Magic: The Gathering Arena is getting a $10 million investment and pro league



https://www.dailyesports.gg/magic-th...ts-investment/

Pretty huge move by WotC and great counter to the hype generated by Artifact's big prize pool.

havent read many details but it would be cool to put the pro tour on arena and people can qualify through ladder like you could for hearthstone blizzcon

Arena doesn't get 10m. 10m is total amount for all mtg prizes, out of which live events take at least 5m and the 32 streamers 3m.

Having stopped playing paper magic ~18 months ago I finally cracked and started playing Arena this week. I've always preferred (and been better at) draft than constructed so with the gems from the starter bundle I've played 3 competitive GRN and am up 600 gems so far. Given my knowledge of the format was watching about half a draft video by Kenji I'm kinda surprised it's gone so well (I didn't play MTGO much but wasn't anywhere near going infinite or anything when I did).

Does anyone know if there is a matchmaking system for limited that is meaning I'm being matched up against weaker players to begin with and it will get tougher or is this a combination of the average player being much weaker than MTGO plus some run good?

Also is there any way to see past draft decks (or even just past results)? I'm pretty sure I've looked everywhere in the client and it doesn't seem to be there so is there any external way of doing it?

Of course the average player in F2P Arena is going to be weaker than the average player in MTGO. As I understand it, and I may be wrong, the way event matchmaking works now depends on how many wins you are at. So if you are at 6-0, presumably you should be matched against tougher opponents.

There is also the possibility that you have lucked out a bit with your sealed events.

The way to see your old games, draft decks, etc. is to download some tracking software. I have been using MTGA Pro Tracker.

the average player level on mtgo was extremely high relative to the entire magic playing population

Competitive drafts were higher quality than the PT for example

reddit is freaking out about losing 3 random uncommons/rares from the constructed events in favor of a few hundred gold instead

id rather have gold all day. theres no dusting value, the vast majority of the time those cards are completely worthless

For sure, and its obvious (imo) they are making those changes in preparation for duplication protection of some sort, which is vastly more valuable anyways.

Edit:

thanks reddit

So now I need to accept my copies of Arcades, the Strategist instead of getting more gold to play again.

Magic subreddit is one of the most toxic communities I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. They just freak the **** out at any change. My personal favorite was when WotC decided that standard gets too stale due to the card pool being so large towards the end that it's hard for new cards to break though, so they pushed up rotations by 6 months. Then everyone lost their ****, they went back on it before a rotation, and then everyone bitched about how awful Mardu Vehicles/Saheeli standard was due to it being repetitive and nothing being good enough to break through. And no, they never realized the irony in their statement.

I don’t frequent many subreddit but it’s the same thing for every game, just look at the Black Desert Online one. Aslways complaining about everything and super toxic in general.

The unsatisfied minority is always the loudest.

yep. fifa has an atrocious subreddit, probably the worst ive been on.

Any official word for how much longer MTGO is to be supported or/and if Arena will replace MTGO?

The main gripe I have with Arena is it seems destine to be the death of MTGO and if MTGO dies what then is the point in a long term investment in Arena? I personally don't want to invest in my mtgo commander decks because it seems like the clock is ticking for Mtgo, and without players investing in an ongoing basis into MTGO, the quicker MTGO's death. I don't really want to invest in Arena because my MTGO investment seems like a waste now.

I think the starter decks that came as the weekly quest rewards were nice and encourage playing. The main bottleneck to decent decks are uncommon wildcards which seem more valuable than a random junk rare. Uncommons were the core of these starter decks and made it a lot easier to put together a shell to improve gradually over time.

I really really hate that brawl, commander and 2hg/ffa are not available. I get that 2hg and ffa are never coming, but brawl specifically seems like a really big oversight for Arena. The competitive formats are cool and all, but only a subset of players are practicing to be the next worlds best pokemon master. The game is mostly supposed to be for funzies. At least they finally introduced friends lists and are allowing dueling versus friends. I couldn't believe they made it until last month without this feature.

I guess it must suck to invest time/resources into mtg go and have it die off.

Buuuuuut, its probably a good thing. MTGA is bringing loads of players to magic who were put off but mtg go because it's looks god awful and it's expensive from what I hear.

Just speaking as a new ish MTG player but I would never have played the game either on paper or mtg go if it wasn't for arena.

I am sure there are lots of people like me who found magic because of arena. Really glad I did it's a really good game with lots of depths/decision points and not as complicated to get the hang of either as the tutorial is actually pretty good for new players.

It's very expensive to play competitive constructed on MTGO, but the casual formats are almost free if you don't care whether or not you have the very best cards. There are many bots that sell junk rares 50 for 1 ticket and more than 200 uncommons for the same. I sold my old MTGO collection after they removed the multiplayer lobby, which crashed the market for such cards. I guess the writing is on the wall but mostly they chose not to support it well. It is somewhat hilarious imo that the $1000 vintage and legacy decks are sure to decrease in value. I bet there are a lot of traders with big inventories who probably cry themselves to sleep every night since arena came out.

