Magic: The Gathering Arena - Catch All

Yep, gladiator is a community format (maybe that's why it's good ). It's been promoted quite a bit by the LoadingReadyRun folks. In fact big tournament coming up soon https://loadingreadyrun.com/splash/g...
Matchmaking is through discord #looking-for-games and is quick, and folks are usually quite pleasant. The #deck-lists channel is updated with the weekly tournament top 8 winners and is a good place to get some inspiration. Singleton also just makes for great deck brewing though.

If you are not interested in the grind that comes with the ladder, I would recommend the standard challenges. The level of play is more casual than the ladder and while you will find plenty of meta decks, you are also much more likely to find home brew decks and even people playing the starter decks. The rewards are also much better than the ranked season, and while I won't say it's easy to break even with a non-meta deck you can probably get pretty close or all the way there by adding in daily quest.

I find that if I play a deck with mostly commons and uncommons on the ladder, it tends to match me with decks of similar power level.

If you like playing lower power decks, they are running a free event right where you can play against other players with preconstructed decks.

Once again I picked up several prerelease packs for Crimson Vow, each including a code for SIX Crimson Vow booster packs in MTGA, and I still don't play it. And in remembering to offer those here, I recalled that I still have a few codes for Midnight Hunt as well. I would rather offer the codes to you folks over just tossing the code cards out. I have 1 code for Crimson Vow and 2 codes for Midnight Hunt available, PM me if you want one (or one of each), non-grinders only.
[Edited [Again] with current values]

I actually logged in to Arena yesterday for the first time in...4 months?...after activating my GeForce Now RTX membership and tried playing some Historical Brawl. It was fun, even if my deck clearly wasn't as optimized as the other person's.

I might try getting back in over the holidays when there's downtime.

The competitive aspect of the online game is still just a bit much for me and my tastes these days.

I'm having a lot of fun with MTGA lately. I did a "prerelease" with my friends last set, where we each bought into the sealed event, saved our decks, and ran a little tournament between us all on Discord.

I've been playing a few games every other night ever since. I found myself enjoying mono black control a lot, but eventually came up against too many control decks since mono red wasn't really prominent until Crimson Vow. Now I'm just enjoying watching the meta get mixed up by all these fun new cards.

I'm finding myself in a bit of a "casual competitive" style of play, where I'm loosely aware of the heavy hitters in the format, but also just want to play cool brews.

Cheers to Eldon, thanks for the codes!

I havent played Magic in a decade but when my fav Binding of Isaac streamer, Larsfest, suddenly switched over to Arena to do a (poorly named) QuickDraft I had to give it a shot and have had a lot of fun over the last couple of days with my Red/Black goblins+vampires deck. Its fast and trips up a lot of people who have gimmick decks, beating them up while they try and put their gimmick together.

I wish Arena tracked statistics of any kind. I'd love to see a breakdown of how effective/ineffective some of my cards have been, avg turn I win on, avg turn I lose on, etc.

polypusher wrote:

I wish Arena tracked statistics of any kind. I'd love to see a breakdown of how effective/ineffective some of my cards have been, avg turn I win on, avg turn I lose on, etc.

I'm pretty sure you can track all that with the plugin from 17 Lands. At least you can for limited...

The untapped.gg plugin also tracks stats for standard I believe. And good for you for diving in in off-meta shenanigans! Definitely bound for success that way.

How does pack retirement work? Will Zendikar Rising be the next one to pass out of the active set of allowed cards or will several sets retire at once? When does that happen?

I notice that Magic 2021 is already retired and the year isnt even over and there's no Magic 2022 set. Seems weird if that's their main vehicle for bringing forward a standard foundation of cards.

Rotation happens once a year with the fall set. Then the sets from 2 years ago all rotate out at once. This year the rotation happened with Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. There are some nice animated graphics that explain this; I'll try and dig them up when I have time.

Edit: all I can track down is this static image, but it's better than nothing:

IMAGE(https://media.wizards.com/2021/images/daily/DYebfwBDFE.jpg)

The ? is Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and the ?? is Streets of New Capenna. After New Capenna there will be a new year rotation, starting with the Brothers' War set. At that point everything from Zendikar Rising through D&D will leave Standard at the same time.

