Magic: The Gathering Arena - Catch All

I'm super excited for the free Momir variant that starts later today. Arena is turning into the only game I play.

Yeah, the game is deep and rewarding. There's a reason why I consider Magic: the Gathering a distinct hobby that I do in addition to all the other games I play.

What have you guys found is an ideal mana amount of mana to start using the Momir factory at? And what amount gives you a creature that is the best bang for your buck?

Having the planeswalkers in there adds a bit of a different twist to it.

Trying to grind to Mythic and finally got to Diamond just now via a very fun blunder from my opponent.

Playing my RDW deck against Azorius control and had a pretty good board state and about 8 or so more life to take.

Oh and I had Experimental Frenzy and Chandra, Fire Artisan on the board.

So pretty good board state but with control, your never know until you are there.

Anyway, had a couple of small red dorks ready to swing in but probably needed two more turns to win.

That's when my opponent played Cleansing Nova....

Against enchantments, which had my oppoent's desired effect of destroying my frenzy...

But also destroyed my oppoent's two Ixillan's Bindings which had taken a Viashino a Chainwhirler!

Hello free three damage, a one turn board state and an a just lovely five second pause while my opponent realized the error of his ways, followed by the concession and Diamond rank four!

Away from my PC for work for the rest of this month's ladder, ending up at Diamond 2. Actually got as high as Diamond 1 and only a couple of games away from Mythic only to go on an epic losing streak all the way down to the bottom of tier 3, spent the rest of the time bouncing around between tiers 2 and 3.

So many mono red decks at the end of the season, made playing mono red myself feel like a complete coin flip and didn't have enough wildcards for a play set of Nissas for an anti-red Simic or Sultai decks.

I did have some success with Esper Hero but I don't think it's win rate against red is good enough to make it through late stage season.

I switched to Grixis as a last gasp and was steadily climbing but the games are usually slow and had to call it still in tier 2.

Maybe should have switched to BO3 once I got close to Mythic. Or maybe embrace my dark side and play Esper control.

Anyone else attempt/complete my the climb?

I'll give it a go again and start at the beginning of the season next month, and at least I won't have to climb all the way from bronze this time.

*Edit*

Actually got back with enough time to make a final push last night. Tried a White Weenie with Azorious splash deck and quickly went something like 16 and 2.

Baby Tef is a great addition to WW.

Final game to reach Mythic was anticlimactic though. On the play, had three weenies about to flip the fort when opponent thought erased me, only to see Marshall, Blackblade and a Loxodon. They didn't even bother to discard anything, just scooped.

And back to Mythic, much easier starting from Platinum 4. Climbed primarily with WW and Grull mid-range and a few games with a fun Sorin Feather deck.

Would like to try the Simic Manipulation deck but need a few more wildcards for more Nissa's.

Think meta seems very diverse and very quick to swing from what you see on a daily basis.

Now, to figure out a good Singleton deck.

Okaaaay, so I haven't touched Arena since November or December of last year. I've got the latest client update and wanted to tip toe back into the fray. I was thinking about trying out a RDW for once. Any tips on best set to target for acquiring key RDW cards?

Looking at the rares, which I assume are the bottleneck, and basing it off of this sort of list (which is roughly what folks are running competitively) it looks like Guilds of Ravnica is the most important since it has Runaway Steam-Kin and Experimental Frenzy. Dominaria has Goblin Chainwhirler, and War of the Spark has Chandra, Fire Artisan.

Thanks 4dSwissCheese. Pretty similar to this other net deck. I imagine there's only so much wiggle room with this archetype. Well, got myself a road map...now to see how many of these cards I already have and in what quantities.

Maclintok wrote:

Okaaaay, so I haven't touched Arena since November or December of last year. I've got the latest client update and wanted to tip toe back into the fray. I was thinking about trying out a RDW for once. Any tips on best set to target for acquiring key RDW cards?

