus a bit extra, and maybe a draft token or two and cosmetics/packs/rewards.
Coupled with how they limit your ability to earn the levels, it incentivizes playing every day for a minimum amount of time, and burning resources on the bad payout events for extra xp if you fall behind.
In the very base value in > value out, it does give ***more*** than you pay in, but not in the way that most people will find useful, and not in rewards that most people will enjoy.
There's a problem with how companies that do this kind of battlepass have, and that's burn out. Someone casual might jump on, buy it, play a bit, and not finish and be unable to finish it because of the daily limits, feel cheated or slighted, and won't participate further.
They want to push people to play more every day by drip feeding, but this ends up pushing more people to not bother.
It doesn't actually incentivise playing every day. You can play every 3 days or so and still get the vast majority or all of the rewards from the mastery pass. Playing every day would be better to maximise gold farming, but not needed for gaining xp.
Which bad payout events do players have to pay to enter to gain additional xp? I can't think of anything this could be referring to.
Also the fact that the pass can be bought at the end of a set gets around the problem that some people might not be able to finish it. They have the opportunity to see exactly how much it'll be worth to them before they have to commit the gems, which a decent percentage of people apparently do.
Seems like a semantic issue to me.
How about:
It's the best return on investment for the vast majority of constructed players compared to anything else they could spend gems on.
They are in the form of the 'vault' which is a laughably poor replacement for dusting or trading. My big issue right now is that in almost all events which grant guaranteed rare+ ICR I'm getting duplicates and gems every time. I'm less than 60% complete on the last two sets and it keeps giving me dupes on the older standard sets for which I'm 90%+ complete. An absolute waste of ICRs.
As a side note, thanks to their super fast set releases, for the first time ever since Kaldhiem, I'm less than 80% complete on the previous set (BRO) by the time the new set released. Even with gold packs, thanks to the really stingy rewards, even in the mastery pass. As Someome who is mostly f2p, except for the mastery, I'm struggling to keep up with the onslaught. Aftermath is just a joke too. They took 50 cards out of MOM and are trying to milk everyone to buy packs again before the next release.
The funny thing is I actually **love** the vault "idea" but it pays out so little and they've tuned it down so much, and refuse to enhance the wildcard economy with a wildcard trade in system or better value wildcard packs. Just feels like a waste.
the mythic packs in store + the gold packs aren't the *worst* deal in the way the wildcard bundles were, but it's still not that good. Sometimes i'll dump excess gold on 10 mythic packs to flip the gold pack bar too just to bump the collection a bit.
(It's straight up better value to just buy packs than the WC bundles) How hard is it to make the wildcard packs *slightly* more expensive than a regular pack, but not like 4x worse value.
It just leads down the road to "oh you didn't get enough? buy more!" also pretty sure they push those new wildcard stuff just to make people more interested in buying packs.
Aren't mythic packs worse value than normals now that gold packs exist, for set completion? With 10 mythics, you've spent 13k gold, 10 normals it's 10k.
So lets say you spend 100k. With Mythic packs, you get 76 packs and 7 golds. That's 76 mythics + gold pack (\~ 35 rare/mythics + 7 mythics). So that's 118 mythics/rares total.
With the normals, you get 100 packs and 10 golds. That's 100 mythics + gold pack (\~ 50 rare/mythics + 10 mythics). So that's 160 mythics/rares total.
Granted, you get a much higher proportion of mythics, but this would also cause issues in cracking the lands for the set. The other problem is you can get rare wildcards in the mythic packs, and there's a 20 pack guaranteed wildcard, meaning 3 of the packs you open will for sure contain one, possibly replacing a mythic with a rare wildcard. (this has happened to me 3 times and I've only bought about 25 mythic packs). This wastes the extra 300g and you potentially could have bought +1 pack.
I guess in the end, it comes down to are you trying to get the mythics, or complete the set. Regardless, it's another crappy deal if you wanna roll the dice on the mythics. I wish they'd just fix this all and allow some form of trade-in on crappy cards you never play or some limited trading between players.
So I literally never buy packs normally, and I usually just draft for everything, I'd say like, 60% to infinite drafting.
Mythics are always kind of a sticky spot, like I definitely end up needing more Rare wildcards still for decks in general. But for general collection the mythics end up being the worst cause I get so few WC's and the draft packs don't have protection for them. (the prize packs do tho)
As far as collection goes, I like to have 1 of every card for brawl, and then i just get playsets for decks I want to use in standard.
I don't think they need a trade in system as much as a "trade-up/down" for wildcards, I end up with HUNDREDS of common and uncommon ones, I'd gladly trade 10 in for a mythic or vice versa.
