I guess a bit emotive I know. To be honest the only reason I am enjoying MtG Arena is due to CGB’s channel. His YCGB series is great for newcomers and a worthy real perspective of what the game will be like for a ftp player like me. Of course I have been playing for a while with a lot of packs opened and arguably a decent enough set of cards to play a certain variety of good decks. MtG’s variety can also be its curse which at first seems an odd thing to say. Singleton is a decent mode but suffers from too many running either mono colour good stuff or typical tier 1 builds. We do have free play and with best of 3. Some of the play modes are locked behind gem purchase so not ftp. Playing along in conjunction with watching CGB’s channel is making it fun still. But without that not so sure SD

What's wrong with mono good stuff in singleton? And what counts as t1? I play more singleton than any other format (mostly with a mono-black deck, sorry!) and the deck variety is crazy. Literally never know what to expect, I find it a lot of fun. The run I just did I faced 3 mono colour decks (mono red die to sweeper, mono green and mono black artifacts? i think), 1 uw deck (with nexus!), 4c PWs, BG value and the finals was rw legendary/blackblade. I doubt I'll see more than maybe 2-3 decks that match the colours next time and the cards they run will be different for sure.

I'd actually say that, barring really good draws, most mono coloured decks in singleton are not as good as a two colour deck with the notable exception of black. I've certainly been rolled by a green deck that just played out a constructed stompy curve (turn 4 ghalta i think it was) but that's super rare and 1 blossoming defence in the deck isn't helping against their major weakness to removal. Mono red is pretty much the same, except their creatures are generally weaker. Mono-b is very strong for sure, but it can struggle against PWs and enchantments.

I've not noticed any strat really dominating in singleton and the games are pretty slow so you can most certainly durdle like a boss. Aggro seems a bit weak if anything, rats is probably the best aggro deck maybe? Still dies to a sweeper mind. Pretty sure that the only aggro decks I've seen past 5 wins have been rats or mono red, and not often at all (I actually cut demise from my deck since it just didn't seem needed).

I've actually seen some G/W token strategies go fairly aggressive; these are not half bad TBH.

Yup, I lost to one yesterday, kept a nice but slow hand and got ran over. Sometimes you just can't answer a bunch of 2/2s and 1/1s. They're very fragile though, the kind of deck that really wants to be on the play and spends every turn going "plz no sweeper", not a strat I'd be wanting to run if I was aiming for 7 wins.

True, but there's stuff to do against sweepers. Make a Stand and Dauntless Bodyguard protect your board, the flipside of Legion's Landing is quite powerful and if you run planeswalkers (Nissa, Vital Force, Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants, maybe Vivien Reid) you have some sweeper insurance.

I really miss having the Vs AI mode that Duels had. People just suck sometimes (emote spamming, roping, endless tier 1 opponents) and sometimes a man just wants to play jank against Razorfoot Griffins you know? Also I don't find the graphics much better if at all than Duels. I wish I could at least make it a more dark/gloomy background/theme.

I guess I'm biased since my preferred sweepers don't care about invulnerability, but then I only run 1 sweeper now since it doesn't seem that important in singleton (I'd run 2 if Languish was still around mind), when I ran Golden Demise as well it was a dead draw far too often. A lot of my thinking about singleton is most likely coloured by the sort of deck I like running - grindy non-blue control with a lot of varied answers - which can deal with most things depending on the draw.

To my thinking singleton is a more extreme version of Duels, it's heavily bomb centric unless your chosen archtype has a lot of redundant cards (e.g UW control, mono red aggro). The decks that seem to do well are either good stuff, strong synergy or highly redundant lists. Things like GW tokens can certainly beat anyone, strong synergy and some level of redundancy, but I wouldn't back them to consistently go for the 7 wins unless they were extremely skilled at drawing their key cards - maybe I'm wrong mind, not a deck I've tried playing but it's a very different deck if it lands a Song and gets to spam the board vs when it casts a 2/2 and a 1/1 then passes the turn.

I miss having the option to play on against AI. Sometimes people bail way too early or when your playing a combo deck, you want to practise the end game...

I'd say the game is enjoyable ATM. The main problems in terms of meta are in common with all of standard, so it's not really arena's fault.
I haven't played much, but it's from a lack of gaming time, not due to not enjoying the game.

I totally agree. In fact, as long as they don't care about adding single-player content, I won't care about playing their game. I ran it some days ago and saw they added a tutorial, so even though it forced about 90% of the player's decisions for the sake of explaining mechanics (meaning the AI didn't really have to think much), they know how to make the computer play if they want to.

The forum thread from a couple months ago named "New Solo Mode" gave me hope... then I discovered it meant "singleton mode".

It dawned on me that the original post on this was probably more about missing exactly what we did have in Magic Duels which was ‘the community’. Basically others you felt you knew and could arrange to play with. Although you can get the very rare meet from someone (in this very, very early days I had a match with CGB himself) and the only other one has been Super Lad Man. But you know increasingly you will never have the chance to match with other players from a community given no organised match making. So yes it’s why I think for me and maybe others I just don’t get the same enjoyment I had from Magic Duels or even the earlier DOTP iterations that all had the player v player and lobby system. I remain ftp but even then I can win a decent number of games so it’s not really about that. Also it’s been argued the economy and current rewards is maybe not that bad, in particular for casuals like me. But the time had passed when I spend any amount of regular time on the game. Too many other avenues where my focused time is better spent. SD

No...