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Magic the Gathering Arena

lukaszek

the determinator
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deterministic system > RNG
 
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Dawkinsfan69

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My 10 win ravnica block event bounce deck:

4 Dovin's Acuity (RNA) 168
2 Clear the Mind (RNA) 34
4 Dovin's Veto (WAR) 193
1 Ashiok, Dream Render (WAR) 228
4 Callous Dismissal (WAR) 44
4 Arrester's Admonition (RNA) 31
4 Unexplained Disappearance (GRN) 56
3 Kaya's Wrath (RNA) 187
1 The Elderspell (WAR) 89
2 Thought Collapse (RNA) 57
1 Teferi's Time Twist (WAR) 72
1 Liliana, Dreadhorde General (WAR) 97
3 Smothering Tithe (RNA) 22
3 Depose // Deploy (RNA) 225

5 Island (RIX) 193
2 Plains (RIX) 192
4 Swamp (RIX) 194
4 Godless Shrine (RNA) 248
4 Watery Grave (GRN) 259
4 Hallowed Fountain (RNA) 251

This deck was so much fun to play, not even gonna use the stained glass arts just had fun in the event
 
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https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-digital/mtg-arena-state-beta-june-27-2019

Here's the video, though there's more info in the link above.


List of news/changes. "Historic" will be the name of the MTGA eternal format, and they will be putting in Amonkhet and Kaladesh blocks at some point but not at launch. We will be getting new starter decks and existing players will get them lukaszek . They're removing the weekly 3 packs and adding a "Mastery tree" to let you pick unlocks (Which will change each time a new set launches), and they'll be adding a "Battle pass" to add more goodies to it (Packs, gold, gems, foils, sleeves, etc) like what Scruffy and I talked about in the past, and it will cost 3,400 gems which is to say $20. Since that lasts for the duration of a set it'll run for 3-4 months, and it remains to be seen how good that actually will be since they didn't go into detail. Considering we're losing 3 packs a week because of the mastery system I'd hope it would be pretty fucking good, but it might be WotC taking another nibble out of free to play MTGA.
 

Scruffy

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Codex 2012 Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014
pets?
no more 3 packs per week?
is it time to sell my account already?
 
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Scruffy lukaszek Dawkinsfan69
Went through the video and snapped pictures of the mastery system and glued them together. That's as far as they got in the video itself, but that was only 6 "Tabs" into it out of 10 so it continues beyond that, so there may be some bigass prizes at the end. So a lot of this depends on how specifically it works. The big flaming balls are "Mastery points" I thought, so maybe these are daily logins? I honestly don't know. The free track does include M20 packs though so we very well may be getting out 3 packs a week equivalent in the new system anyway, with the occasional angry red ball so we can pick up cosmetics on occasion too. The gem rewards included does make it seem a little more enticing just because getting up to the 3,400 point from whereever you're at now means this will spit out approximately 2,000 gems by the end of it (Barring big prizes, and barring this track being something hard to advance on) which means it would be inexpensive to roll into the fancy pass for the NEXT set. The prizes look pretty good, so once this launches and we can see how it actually works (If it's daily logins or what) it might be a pretty good drip feed of shit for cheap. With 2,000 gem "Refund" by the end it looks like you'd also be getting roughly 20 more packs, 10,000 gold, 20 mythic ICRs, random bullshit like styles and cats, and more balls which may be limited to styles.

uHyzWgC.jpg
 

spectre

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The packs per week will be replaced by "mastery", you'll be getting free packs as you levelup (though how exactly do you levelup is anybody's guess, doing quests? or just wins?) as well as some additional shit to choose from - cosmetics, ICR, etc.
This will most likely break the weekly rhythm of playing you had with the previous system, but I don't think they'll be cutting down on the number of cards you'll be getting.
And obviously, they want to make people throw gems at it.