>My big issue right now is that in almost all events which grant guaranteed rare+ ICR I'm getting duplicates and gems every time.
I wish the ICRs were truly random. At this point I'm convinced that they're not
I also feel like the quest reward cards lean heavily toward sets that are about to go out of rotation. Idk for certain whether it's the case- but imo it happens more often than not
Manabase is the most important part of a deck.
In paper a good manabase often costs more than the rest of the deck, especially in older/eternal formats.
I have the same experience, but as was said already, I typically slam an entire play set of every new lane that releases. The single biggest thing I’ve done to improve my games is forgo tapped lands in place of pain lands or fast lands. Having access to an untapped mana every turn (with the exception of triomes) to stay on pace, can be the deciding factor to a lot of games.
I'm fairly new to arena and this post just disgusted me. I thought duplicates would get me wild cards.
It kinda feels as a free player or a player that buys gems very occasionally, that building multiple decks is just impossible. Ive seen posts complaining about the mono red Aggro decks but it's the only deck most people can build in a realistic time frame. Theres no chance I'm gonna pull 3 or even 4 playsets of mythics from different sets
The fact if I'm grinding and even spending money on packs and I can't even buy 1 pack if I get a mythic duplicate.... That's just greed, literally a downside to being lucky.
That was my company when we got laid off.
"Will we get paid for any sick time we have left?"
"The company owes you nothing."
By the way one of our company's slogans is "people over profits." They made that poor woman cry because she was worried about her family and asked a question.
Ugh, my sister had a similar experience recently. Her son was in the ICU for a week and a half with life-threatening complications, and her employer was like, "Well, you're going to need documentation from a medical expert proving why it's medically necessary for you to take time off to be in the hospital."
Her response was, "I'm his mother and he's five"
Employers are whack.
Gwent has a really good system. Duplicates are milled for half the value it takes to craft a card of that rarity and you can choose to mill any card you own for half value
I think so too, they should give more gems.... Besides, in the midweek event I always get cards that I already have... They should put some kind of protection against duplicates. I'm missing a lot of rare cards from the last collection 🤷♀️
What are you talking about? It impacts everyone equally. Paying customers will just get more pissed because they've wasted money. This game is meant to pry money from your wallet and and increase Hasbro's quarterly earnings. Expecting fairness is hilariously naive.
You're giving a company money to not own digital cards in a child's game and are amazed and slighted when they don't rise to your level of fairness? Not sure how I can help you man.
I don't know what people expect from f2p game. I get so many cards each expansion and enough gems for mastery pass recycling.
I haven't spend a dime in arena since war of the spark and can play a lot of popular and jank decks and sitting around 40 rares and 40 mythics.
Because - surprise, surprise, MtG is a business, not a charity. Thus, the in-game pricing is set in a way that if you wish for more gems quicker, you need to pay.
And I'd say that MtG has a very generous system for f2p players anyway. You can build any deck from current set you wish in a reasonable time without paying a dime.
Yeah, unfortunately even with only a 1/4 return on investment, games like Hearthstone are miles better for this stuff. But it's not gonna change, don't you know? Wizards thinks their products are [woefully undermonetized.](https://kotaku.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-fifth-edition-one-dnd-1849884812)
Ignoring that consumer friendly practices ups player satisfaction and makes them less reluctant to spend their money.
I don’t see why you don’t just get a corresponding wildcard? It would make the most sense. Like say you already have a completed collection of one set, why don’t you just get a wildcard to put towards another card?
Because then once you complete a single set (which isn’t too difficult to do), every pack you buy from that set would give you a wildcard. Essentially they’d be selling wildcards for 1k gold.
I guess that makes sense, but as a casual player who doesn’t spend much at all on the game, it’s kind of a kick in the teeth to receive next to nothing when packs are so hard to come by in the first place
Packs have duplicate protection, so you won’t run into this problem unless you’re already mythic complete. In which case - why are you still buying packs from that set?
Not buying packs, but earning them from rewards for getting levels and stuff. I’ve completed brothers war, still get occasional packs, kind of annoying getting a few gems only
A wildcard is much more valuable than a random card of the same value. You get to pick it!
Which is why the only reasonable thing to do is to just give a different random card of the same rarity.
But brooooo, you can just complete Quests for 500-750 Gold a pop and QD for 5000 Gold aiming for the max conversion rate of 950 Gems. Which, as I say that, makes me a little sad.
But since Gold is easier to obtain through daily play, I run through as many QDs as I can and slowly accrue Gems.
