That's $2.36USD per pack! Or $3.04CAD. MRSP up here seems to be $6CAD. Game stores might go a little lower. Even buying by the case I doubt they'd go down to the $3 Americans get to pay. God I love you WOTC. You're just so...

Fun facts:
Trying to find what MRSP was I realized Walmart's a little... off. Their online store for some reason lists a Homelands booster for $30. Maybe there's one Walmart in the world that carries those and that includes the shipping price? They also list singleton prices for a few cards. MAybe they're offering to nab stuff of Ebay or something? If they carry boosters those don't show up on the first page of results for MAgic The Gathering. Good 'ol Walmart.

Clarification: $85 for 36 packs is buying in the largest bundle (booster boxes) only.

The average price for packs when you buy them in smaller amounts is $3 - $4.5 US. Still less than $6 US but...

One thing I've found through the years is Walmart Online is less than dependable on any information really.

I agree with Jack tbh; I really haven't seen any advisement for this game outside of a few particular streams, and the subreddit.

I'm sure it'll pickup when the final game is ready to launch.

Zzmorg, that’s a guy

Ok so I have been thinking on this economy thing during the day and I came to this reasoning.
1. 15 packs for pity timer activation on rare wild cards
2. 25 packs to fully open the vault which means 1 mythic wild card- when they fix this, 1 rare wild card and 2 uncommon wild cards,
3. Packs contain 5 Commons, 2 Uncommons, and 1 Rare or Mythic Rare
sooo at 30 packs you will be getting:
150 Random Commons
60 Random Uncommons
30 Random Rares or mythic
2 Uncommon Wild Cards
At least 3 Rare wild cards
At least 1 Mythic Wild Card
... yup still horrible...

And a competent deck from these cannot be constructed alas. ‘‘Tis the curse of the bad cards that must exist for the limited good and great to stand apart! It’s similar to the maths paradox of there being no ordinary numbers because when set apart from the special the lowest of them is also special and so ad-Infinitum. SD

If you could make 4 wins per day, with the current economy it would take you 2-5 months to make a single Tier 1 deck depending on the deck's price. So basically in some sets you simply won't have time to grind it out, while in others if you can win 4 times per day you'll have about a month to enjoy that 1 deck you spent forever making.

That's a big if too. 4 wins is going to be hard to keep up if a lot of people just outright pay for tier 1 decks. That's why quests that require you to play multiplayer AND WIN suck and why Hearthstone moved away from them a lot a bit over a year ago.

Basically with the current economy, unless it's drastically improved by events, people won't be playing the game for free. Like...... no sane human being is going to put up with that rate of progression and if you can try to defend being that stingy when HEARTHSTONE is nowhere near that bad...

And MTGO might be less expensive to play if Gems at all match Hearthstone prices, just b/c even at $1 per pack MTGO would be cheaper for most decks after the first due to the secondary market.

So as everyone has said, the game is DOA if they don't improve the economy and/or be really generous with gem prices. It's just how much they are going to improve it that will be the question. Because at some point they are going to make at least a token effort of fixing this. It's just how soon and how much and whether it's too late.

Until then, I think we've basically hashed this out enough tbh. You can't really cover much more ground until we see the next big change in the economy (that will probably come with gems if my expectations are correct; hopefully on Dominaria release).

I think all the "concerning" elements of MTGA right now is just a reflection of the state of the paper game, at the higher level. It looks like they are looking to revamp and change some things, I bet many within wotc would move everything to a digital format if they could, but there is a list of a billion reason why they cant and wont. It almost seems like maybe they dont want any digital version to be TOO good, but I doubt it's even that in reality.

Hi, been a while.

Yeah, the game itself functions well enough during play, but there are 2 things I can't shake.

1) Its boring to watch. I know this is subjective, but I tuned in to a couple of streams/replays and being honest, it is just a MS paint version of other Hearthstone, Eternal etc. Part of this is down to the timing of games and how long they take in comparisson, I haven't tried the ranked mode (if it is in yet?) so this is going off of no sideboards.

2) The economy. When I was trying to get into this I did it on the back of maybe 4-5 hours a week in the evenings, so as a casual. If this is meant to be the product to bring that audience in, earning next to nothing of note or value in the same randomised fashion with THAT abortion of a dusting system, then I personally can't see this being as succesful an endevour as WotC would like.

One note on the "push for Twitch" they're going for here, Hearthstone has way too much in terms of cultural resource invested in it at this point. I don't see this pulling that away from the top 5 consistently watched streams of games. When the 2nd most popularly streamed card game is Poker, perhaps its time to reconsider the ambitions and money pumped into chasing them?

This is as good a place as any.

