It sucks, but I think its time to say goodbye to all. I will try to come on site once in a while, but not sure if I will. I miss the old site quite a bit.

But its more about magic duels than anything. old duels were way better than this to me. now I don't mind losing, but can't win very well when you have no cards compared to another person. and I can't see paying real life money to play this. if I wanted to pay, I would go back to magic online, but again, its a money sink.

sucks cause I like the people I have met(most of them). but after only winning 1 game in like almost 3 hours, its just not worth it. Especially when there is a cap on gold you can get.

mega helped me out, but now I'm back to where I started in November. can't win for the life of me to even get coins to get better cards.

it happened to me before when i was unlocking cards, and priority issue kept me from playing land Abbot exiles. I was really pissed and didn't open the game for a few weeks, until I saw people having fun in the EMN tournament. So I played gold cap every day, unlocked all cards soon after KLD released, to join the next tournament.

I suggest you spend some gold or $ on Kaladesh, build a good energy aggro deck and start winning. Losing is okay to me but Abbot and other priority bug was the real irritating one. Building competitive deck using partial cards was actually something fun back in the gold grinding days. Unlocking every booster pack was pretty exciting.

You play on steam or iOS? I'd be fine with grinding gold with you on either platform in 2hg. My availability would be pretty spotty, but if you had a few other friends to tag team with, you'd be able to build a competitive deck sooner than later without paying a penny.

I play on xbox one. I also like older duels cause you didn't have to worry about a meta and be forced to play a deck type. I could just go play mtgo if I wanted to do that.

I don't get the why you feel you should be competitive without paying. This is a free to play game, also known as a pay to win game. You shouldn't be surprised when you get outgunned by someone that has a .50 cal, while you're toting a .22LR. They paid for performance, you didn't. You can either pay here, or pay on MTGO.. but either way, you're going to pay.. be it in time investment or cold hard cash. To expect to be able to be competitive without spending reeks of entitlement.

It was fine to go on the ladder for free when the game was new bc the power level was pretty low. That's not the case anymore.. the gap between the D cards and the rest of the library has widened significantly. But regardless.. no matter which form of Magic you choose.. Wizards is gonna get a little out of you.. or you can do horrible, tedious things like play against the AI.

As someone who started a year late and has since been able to get completely caught up with very minimal spending ($35 total), I don't even really think this issue is THAT bad. At least currently.

Should you be able to stomach grinding against the AI enough to be able to buy an entire set (likely KLD at this point) you should have enough cards to put together at least a couple of decks that will be perfectly viable online. They may not be completely optimized, but they should still function well enough to win games.

I will concede that doing so leaves you with a very limited amount of decks/archetypes you have available until you are able to unlock a significantly larger portion of the cards though. Unlocking all of KLD for example will give you at least a few viable Aggro options by itself, but will likely leave you struggling if you are trying to build a control deck off of it alone.

I will also concede that grinding out everything for free takes a significant chunk of time and only stands to become worse should the game continue to receive support. Which as you pointed out is generally just how F2P games operate.

Add me on xbone, sleephmper. I am working the next few nights but after that if you see me on and want to grind coins we can play some 2HG together.

The grind is indeed the worst part for this kind of games.
Either one sucks it up, or forks out the cash. But that's the kind of business they are trying to push.
And it's quite normal nowadays.

Overall, the investment is worth it if you are planning to play the game extensively enough.

I wouldn't be playing this at all, if it didn't offer a steadily free experience.
I've skipped Magic 2015, because I was sternly against the forced paywall.


That said, Kaladesh season offered the best opportunity to get back into the game and save up gold.

Without an investment choice (time or money), it can be frustrating, or plain boring, using the same deck over and over.

I don't mind spending some time playing. But losing for hours get old real fast. only reason I even play 1v1 is for the coins so I can get better cards to make decks. GRinding the ai is gonna take far too long daily to hit the cap. since AER landed, ai got harder on xbox and I would have to play a minimum of abour 5 hours against the ai and that's saying I even win.

If I had the game when it came out, wouldn't have been so bad. I could have easily gotten all the cards by now. I would have been in same boat as everyone else at this point.

And I wouldn't mind a small investment to the game to help, but to even get anything worth it I have to spend nearly 10dollars do get anything to make a deck that I hope can compete in 1v1.

I prefer 2 headed giant to be honest as I don't care about rank and all that. it means nothing at all to be rank 40. only reason I even want to hit 40, is for the achievements and Gamerscore tied to it for xbox. But even getting into 2 headed giant is a big crap shoot anymore. it can take longer to get into a game than it does to play and 1v1 and either win or lose. Not to mention how janky peoples internet is on 2hg, takes forever to even get through 1 phase all the time.

Could probably make a half decent(origins) black and red deck that just burns and kills creatures(with little to no creatures in mine) just to help my partners critters through. But xbox also has an issue still with people joining together and then being on opposing teams.

Don't get me wrong, I love playing magic. Played it since revised edition for paper magic. When I couldn't keep up so much with playing it(not to mention no one I knew played it anymore) I went to duels of the planeswalkers on console and was happy wit it and paying fo rthe game and its add ons for the year and then doing it again the following one.