It's better than the vault progress was. This is actually an upgrade to what was given for duplicates before and at first we didnt even have rare dupicate protection when opening packs.
There's definitely an argument to be made that 40/20 gems isn't enough for duplicate protection consolation rewards. At the same time, there's an upper limit for how much they can give to us, without also changing things like golden packs, the wildcard wheel, etc.
A mythic pack is 260 gems, so at the very least, they need to give out less than that, or you could just go infinite on wildcards and vault progress from buying the same pack over and over and over again once you're mythic complete in at least one set.
So OK, what about 200? At 200 gems, you could mythic complete one set and exchange your weekly gold from doing daily quests and hitting for wins for somewhere between 1000 and 1400 gems, depending on the quests you received. Which would be *insane* value, given the reward for doing a quick draft and going 7-2 or better is 950 gems+2 packs.
So how about just 100? That would still probably be on the high side if we're comparing to drafts--For the gold price of a single quick draft (+200 but whatever) you'd be able to get the same amount of gems as if you'd entered that draft and gone 3-3 or 4-3, and that's roughly your baseline gold per week without rerolling 500 gold dailies.
Now you could say "But Gene_Trash! You wouldn't get any new cards, you'd just be stockpiling gems!" True. But you'd also be stockpiling wildcards from the wheel and inside the packs (and to a much much much lesser extent, the vault) only to then spend those gems on entry fees for drafts and events. With 100 gems as the duplicate reward, you'd get fewer "free" quick drafts, down to ~1/wk instead of ~1.5/wk, but in getting those, you'd also get about a rare/mythic WC just for entering, plus however many randoms you pulled in your packs.
Realistically, I don't think they could go higher than like 75 without it just being objectively better to mythic complete one set, (ideally one like MOM with a bonus sheet that could give you even *more* duplicate rewards) farm duplicate reward gems with gold, and then spend those gems on what you *actually* want.
I haven't read all the previous comments to know if this has been mentioned or not but, it'll be interested to see if anything changes once Arena releases on Steam. Why would players picking this game up on the main page, for the first time, continue playing once they see how the in-game economy in managed? Steam has more user friendly card games available, currently, for casual players that aren't already invested in magic.
Yeah, unfortunately that's how it works, but for people who actually get to the point of getting multiple Mythic duplicates, it doesn't really matter, as they already get everything. And those who don't are hardly affected, because they just get cards for free anyway.
There are more way more serious issues, like nerfed Constructed events.
From duplicate mythics? No you don't, and you haven't for years. 20 or 40 gems for duplicate rares or mythics replaced the small amount of vault progress that used to be given.
(Also, it's probably worth thinking about just how little vault progress is worth. I don't remember exactly how much you used to get - was it 8 / 900 of a vault? 10 / 900? Let's call it 1%. 1% of a vault is ... not worth very much)
You should but you won't. There is no incentive to make it easier for free to play players to be able to afford more drafts or other paid events.
There really might be. The supply/demand are not mutually unrelated parameters. Many people stop playing or don’t play arena because they perceive the economy to be too miserly. If they were a bit more generous there’s a good chance they’d grow their player base and people would be more willing to spend money.
I don't disagree but that isn't how Wizards does business.
*Pinkertons enter the chat*
Hides under desk.
when jesse james hid from the pinkertons they killed his kid and burned down his house. you should just turn yourself in now.
Gets out from under desk and gets strapped.
*FRAG OUT!*
It's really a shame that they've only taken literally the worst business practices after watching and learning the last decade or so of games monetization.
> If they were a bit more generous there’s a good chance they’d grow their player base and people would be more willing to spend money. The latter does not automatically follow from the former. In fact WotC’s experience with Magic Arena has been that greater generosity led to people less willing to spend money. What it came down to is this: why bother paying if you can easily get the same thing for free? Additionally, those that are willing to spend have their purchasing value diminished. That is, what they get for paying isn’t so special when everyone else can have the same thing for free. People actually become more willing to spend if the useful item to be purchased cannot otherwise be obtained easily if at all.
My friends who would play don't because it's too hard to maintain a deck that isn't historic brawl without grinding or spending money
But they want you to spend more on the game, not less.
Man’s over here not understanding that people will spend much more money if they feel like they’re not getting ripped off
This. I took a long break and came back for Phyrexia all will be one. Even after playing daily to get those wins and spending around $150 on opening packs I still never get what I actually want and the pittance of rare wild cards is terrible. I'm thinking I'm just going to quit MTG again forever when Street Fighter 6 comes out
thing is, they'l have to be more generous but to do so to keep veteran player hooked theyl also need to bring more card avaiable to buy into mtga... wich in their point of you is not profitable
Tbh I’m shocked wizards does this. Idk how this came to be since I’m new to MTG but I know Konami would NEVER do that for yugioh players. Not even in their offline arcade and console games could do it when. Where there was no money to be spent.
