I believe the base stuff is fine but it definitely needs fixing especially after reading that article which did other articles on the other games too which clearly point out their economies.
The article was very generous with its estimates like it said and it barely seems like MTGA is just about at Hearthstone level if not behind which doesn't sound very good, especially since you can't actually grind beyond the first few days like in Hearthstone.

Though like it says there's the events still to come and they're at least putting Mythic Wildcards back in the vault but events are not for everyone and they would need to really double the economy like that article said to be the so called saviour like Wizards wants.

I have personally been fine grinding out my RDW deck but I have got to a point where I have this feeling where I dunno if I should be spending anymore Wildcards on it, like they're so rare and using them wrong feels punishing just as the article also explains so its at a point where I feel like the cards I choose won't even add enough worth (do I absolutely need the Ferocidons?).

Felt the same way about using my first mythic wild. If I would have really thought it through I would have crafted a Phoenix. Instead, as I started off messing with the Cat deck and had heard great things about Gideon of the Trials from Duels I crafted him instead. Mind you he was a good craft and has come in handy in many games but for a while after that I kept questioning my decision as mythic wildcards weren't knocking down my door trying to get in. Even something as simple as one mythic or rare wild card per daily win total (let's say 5 wins) would be a major boost to f2p players and would not break the game.
I will spend a pinch of money on the game just like I did all the DOTP's if they start showing me I want to be in it for the long haul but I'm in no means planning on Whaling it. One wild guaranteed a day per wins will go a long way in keeping the playing field level and will make it easier to not have to grind with one deck and one deck only for months to save enough to make another viable deck. You can always go Jank I guess but good luck on those wins as people grind with t1 decks they payed for and won't put down for nothing.
I've only got three decks right now I have crafted and while viable they are all still a little janky because it is so hard to get those wilds and the cards I need to really get them cranking. I need at least these three decks to keep me interested in the game though. It's real easy to lose interest playing one deck over and over and over again.

ugh, it sounds like the wildcards are going to be the ultimate regret-generators for me

Well, fwiw, my number one concern with this type of thing isn't the FtP prospects, but rather the actual cash economy. Duels was expensive, but not unreasonable. If I can get a full set for $50-60 then I won't be particularly concerned. if it's closer to $500-600 I just won't play at all. There is no way that I have time to grind (fair or not) for a game like this, so I'm very clearly either a whale, or nothing for this game. Also, if there is no direct way to complete an entire set that will also be a huge turnoff to me. I know how RNG's work, so if I don't have a direct way to complete a set (e.g.: make these silly Wildcards directly purchasable at a reasonable price), I probably still won't play.

Reason why you all should care: fundamentally, you are all talking about the aspect of the game that makes 0 money for WotC. They will still have to attract paying costumers or the game fails - obviously, it also fails if the economy is too brutal for the FtP crowd, because then I've got no one to play against and hence won't pay to play.

I don't think a lot of people in this thread have realistic expectations.

The reality is that F2P is a bad model for everyone.

You can't make it too friendly (some of what Devil is suggesting is way too friendly) or the game ends up like Magic Duels with no paying customers. That's why that game died. Your hardcore customers HAVE to have some reason to feel the need to keep feeding money into the game. That's how a F2P game works.

At the same time you can't make it too cheap to whale (like DJ wants; $60 per set is not realistic). You just literally can't. F2P games don't get enough whales that they can sell it that cheaply.

Literally, F2P is a model deisgned to suck for both free "customers" and paying customers.

------------------------------

The reality is that the real best models for this game, from a consumer standpoint, would have been:

Make it a $40-60 game and then

1) Make each set a paid dlc

OR

2) Make it subscription based.

But that would compete too much with paper while not getting the Hearthstone crowd, so we're stuck with this F2P ****.

------------------------------

Now that I've said my piece on that, I expect the best possible case you could realistically expect to come out of WOTC's collective arse is that the game will be slightly faster to grind than Hearthstone and cost $200 per set to complete. That's just how F2P works in the best case scenario for this game.

You know what they really should have done?

They should have just worked really hard to balance and test pre-cons that they would release in fixed-price sets. Maybe have a base game that costs $20 or so with 10 decks, and then every so often we would get a dlc pack with some new decks. Each deck would have 30 or so "extra" cards you could swap in and out so you had some creative control over the decks to bring in the more spikey johhny-ish audience, but you would also get the best of both worlds where it wouldn't be too advanced/expensive for the casual audience to enjoy. I feel like I have heard of that working really well at some point before for some card game whose name I can't seem to remember, before that card game decided it would rather milk it's more casual customers as much as possible.

