I took some time to post feedback on that:

https://mtgarena.community.gl/forums/threads/35231

Do you agree?

Disagree. It's fine as it is, imo. Maybe I'd turn up the wildcards alittle bit (like 5 packs triggers one rather than six), but otherwise it's pretty fine to me.

To be honest I think the rate of card acquisition is almost fine right now: too fast and, once I acquire every card, I'm much less motivated to play.

But there really should be ways to turn one card into another. For example, uncommon wildcards (of which I have more than I know what to do with) into rares and mythics, or one rare into another. It doesn't have to be a good rate (ala Hearthstone), but there should be some way, otherwise there's just a lot of detritus in my collection, and I'm incentivized to rare draft in limited.

Like 10 uncommons to 1 rare.

And the reverse is like 1 rare into 2 uncommon. Something like that. Because I got like 50 commons and uncommons doing nothing.

you guys are asking for a wall of text...

Vert and Banedon, may I assume that you only partially disagree? You both seem to be in favor of a dusting system.

Also, could you tell me, when you started Arena and how many Mythic and Rare wildcards you have accumulated/spent in that time?

I have one okay'ish mono colored Constructed deck by now, into which I invested 9 Rare and 2 Mythic wildcards. I started 4 weeks ago, so given that most of the spent wildcards were not earned but given at the start, I don't feel the speed is acceptable. I don't want to play the same deck for the entire rotation.

F2P, started playing 4 weeks ago. To be fair, I entered Arena with some prior knowledge of other CCGs and had a pretty good idea of what I was doing pretty much from the get-go.
While both my R/B (Aggro?Midrange?Whatchawannacallit?) as well as my U/W Control still need a bit of work to be full-on meta decks (haven't spent many wildcards on the lands yet) they definitely hold their own in Quick Constructed at Silver 1-2. As for a total of Mythic/Rare WCs spent, I'd estimate around 10 Mythics (I've been lucky pulling quite some out of boosters) and 15-20 Rares.

The card aquisition rate is quite okay in my mind; especially when you decide to jam Drafts and are somewhat decent at it. You should have no problem to open 1-2 packs a day or jam a draft every 2-3 days on average; and a pack getting you 1/6th of the way to a Rare of your choice is quite generous.

I agree there should be a better way to use your fifth copies of cards (or cards you don't need because they're in multiple sets), and I'd love a way to exchange Wildcards for Wildcards of higher rarity (have 16 Common and 10 Uncommon WCs sitting around looking pretty while I need Rare WCs like no tomorrow for my manabases and some more maindeck slots. I'm pretty much good on Mythic WCs despite having made a mistake and crafted three Karn; only need like 1-2 more for my current decks).

Probably Mono-Green was not a great starting point for you; you start off needing a ton of cards you can't easily replace and can't really use in other decks (plus, the deck is rare-heavy despite not really needing lands). If you start off R/B, you can use cards you craft in mono-red or Grixis Midrange, for instance; while Steel-Leaf Champion and Ghalta are really mono-green only cards.

For the F2P players, do you do the $5 one time intro offer or legit zero investment?


Because that is great value.

I haven't even done the $5 investment yet, but I agree it is good value if you're willing to spend a bit on the game.

I have been fine for ages and it has only gotten better and figure its not quite as bad as people think.
Maybe I will think otherwise when we wipe and I have to start from scratch with a whole bunch of sets but the acquisition rate has improved and I got a lot of my cards before it improved so I doubt it.
What might be different is that there's less ICRs to kind of grab random cards and guide me into new decks (currently) so it might be harder to know which deck to go into, whereas in the past I got Hazorets and stuff for free and I basically went to building RDW as my main deck at first.

Though I imagine aggro is best anyway and its just a matter of figuring out the post-rotation meta, then again that's another problem with the wipe is that the meta will be shaken and we won't know what decks to build toward at first when we wipe.

In some ways it's improved but it's really hard for me to tell - there were bonus packs and icrs for a long time, the vault was changed numerous times and they gave away a ton of amonket cards for free plus two different sets of precon decs.

I think it'll take the next wipe for me to really have a clear idea of what it'll look like. I suspect it'll still be quite slow without the big buffer of free cards we were given.

Who can do the 5$ investment? I haven't seen it. Is it in the shop?

That's true, they gave us A LOT good cards for free. Imagine farming all those gearhulks, fumigates, scrapheaps, chandras, kierans etc...

Damn, I missed all the amonkhet freebies... no hazorets for me ;-(

It's in the shop for USD, not in the shop for EUR.

Found it, thanks. the +TAX is pathetic. What do I care about WotC or US taxes?!

Ask Ronald McDonald Trump

This is a good point. I landed at the green starter deck on day 1 for 2 of my quests required green mana. Then I improved it with what I had.. and later I invested wildcards into the real goodies for it.

As I take it from the Young CGB vids, there's a great part of the #1 meta R/B deck already in the pool of free cards. So when we rotate and reset, I will keep these things in mind. Just hope for a different pool of unlocked cards. Seeing those 4 blue Gearhulks for every player isn't nice

I did not purchase the 5$ package. I intend to do that at release though. Wasn't sure how much I would play the beta. I know, I'll get it refunded anyway, so no reason to not get it. However with a wipe coming up, I might do less until then to not burn out.

I think competitive constructed is lucrative enough that I can acquire the cards I want at reasonable pace once I can play there; in fact right now I'm going infinite in that format with a lot of extras to spare. Of course the drawback is I need to get the full 75 before I can play competitive constructed, and that took me a long time. Once the wipe happens I'd have to grind quickplay, which is much more painful.

If you can go infinite, your R/B record can't be thaaaat bad

I haven't gone beyond Quick Constructed yet. Maybe I should try Competitive, but time aspects (longer time where I can't afk; waiting for sideboard choices) are holding me back. Also, I don't have/play tier 1 decks.

I think you might underestimate the time it takes to get to those 75 tier 1 deck cards because this time the free cardpool had a massive overlap with the #1 meta deck of this Standard era. I hope this was a coincidence and that the starting cardpool at the release (or the next wipe for that matter) will not steer so many players in the same direction.

Well it's not that hard to go infinite in competitive constructed - 50% win rate suffices. But yes, recently my win rate with R/B has been quite strong, and I'm getting 4-5 wins in competitive constructed regularly.

I'm certainly not underestimating the time it takes to get those 75 cards lol. There was a time when I had only one rare wildcard and needed Dragonskull Summit, Canyon Slough, and Kari Zev. Took quite some agonizing before using that wildcard then. But it's only been ~6 weeks since I started playing, and I'm already generating more than enough gold. That's not overly long. Of course part of it could be because I'm willing to netdeck a tier 1 deck and play that only, but it really isn't something I mind. If the wipe happens with reset, the first thing I'll do is probably draft until the meta settles and I know which constructed deck to home in on.

I mean, most of your deck was in the free cardpool, right? You didn't have to craft Chandra, Heart of Kiran or Bomat Courier.

Let's count Rares in this example deck: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/standard-r-b-aggro-51029#arena

10 Mythics (all main deck)
31 Rares (28 main deck)

How long do you think that would take from scratch?