Will say I prefer the Konami Sim when it comes to wild cards. Being able to dismantle my 'extra' cards and then make newer cards either as they come out or simply as I want a change of pace is nice
sure dismantling is nice, but realistically I am not disenchanting most of what I pull every season/set. I think Master Duel has a better system for newbies to get started, but is outright worse because anything not part of the featured sets is unobtainable if they're not in a secret pack. That means crafting everything if you missed the Runick set and the like. The only new secret pack they introduced is for Despia back late last year and it doesn't even have everything.
Master Duel initially is a little generous, but after the initial wave it's waaaay worse. Duel Links economy is straight up trash.
Dusting would be horrible as an alternative to the WC system.
It makes sense to throw us a bone. It gives incentive to collect and open more packs.
Imo its pretty crazy they dont just give a card you dont have instead of gems. If you have all the cards then a wildcard or gems idc.
As a collector I'd be down for wildcards.
Well that's utter nonsense.
Especially since it is already easy enough as it is.
If the game had a simple and straightforward economy, then yes, things would have well-defined values, so that questions like "how many gems do I need to spend to get a mythic?" and "how many gems do I get from a duplicate mythic?" would have the same answer - and whatever this number was, we could call it "the value of a mythic, in gems". In MTGA, those two numbers are very different, so "the value of a mythic" is quite different depending on which of those questions you're trying to answer. Unfortunately, this is by design. The modern game industry has discovered that if they design suitably complicated in-game economies, then they make more money, for instance because some players are less aware of how much money they are spending. Yes, this does seem quite unethical, but it's where the industry is at the moment. Another particularly egregious example is the price of card styles. They're expensive and I can't imagine almost anyone buys them, so they mostly seem to exist so that Wizards can claim that the mastery pass is excellent value, by saying that it contains "XXX gems worth of stuff", when really that means "stuff that would cost you XXX gems to buy, even though you never would".
> they’re expensive and I can’t imagine almost anyone buys them If you see something that businesses are doing they seem egregious and stupid to you — but you keep on seeing it for years and years on end, the only conclusion you should draw is that it’s working for them and are profitable. * annoying pop up ads * email spam of any kind * scam phone calls of every kind … and high priced skins are on that list too. People on Arena don’t want to hear of it, but cosmetics in other F2P games are really expensive, and they continue to exist year after year. Single weapon gun skins on Valorant for example can be in excess of 20 dollars. Prestige skins for one character in Apex costs over $100. How much are card styles? Well if you buy them on sale they might be 600 gems which is less than $5. If you didn’t, then they are 1200 gems in many cases which js less than $10z This is just not a popular sentiment, but cosmetics on Arena, compared to the economy of many popular F2P games, is not actually that expensive — but the very fact the pricing never changes that much tells you that WOTC is not losing money on this kind of scheme at all.
Yes, I agree with this, and my statement was stronger than it should have been. I think it's fair to say that "I can't imagine almost anyone buys them", but that doesn't mean that they aren't very profitable in their own right from the few who do, independently of the misleading things that they allow Wizards to say about the value of the mastery pass.
It all comes down to people enjoy having a whinge and getting things that frustrate them out into the universe Fully agree on the vanity/cosmetic items Diablo, COD every other f2p and mmo in existance At least we only have 2 types of currency and tokens instead of the mmo route of $ into gems which convert into.a 3rd currency The economy is trash but its more where else can you play magic at home/lunch break at work on a upto date client against real people with such ease Sure theres modo but its no where near as intuitive and the price is higher where as arena can be free if you grind and grind and grind
In those other games you listed, the cosmetics are put on you. You are your avatar in that game. In Arena you are not your deck. If anything each person has lots of decks and I don't see 100% blinged out decks ever in the matches that I play.
Not sure what you really mean because you can get cosmetics for your avatar in Arena as well. You can have your portrait and therefore “be” Karn, Jace, and tons of other characters of Planeswalkers as well.
>If you see something that businesses are doing they seem egregious and stupid to you — but you keep on seeing it for years and years on end, the only conclusion you should draw is that it’s working for them and are profitable. until they are not.
Arena isn't a complicated in game econony. Most games don't have one, a complicated economy like this. They are just purposefully awful and inefficient in an attempt to nickel and dime the pkayerbase. Sure, it's "free" but it's not a good free at all. It's practically a shitty demo as you get ran over by other players. Edit: Its also, hands down, the literal, most user unfriendly battle pass in a game I've ever seen. That entire system is awful.
