The Hearthstone thread is mostly talking about how MTGA is the better game, so I thought I’d create a thread. I started playing around Christmas. I have mostly just been playing the decks they give you, though I’ve converted the lifegain with a few vampires to vampires with a bit of lifegain. I’ve fallen in the trap before in these games of waiting to dive into competitive until I have more cards, and then just never feeling like I have enough cards.
I like the economy, as I rarely feel like I’m grinding. I like that tournament wins still count for the daily rewards, though feeling like I’m missing out by not playing every day isn’t my favorite.
I’ve been liking Momir - If you assume it’s a coinflip, the EV is 250 gold for two cards, one of which is at least a rare. My perception may be skewed because my last couple runs were 4-5 wins, though I still think it’s pretty close to a coinflip. I can only think of a handful of games that were decided by non-obvious decisions. I’m not sure it’s as solved as MTGO Momir was, or at least I haven’t seen much discussion about whether 6,7,8 or 9 is better, and which you should aim for on play vs. draw. I’ve been aiming for 8 on play and 9 on draw, though I lost once by sticking to going for 9 when the play side was going for 7, and the extra early drops let him overrun me.
I’m curious what will happen when the sets rotate. I know previously they deleted your cards and gave you a gold payout, but that was Beta (is it technically still beta?) and I’m not sure that’ll be their strategy going forward.
I have played Magic since 1997 and was lucky to get an invite of Arena from day one so I have been playing it for almost 2 years now. I really enjoy it.
The last rotation was during closed beta and they just took the rotating out sets (Kaladesh and Amonkhet) out of the game. It coincided with a data wipe so every started one an equal footing. No one knows 100% what they will do with this Fall’s rotation but they have said there will be a way to keep playing with all your card. The assumption is they will make an Eternal non rotating format that consists of all the sets in Arena (probably retroactively adding Kaladesh and Amonkhet back in since they are fully coded and in the game already).
When they did the data wipe they didn’t give you gold. If you had spent any real money you got those Gems back to spend again. If you hadn’t spent any money you just started playing like a new player. FWIW they have said that even though the game is technically still in (open) Beta they have no plans for any data wipes anymore.
“Copy protection works like so: if you have 4 of a certain rare/myth, it gives you another FROM THE SET, if you have all r/m cards in the set, you get 20/40 gems instead. Commons/uncommons do not get protection, they still go to the vault.” but I haven’t seen the official source yet.
I would be perfectly happen not to see Kaladesh in whatever MTGA eternal format exists. Amonkhet’s cool though, I did like embalm/eternalize.
I did relearn why I usually stick to gold drafts though. After going 5-1 in BO3 draft with the free code from paper pre-release. The rest of my drafts topped out at a single 3-2. A few 1-2 or 0-2s really chewed up my gem balance.
I’ve been playing for quite a while and I’m enjoying it. I’ve been playing Magic since 1994.
There are many things that are better than MTGO, but there are so many easy things that are worse that it’s frustrating. That said, they do seem to care about it, so maybe they’ll fix them. It’s definitely improved significantly since the beginning of the Beta.
Imagine if they’d put the amount of work into MTGO years ago? Maybe it wouldn’t have languished in obscurity. I saw the writing on the wall and sold my MTGO cards just a few days before the big crash (which has apparently mostly reverted now)
The economy seems to be generous enough that I can do 3-4 drafts a week as a free player, although that’s dropping due to matchmaking-by-rank in drafts. I’m only a few more wins away from Platinum draft rank, at which point I expect my draft game results to be fairly close to a coinflip. I think at that point I’ll probably stop drafting until the rank reset comes, or do only Bo3 drafts. I really dislike this change, as it turns drafting into a pay to win format. Drafting used to be the purest skill-testing format.
I like Best of One games because I have two small children, so blocking out enough time to reliably play a 3-game match can be a challenge.
ETA: Also, I dislike the 2-elimination/3-elimination format. I want to just play N games with my deck and get rewards based on win/loss.
The UI for making Sealed decks is miles better on MTGO. I loved doing 3 - 5 different decks from my pool to see whats better. Can’t do that on MTGA, or see all my pool at once.
It would make paying for Sealed/BO3 drafts with money a lot more palatable if going 0-2 didn’t mean you were out immediately. There’s no real money value to the prizes, so we may as well have relatively consistent entertainment / dollar.
Yeah, the UI seems terrible there. I’m also annoyed that there’s not a single view that will show my whole deck and sideboard, since I always take screenshots to refer to while playing and to share with friends to get their thoughts on the build.
On the other hand, the autotapper is, while not perfect, pretty good. And that makes a fantastic difference in play.
The sad thing is… they could have implemented an autotapper on MTGO years ago.
In the original days of the Beta (the alpha really) the auto tapper was really really bad. It would constantly lock you out of other colors in your hand for no reason so I am still in the habit of tapping my own mana most of the time.
I let the auto tapper do its thing 95% of the time now. It doesn’t do that many crazy things these days.
And manually tapping takes sooo long compared to tapping on MTGO. Do I really need to wait for the tapping animation before i can move on to the next land? Or play crazy whack-a-mole with moving lands when I’m playing my ramp/lands-matter deck?
I complain, but overall the play experience is enormously better than MTGO.
Yeah, I remember. It was embarrassingly bad. I remember people complaining about it in the forums and on reddit and the answer was always some mealy explanation of why it wasn’t always possible to leave up the right mana, ignoring the fact that it would tap all your basics and leave you with two Arch of Orazca untapped instead of colored mana that would cast your spells.
It could still be improved. Honestly there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit and sharp edges to be filed off.
Today my opponent played a Gateway Plaza, didn’t pay 1, and sacrificed it. Twice in one game. That… should basically never happen. I don’t know how many interstitial screens you need, but having someone use their land drop and lose the card should be really hard to do. It’s obviously not hard enough right now in the interface, since they screwed it up twice.