It just really sucks that if someone wants to play duels and is new, the will have a bad experience with the game and more than likely not want to continue playing it.

I'm also ok with 50-50 win ration when playing, again none of that matters, at least I would be getting the coins, but other than the other day when I actually capped gold for the first time since November(when I started) I barely get enough for a pack each day. I do have a life outside of the game, that's what makes a lot of this suck for playing,

Only need to wina around 10 games a day plus daily quests to basically max your coins for the day. issue is winning those 10 at this point.

I don't mind it being free to play or anything like that. I don't even mind that there is a pay option if you so choose it. It just sucks when coming into it late and not being able to compete without it being a moneysink at that point.

there supposed to be a u in there like on here or is that intentional?

edit: think I found you. will see if your friend me back lol.

I can somewhat see how Duels since AER is about as much of a mountain to climb as Hearthstone was if you're only spending $30 or so and grinding the rest. It'll basically boil down to "accept playing aggro forever because you don't have tech to make anything else viable yet".

I haven't paid anything for Duels at all, and I definitely understand the struggle. This season has been a downhill struggle for me. I haven't been able to crack rank 30 at all. That said, I have accepted that my allotted budget of zero for Duels largely means I can expect to suck for the most pat in the ladder.

I recommend searching for a decklist here that includes mostly cards you have, get recommendations on alternates for those you have, and stick to it.

if I have to play agro or something for the 1v1, so be it for the most part. I have the complete set of origins, anything unlocked through story mode which I think is very little and about 35% of SOI since it was on sale when I first started, so I bought those. And I do check on here for decks, but not all can still compete or they have cards in them I don't have(depends on how old the decklist is).

I guess with income tax coming I can drop enough to get all the cards from all the sets, but for that price I could just as eaily but a lot of games or even a new system, lol. I don't know. I love the game, it's just a struggle at this point.

Megabeast helped me with a deck and it did fine the first 2 days at winning. then all I kept doing after it is lose. and lose, and lose some more. I am more worried about dropping the money on it and wizards deciding to stop doing duels and make a new product on xbox or just not care about it anymore and it fall into oblivion. meh

They should make some preconstructed D decks like earlier dotps, so new players have at least some chance of winning and grinding. The d vanilla cards are just terrible.

I think you're going about it wrong by trying to grind playing PvP. You win-loss ratio makes it highly inefficient, other than to satisfy the daily quests. A decent aggro build using starter box cards should be able to win against the AI fairly quickly - turn 5-6 usually. In the time it would take you to play one PvP match, you can probably get in at least 2-3 wins against the AI. So, 30-45 gold from AI or very likely 0 gold against a live player. Or wait for the booster pack sales and buy a large chunk of the set.

Beast is right. Especially that previous iterations of Duels all cost money and no one had a problem with that. You either pay a bit to catch up or you pay in blood like I did, which I totally loved cuz I enjoy playing the game and especially trying to win with worse decks

It really takes you 5 hours to hit the gold cap playing against the AI? I find that hard to believe.

I just got Duels for Xbox One about a month ago; I only have ~15% of SOI and ~20% of AER unlocked and I can still beat the AI fairly easily. Yes, sometimes the AI drops cards that I just can't deal with with my limited card pool, but I just restart when I know it's hopeless. Either way, 5 hours to cap against the AI sounds like either an exaggeration or really inefficient play.

Why does 5 hrs seem long? A highly tuned aggro deck could prolly hit cap a lot faster, but with thr kind of hodgepodge that a new player will be stuck with, the games can be pretty grindy. Say 10-15 minutes per game and only 15gold per game. That's 60-90 gold per hour. Or 360-450 gold per 5 hrs.

One other thing to consider is that we are still in the new season period where low ranked players are packing fully loaded decks. I made it to low 30s last season with just EMN/SOI on iOS. I'm currently 14 in this season and regularly facing harder opponents than I was at the end of last season. Over the next month or so, pvp will be much more tolerable for new players/collections. For now, the sharks are still in the kiddy pool.

400 coins to cap divided by 15 coins per game against the AI is 26.6(keeps going with sixes) so round it to 27 games. With loading times and the way computer plays(takes its sweet time tbh) figure about 10 minutes per game. so that's 270 minutes right there. divide that by 60(minutes in an hour) and you get 4.5 hours. and that is if you ae winning each game. even if yo don't and you need to start over, you still add more time by doing that.

regardless, its not that fast against the Ai. right before typing this, I capped from the previous day(got pissed cause I onlywon one game yesterday out of like 15). I used a red and black deck that was partially from this site with some tweaks and it did mostly ok. but tomorrow it may fail miserably. and I have to make a different one. Once I have some better cards, will be less of an issue.

Just sucks to be gimped for not having played it from the start. And again, I don't mind a grind, but facing Ai just plain sucks. and I can get it done faster against humans. Could do it playing 2hg too, but takes to long to get a game most of the time. could do at least 2 games in 1v1 and still make out the same even if I win one and lose one.

anyways. Full origins, around 35% of SOI, and the KLD and AER that you get for going against the story mode. What set would all say to work on?

Kinda depends on what you want to build. I'd say going with either SOI or KLD is fine for now; except there is a sale in which case I'd jump ship straight away.