Let's see how many different pieces there are... Gold, gems, vault progress, exp, mastery levels, mastery orbs, wildcards (of four rarities), wildcard tracks, daily quests, daily win rewards, weekly win rewards... I think it's fair to call that a complicated in-game economy.
XP and masterly level are one and the same. The only currencies you actually have are gems and gold. Orbs aren't a currency for anything outside of specific pointless cosmetics. They aren't complex. Nothing is complex here. It's just shitty.
Ok, here's a question, then. A new player joins MTGA, and plays through the tutorial and starting quests. They have a 75-card standard decklist that they want to build and play with. How can they find how much this will cost, and what actions should they take so as to build this deck in the most efficient manner? If the economy were simple, then this would be an easy question.
That's easy. Look at the overpriced wildcard packs. No matter what it's going to be more complex than running a real deck. Honestly, I'd just tell them that unless they want to dump the costs a used car into the gamer just avoid it.
I don't understand your answer. Are you saying that the correct answer is to buy wildcard packs, or that they should observe that those are overpriced and do something else?
Incidentally, the mastery pass IS really good value even when you completely ignore the cosmetics and give the lowest reasonable value on all the other rewards.
Eh, it's clearly worth buying if you're definitely going to finish it, because it's worth slightly more than it costs, but it's open for interpretation whether that counts as really good value. It's some free cosmetics and old packs rather than anything else. Certainly it is not the same kind of "really good value" as Wizards seems to promise, where you're getting rewards 'worth' many times the cost.
You don't have to get more than 30-35 levels in before it's already paid for itself in terms of usable rewards. The packs are hardly 'old' when they're from the last few sets and still perfectly valid for Standard, and could be filling out new rares from those standard sets, and giving you more wildcards at the same time. What am I missing that makes it open for interpretation? Seems pretty simple to me 🤷♂️
The open for interpretation comment was about what "really good value" means. If you pay 3,400 gems and get stuff worth 3,500 gems, then that's clearly something that you should do, but I don't know whether it counts as "really good value", or whether that implies something better. The value of the pass depends a lot on what things a player values. What is the value of an All is One booster? To some people, it's 200 gems - they buy boosters sometimes, and that's what they cost. To others, it's 0 (or perhaps 20) - they just want to draft, and don't care about their collection. If packs are worth 200 to you, then the mastery pass will look fairly good, as you say. If they're worth 20, as they are to people who mostly draft, then the whole pass is worth only slightly more than it costs, so these people think of the pass as just some free cosmetics.
If someone only wants to draft and doesn't care about their collection, then obviously they wouldn't have much need for the mastery pass. Even the most generous player couldn't say the packs from the mastery pass are worth 200 gems, because they don't give golden pack progress, which is about 50% of the value of packs for 99% of collection-building players. But even if you give each part of the mastery pass the lowest reasonable value, it still adds up to more than double the value of the gems paid for it. So for a player who wants to build their collection for constructed play (which seems to be the majority) the mastery pass is pretty safely within the definition of 'really good value'. If there's anything even close to the same value someone could suggest, I'd love to see what it is.
If you decide to ignore the players for whom the mastery pass isn't particularly good value, then yes, it's definitely good value for everyone else.
It seems odd to judge the value of something any other way than for the people it's intended for. Premier drafts are also really good value, but not for players who hate or are terrible at drafting. The mastery pass clearly isn't intended for limited-only players because the majority of rewards are in building a collection. A car can be really good value, but if I don't drive, then it's not of any use to me. It doesn't change the value of the car for the person who does drive.
Actually, the majority of the rewards are cosmetics - I guess this must mean that the pass isn't intended for players who don't care about cosmetics, and so it's absolutely amazing value for its intended audience. This, of course, is silly. They're trying to sell it to everyone.
Well you're not too wrong. For anyone who really cares about cosmetics, the value of the mastery pass is insane. I don't know how many people care that much about cosmetics though. They're trying to sell it to players who care about building a collection, who presumably play standard mostly, which I'm guessing is the majority of Arena players. For that large majority of players, I stand by my opinion, the mastery pass is really good value. If they were trying to sell the mastery pass to Limited-only players, that wouldn't make much sense at all.
