MTGA now holds the title for the most expensive, most P2W, least generous F2P, digital CCG ever produced. Mind blown.
That is what people say when they don't put in consideration how good the game actually is. As I said before, for a game like this, the rewards system is super generous. You can't compare it directly with other digital CCG like Hearthstone because MtG Arena gameplay is incredibly superior to them.
I played MTGA for hundreds of hours, since the beginning of the closed beta. Like many other people, I gave a large amount of feedback to the devs, mainly on the economy and the new player experience (as we were asked to). Sadly, we were ignored.
MTGA is definitely a good game, but the cost is very high. The rewards for playing seem reasonable at first, but then you factor in the hugecard pool, and the very high rarity composition of decks. Imagine a Hearthstone deck, where you can have 4 copies of each Epic and each Legendary...
On top of that, many cards in every set are unplayable in constructed. Therefore, without a true crafting system, it is extremely hard to get the specific cards you want in an efficient manner - which inflates the price further.
Some people have tried to calculate how good/bad the F2P experience is - they concluded that it is quite bad. See here:
I don't want to put anyone off, like I said the game is good. However, personally, I would not consider playing constructed unless I was prepared to pay at least $200 USD on packs immediately (and then another $50 USD for each new expansion, minimum), plus significant grinding.
You could play draft/sealed instead. Sealed is about $10 a go (you keep the cards). Draft is about $5 a go. Competitive Draft (better prizes) is about $10 a go. So not cheap. There are no free/phantom draft options.
I'm saying "about" because you can't just buy an entry, you have to buy "Gems" which is MTGA's in game currency. And of course the amounts of Gems don't line up with the entry fees - which inflates the price further. You might be detecting a pattern here...
Lastly, cards rotate, so what happens to your cards on rotation (with no true crafting system)? We don't know. A legacy format has been hinted at, but it is not confirmed. So, buyer beware.
MTGA now holds the title for the most expensive, most P2W, least generous F2P, digital CCG ever produced. Mind blown.
That is what people say when they don't put in consideration how good the game actually is. As I said before, for a game like this, the rewards system is super generous. You can't compare it directly with other digital CCG like Hearthstone because MtG Arena gameplay is incredibly superior to them.
I played MTGA for hundreds of hours, since the beginning of the closed beta. Like many other people, I gave a large amount of feedback to the devs, mainly on the economy and the new player experience (as we were asked to). Sadly, we were ignored.
MTGA is definitely a good game, but the cost is very high. The rewards for playing seem reasonable at first, but then you factor in the hugecard pool, and the very high rarity composition of decks. Imagine a Hearthstone deck, where you can have 4 copies of each Epic and each Legendary...
On top of that, many cards in every set are unplayable in constructed. Therefore, without a true crafting system, it is extremely hard to get the specific cards you want in an efficient manner - which inflates the price further.
Some people have tried to calculate how good/bad the F2P experience is - they concluded that it is quite bad. See here:
I don't want to put anyone off, like I said the game is good. However, personally, I would not consider playing constructed unless I was prepared to pay at least $200 USD on packs immediately (and then another $50 USD for each new expansion, minimum), plus significant grinding.
You could play draft/sealed instead. Sealed is about $10 a go (you keep the cards). Draft is about $5 a go. Competitive Draft (better prizes) is about $10 a go. So not cheap. There are no free/phantom draft options.
I'm saying "about" because you can't just buy an entry, you have to buy "Gems" which is MTGA's in game currency. And of course the amounts of Gems don't line up with the entry fees - which inflates the price further. You might be detecting a pattern here...
Lastly, cards rotate, so what happens to your cards on rotation (with no true crafting system)? We don't know. A legacy format has been hinted at, but it is not confirmed. So, buyer beware.
People blindly say other card games are "superior" and "simply better". At least someone like you actually knows how it's system works. I really like to play magic, but without a crafting system like hearthstone i will only play it with cards i bought in the 90s. It's too costly...