The best thing to do is accept that buying the "right" set is unreliable at best, and you'll probably just have to grind out the wild cards you need. That said, it's still correct to give yourself the best chance to get lucky. Also remember that the free weekly packs will be War of the Spark, so you'll probably want to put gold elsewhere until you get the other cards you need.

On a tangent... man, deck building is a lot easier when you keep up with the limited formats. My wife has avoided Arena because she's used to Magic Online and doesn't like drafting against bots. Lately she's come up with a Standard deck she likes and wants to be able to play it, but buying it on MtGO is kind of a pain and the Standard scene is dead there. She was asking about how to build up her collection on Arena in a way that wouldn't annoy her. Then we figured out that I basically never play constructed, so she hopped on my account and built her Standard deck from my draft leftovers. She used up a lot of my Wild Cards, but they're meant to be used so that doesn't bother me.

Anyone catch the Mythic Championship?

Dial up the 54:00 minute mark of game two.

I watched almost all of the semis and finals. Glad to see Mono-Red get destroyed, even if it was by Nexus.

I'm still blown away that WotC ever printed Nexus of Fate. It's such a toxic card that limits their own design space so much. There are so many cards they can't make because of that card. Cannot wait for that to rotate out.

That being said, Matias played the deck masterfully and deserves the crown. He beat Mono-Red with Simic Nexus in the playoffs! That's insane!

The casting, presentation, and player skill were all incredible though. Very excited about the future of Magic Arena tournies.

I took another look at the game mostly to redeem the deck I got from the amazon/twitch promotion. They apparently made some changes and now you can level up and unlock decks and cards in a mastery tree. But I'm really confused on how they expect you to do this.

To level up you need to win 2-3 games vs. the AI which gets really boring fast and the chance to win best of 1s against real people seems slim.

How did you guys grind through this in order to unlock all the free stuff?

A couple of games against the AI doesn't seem overly cumbersome. But try in the unranked Best of 1 queue if that's too tedious. Other folks can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that that one takes into account a rough estimate of deck strength when doing the matchmaking, so if you're playing with the pre-built decks you should get paired primarily with other people doing the same.

Matchmaking works as follows in the free modes:

Play: A combination of deck strength matching and hidden MMR. If you are playing an unchanged starter deck, you are fairly likely to play someone else with one as well unless you really start racking up your MMR.

Traditional Play: Hidden MMR only

Ranked and Traditional Ranked: Mix of Rank and hidden MMR. Your hidden ranked MMR is used for your ranking once you are in Mythic. In Mythic the Top 1200 players get a number. Below that you just get a percentile rank.

Jasonofindy wrote:

In Mythic the Top 1200 players get a number. Below that you just get a percentile rank.

I had a number all month in Mythic, then went on an epic slide down to 90% today. Wasn't even tilting, just bad luck and strong play from the opponents.

Ah well, try again next month.

I only played maybe three single round matches so far and all of those seemed to be against decks that were either fine tuned or later in the unlock tree. So maybe I just need to loose a couple of more matches to lower the MMR as it seems the game has trouble matching me against pure starter decks (which is understandable since I guess only beginners will ever end up playing those decks online).

It seems like I get the same xp from a win vs the AI as I do from a win vs. humans though so maybe it's just grinding two dozen games vs the AI to unlock some of the cards and earn some gold.

I wish they would just sell me a better deck instead of just selling packs in the store.

I just found out that you can redeem the physical planeswalker decks online so that might be something I'll look into. Checking prices this will be comparable to just buying 10-15 packs in arena which might just be the better value if it doesn't turn out that the planeswalker decks are super awesome.

Ok, after loosing two games the next four games went like this: I play a zombie, they do nothing, I play a zombie, they do nothing, I play a zombie, they leave the game

For anyone who only plays casually or intermittently and might have missed last week’s update, I wanted to pass on some of the info. Tuesday’s patch will make a number of changes.

First and foremost, I want to mention that the 3 weekly packs for 15 wins are being replaced by a new mastery tree that will refresh with each new set release. So if you can manage it, get this week’s 15 wins/3 packs before the patch on Tuesday.

