Magic the Gathering Arena

I haven't touched "Play" in a very long time, but from what I remember, there is a grace period for new players where you should be matched with other new accounts mostly for a number of games (50?).
After that, the matchmaker kicks in, taking into account your deck strength and MMR. Which means, theoretically you should be matched with other starter decks if you bring your own starter deck,
but if you win too much, your MMR gets too high and you get matched vs. better stuff. Perhaps you could manipulate this by conceding a bunch of games in a row if you're feeling like it.

Ranked will be nothing but netdecks and tryhards after a certain point, but you should play at least a few games until you get... as far as you feel like. Gold should be easily achievable.
Platinum needs a working deck, but is still easy cause you get 2 pips for each win. The point here is to be eligible for end-of-season rewards, and you should play some ranked drafts for the same reason.

Since your starting collection is most likely shit, keep an eye out for events like singleton, artisan or standard shakeup where you can try and compete with what you have.
Here's a list of budget stuff to get you going.
https://mtgazone.com/mtg-arena-budget-standard-decks/
You need at least a few of decent decks to give you wins, so you can earn those daily rewards without too much fuss.
Up to you to set the threshold that works for you, going for 15 wins every day is a good way to burn yourself out.
A lot of folks go for 10 wins, but the diminishing returns start after four.

 

"Play" is the only way to play standard in my opinion. Sure you do get trash but diversity is higher than in ranked

 

thanks for the tips, my men! Poor man's Dimir Flash it is. Only 2 rare and a couple uncommon wildcards away.
Is it worth jumping into Limited? Or is it a surefire way for a noob to waste his precious gold?

 

Yeah, I've been primarily playing with the Mono Black starter deck since it seemed somewhat decent and I liked it has a vampire theme going on, the one drop vampire with deathtouch and the flying one which buffs each time you lifelink have been doing some admirable work for me so far against other beginner decks. Is there any way to hasten the process of unlocking the dual colored decks or do I have to wait for the reset timer each day?

Also which boosters are best value for someone looking to play Black or Green based decks? I've also been thinking of B/W.

 

I think it's actually a pretty good environment for a noob. The field should be level, cause it doesn't care about your collection.
It's also a very good way to get the feel of an expansion, you'll be playing with shit you'll probably never going to see in constructed.
Not to mention, it's quite rewarding when you can just get gems and buy mastery passes this way.

You keep all the cards you pick, so it's down to whether the baseline rewards are acceptable to you as opposed to just buying packs:
45 cards you picked, including 3-4 rares, a handful of gems and a pack.
IMO it's roughly equivalent to what you'd otherwise get from 5000 shekels.
Buying packs is only better if you want wildcards and specific cards, if you can manage at least 1-2 wins, I'd stick with the quick drafts.
Premium drafts have a better reward structure once you get the hang of it and feel you can pull ~4 wins, leave those for later.

You have all the time in the world to do the bot draft, so feel free to consult your picks with some online guide.
Check some videos of people drafting to get an idea what a good draft deck might look like.
Stuff you wouldn't touch in constructed can be very powerful, and on the contrary, shit you'd kill for in constructed can be merely meh in draft.
You can also get a white friend and consult your final list with them for adjustments. Sometimes you can shuffle 3-4 cards around and unfuck it.
It takes time to get it right, what I did was put away shekels for 2+ draft tickets. This way if I royally fuck up my picks, or see some bomb plays to copy, I can immediately try and improve my game.
This approach also helps when you get easily distracted by the oooh shiny rare, this way you can spend one draft ticket cherry picking the good stuff, then try to actually draft a working deck on the next go.

I still suck in draft, by the way, I never went above gold rank and Bo3 drafts are fucking juden sciencemajik for me, but it's good enough to keep me free to play and 99% complete on pretty much all the sets.

I'd wait a bit for M21 to drop, looks like it's got some black stuff that looks cool.
Normally, I'd suggest looking into the Ravnica expansions, as there's a lot of two-color support there, but these things will soon be falling out of standard (assuming you care about this).
There is a bit of support for going mono black in Throne of Eldraine, but good stuff is pretty much littered all over the place. You should be fine by buying into whatever expansion
(or better still, read above about trying not to succ in limited and try doing that). Otherwise, just play the game and see what people are playing to give you some idea about what works.

 

I started spamming limited immediatly and never regretted it. While you lose monies compared to buying packs in the beginning you get better at the format and your wins even out quickly. Also it lets you control which uncommons and rares you get to a degree, which isnt to be understated. Dont play the draft modes which are only three games, those rip you off when your winrate is bad. Also try to stick to the 5000 gold modes, the 20000 ones are more risk reward. Drafting with humans is more fun tho.

Using a limited tier guide makes it a lot easier. Also deckbuilding is not as binary as Hearthstone Arena so it doesnt make the game boring, I highly recommend one. The best one used to be the limited review by Luis Scott Vargas but that is behind a paywall now.
Next best F2P alternative is https://mtgazone.com/ikoria-lair-of-behemoths-limited-tier-list/ in my experience, just open their respective list for the colours you want to play in that draft https://mtgazone.com/ikoria-lair-of-behemoths-limited-set-review-black/ and keep them open to double check. Mtgazone gives you the opinions of two players to cross reference but both are worse than LSV at the game.

If you dont care about rotation Guilds of Ravnica has the Golgari guild, and many important Green/Black cards. If you want to be rotation proof Throne of Eldraine has many of the best green and black cards recently printed.

Edit: ninjad by 2 minutes by spectre . We pretty much say the same stuff lol.

 

i think its arena cheaper to do simic flash, only rare you die to get is wolf, maybe goose. Then you can gradually get cards toward dimir flash, or do sultai one(would need a lot of rare lands for that one).

oh and I consider slitherwisp trap choice, dont burn your wildcards on it.
EDIT: you might want to skip on flash counterspell shark too

dont listen to spectre, you are fine without white in your life

 

Look man, we need to sit down and actually talk this one through.
You need a white friend in your life, otherwise you're not assembling any IKEA furniture. It's in the booklet, it's the law.

 

i have trust issues with people coming to furniture assembly with pencil like that. Proper friend would bring beer

 

Stop the pretending already guys. If we had friends, we wouldn't play magic