Is there anything you'd want to tell someone new to Arena? I know how to play Magic and have played standard off-and-on for some time, but the new economy has me thrown for a loop. What do you wish you'd known when you first started playing in the Beta?

Conserve your wildcards until you know what deck you want and then focus them into that one deck, probably until it is complete but not necessarily if you feel it is working well enough.

Yup.
That's probably the single most important piece of advice.

Use protection.

I kid.

If you can get your winrate up to ~75%+ and you just feel like grinding, quick constructed is easy enough to go infinite in. I'm currently still at about 5000gold up in qc, although I get bored grinding it that much.

If you have gold hoarded, and a flash-event pops, spend it there. The entry fee is 1k gold, you get a guaranteed booster for loosing 2 matches. You can get more if you win.

As far as I can see, it IS possible to grind out the game without spending a dime. I think it's even possible to grind out all the full collections within 1-2 years time. However, I fear it will take some serious grinding and thousands upon thousands of games with a good win-rate. Accumulated gold spent on flash-events, quick constructed to limit the amount of wildcards needed for rares later, quests and ICR + wins for gold. However, I will probably cave and drop a few hundred $ a year. Which admittedly is still way less than I spend on drafts IRL, and I recently decided to stop that. Sold all the cards too.

We've also got the "Dominaria Standard Fest" coming up. It's basically a two day flash event with a higher reward ceiling if you do well. The floor isn't bad either, 1000 gold for a booster and three cards that are at least uncommons. Seems unlikely that we'll get a flash event soon with Singleton queues and this coming up, so this is probably the thing to save for if you would buy DOM boosters otherwise.

My #1 feeling (having just started today as well) is to play red aggro teched for the mirror. At my current level around silver tier, red aggro is by far the most common deck. Aethersphere Harvester is the card that first came to mind when I was looking for something to use as tech. Other priority cards to acquire: Hazoret the Fervent, Glorybringer (a bit of counter-synergy with Hazoret however since it's quite expensive), Rekindling Phoenix, Goblin Chainwhirler.

The abundance of red aggro aka. Chainwhirler makes Glint-Sleeve Siphoner a little worse, but I'm at a loss for what else to run instead.

Also a question: what's the best set to use my gold on?

Okay I had a "cast blue or white spells" quest, threw together a very bad mono blue deck, and somehow won three games without much opposition. Come to think of it, I might actually have used all my wildcards on the wrong stuff (i.e. red cards). It's true that the red decks are very consistent, very powerful, and have fast games, but control decks might have the highest win rates of all. That's because they blank the opponent's removal, and since quickplay games are best of 1, opponents never get to upgrade their dead removal to Duresses and Negates. Also somehow I had 4 Torrential Gearhulks in my starting collection, which was like, wow.

Are there any more rewards after the quests are done? Seems to me like the answer is "no", but not sure.

Did you go through New Player Experience?
The tutorial.

Is it possible to cycle quests? I still have a "play 20 red or green cards" from the first time I logged on. I just play UW exclusively.

You've never tried cycling your quests? You just click them and it changes once per day.

Question, which set should I use my gold on? I'm mostly playing an R/B aggro deck and these are the cards I most need:

Hazoret - currently have 2 (or was it 3?) and could use more.
Rekindling Phoenix - have zero.
Glorybringer - currently have 2. Not sure if I should get more since the high cost does not work well with Hazoret, on the other hand I don't have that many Hazorets.
Goblin Chainwhirler - only have one.
Soul-Scar Mage - have zero.
Dragonskull Summit - have two.
Canyon Slough - have zero.

Other odds and ends I can use: Earthshaker Khenra, Kari Zev.

How do I tell which card is from which set + their rarities short of googling for them?

Well, I'd skew my choices towards the most recent set for ROI reasons. You don't want all your Mythics to be the first thing to go when Standard next rotates.

*gasp* I completely forgot about the rotation. Oh boy, I'm going to feel pretty stupid once those Hazorets rotate ...

There’s a good chance that the rotation will coincide with the wipe, so it probably doesn’t matter.

Wow, I didn't know there was going to be a wipe.

I guess I'm done with Arena until the the end of closed beta then

Have they said anything about the wipe?

Only that there is one more programed wipe before open beta.

It’s more the content providers that would have an issue on wipes (over and above the norm of course). For recognised channels like CGB’s they do look after them in terms of stocked accounts for events and I assume any actual money spent is credited to the account. So e.g. CGB’s inadvertent multiple purchase with his tax rebate should stand him in good stead.

Standard rotation I guess helps keep the population of the pool “within reach” ongoing. It has been a feature though of Magic through the years that rotation (at least for recognised competitive formats) erodes the value of older cards. I still find it odd though you would appear not to be able to play them in a casual format when they have been coded to work. SD

I'm probably wrong, but I expect them to have multiple eternal formats. It just makes more sense to me, and those formats would/could be cash cows.

Yeah, the FAQ suggests they are planning some form of Modern/Legacy/etc. format. Maybe only casual, but who knows?

https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena/faq


Q. What happens when my cards rotate out of Standard?

A. We want you to have ways to continue to play with your cards once they rotate out of Standard. We'll talk more about this later in the year.