This year the Dungeons and Dragons Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set took the slot that M22 would have had. Their original plan was to make the core set D&D themed, but when they found that was restricting how D&D they could make things they decided to let it be its own thing. There also isn't a M23 on the schedule, but they haven't fully announced what's up with that.

Another point of confusion: this year they changed the set release schedule. The Innistrad: Crimson Vow set that just came out is the winter set that would previously have been released some time after New Years. They're changing it up because retailers want a November release for the holiday shopping season. So this year had 5 Standard-legal sets instead of 4. Next year will be back to 4, with rotation happening in the early Fall.

Neon Dynasty will be out late January, 2022, I believe.

On the row of 6 questy things, the 5th one right before the Mastery tracker... I don't get it. It basically always shows full, it sort of randomly gives me a deck I pay no attention to, and clicking it takes me back to the color challenge tutorial stuff (which I completed).

Today it says it unlocks a mythic rare wildcard though, for casting blue or black spells, so I want it. Do I have a day? a week?

Edit: Well I got it pretty easily but I'd still like to know. When I did it I got the sort of 'end of tutorial' animation again, with the spark critter telling me good job for collecting all ten decks :shrug:

Edit2 to post some adventures of a Magic noob: I made a black deck, basically its only purpose was to unlock that mythic rare wildcard. It just punches hard and fast with a bunch of instants to get rid of their early stuff along with cheap monsters and a few big ones, and had a pretty proud win this morning. A red/blue deck appeared in Ranked Standard (silver tier3) and dropped a Smoldering Egg (0/4, charges up with instants, hatches at 4 charges) and started counter-spelling, shocking, etc my chumpy early minions to charge the egg.

At 3 charges I realized all I was doing was helping him hatch his egg. I figured most red-blue sorcery/instants are all just Nope cards, so I just started collecting cards for a few turns. He did literally nothing on his turns. Finally he summons something else and I've got enough mana to take over, sacrificing my one minion to kill his summon, spend full price on another killing spell and leave me free on my turn to summon Egon, god of death, Sengir Vampires, and a Savage Gorger.

I just punch away to the end of the game, he had nothing left. I'm pretty proud of having read the situation and effectively solved the puzzle.

Edit3: Jeez I'm 10-1 with this new deck today. That's crazypants

So I've ridden this deck up to Platinum 4 and still going strong. MTG Assistant says I'm 27-12 with it (69% nice) but that does include some mysterious early concessions and one weird match where my opponent showed 256 card deck and never had any timers or anything go off. Probably should have quit and restarted instead of conceding but whatever.

Some of that was me learning what to do about Nope decks but I think I've got that down, and there was a streak of like 8 losses yesterday, maybe too much whiskey. I had one win yesterday where I recovered from 1hp and ended with 40. I had a tense half-hour match against a blue and black deck with a lot of pulling creatures from the graveyard and stealing my creatures. That was a tough one, lots of back and forth. I was down to 6 hp at one point and climbed back up, winning more from attrition I think.

I'll share the list here, curious if any of you experienced players has thoughts

I'd say Compund Fracture and Gift of Fangs might be on the cut list. CF has helped me get board control early without sacrifices though

Just reinstalled this on PC and mobile after being away for like 3 years. God help me.
So many shiny cards…

I started this recently. Marvel Snap got me interested in TCGs again. I played MTG for most of 1994 through The Dark and then stopped cold (no, unfortunately, I do not still have my cards...). There was a couple times where I tried out MTGO for a bit but always felt overwhelmed. MTGA, while the economy isn't as friendly, has proven to be a much better reentry for me. And there are a lot of YouTube guides to getting the most out of your account without spending much money. So far, it seems like the right vehicle to get me back into playing MTG.

If you're decent at draft then the economy is as friendly as it could be. If you want a comprehensive collection so you can make any deck you want, that'll be rather expensive. Though I've heard that the new "golden pack" system helps a lot.