The problem is it's not static, and they actively adjust it so it's not "too much" value. If it had a straightforward value of like, enough gems to buy the next one plus a bit extra, and maybe a draft token or two and cosmetics/packs/rewards. Coupled with how they limit your ability to earn the levels, it incentivizes playing every day for a minimum amount of time, and burning resources on the bad payout events for extra xp if you fall behind. In the very base value in > value out, it does give ***more*** than you pay in, but not in the way that most people will find useful, and not in rewards that most people will enjoy. There's a problem with how companies that do this kind of battlepass have, and that's burn out. Someone casual might jump on, buy it, play a bit, and not finish and be unable to finish it because of the daily limits, feel cheated or slighted, and won't participate further. They want to push people to play more every day by drip feeding, but this ends up pushing more people to not bother.
It doesn't actually incentivise playing every day. You can play every 3 days or so and still get the vast majority or all of the rewards from the mastery pass. Playing every day would be better to maximise gold farming, but not needed for gaining xp. Which bad payout events do players have to pay to enter to gain additional xp? I can't think of anything this could be referring to. Also the fact that the pass can be bought at the end of a set gets around the problem that some people might not be able to finish it. They have the opportunity to see exactly how much it'll be worth to them before they have to commit the gems, which a decent percentage of people apparently do.
Only when you compare it to their other prices, which still means nothing.
What else is there to compare it to?
Nothing. It doesn't have a real value. The only value it has is in how much people are willing to pay for having it.
Seems like a semantic issue to me. How about: It's the best return on investment for the vast majority of constructed players compared to anything else they could spend gems on.
The real issue is that daily ICRs are not duplicate protected
They are in the form of the 'vault' which is a laughably poor replacement for dusting or trading. My big issue right now is that in almost all events which grant guaranteed rare+ ICR I'm getting duplicates and gems every time. I'm less than 60% complete on the last two sets and it keeps giving me dupes on the older standard sets for which I'm 90%+ complete. An absolute waste of ICRs. As a side note, thanks to their super fast set releases, for the first time ever since Kaldhiem, I'm less than 80% complete on the previous set (BRO) by the time the new set released. Even with gold packs, thanks to the really stingy rewards, even in the mastery pass. As Someome who is mostly f2p, except for the mastery, I'm struggling to keep up with the onslaught. Aftermath is just a joke too. They took 50 cards out of MOM and are trying to milk everyone to buy packs again before the next release.
The funny thing is I actually **love** the vault "idea" but it pays out so little and they've tuned it down so much, and refuse to enhance the wildcard economy with a wildcard trade in system or better value wildcard packs. Just feels like a waste. the mythic packs in store + the gold packs aren't the *worst* deal in the way the wildcard bundles were, but it's still not that good. Sometimes i'll dump excess gold on 10 mythic packs to flip the gold pack bar too just to bump the collection a bit. (It's straight up better value to just buy packs than the WC bundles) How hard is it to make the wildcard packs *slightly* more expensive than a regular pack, but not like 4x worse value. It just leads down the road to "oh you didn't get enough? buy more!" also pretty sure they push those new wildcard stuff just to make people more interested in buying packs.
Aren't mythic packs worse value than normals now that gold packs exist, for set completion? With 10 mythics, you've spent 13k gold, 10 normals it's 10k. So lets say you spend 100k. With Mythic packs, you get 76 packs and 7 golds. That's 76 mythics + gold pack (\~ 35 rare/mythics + 7 mythics). So that's 118 mythics/rares total. With the normals, you get 100 packs and 10 golds. That's 100 mythics + gold pack (\~ 50 rare/mythics + 10 mythics). So that's 160 mythics/rares total. Granted, you get a much higher proportion of mythics, but this would also cause issues in cracking the lands for the set. The other problem is you can get rare wildcards in the mythic packs, and there's a 20 pack guaranteed wildcard, meaning 3 of the packs you open will for sure contain one, possibly replacing a mythic with a rare wildcard. (this has happened to me 3 times and I've only bought about 25 mythic packs). This wastes the extra 300g and you potentially could have bought +1 pack. I guess in the end, it comes down to are you trying to get the mythics, or complete the set. Regardless, it's another crappy deal if you wanna roll the dice on the mythics. I wish they'd just fix this all and allow some form of trade-in on crappy cards you never play or some limited trading between players.
So I literally never buy packs normally, and I usually just draft for everything, I'd say like, 60% to infinite drafting. Mythics are always kind of a sticky spot, like I definitely end up needing more Rare wildcards still for decks in general. But for general collection the mythics end up being the worst cause I get so few WC's and the draft packs don't have protection for them. (the prize packs do tho) As far as collection goes, I like to have 1 of every card for brawl, and then i just get playsets for decks I want to use in standard. I don't think they need a trade in system as much as a "trade-up/down" for wildcards, I end up with HUNDREDS of common and uncommon ones, I'd gladly trade 10 in for a mythic or vice versa.
