Magic: the Gathering - Maro's Mistakes

[Moridam]

the jace editions of classic spells are all worse than existing printings anyway, hard pass

[Tomiko]

The new Opt promo art is INSANELY nice. I am getting 4 JP foil ones the second Hareruya puts them up for sale.

Spoiler for possible huge img:

That looks really nice.

[Gokku]

Sooo.... Toys r us liquidation sale is tomorrow is it worth getting up to raid it first thing?

[Moridam]

doubtful. what product do they typically carry that would be worth raiding? a few boxes of recent standard junk and some precon stuff?

well, nothing that would interest me anyway, but i pretty much only play legacy so YMMV

[Gokku]

doubtful. what product do they typically carry that would be worth raiding? a few boxes of recent standard junk and some precon stuff?

well, nothing that would interest me anyway, but i pretty much only play legacy so YMMV

well it was a thought of mine to see if i could find any unsold old product , maybe as far back as like gate crash.... i was mostly thinking cannon fodder for drafting with friends

[Viserdes]

I've read accounts already of people trying to get deals on this only to find the product sent back to the distributor. This is because Toys r us doesnt own the mtg/pokemon tcg stuff and its stocked by a 3rd pt distributor, same is true for the walmart and target tcg sections.

[Cantih]

So MTG Arena is out of NDA.

I havn't played it much, busier with other things. And while I havn't launched it post update to check things, but from how it was the past couple months I can say it's okay, needs some speed optimizations, UI work, tooltips, and an overhaul of the collection/deckbuilding tab.

[Weltall]

Did they ever say if it was going to have Modern/Legacy cards? If not, it has no chance. Awhile back, it was going to be "from X point forward, where X is like...Ixalan". I've been in it since the first Closed Beta and the Dino deck (if you could get it all) was WAY OP.

[Cantih]

Presently it's set to be Amonkhet forward. And from what I get the feeling of, is it depends on it's success.
If it's middling, then it'll just be that. If it's well received, I've heard some kind of noises that they will go back and add in older sets, like MTGO did with pre-Invasion sets. It's just that adding in blocks/mechanics take time.

Basically, if it does well and they see an opportunity to sink MTGO, they're gonna take it. Because the reasonable thing would be to take the resources being used on Arena, and use it to fix/5.0 MTGO, and they aren't doing that.

[Weltall]

So long as it has all of Standard and is free, I'll use the shit out of it.

[Cantih]

I played a few games last night.

It does need some granularity in it's stops, improvements in tooltips (I can't remember the exact details of explore, and it's not on the card or keyword tooltip. And there's a button in the collection tab idfk what it does), and an overhaul of the collection.
Speed is decent now, though there are a few slowdowns I think aren't attributable to waiting on the opponent.

[fantasticdan]

I've been playing a bit of MTG arena, seems ok. Was able to make a decent blue/black control deck (turned rare/mythic wildcards into 2 scarab gods, vriskas contempts, hostage takers, azcanta, rare blue/black lands). Haven't played MTG since whenever scourge was, but I'm crushing people in this, I assume mostly a bunch of noobs from hearthstone.

The UI is mostly fine, but is really obtuse for certain things, like responding to 'unless the opponent pays X" spells. I've noticed there are bugs where (in the default auto mode), my phases and opportunities to do things are sometimes skipped; IE playing an ability or instant before my turn/untap. The auto mode can also make pretty bad decisions with the land it taps (like using up colored before colorless), which can fuck you. TLDR: you need to stick to manual mode, which is tedious because you need to ok every step of every phase and every effect of every card played by both players, even if you have absolutely nothing you could play at that time.

F2P looks sketchy if you want to play a variety of decks, and what you get per $ if you were to spend it seems very underwhelming. If they are aiming to compete with hearthstone/shadowverse/gwent/etc (rather than just against their own physical cards and MTGO), they could stand to be a lot more generous, and get rid of the second currency (gems), which as far as I can tell, serves no purpose beyond obfuscating costs and fucking players with unspendable remainders.

TLDR: I think MTGA could be pretty good if they make the auto mode less shitty (or offer something in between that and full manual mode), and the economy was less greedy.

[Cantih]

There is supposed to be an economy blog post on Wednesday.

[fantasticdan]

I hope they do change it for the better, and MTGA is successful. The game at it's core is quite fun, and has far more depth than the competition.

[Cantih]

The economy post is out. https://forums.mtgarena.com/forums/threads/26770

Weeks late, and saying absolutely nothing. (The daily reward changes were announced yesterday, it's only a 20-30% boost, not the fundamentals needed. And the Kaladesh freebies program are unknown about their status after beta.)

This and "pre-order a box" chase cards continuing: "Hasbro hears ya, Hasbro don't care".

I'll play Dominaria draft this weekend since I've been saving up for it, and I'll log in to claim the Kaladesh stuff. But unless they pull their head out of their ass before they come out of beta/last wipe, I'm done with this.

[Viserdes]

aside from being money grubbers, i dont see why they dont just do what they did with magic duels' card acquisition system. Basically, you could never get duplicates and at a certain number of packs youd own all the cards without the randomization. could probably still keep all the other rewards and wild cards too, but at least the packs would be vastly improved.

[fantasticdan]

I can't imagine they would benefit from being so stingy in the long run, especially with so much competition in the market offering better f2p, and more value per $. They would be better served monetizing cosmetic shit (like foils for whales to chase after, avatars, etc) rather than imposing a massive cost of entry.

[Cantih]

They don't even have foils coded in. And atm they have a static pair of avatars that they change every set release, you're always one, opponent is always the other.

Shit, they could even have other cosmetic alters for cash. Code in a white border (or gold, or silver for non-Un sets), or even the old pre-modern card frame (though that would take a bit of work, some modern cards would need a template work up, stuff like planeswalkers, leveler, sagas, devoid, etc.)

Card backs? Nope. They could do that Arabian Nights one they had to drop when they realized, "oh, it'd mark the cards". Do ones for all the other expansions, tons of shit.

Seriously, Hasbro corporate needs to be smacked upside the head.

[fantasticdan]

Yeah there is a ton easy money cosmetic junk they could implement, it seems they aren't paying attention to other digital card games at all.

For card backs, one easy thing they could have done is repurpose the art from old boxes and rule books.

Spoiler: show

People would eat that shit up.

[Moridam]

congrats to anyone who's been holding duals, i just checked prices recently and the world has gone insane. i think underground seas shot up by close to $300 in the last month alone, and even the nonblue stuff has skyrocketed; the badlands i paid ~40 a pop for in 2016 are now pushing 200.