The last thing I'm sincerely worried about WOTC screwing up is I'm worried they are going to start selling gems before the economy is finalized.

I think it's okay to do a wipe (as long as everyone knows there is going to be another wipe) and keep the system the same or make the system more generous. But people will feel really ripped off if you do a wipe and then their money doesn't go as far as it did last time. I'm hoping WOTC is competent enough to not try to "jack up the prices" a few months after they start taking people's money. It doesn't matter what kind of disclaimer they put on it imo.

I just got myself a PC to play Magic Arena and it seems that I need to request permission to play from Wizard of the Coast’s website. I put a request in today and have to wait about 3 day. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this version has been released fully to the public but in the “testing phase” so Wizard has not gone full blown with the marketing.

Chicken little says the sky is falling again.

So you are betting on WOTC being smart this time around?

I'm 2 for 2. I'm either going to be 3 for 3 or happily surprised. Win-win.

Yall remember those discussions when people said full-deckbuilding would come at a severe cost and that Magic Duels was going to die right?

Well Magic Duels is dead and the severe cost is we get a Pay-To-Win game in the best case scenario. It seems like making an educated guess based on past history and information at the time can, in fact, lead to correct predictions. But keep the drive-by posts coming. I play Dead by Daylight for >30% of my gaming time. I've learned to feed on salt.

Edit: As for the current train-wreck, after receiving a beta key it is EXACTLY as bad as everyone says it is. I think I'm going to wait for the next wipe or for a sane implementation of gems (whichever comes first) before I keep playing. Having a 30% win rate because your opponents just have better cards is not enjoyable.

Edit: They have officially confirmed no wipe with Dominaria.

I still don’t accept the premise that Duels was a failure. Huge player group and download rate. I’d like to see the numbers on how they did overall with it. It’s supposed to be the gateway drug to the real thing anyway

If it was a success, they wouldn't have shut it down. And by success here I mean making a lot of money. No-one would discontinue a digital game making a huge profit to try and make the same kind of digital game a 2nd time.

Magic Duels had a model where most of the dedicated fans never had to spend any money on it ever again, while at the same time the barrier to entry after a few expansions was over $100 or months worth of grinding for an inferior experience to Paper or MTGO.

So the game had a model that didn't even give long-time dedicated fans the option to spend money (literally people made threads complaining about having too much gold and having nothing to spend it on), while at the same time it hemorrhaged any new players due to a massive barrier to entry. WTIH NO DUST SYSTEM (sound familiar?). That is the complete reverse of what you want in a F2P game. A successful F2P has a low barrier to entry, gets you hooked, and then encourages long-time dedicated fans to keep spending money over a long period of time.

------

I'm sorry, but you are just in plain flat-out denial at this point.

Edit:

Just from a design stand-point, the game as a F2P game is poorly designed.

1: You could pay for the first expansion on release and then play a reasonable amount daily to never have to spend money on the game again. It gave you stuff for free fast enough that even for free after Battle For Zendikar people who played from the beginning didn't really ever have to even consider spending money on the game.

2: If you joined the game too late you had a massive barrier to entry because of the lack of a crafting system. There simply was no way to quickly get all the cards you'd need to make one competitive deck without grinding for over a month or spending ~$100. That's too high for a F2P game. The Vault is an extremely greedy attempt at rectifying this in their 2nd iteration.

There is no way the game was going to make a long term profit with this design, which is why it got shut-down and they are now trying a triple greedy version of the Blizzard model of things.

I'm slowly realizing that there are enough MTG addicts that this could become the next MTGO.

I still don't think it's going to become the next Hearthstone.

What I mean by that, in the literal sense, is that the game might survive based on Draft sales and Pack Sales from people who are already addicted to Magic the Gathering. But I don't think this is going to get a big F2P audience from people who aren't already heavily invested in the brand. I find it hard to believe that this is going to get any of that "Hearthstone Money" it is aiming for, but I am starting to find it credible that there are enough mini-whales for it to grab that it could survive that way. There might be a group of people willing to spend a few hundred up front and then a $100 per set. And there's also probably going to be a group of people willing to pay $50-$100 a month to draft in this environment. Between those groups it might be reasonable to expect the game to become the next MTGO-like product.

But I feel like eternal is very fair? I don't play it a ton but I have built some strong decks. (Gotta get my magic fix somehow since duels was so bad. TESL and Eternal were those fixes as soon as I discovered them)

I played 1000+ hours of Duels.

I got a key for Arena a few months back, I put in about 10 hours. Dropped it. I'm a casual gamer so the time I invested in Arena didn't pay off.

IMHO it's down to the economy, gameplay is good enough I think but WOTC clearly wants ppl to spend money in order to have a minimal amount of fun.

I hope they are able to fix this before launch...