The big question is which other reward systems will be overhauled together with this. Will they finally unfuck the Vault (it's inane to keep it above 100% just to see your progress)? Will they let you unlock shit beyond your daily 15 wins?
Will they be scrapping the ICRs? Or is it replacing the season rewards? It seems like the mastery system shares a bunch of stuff with these, but who knows.

Real darned shame they're not throwing in Amkptkhtpk and Khaladesh. I'm not getting the argument about the supposedly fantastic meta. Yea, it was pretty great before they shat out WAR, now it's mostly warped towards Narset, Baby Teferi, Nissa and the decks that can use them best.
I would get an argument that they want to ease people into this idea and they're still figuring out the booster pricing for the eternal format. Apparently, there won't be any ranked in this mode, so they'd better get creative with this shit
because at the moment is looks like one big afterthought.

EDITH: @up, I "think" it's supposed to work like this, f2p guys get the top row, if you buy into the premium mastery, you'll get the benefits of the second row (the first reward ever being a pet cat seems like an obvious tell, no way in hell they're handing this shit out f2p). At first I was excited that they're handing out gems, but on second thought that felt too good to be true. In any case, the "three fiddy hundra" investment feels a tad steep, but it looks like it can potentially pay for itself in some part. This would confirm my suspicion that they want to ease the "mostly f2p" crowd into the idea of buying gems from time to time.

Now, the biggest question is how you advance this shit. If it is supposed to work similar to the old weekly packs model, I'm thinking you either get one advancement per finished quest AND/OR every 5 wins. This would result in a somewhat similar progression speed.
 
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Jason Liang

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Excited to get muh Paradoxical Outcomes and Kari Zev back again.

But we pretty much already knew Kaladesh and Anomkhet were coming back. They already developed the assets for those sets, it's free cash for them. What would be even more exciting is if they retro'd return to Innistrad block.
 

spectre

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I think most folks would be satisfied if they went back all the way to Origins. People would get to play around with their favorite 'wankers from the very beginning of their stories, back when Yideon was a puny Savannah Lion.
They might even make a decent themed event out of it.

Myself, I'd also love for them to throw us a bone with Modern Horizons, but we'll see.
 

Dawkinsfan69

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I'm mostly happy about the 2 ranked draft formats at a time thing, although kinda sad that I guess we'll never see drafts for rotated sets again.

So Mastery Pass is 3400 gems but you can buy Mastery Pass +10 levels for 5400 gems according to the video. This is pretty scary because it reminds me of Dota 2's battle pass, where it's basically impossible to get levels and you essentially need to buy each level. No joke people spend like $500 or more just to unlock cosmetics in that game for each battle pass
 

Dawkinsfan69

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important info might be "save 20%". Since you are buying it with gems - it would mean that you advance lvls by soaking gems in the system to lvl up?
It appears crazy... We get equation 10*x*0.8 = 2000, so it will be 250 gems per lvl? Its crazy

Yeah good catch, the "save 20%" implies that you'll be able to buy levels. In case you guys are unfamiliar with Dota 2's system, here's a vid that kinda goes over the cost of their recent battle pass:



If they're actually selling levels for 250 gems each I'd imagine the levels are gonna be pretty damn hard to get. In Dota 2 the higher levels are actually literally impossible to get without spending hundreds of dollars
 
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how odd... it doesnt give 2020 packs in paid mode

So Mastery Pass is 3400 gems but you can buy Mastery Pass +10 levels for 5400 gems according to the video.
important info might be "save 20%". Since you are buying it with gems - it would mean that you advance lvls by soaking gems in the system to lvl up?
It appears crazy... We get equation 10*x*0.8 = 2000, so it will be 250 gems per lvl? Its crazy
It does give M20 packs in paid mode too, it's just that they're rotated along with other packs that'll be remaining in standard, and you get a lot of M20 packs on the free-track too.