MTGA could be a real competitor to hearthstone, but they decided to milk the magic community instead of being an accesible game. I played closed beta for a while and had fun, then open beta happened. It looks REALLY hard to play as f2p.
I don't think it will do much better than the other magic game. And not having a smartphone app doesn't help either.
Well I finally played a bit over the weekend. It's pretty fun! Except I'm already realizing how much my collection pales in comparison to some others haha. They seem to have lots of rare cards in their deck. I just opened an Alpine Moon which, to an outsider (me), looks completely useless. Apparently it counters some kinda Tron deck that I know nothing about.
Anyways, I'll probably play it some more. It is a lot smoother than I imagined it would be. I might even drop some money on it before too long haha. Maybe not hundreds of dollars yet, but it just seems so much deeper and intense than Hearthstone (obviously).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Twitch name: Anatak15 NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
I've really enjoyed it so far, even though I have a ton to learn. I got two green Planeswalkers so I've made a green deck and seem to be doing ok at the awful ranks. It's definitely more complex than HS, and I don't fully understand a decent number of aspects of the game, but I'll keep figuring things out over time. Wish there was a mobile client, though.
I had a blast playing the Welcome Weekend Singleton event with a super fun black/green deck I made myself. I obtained many strong cards thanks to it, including some planeswalkers.
God bless Magic: The Gathering Arena, and of course, f...k Hearthstone. :D
I suppose it's time to play some tournaments in real life again and share some time with some nerds, hehehe. :)
Never played MTG before so I checked it out, I really like it so far but it's not that much more difficult than HS and I agree they are being very generous giving decks away but let's not forget the point of an open beta. They want everyone playing with everything for the moment, I can't help but feel they will probably roll back the generosity after release, there's not even 3 pages of planeswalkers yet and I already opened 2 and can still craft one and almost close to crafting 2. No way that pace stays after release.
Too get too the HS comparisons going from 30 card decks to 60 card decks is probably the biggest adjustment and some of the mana interactions are tough to figure out at first but a little playing around and a few games is all it takes. Which was a little annoying there's no advanced tutorial for first timers like me, I've yet to even get a planeswalker out but there's no explanation on how they work which is intimidating but I'll figure it out. There's a lot of turn fazes and the other player can rope their whole turn and rope you every turn of yours if they have an instant in hand, that's dumb af and so is having to discard if you have more than 7 cards in hand but that's another small thing that won't take much to adjust to. It looks nice everywhere, menus are nicer than HS, not much more options but it sure does seem like it, card art is good, not every card gets an interaction when it hits the board but the ones that do trigger art seem to be the only ugly thing I've seen but I'm sure that will be polished up. Hopefully they do foil cards or maybe they do and I just haven't seen it yet. It plays well too, no complaints there.
Worth checking out for sure but like I said above I think you're nuts to put money into it yet.... but you do you
*edit- forgot one thing, you can shuffle the cards in your hand lol that's pretty awesome even though it makes no difference with the game itself
I had a blast playing the Welcome Weekend Singleton event with a super fun black/green deck I made myself. I obtained many strong cards thanks to it, including some planeswalkers.
God bless Magic: The Gathering Arena, and of course, f...k Hearthstone. :D
I suppose it's time to play some tournaments in real life again and share some time with some nerds, hehehe. :)
Then why are you posting in a Hearthstone forum and not in a MTG one, since HS is so shit? Just curios...
Generous? MTGA is? Uhm, nah. Well, really depends I guess.
I have not invested any money in, and I really like limited (as in, Drafts and Sealed). Due to the fact that thre are no phantom Drafts/Sealed, the return is abyssmal. Like, you can get up to 1250 - 1500 if you get 15 wins and complete your quest. A Draft costs 5k, meaning, that you need about 4 days to do one. So the rewards for a Draft really depend, but you get around 300 gems on average I assume, maybe if you are good about 400. A sealed costs 2k gems, so, I get to play one after around 5 drafts, which are about 20 days (somewhat lower, but still).
