Magic the Gathering Arena

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

4 Merfolk Secretkeeper (ELD) 53

this one is neat! guess i should read card list from this expansion

It feels like it'd be really fucking good in a mill deck since it's two triggers on drowned secrets as well as a fairly sturdy blocker. In reanimator it's probably overkill alongside the wall (Though basically just strictly better) but having bodies for blood for bones is good too, so eh. It's not a bad idea to throw some radical ideas in there too, since they give you a way of discarding juicy stuff from your hand and if you mill over them you still get use out of them.

 

[spectre]

I'd get two Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentors there for self-discard. You got plenty of shit that can pile up in hand and Liches might and Discovery not be enough to get them where you need them.

 

[anvi]

Can't even find a net deck I like. They are mostly creatures, only a few control decks and they seem to rely on having 90 planeswalkers. I might have to make my own. I really love unmoored ego but it is no use to me at the moment because I don't know the meta enough to know what people will be using. And saving it for when you already know what they have is usually too late. So I'll have to make a control deck without that.

 

[Jason Liang]

anvi, sorry bro War of the Spark was a turd of a set that's going to stink up standard for another year. If you *are* heart set on control, that means 3Teferi and Narset, both planeswalkers from that set.

Best to find a fun and funky creature from Eldraine and build around that. Not sure if I like Eldraine yet but I admit it has some cool creatures.

 

[anvi]

Thanks finding an interesting creature and building a deck around it would be fun. I think I'm gonna aim for both that and a control deck, maybe combined into one.

 

[spectre]

Yeah, the Little Magic Negro and Narset duo will remain a control staple, because these two cunts shut down entire decks on their own.

While I agree about the general sentiment for War of the Spork, creatureless control will most likely always be like that. Most planeswankers are card advantage engines with built-in win conditions, which is what a control deck wants.
It's a shame they didn't reprint the Immoral Sun in the core, or give us something that shits on the wankers' static abilities as well.

Can't even find a net deck I like. They are mostly creatures, only a few control decks and they seem to rely on having 90 planeswalkers. I might have to make my own. I really love unmoored ego but it is no use to me at the moment because I don't know the meta enough to know what people will be using. And saving it for when you already know what they have is usually too late. So I'll have to make a control deck without that.

The trick to work with Unmoored Ego is to open up with Durex, then follow up with Thought Erasure. After that, you should have a good idea what to ban.
Though UB is more of a midrange deck rather than control - you want a bunch of value stuff: Vantress Gargoyles, Doom Whisperer, perhaps an Embodiment of Agonies or Pteramanders to end the game quickly.
The more controlling variant goes UBR for Fires of Invention and Bolas and from what I saw uses pretty much the full assortment of 'wankers.

If you want a different flavor of control, try building around Niv Mizzet, Parun. It's a bit of a bummer that a resolved Narset shits on that game plan entirely, so it most likely won't ever be top tier unless you will be wanting maindeck Fries with that.

IIRC the decks based on Wilderness Reclamation were also pretty light on 'wankers. The trick was to roll up a big ass Expansion//Explosion at the end of your turn, or copy stuff like Inescapable Blaze with Ral, Storm Conduit, who is the only 'wanker you really need.

Also, there's a thing called Esper Stax which is a control/combo with just Teferi. Not sure why the fags call it stax since the deck is based on Dance of the Manse which is an Opalescence / Replenish rolled into one, and Doom foretold is nowhere near as cool as Smokestack... but I digress.
The deck gets fucked over really hard by UG Flash, so take that into consideration. Despite this, I think it managed to win some kind of a tournament.

 

[anvi]

Thanks a lot! I can afford a few PWs but decks that have like 9 of them seem pretty lame and I couldn't afford that anyway. That Esper Stax deck looks a lot like what I want to make!

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Best to find a fun and funky creature from Eldraine and build around that. Not sure if I like Eldraine yet but I admit it has some cool creatures.

The thing I dislike about Eldraine is how heavily pushed the rares and mythics seem to be. Shit will probably calm down eventually, but some stuff like goose of paradise is probably going to be a staple for the next 2 years, and murderous rider very well may be too since "BB1: Destroy a creature or walker, lose 2 life" would be good by itself even without the body.

I will say gates with Golos and field seems to be kicking all sorts of ass and taking names. Tried that out last night and went 5-1 or some damn thing, most matches not even being close. Since people are going heavy into midrange with Eldraine that's exactly what gates and field completely roll over the top of. Might end up running that in the "Win every card" event, I'm guessing it'll mostly be outright aggro with some simic flash and simic/sultai/Oko tribal bullshit rolled in, and that should be fairly good against everything that isn't flash. And flash wouldn't be a straight loss since a gates ablaze could turn things around if it manages to resolve.

