This is Magic the Gathering, not Hearthstone. Frankly, I'm surprised people only have to pay a small fraction of the price required in either paper or MODO to play in events in Arena. WOTC sure has eased up quite a bit on the micro-transactions compared to what they were originally going to try to pull with this digital offering.

Stop trying to compare it to anything other than paper Magic. It's the worst economy on the market because it's pricing model is based on being a cheaper version of that, not trying to compete with other F2P CCG's.

Make love to me

No. Last time you blew up your rice cooker. I'm still trying to repair the scorch marks on my desk.

Lol I love that avatar

You’re the Yin to my Yang

I taped over your exercise videos with reruns of Frasier.

Barney, lack of Magic Arena in your life is making you progressively more gay. If that's your thing, fine by me, but if you really want to preserve your heterosexuality, then install arena asap.

Lol, hey I’m trying to keep an open mind

Am now participating in the exchange of the information with the customer support reps. Hopefully I'll be able to recover my account with apparently? 100,000 gems.

Edit: Oops, wrong thread.

I think the duplicate protection actually increases the value of drafts. Without it, you needed wildcards to get the rares you wanted. Now you can easily complete the set by buying packs. So every trash rare you draft is a pack's worth of progress towards the cards you want.

I often get passed multiple rares in a single draft, which alone pushes the value above packs from a collection standpoint. On top of that, every third draft is basically free from gem rewards, you occasionally get another free pack and your progress towards the vault increases. Of course you also want to draft a little for the season rewards, too. So basically, there is no way, packs are better value than drafts, until you risk multiple duplicates per draft.

Maybe packs are an acceptable alternative, if you don't plan to go for set completion. However, why wouldn't you? There's easily enough gold for it, even for free to play guys like myself. Buying packs gets you specific cards faster, but you lose a lot of collection value.