I got back into Magic with Arena back in the fall and the release of Dominaria United. I paid the $20 for the new player gem packs and haven't spent any more money. You get enough free currency to keep going. I don't have a lot of cards from before I started, but I've been hoarding wildcards since I started. I could make any competitive deck I wanted to at this point, probably two. I've managed to get to platinum with a Soldiers deck that isn't too far from the recommended lists. So it's pretty wallet friendly!

steinkrug wrote:

I started this recently. Marvel Snap got me interested in TCGs again. I played MTG for most of 1994 through The Dark and then stopped cold (no, unfortunately, I do not still have my cards...).

You knew we'd ask!

Yes, I didn’t have anything too crazy but thinking back at the cards I remember people having back then… Definitely knew people with Mox jewels and Black Lotus. None of us had any idea any the cards would be worth so much today. But I guess few did and that’s why they are worth what they are.

And yeah, I’ve watched some videos about how to approach Arena’s economy and I’m pretty happy with it now that I understand it better.

If anyone's wondering what's up with the next set, March of the Machine, and why it's such a big deal, here's a nice quick video getting you up to speed on the story in ~5 minutes (give or take a few minutes of preamble):

Thanks. I’ve been watching some videos and reading some stuff to learn a bit about the story. There wasn’t much of one last time I played! I think I’m going to actually read the stories to go along with ONE.

Yeah, the Magic story went through a real rough patch there for a while. They had good people who were invested in their lore doing it in addition to their actual jobs, then corporate said "hey, people like these stories; let's bring in professional writers (and micromanage them) and spin this out into a cross-media brand." At which point everything went to sh*t and they kind of pulled the plug. Now they're back to doing short fiction on the web and they have professional writers who are also invested in their world and story and things are pretty good again.

Except for everyone who isn't Phyrexia. They're pretty much screwed.

I bought a box of OG Jumpstart some time back but never ended up using it. For whatever reason, yesterday was the day. My son and I have now played it three times each (a time being each busting two packs), and it's been quite fun! I really like the concept of basically getting a random sealed deck instantly, for times I want to play quicker and/or spend less than it takes to do a true sealed together.

Do be aware that a lot of people like Jumpstart and Jumpstart 2022 or whatever but don't like the ones associated with expansions - apparently those are something of a rebrand of theme boosters?

The OG boxes are actually cheaper right now than the 2022 set, FWIW.

Nice! Sounds fun. Yeah, I’ve seen negative sentiments about the Jumpstart boosters tied to expansion sets. It does seems like it has something to do with them being a poorer experience and value.

The set-associated Jump Start boosters basically just have 1 half-deck per color, so they get old real quick. The cards they have that are JS exclusive are usually underwhelming cards that they would have put in the old intro deck products. Those are designed to be unexciting for veterans so that veterans don't end up buying them all out from under the new players. The stand-alone sets have way more variety and tend to include more powerful and interesting cards.

Vargen wrote:

The set-associated Jump Start boosters basically just have 1 half-deck per color, so they get old real quick. The cards they have that are JS exclusive are usually underwhelming cards that they would have put in the old intro deck products. Those are designed to be unexciting for veterans so that veterans don't end up buying them all out from under the new players. The stand-alone sets have way more variety and tend to include more powerful and interesting cards.

This fits with everything I've read. I'll probably buy a box of '22 whenever we finish the one we're on. Great product, and honestly, I can see where the set-specific ones might fill a particular niche, but they should almost come with a warning label!

In other news, I don't think we've discussed the upcoming Commander Masters. The price point is a big bummer for me. My son and I adored Commander Legends and also had a good time with CL Baldur's Gate, even if it was a but underpowered. When I heard "Commander Masters" I was immediately prepared to pay the Masters cost of $220 (or so) for a box, confident that we'd have a ton of fun playing Sealed with it. When I saw they were over $300, well, that's pretty crazy for a product you're supposed to be playing Limited with.

Not to mention the prices of the LotR stuff… I’m mostly interested in constructed sets myself so far. Hoping those stay around their current price. WotC seems to be seeing how much they can get away with charging for stuff though?

The licensed stuff costs more because the companies they're licensing from want a cut as well.

Considering the base prices have only gone up a little bit in the past 30 years and we're several years into a global paper shortage, I'm amazed prices aren't worse.