Thanks a lot! I can afford a few PWs but decks that have like 9 of them seem pretty lame and I couldn't afford that anyway. That Esper Stax deck looks a lot like what I want to make!

It's a fun deck but I would warn you that it's pretty bad for general ranked play. And burning rare wildcards on dance and doom when you're fairly new is a losing proposition since I doubt those cards are going to see much use outside of one, maybe two decks. Though if it's your jam, follow your heart. I just was (And am) stingy on crafting stuff for single decks.

 

[Perkel]

Played regularly past few days and made some calculations.

Daily
- 1000 gold a day (500 dailyquest + 500 from daily wins)
- around 4-5 cards (i got mythic rare from them yesterday)
- 250 XP toward level (every level is 1000xp) which nets you booster every two levels.

So 1 booster daily (you can buy booster for 1000gold) + 3-4 cards + xp. You can amas up to 3 daily quests by not playing for 3 days but you will miss out on daily wins gold so you will miss 1000gold. So even if you play once in while like every 3 days you can still get 2 boosters while playing every day will net you 3 + more random cards, instead of 3-4 like 10 which is effectively another booster.

Weekly
Gives you enough xp to reach few levels which is boosted by daily quests as they also have xp component for prize. So weekly you are expecting around 2-3 boosters from that.

Season
Season is effectively "monthy". Every 30 days your ranking gives you rewards. Getting to gold ranking is pretty easy and something you can get in 2 days and if you have strong deck you can get to plat and above easily. With slower deck it will take more time but it is 100% doable from what i see just playing for week or two.
Gold ranking nets you 2 boosters and 1000gold and some cosmetic crap.

So if we sum everything up and assume 30day month, if you play this game daily:
- 30 boosters in gold + 19 boosters in cards from daily wins from just dailies
- 8 boosters from weeklies (assuming you get only 2 weekly from them)
- 2 boosters + 1booster in gold from season

Total: 60 boosters in a month playing every day.
~50 if you play every 3rd day.

 

[Perkel]

As you can see by above calculation overall as i said before monetization scheme is great.
That is more than 400 cards every month. Expansion sets are every 3 months. Which means...
That if you play every 3rd day for that period you are looking at around 1200 cards here.

Spending absolutely 0$. Getting into MTG never was so cheap.

This naturally depends also on how they will tune their monetization.
They apparently already tuned it down because previously you could win 25gold for every win regardless of wins in a day. So with good deck you could do 2-3k a day in reasonable timeframe.
Also above calculations do not count codes which wotc releases once in while which give you quite a few boosters.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Ur math's wrong, the only cards that matter are rares/mythics. Those 2-3 shitty common/uncommon icrs u get each day are worthless. MTGA's monetization is a hell of a lot better than paper but it's no better than hearthstone's.

 

[anvi]

I blew all my wildcards and made my first 'real' deck, and to be extra reckless, it wasn't a net deck. It is just the control deck I've been playing but improved with 3 PWs and much better cards in place of all the common junk it had.

But I spent a whole day scouring the netdecks and I now know a lot of the cards, so the deck plays in my own way, but it uses the best possible cards for each thing that it does. Too early to say how competitive it is but I'm winning more than I'm losing, so I am clawing my way up the ranks. It is awesome to start as a noob a week ago, play all the noob decks and unlock stuff and learn the basics, figure out my own deck, play with it for a while and tweak it into better versions, and then finally boost it into being a much stronger version of itself with a bunch of wildcards. I had a dream, and now I'm playing it! And it didn't even cost me anything!

 

[anvi]

I like the calculations above. Yeah you get a lot of junk which you cant trade or deconstruct which sucks, but still, 60 boosters a month for free is cool. I like how the wildcards mean you don't need to destroy your shit to craft, you just make exactly what you want. I can't compare it with Hearthstone (fuck that game) but it seems like f2p is genuinely viable, and compared to MTG Online, this is about 100000 times cheaper.

It seems it could get expensive if you want faster than F2P though. Like you can buy 90 packs for 18,000 gems, which is a fair chunk of cash. But if you keep getting duplicates you don't need and you don't get the wildcards you want... that would be hell after spending that much money. I suspect the F2P is only generous because a lot of addicts blow a ton of money on the gems shit.

 

[Jason Liang]

Yes I was going to say that at least Narset is only uncommon so you shouldn't feel bad about wildcarding a set.

Obviously if you are going to play a ton, the Mastery passes are the best return for crystals. I opted out since the game still has stability and connection issues for me so don't feel bad about skipping it.

 

[spectre]

Good for you man, you can always share it so we can pick it apart.