I'm surprised you think that's an unrealistic number. That comes out to close to a $400 (edit: it's actually $480) spend to play standard. That's a high willingness to pay. Not $60 for all the cards in standard, but rather $60 or so for all the cards in e.g.: Dominaria. If it costs $200/set the result will be $0 from me - also 0 play time from me. They need to make the grind expensive enough, they don't need to make the game prohibitively expensive to pay into. (Of course I realize some folks will have a higher price, but it's not going to be that much higher than mine, IMO. At least I doubt it.)

AND, I'd argue that getting ~$60/quarter out of every paying customer would be plenty. That's more than I spend for any developer - even including developers of MUCH MUCH better games.

The base game itself is going to have to be cheaper. But it won't be. This is one of the major problems they are going to have.

$60 per set after the base game comes out... yeah it's going to be $100-$200 easy. If it's any cheaper than that I'll be highly surprised.

Well they’ll have to crunch some numbers and figure it out for themselves. But I can’t imagine people being willing to spend like that on a 0-value non-transferable product, with no guarantee of continuance. Obviously, I’m not the entire market, but I do happen to be in the group who can and would pay a “reasonable” amount of money for full unlocks. $1,600 would be laughably unreasonable. I’d rather spend a week in Grand Cayman, lol.

I think they should target a price per deck thought process instead. Maybe $100-150 for a highly competitive standard deck, give or take. If it’s much more than that, they are charging more than their transferable, actual value, with permanence built in paper product. Or in other words, too much.

Let's ignore some of the price points for a moment. Here are the other problems I have with the game's economy:

- Most people don't want to have to own 4 copies of most commons and uncommons. The majority of them are trash designed to support sealed formats, and ... that's basically it. The game currently tells people they are going to have to wade through opening and keeping a bunch of playsets of complete utter trash in order to make vault progress. ... That's just awful. Every other F2P card game on the planet has dusting for a reason.

- There is fundamentally no difference, in number of mythics obtained per month on average, between 4 wins per day and 30 wins per day. They have structured the grind so that winning past 4 wins does not really matter.

- As a general rule, most of what you open in packs is trash. You get 1 rare or mythic per pack, 25-30 packs per month, and there's no way to grind faster than that. Most of the product everyone is going to open is going to be completely useless, either b/c it's trash (trash rares and mythics exist) or b/c it doesn't fit in your deck. This is not acceptable for a F2P game. Opening packs has to be at least somewhat rewarding on a somewhat consistent basis. People are already complaining about getting bored b/c they aren't opening anything they want and they basically are making no progress for days at a time. That just feels bad.

- The game is going to release with too many sets. ... That's it. That's a point in itself. 4-7 sets, filled with tons of trash commons and uncommons people don't want to wade through, is just too much to handle on release. As DJ has so kindly put it, the game at release is going to face a pricing problem no matter what they do because each set after release needs to be expensive, but there's going to be too many damn sets in the game for the kind of pricing a real successful F2P card game requires. On release.

- They haven't stated how they are going to handle sets rotating out of standard. This is the most important point, and the thing that will decide whether I touch the game at all or not besides pricing (like DJ; I'm not going to grind and I'm only going to pay so much).

Me too, as a long standing player it highlights my flaws as much as anything. It’s actally now just annoying that I am looking at wracking up a lot of wins but it stubbornly sits at 37/15 because the week has not reset. Despite decks like Merefolk and to an extent my on Rakdos build being reasonable I either hit a deck that has some clever build or a Planeswalker or luck break (like 2 second suns). I know there are great players watching pro Tour who can field T3/4 wins but the matches are either too long or often there is too much either mana screw or mana flood. Yes I can think about building round that with card draw but it’s just draining any enjoyment out of it for me. I hit a similar plateau early with the previous builds - kind of got to a mid range deck that I enjoyed playing but did just run into better players or decks. Grinding for Singleton cards is one thing but I am not inclined or versed to continually assess the pool for some clever build. I can take the standard approach to building but the reality is I can’t come up with anything that’s half wise consistent as the 55% at best and even then for a short run is not cutting it. There is little point in looking at any builds as it’s almost certain that you will miss some key cards. I guess I already converted some wildcards but probably in advisedly - who knows. But when it just ends up being a frustration rather than fun it’s time to move on. SD

Something about this has been bugging me, and I wasn't sure what. And then it hit me. And now it seems so obvious that I'm wondering how I didn't make this point before.

In my mind, MTG: Arena is currently on a very wrong path, simply because MTG: Arena is not how people play Magic the Gathering. ... That's it. At a fundamental level Wizards of the Coast is trying to translate a thriving Magic ecosystem into a digital format that does not at all resemble what the MTG community looks like.