Second, with the release of M20 on Tuesday, the existing New Player Experience tree and 15 starter decks are being replaced with decks built from cards that don’t rotate in the fall.

Third, the random card rewards (ICRs) earned in events and from daily wins will stop awarding cards from Ixalan, Rivals, Dominaria, and M19 after Tuesday’s patch.

Fourth, the Arena nonrotating format has been announced with the name Historic, will launch at the fall rotation, and for the time being will include everything from Ixalan forward. There will be Play and Traditional Play queues for the new format and side events on Arena such as Pauper and Singleton will use the entire Historic cardpool instead of being restricted to the Standard card pool.

Jasonofindy wrote:

First and foremost, I want to mention that the 3 weekly packs for 15 wins are being replaced by a new mastery tree that will refresh with each new set release. So if you can manage it, get this week’s 15 wins/3 packs before the patch on Tuesday.

Also, the redeemable code: MYTHICMAGIC for 3 free rares is expiring on the second.

If you haven't redeemed any codes before, you can find a good list of them here.

And finally, if you have a Twitch Prime account via Amazon Prime, you should have aa code for a Boros (red/white) deck that might be useful for new players.

Jasonofindy wrote:

Fourth, the Arena nonrotating format has been announced with the name Historic

Not to be confused with Modern, which is a paper format using cards printed since 2003.

Magic might need to do some work with their non-rotating format names...

How's everyone enjoying the new set? /s

codes PLAYM20 and LEVELUP for some packs and 'mastery XP'

Huzzah, the game is finally up!

So I did unlock all points ind the new player tree thing decks before they changed the decks but apparently there are still some decks I don't have as I found decklists online that were supposed to be buildable with the cards from the starter decks.

One of the decks I don't have is called "Eternal Thirst" another "Wrath of Mages". Any idea how I was supposed to get these?

Or what I may get now instead?

The set mastery thing looks suspicious... It basically looks like a bad implementation of a season pass. Bad as it seems to pretty much force you to play a ton if you buy it while I think a season pass should speed up getting all the stuff as well as adding more stuff to get?

MEATER wrote:

The set mastery thing looks suspicious... It basically looks like a bad implementation of a season pass. Bad as it seems to pretty much force you to play a ton if you buy it while I think a season pass should speed up getting all the stuff as well as adding more stuff to get?

I'm OK with it because you don't have to buy it to earn progress. You can just go in at the end of the cycle and see exactly what buying the pass will get you based on the XP you've earned. That makes it easy to tell if it's worth the cost.

I hate Scapeshift!

I find it boring to play and infuriating to play against. It single handedly ruined my very fun, Gruul Superfriends deck.

But I had my revenge, I dusted off ol' RDW and threw happy little Chandra Three in there and I raced the zombie horde to Mythic.

Badferret wrote:

I hate Scapeshift!

That's why they waited until M20 to print the major payoffs for it. It'll dominate for a couple months and then rotate out.

Vargen wrote:
Badferret wrote:

I hate Scapeshift!

That's why they waited until M20 to print the major payoffs for it. It'll dominate for a couple months and then rotate out.

Yeah, I get it but it feels just like Nexus in Bo1, you either beat it before it goes off or you lose, just not very fun magic.

Though, I'm thinking of crafting LVD's Blood Sun/Lotus Field deck next month if Scapeshift stays this prevelant.

Also got tired of playing vs. Scapeshift or Vampires on ranked. However playing my weird Elemental deck on normal/unranked gets me matched against all kinds of weird decks so I won't complain and its even fun to loose with it as its mostly me looking for the cards I want and building my board.

Izzet Wizards seems like a deck worth looking into as it seems to be able to beat both Scapeshift (by being fast) and Vampires (by having lots of removal). It's also only 4 rares (not counting lands) and 2 mythics and I already have most of these (and even some of the dual lands required).