The issue with the pricing of Arena is that uncommons are far far more expensive to collect and I could not build a decent version of a deck without a starter core to go from. This means even a pretty low tier crappy is going to cost like $20 which will require going with whatever cards were opened, and is way way way more expensive than the equivalent in MTGO where one could simply trade/buy what specific cards they wanted. Is the game more accessible? Yes, but the entry point is more expensive too.

Meh idk

Like I got starter packs and bought the deal they do plus bought one $50 pack.

Been playing for like 6 weeks and have 4 decent working decks. Admittedly I did massively luck out with some of the packs I got.

That plus playing for quests and doing ok in drafts I have some decent decks already.

Izzet drakes, golgari midrange, budget dimir surrveil and mono blue.

I guess I am coming from HS which is very expensive to keep up. Think keeping cards from drafts really accelerates of new players compared to that game. Plus the gold quests are decent and u can go infinite fairly easily.

To be fair your opinion is going to carry greater weight than mine since u have experience of both. All I can say is that I would never have touched magic via mtgo and the arena beta is great. I don't think it's that expensive compared to other games out there (but maybe to start with compared to mtgo).

Also how u doing we used to talk on Skype back in the sng days

The game has been in open beta for literally two months. Freaking out because not all the features in MTGO are implemented at this point seems a little weird to me. I get that you are salty because you are losing money on the game at this point, but com on now.

Arena is in no way more expensive than MTGO. Uncommon wild cards are plentiful; I don't have anything to spend those wild cards on two months into the game. You are given a bunch of starter decks that are playable, full of uncommons, and even has choice rares and mythics included.

To even start in MTGO, you have to pay $10 up front. You then have to put up with an interface which is barely coherent, and has actually gotten worse over the years.

If you want to compare MTGA and MTGO, then MTGA blows MTGO away in every way. The argument that it is any way more expensive to play MTGA is patently false. What MTGA lacks are the casual formats, so if that is what you want, then stick to MTGO.

Don't get me wrong, I greatly agree the interface is a million times better and that the wild cards make collecting rares and mythics much much easier.

there are pros and cons to both

mtgo it was nice to buy a full standard deck and if I wanted to I could always sell it off and get another one for just a small vig. on mtga if I use all my rare wildcards on blue/black duel lands then it is impossible to switch to a playable red/white deck without months of play or buying a lot of packs

they say that they dont have a dusting system because it "feels bad" to have to make a choice to destroy cards, but with the current system the first deck you build you are committing to for a very long time. players who started with boros angels or something then saw it fall out of favor got ****ed. it is especially horrible for new players who dont really know what they are doing and waste extremely valuable wildcards without a long-term deck plan.

teferi costing the same as any other mythic is great for people who want to grind tier 1 decks but awful for casual players who like trying to make thousand year storm work

uncommon wildcards are gold as a brand new player but then lose all their value. the fifth card problem is real with no dusting system

+1million.

Personally, I'm holding onto all my wildcards so that I can start playing constructed in 4-6 months without having to craft any ravnica stuff. I also don't play any non-Ravnica limited as those cards rotate a year earlier than Guilds of Ravnica. I probably have like 60% of Rav rare playsets filled (ie. about 2.5 of each rare on average). Mythics will be rough, although I don't think there really is anything but the Arclight Phoenix you actually want 4.

Very cost effective way to open mythics and rares is to join the "casual" queue and drop right away. It costs 500 gold or 100 gems and you get 100 gold back + 1 at least rare and 1 at least unc,. About 1/3 chance to get mythic (either as mythic + unc or mythic +rare). Main reason I don't do it is what I mentioned above: not wanting to get non-ravnica stuff.

As for MTGO, it will be fine at least for couple of years. Even the boosters haven't really crashed, so people still draft a ton on mtgo. Standard has become about 50% cheaper these last two weeks (Ravnica hasn't dropped at all, but the non-redeemable crashed) while the modern stuff has rebounded and are once again trending upwards.

Years back I tried to be a low-budget player in MTGO and it was a pretty abysmal experience. Yeah you could get a huge collection of penny-cards but these aren't going to make anything worth playing. I found games in the most casual lobby category and still ran into people with $300+ control decks...

Even Pauper was largely dominated by decks getting into the $50+ range (at least at the time, prices down a lot now).

I guess if you have a group of friends you could come up with your own Kitchen-Table modes of play to make use of this vast library of cards for cheap, but it's not a great system at all for onboarding new-to-MTG players without a fat wallet.

The biggest problem with Arena on the other hand is that there is a very hefty impatience tax. If you are a new player and want Jeskai Control and Golgari Midrange, NOW, you are looking at essentially MTGO level prices without any ability to cash out.

Both clients seem to have their place at the moment.