I'm also really concerned about the mastery thing costing gems/money to advance. The specifics of how you gain levels will really determine if this is worth a fuck or not, but it also determines if we'll still be earning roughly 3 packs a week. If we earn 6 "Mastery levels" over the course of a week that would maintain the 3 pack a week free goodies we've got now. It's roughly 150 gems-per-dollar if you aren't buying at the $100 pack level, so that sounds pretty fucking gross if levels are 250 gems each unless we can also earn levels at a reasonable rate just from normal play. And I hope normal play isn't "Lol bruh your 15th win daily each day is 50 gems get cracking" since I enjoy playing MTGA but not that fucking much. All of this shit is actually making me reconsider buying the M20 preorder just because now I'm paranoid they're going to ruin the free card acquisition and I don't want to feel like I HAVE to spend money on MTGA, rather than "I enjoy this, I'll spend some money".

Edit: Although it's worth bearing in mind that the "Premium-deluxe-ultra mastery pass" thing with "+10 levels!" may be fairly innocuous. It might, MIGHT mean that there are 10 additional levels and it might be that's where the more expensive prizes are. So it could be that everyone will be filling up the pass regularly through normal play, but if you splash for the fancy one that "Save 20%" is because the extra cost adds more expensive shit like larger bundles of packs, bigger gold/gem rewards, etc in those extra 10 levels. Since they didn't scroll to the end of the rewards in the video it's possible that 9 pages are the free and basic-paid tracks and then the final page is for the high rollers. I wouldn't count on this being the case since it's probably going to be a nightmare, but it's possible.
 
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Dawkinsfan69

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And I hope normal play isn't "Lol bruh your 15th win daily each day is 50 gems get cracking" since I enjoy playing MTGA but not that fucking much. All of this shit is actually making me reconsider buying the M20 preorder just because now I'm paranoid they're going to ruin the free card acquisition and I don't want to feel like I HAVE to spend money on MTGA, rather than "I enjoy this, I'll spend some money".

Yeah, if they're expecting me to play like 8 hours of magic a day in order to keep up with levels they can go fuck themselves. Something that I don't really understand is that battle passes are generally really well received when imo dota 2's is one of the scummiest f2p business models I've ever seen. But because people seem to like battle passes they can get away with fucking people over harder. People freak out over loot boxes all the time but that's nothing compared to the battle pass.

Another odd thing is that the battle pass rewards gems? So you pay gems for the pass and possibly for levels but then they give you gems back as a reward for getting levels? That's a big ol' red flag if I've ever seen one
 
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EDIT: losing 3 packs/week sucks but... I am not that concerned really. It is not where each on of us get majority of cards. Also I imagine you guys already got 40k+ gold since WAR started. Imagine you just bought some extra packs
It still hurts quite a bit. Over the span of a month that's 12 packs (So 12 rares/mythic rares even if we ignore the uncommons and commons) and 12 pips moved along the wildcard track, so 2 guaranteed rare wildcards on top of the ones pulled from the packs. And those wildcards ARE a fairly big deal since they let you specifically make whatever you want.

Only reason why I hope it's worth it is 'cause it was like that thing Scruffy and I talked about months ago, where it'd be nice if there was a "Delayed gratification" way to spend money for more favorable rewards similar to the newbie pack. This sure as hell isn't $5 for 5 packs and $15 worth of gems or whatever the newbie pack was, but it might be similarly decent if they don't get too scummy with it. It could potentially be a better deal than these set preorders at least.

And I hope normal play isn't "Lol bruh your 15th win daily each day is 50 gems get cracking" since I enjoy playing MTGA but not that fucking much. All of this shit is actually making me reconsider buying the M20 preorder just because now I'm paranoid they're going to ruin the free card acquisition and I don't want to feel like I HAVE to spend money on MTGA, rather than "I enjoy this, I'll spend some money".

Yeah, if they're expecting me to play like 8 hours of magic a day in order to keep up with levels they can go fuck themselves. Something that I don't really understand is that battle passes are generally really well received when imo dota 2's is one of the scummiest f2p business models I've ever seen. But because people seem to like battle passes they can get away with fucking people over harder. People freak out over loot boxes all the time but that's nothing compared to the battle pass.