Yeah, I've seen people spend abusrd amounts of money on this. I mean, one guy I played it bought the entire set mastery immediately after launch (I could tell cause he had the chandra sleeve).
Makes me wonder how much money I could possibly get for an account with closed beta goodness.
Thought it most likely going to get more valuable with time.

I will say gates with Golos and field seems to be kicking all sorts of ass and taking names. Tried that out last night and went 5-1 or some damn thing, most matches not even being close. Since people are going heavy into midrange with Eldraine that's exactly what gates and field completely roll over the top of. Might end up running that in the "Win every card" event, I'm guessing it'll mostly be outright aggro with some simic flash and simic/sultai/Oko tribal bullshit rolled in, and that should be fairly good against everything that isn't flash. And flash wouldn't be a straight loss since a gates ablaze could turn things around if it manages to resolve.

Golos/Field of the Dead/Gates has amazing late game. Almost nothing can stand to that motherfucker once it gets rolling and it almost makes me feel bad for the opponent if you go first then go: Grazer, Growth Spiral, Circuitious Route.
Turn three and I am on six lands already. Try and keep up baby.

It's also pretty cool because you can build it in a number of ways. At one point I tried splashing black heavily with Casualties of War and Little Vraska for permanent destruction. After that, I tried a Karn, Great Creator wishbox approx.
He can fetch all kinds of kinky stuff Golos usually goes first, God-Pharaoh's Statue was also nice, single Meteor Golem was a given, I could also relegate Gates Collosus to the sideboard. And there was also Icon of Ancestry to make 3/3 zombies.

In the end, I had a few problems in the Gates variant. Guild Summit is an amazing pay off card that gets raped hard by Narset (and I struggled to find an elegant solution for this guy dropping early). Another pay off card was Gates Ablaze, but I had a hard time guaranteeing an on-curve access to red. Rely too much on Plazas and it becomes abysmally slow. Put too many red gates and they start popping in multiples and Field of the Dead gets delayed. The meta at that point was pretty much all mirror matches, Cavalcade, Superfriends and UW fliers, so I decided it's not just going to work.

In the end, I made a non-gates WUG build with the plan to steal fucking everything by recurring Agent of Treachery with Teferi. So much fun... still lost to fucking UW fliers almost every time.

This naturally depends also on how they will tune their monetization.
They apparently already tuned it down because previously you could win 25gold for every win regardless of wins in a day. So with good deck you could do 2-3k a day in reasonable timeframe.
Also above calculations do not count codes which wotc releases once in while which give you quite a few boosters.

It was a fun time, they could leave that 25 gold up and nothing would have happened, except for maybe a few tryhards dying from exhaustion after an RDW all-nighter.
For all the time it takes to earn 250 gold, I think I'd rather go to sleep and tick the daily quest to re-roll from 500 to 750.

The most significant change they did, imo, was the event reward structure. Previously, it was easy as fuck to get a random rare from Constructed Event at 4 wins from the BO1.
I think I nearly got the entire checkland+shockland package from it.

I tried two runs on Traditional Draft so I can see if I could get anything useful. I suddenly remembered all the reasons why I hate it. Not only you usually get to see the entirety of the other wanker's deck,
because the matches are usually a close meatgrinder, and in the worst case scenario you get to do it three fucking times.

EDIT:
-Qwinn

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[anvi]

I got so lucky with my deck because there is a mini synergy with 2 of the cards that I didn't even notice and some of the other cards work much better than I expected, and it helps with something I thought was going to be a big weakspot. I got pretty lucky :D But I'm still early in the standard ranked so maybe I will hit a wall soon when I get past the noobs.

They need to sort out the CPU spikes, I see a lot of people talking about technical probs and I bet that is a main one. I have a 4.8ghz CPU and it still spikes up to 100% sometimes which is pretty facepalm considering it is just a card game with sparkles. Other than that, my only dream for this game is to have a 2 headed giant mode. I had so much fun playing that in the past, it is almost like a whole new game because you can play as a support deck. But I doubt they will add it because it was never that popular and they have limited resources. And they probably don't want to start splitting up the players. The general basic "Play" option rarely has me wait more than 5 seconds which I bet they are proud of and don't want to water down.

 

[anvi]

once you are happy with what you have and stop being newbie here is the flow:

dont spend money, play just enough to complete daily quest, i dont even bother to get 4 daily wins.
Once expansion hits in you start playing ranked draft to collect cards.
Once you lose all the money you wild card whatever you are missing.

I ended m20 with about 10 mythic wildcards this way i think.

So yeah, not even trying.