The sealed rotates in around 3 weeks, so I am cutting it close to even getting to play one Guild Sealed. So, for people like me who don't really care for constructed, MTGA has a terrible prize structure.
Now, also mind that events, barring the exception that was this free singleton, are always costing gold (most times 500). So, the few things I would like to actually partake in (as in, getting away from the normal games), give me a negative revenue (since they changed their price structure, making it so that it is inclined to give cards instead of gold) As you can see, if you want to play constructed - sure, it is alright (I did get quite a lot in closed Beta after all), but if you are someone who likes to play events - since game isn't that forgiving in that case.
As a comparison: In HS I never really had trouble to enter Arena. After not really playing some weeks and months, just doing some dailies once in a while, I collected around 5k gold. That would give me surely over 50 Arena runs! In MTGA, I had in the end (because I was kinda tired of the Draft options) around 2k gems (yep, exactly what is needed to enter the new sealed event) and around 10k Gold. Thats, uh, around 7-8 Drafts I guess.
Also, the problem with duplicates. The return currently is really abyssmal. Getting a few wildcards after getting sooo many duplicates, the system is by far worse than HS (so, the greater your collection, the worse it actually becomes, especially if you are drafting the same sets over).
Well, I may have sounded quite negative, but MTGA isn't that bad of a game - just even greedier than Blizzard. You think the deck rewards are generous? Did you know that it used to be 10 and was changed to 5 (assuming the patchnotes don't lie), as well as the fact that the decks may be okay if you start out, but are totally wasted against high tiered decks. Sure, they have some premium cards, but most of it becomes obsolete over time and you can't dust these cards either... All in all, though, it is a nice game with a lot of cards, and thus, possibilites.
I had a blast playing the Welcome Weekend Singleton event with a super fun black/green deck I made myself. I obtained many strong cards thanks to it, including some planeswalkers.
God bless Magic: The Gathering Arena, and of course, f...k Hearthstone. :D
I suppose it's time to play some tournaments in real life again and share some time with some nerds, hehehe. :)
Then why are you posting in a Hearthstone forum and not in a MTG one, since HS is so shit? Just curios...
Hey, do you realize this is the Off-Topic section of the forum? I can talk about whatever shit I want here, hehe, with only some exceptions. I love this forum (some users are amazing :D), the entire Hearthstone community, and I still have hopes this game will improve in the future (still waiting for tournament mode here...). Meanwhile, I'm going to play this amazing game called MtG Arena. ;)
I'm causally playing the game for several days. It's okay. Mechanics are alright. Presentation as well.
What does turn me off is lore. Cold generic fantasy mess.
I will not spend a dime on the game, but just play casually, on low ranks / drafts, or get a competitive deck or two on the way.
I hear the economy is expensive, no friends, no spectating, not getting rid of rotated cards... a lot of issues. Devs seem too ambitious, in an inflated way.
It's 20% less dumb then HS. Generating those Lands, while interesting and deep, is quite RNG and usually steals you the win. On the other hand, HS has lore, power of simplicity and unsurpassable presentation.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Oh, and, of course, the fact GOLGARI'S BACK BITCHES
People, don't forget to play the Welcome Weekend Singleton event as many times as you can, it's totally free and gives you cards as rewards. :D :D :D
9/10 games I'm playing are against that 'rat colony'; not even slightly fun...
Tech against it if you can - if not, well, keep trying. You can concede against them if you know you'll lose.
Well, I have lost and won several games against that deck. As Edgy_Teenager said, try to tech against it.
I can't even play it since there's no mac client =(
Got into the beta a month or two ago but when I tried to start it up using wine kept getting an error message on install.
I played MTGA for hundreds of hours, since the beginning of the closed beta. Like many other people, I gave a large amount of feedback to the devs, mainly on the economy and the new player experience (as we were asked to). Sadly, we were ignored.
MTGA is definitely a good game, but the cost is very high. The rewards for playing seem reasonable at first, but then you factor in the huge card pool, and the very high rarity composition of decks. Imagine a Hearthstone deck, where you can have 4 copies of each Epic and each Legendary...