Another odd thing is that the battle pass rewards gems? So you pay gems for the pass and possibly for levels but then they give you gems back as a reward for getting levels? That's a big ol' red flag if I've ever seen one
That's why I have the faintest hope that gaining levels in that won't be tied to spending gems, because "Spend 250 gems to gain a level and be rewarded 200 gems" sounds really suspect. Admittedly that's on the paid track though, so they might be thinking "Those fuckers paid to get access to this anyway and there are packs and mythic ICRs on this track, so rather than an empty space we'll just give them 200 gems".

I actually know jack shit about DotA2's battle pass system but I'd be inclined to give it a pass just because DotA2's completely free to play anyway. The equivalent in MTGA terms would be if all the cards were completely free but they wanted you to spend 2,400 gems to get the pass and 250 gems per level just to get styles/card backs/cats. MTGA's tolerably free to play but not to the degree where I'd be as forgiving if they go bonkers with this shit which is why I'm already clutching my fucking pearls over the 3 packs a week.
 

Dawkinsfan69

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I actually know jack shit about DotA2's battle pass system but I'd be inclined to give it a pass just because DotA2's completely free to play anyway. The equivalent in MTGA terms would be if all the cards were completely free but they wanted you to spend 2,400 gems to get the pass and 250 gems per level just to get styles/card backs/cats. MTGA's tolerably free to play but not to the degree where I'd be as forgiving if they go bonkers with this shit which is why I'm already clutching my fucking pearls over the 3 packs a week.

I'm just trying to point out the psychological manipulation in Dota 2's battle pass. Dota's pass has about 1000 levels, and it's only possible to get 250 levels for 'free' (without buying levels), and that's only if you play like 8+ hours every day. The cool rewards are of course unlocked at much higher levels (400+) and buying 100 levels costs like $50.

So anyway the unsuspecting player sees some cool reward, thinks they can unlock it by just playing the game, then realizes that after like 3 months of playing consistently they're only level 20 and they'll need to shell out a couple hundred bucks for whatever they're after.

You're right, WoTC shouldn't be able to get away with something THAT predatory, but I wouldn't be surprised if they try. I'm pretty mad about losing the 3 packs/wk too because I really doubt the replacement system will be better for us. I'm expecting the grind to be insane.
 
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I'm just trying to point out the psychological manipulation in Dota 2's battle pass. Dota's pass has about 1000 levels, and it's only possible to get 250 levels for 'free' (without buying levels), and that's only if you play like 8+ hours every day. The cool rewards are of course unlocked at much higher levels (400+) and buying 100 levels costs like $50.
That's definitely true. The scummy obfuscation of what you're getting for your money is arguably worse than loot boxes and shit anyway. Loot boxes can scratch the gambling itch people have and keep them paying, whereas something like that may burn someone once and then get them to bail on it (Or spend more money to get what they wanted out of it, then be unwilling to stop paying due to sunk costs).

The fact that they're so vague about the new system also makes me think it's probably going to be worse for us. I have a hard time believing that they don't already have all the pricing and advancement nailed down and finalized with less than a week before it launches, so the fact that they aren't talking about it in more detail is mighty suspicious. Edit: Although given the big mess of non-stop changes during the Valve sale maybe I'm giving companies too much credit and they'll be fucking with everything right down to the wire.
 

Jason Liang

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+M+MRED ALERT BOYS, RED ALERT!+M+M lukaszek Scruffy Dawkinsfan69 Jason Liang spectre

Code "MYTHICMAGIC" for 3 random mythics from GRN, RNA, or WAR. I got two copies of Rhonas and a Vraska, Golgari Queen. Code expires July 2nd so hop on it quickish.
mtga097.jpg

So one great card and two fun cards. That's my fourth Vannifar, so that's something to play around with anyway. Really wasn't much more I would have preferred other than more jellyfish.
 

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