Thanks for the tips, that sounds awesome. I will work towards a second deck that is different to my first one and then I can probably just play those 2 decks and start saving my cash like you said.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[anvi]

That seems like a good way to play, I kinda did a similar thing. I know I could win faster with a burn or aggro deck, and I know I could win more often with a net deck. But I did neither, made a slow control deck that was my own idea so probably not super competitive. But the upside is I love playing it

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

That seems like a good way to play, I kinda did a similar thing. I know I could win faster with a burn or aggro deck, and I know I could win more often with a net deck. But I did neither, made a slow control deck that was my own idea so probably not super competitive. But the upside is I love playing it

post it!

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Golos/Field of the Dead/Gates has amazing late game. Almost nothing can stand to that motherfucker once it gets rolling and it almost makes me feel bad for the opponent if you go first then go: Grazer, Growth Spiral, Circuitious Route.
Turn three and I am on six lands already. Try and keep up baby.

It's also pretty cool because you can build it in a number of ways. At one point I tried splashing black heavily with Casualties of War and Little Vraska for permanent destruction. After that, I tried a Karn, Great Creator wishbox approx.
He can fetch all kinds of kinky stuff Golos usually goes first, God-Pharaoh's Statue was also nice, single Meteor Golem was a given, I could also relegate Gates Collosus to the sideboard. And there was also Icon of Ancestry to make 3/3 zombies.

In the end, I had a few problems in the Gates variant. Guild Summit is an amazing pay off card that gets raped hard by Narset (and I struggled to find an elegant solution for this guy dropping early). Another pay off card was Gates Ablaze, but I had a hard time guaranteeing an on-curve access to red. Rely too much on Plazas and it becomes abysmally slow. Put too many red gates and they start popping in multiples and Field of the Dead gets delayed. The meta at that point was pretty much all mirror matches, Cavalcade, Superfriends and UW fliers, so I decided it's not just going to work.

In the end, I made a non-gates WUG build with the plan to steal fucking everything by recurring Agent of Treachery with Teferi. So much fun... still lost to fucking UW fliers almost every time.

Narset is an absolute bitch, but fortunately she's way less common now after rotation and Eldraine. This is what I've been playing, chugging right along extremely well. Got matched against a guy playing esper dance who used the fairy to pull ego out of his wishboard and remove my fields before any entered play, but then I just self milled myself with Jace and won regardless. Final turn was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to self mill myself that turn so he didn't get a chance to untap and fuck my Jace somehow, ended up drawing 12 by playing one summit and tapping all gates, playing another summit, playing a gate to draw 2 more, then Jace myself to mill the final 2 cards from my deck and then draw for exacties. Felt nice.

Spoiler

4 Circuitous Route (GRN) 125
3 Field of the Dead (M20) 247
4 Gates Ablaze (RNA) 102
3 Golos, Tireless Pilgrim (M20) 226
4 Growth Spiral (RNA) 178
2 Gruul Guildgate (RNA) 249
3 Guild Summit (GRN) 41
1 Orzhov Guildgate (RNA) 253
1 Island (ELD) 257
1 Forest (GRN) 264
1 Boros Guildgate (GRN) 244
4 Plaza of Harmony (RNA) 254
2 Selesnya Guildgate (GRN) 255
3 Simic Guildgate (RNA) 258
1 Stomping Ground (RNA) 259
4 Teferi, Time Raveler (WAR) 221
1 Time Wipe (WAR) 223
2 Breeding Pool (RNA) 246
2 Gateway Plaza (WAR) 246
1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries (WAR) 54
3 Hydroid Krasis (RNA) 183
2 Izzet Guildgate (GRN) 251
3 Agent of Treachery (M20) 43
1 Deafening Clarion (GRN) 165
2 Azorius Guildgate (RNA) 243
1 Rakdos Guildgate (RNA) 255
1 Flame Sweep (M20) 139

2 Veil of Summer (M20) 198
2 Planar Cleansing (M20) 33
2 Negate (M20) 69
1 Mystical Dispute (ELD) 58
2 Tamiyo, Collector of Tales (WAR) 220
2 Archway Angel (RNA) 3
2 Arboreal Grazer (WAR) 149
2 Disdainful Stroke (GRN) 37

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[spectre]

Narset is an absolute bitch, but fortunately she's way less common now after rotation and Eldraine.

Fired up your deck, made exactly two changes that felt immediately logical - Clarion for fourth Summit, upgraded Island to Steam Vents (I figure, you need those red mana sources to make Gates Ablaze happen consistently).
What I get is a fucking WUR that drops an on-curve Narset, so there's that.

EDIT: You'll never guess what I was matched against in the very next game.

Anyways, my general first impression was that 4 growth spirals isn't enough. I would struggle to put the 4 grazers back in, even at the expense of two Circuitious Routes because 28 lands will flood you hard and you really need to have something that puts them to use.

Oh, and maindeck something that fucks Narset in the ass. Fry and Baby Vraska are the only things I can think of at the moment, and neither is too appealing.

-Qwinn