I have for the past several months logged in daily into Magic The Gathering Arena to at least get my next quest started and even play some matches. I might have missed a day or two but who’s counting. While there are a number of DCCG out there not all of them have a very pleasant experience for these kinds of players. I knew I was not going be able to get a full review which is why I ended up creating a First Impressions after some time playing the game at first. With plans to make this my follow up post.

The goal was to collect at least one pack day or 1000 gold to buy a pack. That was not too hard to do as you tended to get 500 to 750 gold from the daily quest. You also got some gold for daily wins such as 250 for the first with it decreasing down to cards after a few. They also reward you a weekly win pack for 5, 10 and 15 wins per week. Finally, you had the monthly season that reward packs and gold. All of this was to take advantage of a very unique feature this game has called Wild Cards. With them, you can trade one of these special cards in for the same rarity of the card you wanted.

I also wanted it to be from a casual new player point of view. As such, I did not spend gold or buy paid gems to enter into the many Drafts where you could earn it back and get packs if your deck was good enough. There was also no spending on my end.

With only playing the standard decks they start you off within the game after unlocking them doing a number of quests and other achievements. I was constantly month after month able to get into a gold tier for season rewards. While the two decks and 1k gold was not a lot is added to the pile.

While this was going on a War Of The Spark came out and so instead of earning Ravnica Alliance booster packs like I was, it switched over to those. This is something a f2p player should expect to happen from time to time. Even right now they are promoting the launch of Modern Horizons on June 14 at least the physical cards. So I just bought the new booster packs with the gold I was earning as well.

While low loot chance I got a number of Mythic Rares from opening at least a pack daily. That was always something as a player that kept me coming back wanting more.

I also found unlike something like Hearthstone or Steem Monsters I was getting a lot of wins even after making it to the final tier I was not going to surpass. While it was closer to 40/50 rates it was quite rare for me to just get smashed as you would in Hearth Stone over and over.

I mostly played a mono-red deck called Dragon’s fire or a mono-black deck called Graveyard Bash. Everyone has these and while It was tempting to start replacing cards with the new ones I was getting I reframed from doing so. The only decks I really hated playing against where control slow playing decks as I did not want to spend 30 minutes on a single match. I wanted quick as they can be in a game like this to just get my rewards and move on in my day.

The end result from the reward wildcard system was 31 common, 36 uncommon, 16 rare and 6 mythic rare wildcards. You would acquire these wild cards for every X amount of packs opened. Along with them showing up in packs themselves which is more than enough to create a new deck around the current meta for War Of The Spark. I have quite a number of cards as well from all the packs making even cheaper then what I’ve collected so perhaps two even if the mythic rare slots I already had or it was not very high card count.

While it’s tempting to make a new deck and play for a couple of months for another post on how my progress has been going. I’m going to hold off that chapter till I have fewer games I’m trying to keep up on for posts like these. Perhaps by then, I’ll end up making a deck around whatever the meta will be for Modern Horizons assuming it gets added into Arena which I don’t see why not. For now, my wild cards can sit unused for when I return.

Final Thoughts

While it did take me a while I had fun almost daily logging in and playing. Surprisingly Magic The Gathering Arena treats the player very well even if they don’t spend anything on the game. This might be in part with them wanting players to get into collecting physical cards or perhaps they are slowly looking to be digital only one day. While you can’t sell the digital cards they have had a massive tournament in the past with a million in prize money for the top players invited out. So there is some potential there for future events for the top players.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about the game Magic The Gathering Arena.