Both in paper and in MTGO, serious players don't buy packs. They buy singles, or they pay to participate in a draft. An unopened pack you can use to draft is worth far more on average in MTGO than the random crap that is very likely to be inside. Both paper and MTGO, the two long-standing MTG giants that have been around forever, are structured very heavily around a secondary market where people who want to play standard seriously can buy singles because buying packs is a bad deal by comparison. People, or at least the people who know better, don't buy packs unless they want to participate in a draft. Because no-one wants to open a bunch of copies of Archangel they aren't going to use in anything outside of a draft.

The MTG:A economy feels so bad, because you are A) forced to buy packs and B) unable to sell product you don't want on a secondary market. And those packs are going to contain a whole bunch of cards that are completely and utterly useless outside of draft formats. Which you aren't participating in when you are buying packs direct. The game fundamentally is currently forcing players to participate in an activity that does not at all resemble what really serious Magic the Gathering players would do either in paper or on MTGO. And the sets have not been changed to reflect this.

Think about that. As far as I can tell from what people in beta have been complaining about, you are being forced to buy packs that are smaller than real life packs (already a problem as far as I'm concerned) that contain cards you are never going to use because those cards were never designed to be used outside of a draft format. The entire idea of "bad cards have to exist" falls apart a bit when you try to translate paper magic the gathering to digital without a secondary market and the ability to buy single-tons, because that's just how the game has been structured and been working forever. The average magic the gathering pack SUCKS. And we all know this. And we put up with it b/c we can buy singletons that are actually worth buying much cheaper than what it would take to get them out of RNG packs. Right now MTG:A doesn't let you do this. And it doesn't have anything resembling a secondary market at all. So the economy SUCKS.

Because when people are actually forced to open MTG packs, they realize just how bad straight up relying on mostly lucky pulls from packs feels in the digital space compared to what we get with a thriving secondary market in real life.

IF MTG:A wants any hope of actually having a serious standard format, they are going to seriously need to provide people the option to buy wild-cards semi-cheaply in order to simulate a secondary market. Or it's just going to be so much more expensive than straight up playing paper that the game isn't going to do well with people who might otherwise be willing to whale it up a bit.

Jesus, these mjack walls of text. As if the 600 post threads on the beta forums weren’t bad enough. Not gonna read either

Thank you for your valuable contribution to this forum conversation. I hope you can stop by again sometime to share your remarkable insight into this topic and related issues. I think I am never again going to view this topic the same after reading your stunning exposé that has helped to shine a brand new light on the Magic The Gatherering: Arena economy. Truly it was a delight reading your post, and I hope we can receive more of the same in the future.

You have my upvote sir! Bravo I say! Bravo!

That quite the point, I agree with wall of it... I bet the real money currency can solve some of the issue but, how you build a digital collection has nothing to do with making a top tier standard deck. Those are very different paths and the economy we are seeing right now fails at both. Either they make the grind a lot... and I mean a lot more generous -and still you will never own a full collection- or they have to give the option to buy wildcards.
I personally would like to have a big collection to build spikes and fringe decks... I loved having a full collection on Duels, but I think that time has passed and WOTC will never allow that again.

Ultimately the thing comes down to the big numbers: how much is the digital format worth? how much of that pie can WOTC actually get?... and how can it do that with out upsetting the pay to win paper format? coz that´s a big part of the equation and in this regard WOTC is alone... Heartstone, Gwent and all of those games doesn't have a second bigger economy.
I just hope they can balance this thing right and we can enjoy this game at a fair price.

MJack the early DOTP series were like that in effect. A set price for a base set of decks and you could pay or grind for a sideboard of 30 cards thus giving some deck variety. The released deck packs with additional decks. There were other modes but importantly 4 player FFA and other play modes like 2HG. What they provided in terms of variety and a good Play experience was set aside for ultimately full deckbuilding but less game modes. For Magic 2015 through to Magic Duels at least it was both viable and fun to play. The one detractor for MtG had always been the cost in paper for a true decent standard deck. MTGO made it slightly less cost expensive. It seems that Magic Arena is beset with the exact same issue that paper had and the measly 3 boosters a week I can earn on day 1 means I may keep Arena to an occasional play to see if anything interests me enough with 3 boosters. Not I guess what WOTC were aiming for.

*whoosh*

Lol

I'm going to go on record and say that DOTP 2013 is the best game in the series. Or it was until the 5 color deck came out. DOTP 2014 was close but it had sealed mode and that's what started this whole mess. Also they kept adding bad DLC.