On top of that, many cards in every set are unplayable in constructed. Therefore, without a true crafting system, it is extremely hard to get the specific cards you want in an efficient manner - which inflates the price further.
Some people have tried to calculate how good/bad the F2P experience is - they concluded that it is quite bad. See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/9jkk5i/the_math_behind_free_to_play/
I don't want to put anyone off, like I said the game is good. However, personally, I would not consider playing constructed unless I was prepared to pay at least $200 USD on packs immediately (and then another $50 USD for each new expansion, minimum), plus significant grinding.
You could play draft/sealed instead. Sealed is about $10 a go (you keep the cards). Draft is about $5 a go. Competitive Draft (better prizes) is about $10 a go. So not cheap. There are no free/phantom draft options.
I'm saying "about" because you can't just buy an entry, you have to buy "Gems" which is MTGA's in game currency. And of course the amounts of Gems don't line up with the entry fees - which inflates the price further. You might be detecting a pattern here...
Lastly, cards rotate, so what happens to your cards on rotation (with no true crafting system)? We don't know. A legacy format has been hinted at, but it is not confirmed. So, buyer beware.
People blindly say other card games are "superior" and "simply better". At least someone like you actually knows how it's system works. I really like to play magic, but without a crafting system like hearthstone i will only play it with cards i bought in the 90s. It's too costly...
Always expect the unexpectable!
MTGA could be a real competitor to hearthstone, but they decided to milk the magic community instead of being an accesible game. I played closed beta for a while and had fun, then open beta happened. It looks REALLY hard to play as f2p.
I don't think it will do much better than the other magic game. And not having a smartphone app doesn't help either.
Ready for action
Paying a company to test their game blows my F'n mind
Well I finally played a bit over the weekend. It's pretty fun! Except I'm already realizing how much my collection pales in comparison to some others haha. They seem to have lots of rare cards in their deck. I just opened an Alpine Moon which, to an outsider (me), looks completely useless. Apparently it counters some kinda Tron deck that I know nothing about.
Anyways, I'll probably play it some more. It is a lot smoother than I imagined it would be. I might even drop some money on it before too long haha. Maybe not hundreds of dollars yet, but it just seems so much deeper and intense than Hearthstone (obviously).
Twitch name: Anatak15
NA Legend Season 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 74
I've really enjoyed it so far, even though I have a ton to learn. I got two green Planeswalkers so I've made a green deck and seem to be doing ok at the awful ranks. It's definitely more complex than HS, and I don't fully understand a decent number of aspects of the game, but I'll keep figuring things out over time. Wish there was a mobile client, though.
I had a blast playing the Welcome Weekend Singleton event with a super fun black/green deck I made myself. I obtained many strong cards thanks to it, including some planeswalkers.
God bless Magic: The Gathering Arena, and of course, f...k Hearthstone. :D
I suppose it's time to play some tournaments in real life again and share some time with some nerds, hehehe. :)
Never played MTG before so I checked it out, I really like it so far but it's not that much more difficult than HS and I agree they are being very generous giving decks away but let's not forget the point of an open beta. They want everyone playing with everything for the moment, I can't help but feel they will probably roll back the generosity after release, there's not even 3 pages of planeswalkers yet and I already opened 2 and can still craft one and almost close to crafting 2. No way that pace stays after release.
Too get too the HS comparisons going from 30 card decks to 60 card decks is probably the biggest adjustment and some of the mana interactions are tough to figure out at first but a little playing around and a few games is all it takes. Which was a little annoying there's no advanced tutorial for first timers like me, I've yet to even get a planeswalker out but there's no explanation on how they work which is intimidating but I'll figure it out. There's a lot of turn fazes and the other player can rope their whole turn and rope you every turn of yours if they have an instant in hand, that's dumb af and so is having to discard if you have more than 7 cards in hand but that's another small thing that won't take much to adjust to. It looks nice everywhere, menus are nicer than HS, not much more options but it sure does seem like it, card art is good, not every card gets an interaction when it hits the board but the ones that do trigger art seem to be the only ugly thing I've seen but I'm sure that will be polished up. Hopefully they do foil cards or maybe they do and I just haven't seen it yet. It plays well too, no complaints there.