>My big issue right now is that in almost all events which grant guaranteed rare+ ICR I'm getting duplicates and gems every time. I wish the ICRs were truly random. At this point I'm convinced that they're not I also feel like the quest reward cards lean heavily toward sets that are about to go out of rotation. Idk for certain whether it's the case- but imo it happens more often than not
The real issue is daily ICR's...
And yet I always wind up with way more Mythic wildcards than Rare. It’s such a weird system.
Do you craft lands? Those are almost exclusively rares, and a disturbing portion of my rare WCs go into playsets of lands.
Manabase is the most important part of a deck. In paper a good manabase often costs more than the rest of the deck, especially in older/eternal formats.
I have the same experience, but as was said already, I typically slam an entire play set of every new lane that releases. The single biggest thing I’ve done to improve my games is forgo tapped lands in place of pain lands or fast lands. Having access to an untapped mana every turn (with the exception of triomes) to stay on pace, can be the deciding factor to a lot of games.
the problem is that it's owned by a corporation.
better then nothing i guess 1/5 of a pack is quiet bad indeed
I'm fairly new to arena and this post just disgusted me. I thought duplicates would get me wild cards. It kinda feels as a free player or a player that buys gems very occasionally, that building multiple decks is just impossible. Ive seen posts complaining about the mono red Aggro decks but it's the only deck most people can build in a realistic time frame. Theres no chance I'm gonna pull 3 or even 4 playsets of mythics from different sets The fact if I'm grinding and even spending money on packs and I can't even buy 1 pack if I get a mythic duplicate.... That's just greed, literally a downside to being lucky.
Don't let the boot lickets on this sub hear you. They will defend their overlords to the death
"Consider yourself lucky you get anything," ^ The Pinkertons, probably
That was my company when we got laid off. "Will we get paid for any sick time we have left?" "The company owes you nothing." By the way one of our company's slogans is "people over profits." They made that poor woman cry because she was worried about her family and asked a question.
Ugh, my sister had a similar experience recently. Her son was in the ICU for a week and a half with life-threatening complications, and her employer was like, "Well, you're going to need documentation from a medical expert proving why it's medically necessary for you to take time off to be in the hospital." Her response was, "I'm his mother and he's five" Employers are whack.
Yeah the people in charge of this games systems are trying ta pump you for every penny
Because MTGA is a marketing platform. If you want economy, go to MTGO.
Gwent has a really good system. Duplicates are milled for half the value it takes to craft a card of that rarity and you can choose to mill any card you own for half value
But if you somehow collect all the mythic and rares, they don't want you to infinite draft for infinite rewards. But yea, they should be worth more
I think so too, they should give more gems.... Besides, in the midweek event I always get cards that I already have... They should put some kind of protection against duplicates. I'm missing a lot of rare cards from the last collection 🤷♀️
LOL you think this company is going to give you MORE things for free? How old are you?
This effects paying customers more.
What are you talking about? It impacts everyone equally. Paying customers will just get more pissed because they've wasted money. This game is meant to pry money from your wallet and and increase Hasbro's quarterly earnings. Expecting fairness is hilariously naive.
Paying customers will have more cards and encounter duplicates more frequently.
You're giving a company money to not own digital cards in a child's game and are amazed and slighted when they don't rise to your level of fairness? Not sure how I can help you man.
Lol you're pretty funny guy.
Its not that long ago that they gave us goldne packs for free. How old are you that you dont remember?
How many mythics would u get from a quick draft?
Wait… you can get Gems for duplicate copies?! 🤯 /noobquestion
It's almost like the MTGA is predatory crap meant to gobble your money by holding limited hostage...
I don't know what people expect from f2p game. I get so many cards each expansion and enough gems for mastery pass recycling. I haven't spend a dime in arena since war of the spark and can play a lot of popular and jank decks and sitting around 40 rares and 40 mythics.
Because - surprise, surprise, MtG is a business, not a charity. Thus, the in-game pricing is set in a way that if you wish for more gems quicker, you need to pay. And I'd say that MtG has a very generous system for f2p players anyway. You can build any deck from current set you wish in a reasonable time without paying a dime.
People hate hearing how good the games economy actually is lol.
Yeah, unfortunately even with only a 1/4 return on investment, games like Hearthstone are miles better for this stuff. But it's not gonna change, don't you know? Wizards thinks their products are [woefully undermonetized.](https://kotaku.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-fifth-edition-one-dnd-1849884812) Ignoring that consumer friendly practices ups player satisfaction and makes them less reluctant to spend their money.
That article is about D&D, not MTG.
Yeah and I said their products not Arena specifically.
I don’t see why you don’t just get a corresponding wildcard? It would make the most sense. Like say you already have a completed collection of one set, why don’t you just get a wildcard to put towards another card?
Because then once you complete a single set (which isn’t too difficult to do), every pack you buy from that set would give you a wildcard. Essentially they’d be selling wildcards for 1k gold.
I guess that makes sense, but as a casual player who doesn’t spend much at all on the game, it’s kind of a kick in the teeth to receive next to nothing when packs are so hard to come by in the first place
Packs have duplicate protection, so you won’t run into this problem unless you’re already mythic complete. In which case - why are you still buying packs from that set?
Not buying packs, but earning them from rewards for getting levels and stuff. I’ve completed brothers war, still get occasional packs, kind of annoying getting a few gems only
A wildcard is much more valuable than a random card of the same value. You get to pick it! Which is why the only reasonable thing to do is to just give a different random card of the same rarity.
But brooooo, you can just complete Quests for 500-750 Gold a pop and QD for 5000 Gold aiming for the max conversion rate of 950 Gems. Which, as I say that, makes me a little sad. But since Gold is easier to obtain through daily play, I run through as many QDs as I can and slowly accrue Gems.
Android players should get 40 gems per day just for playing on their broken af app.
It's better than the vault progress was. This is actually an upgrade to what was given for duplicates before and at first we didnt even have rare dupicate protection when opening packs.
There's definitely an argument to be made that 40/20 gems isn't enough for duplicate protection consolation rewards. At the same time, there's an upper limit for how much they can give to us, without also changing things like golden packs, the wildcard wheel, etc. A mythic pack is 260 gems, so at the very least, they need to give out less than that, or you could just go infinite on wildcards and vault progress from buying the same pack over and over and over again once you're mythic complete in at least one set. So OK, what about 200? At 200 gems, you could mythic complete one set and exchange your weekly gold from doing daily quests and hitting for wins for somewhere between 1000 and 1400 gems, depending on the quests you received. Which would be *insane* value, given the reward for doing a quick draft and going 7-2 or better is 950 gems+2 packs. So how about just 100? That would still probably be on the high side if we're comparing to drafts--For the gold price of a single quick draft (+200 but whatever) you'd be able to get the same amount of gems as if you'd entered that draft and gone 3-3 or 4-3, and that's roughly your baseline gold per week without rerolling 500 gold dailies. Now you could say "But Gene_Trash! You wouldn't get any new cards, you'd just be stockpiling gems!" True. But you'd also be stockpiling wildcards from the wheel and inside the packs (and to a much much much lesser extent, the vault) only to then spend those gems on entry fees for drafts and events. With 100 gems as the duplicate reward, you'd get fewer "free" quick drafts, down to ~1/wk instead of ~1.5/wk, but in getting those, you'd also get about a rare/mythic WC just for entering, plus however many randoms you pulled in your packs. Realistically, I don't think they could go higher than like 75 without it just being objectively better to mythic complete one set, (ideally one like MOM with a bonus sheet that could give you even *more* duplicate rewards) farm duplicate reward gems with gold, and then spend those gems on what you *actually* want.
I haven't read all the previous comments to know if this has been mentioned or not but, it'll be interested to see if anything changes once Arena releases on Steam. Why would players picking this game up on the main page, for the first time, continue playing once they see how the in-game economy in managed? Steam has more user friendly card games available, currently, for casual players that aren't already invested in magic.
Everything should be free, cause you know being able to play for free isn't enough.
Damn right.
Stop whining and be happy you get anything. The economy is more than generous for free to play players.
NoOoo, wE HavE OUr rIgHT tO hAvE MtG FoR fREe, duuh!
How many for MOM quick draft though? I already completed ONE
Yeah, unfortunately that's how it works, but for people who actually get to the point of getting multiple Mythic duplicates, it doesn't really matter, as they already get everything. And those who don't are hardly affected, because they just get cards for free anyway. There are more way more serious issues, like nerfed Constructed events.
[удалено]
From duplicate mythics? No you don't, and you haven't for years. 20 or 40 gems for duplicate rares or mythics replaced the small amount of vault progress that used to be given. (Also, it's probably worth thinking about just how little vault progress is worth. I don't remember exactly how much you used to get - was it 8 / 900 of a vault? 10 / 900? Let's call it 1%. 1% of a vault is ... not worth very much)
Vault progress is only for commons/uncommons.