Worth checking out for sure but like I said above I think you're nuts to put money into it yet.... but you do you
*edit- forgot one thing, you can shuffle the cards in your hand lol that's pretty awesome even though it makes no difference with the game itself
MtG Arena is a godsend for those like me, who are tired of mindless games of Hearthstone, there is no doubt about that.
Thank you, God. :)
Then why are you posting in a Hearthstone forum and not in a MTG one, since HS is so shit? Just curios...
"A bargain forged in blood and shadow"
Generous? MTGA is? Uhm, nah. Well, really depends I guess.
I have not invested any money in, and I really like limited (as in, Drafts and Sealed). Due to the fact that thre are no phantom Drafts/Sealed, the return is abyssmal. Like, you can get up to 1250 - 1500 if you get 15 wins and complete your quest. A Draft costs 5k, meaning, that you need about 4 days to do one. So the rewards for a Draft really depend, but you get around 300 gems on average I assume, maybe if you are good about 400. A sealed costs 2k gems, so, I get to play one after around 5 drafts, which are about 20 days (somewhat lower, but still).
The sealed rotates in around 3 weeks, so I am cutting it close to even getting to play one Guild Sealed. So, for people like me who don't really care for constructed, MTGA has a terrible prize structure.
Now, also mind that events, barring the exception that was this free singleton, are always costing gold (most times 500). So, the few things I would like to actually partake in (as in, getting away from the normal games), give me a negative revenue (since they changed their price structure, making it so that it is inclined to give cards instead of gold)
As you can see, if you want to play constructed - sure, it is alright (I did get quite a lot in closed Beta after all), but if you are someone who likes to play events - since game isn't that forgiving in that case.
As a comparison: In HS I never really had trouble to enter Arena. After not really playing some weeks and months, just doing some dailies once in a while, I collected around 5k gold. That would give me surely over 50 Arena runs! In MTGA, I had in the end (because I was kinda tired of the Draft options) around 2k gems (yep, exactly what is needed to enter the new sealed event) and around 10k Gold. Thats, uh, around 7-8 Drafts I guess.
Also, the problem with duplicates. The return currently is really abyssmal. Getting a few wildcards after getting sooo many duplicates, the system is by far worse than HS (so, the greater your collection, the worse it actually becomes, especially if you are drafting the same sets over).
Well, I may have sounded quite negative, but MTGA isn't that bad of a game - just even greedier than Blizzard. You think the deck rewards are generous? Did you know that it used to be 10 and was changed to 5 (assuming the patchnotes don't lie), as well as the fact that the decks may be okay if you start out, but are totally wasted against high tiered decks. Sure, they have some premium cards, but most of it becomes obsolete over time and you can't dust these cards either...
All in all, though, it is a nice game with a lot of cards, and thus, possibilites.
Hey, do you realize this is the Off-Topic section of the forum? I can talk about whatever shit I want here, hehe, with only some exceptions. I love this forum (some users are amazing :D), the entire Hearthstone community, and I still have hopes this game will improve in the future (still waiting for tournament mode here...). Meanwhile, I'm going to play this amazing game called MtG Arena. ;)
I'm causally playing the game for several days. It's okay. Mechanics are alright. Presentation as well.
What does turn me off is lore. Cold generic fantasy mess.
I will not spend a dime on the game, but just play casually, on low ranks / drafts, or get a competitive deck or two on the way.
I hear the economy is expensive, no friends, no spectating, not getting rid of rotated cards... a lot of issues. Devs seem too ambitious, in an inflated way.
It's 20% less dumb then HS. Generating those Lands, while interesting and deep, is quite RNG and usually steals you the win. On the other hand, HS has lore, power of simplicity and unsurpassable presentation.
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
LOL...
You have to be kidding, dude...