this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I have spent far too long playing Magic Arena when it’s really just awful in pretty much every way you can imagine.
The economy is unbelievably broken because randomised packs are the only direct way you can use your gold to get cards, and they’ll almost never have the cards you need or in the quantities you need to have a halfway competitive deck.
Wildcards do allow you to choose to redeem them for specific cards, but they have to be of the same rarity as the wildcard and the mythic and especially rare wildcards you need so many of are always in short supply. Getting anything decent without spending real money requires a ton of grinding. I honestly wouldn’t even mind having to spend money if I could just buy the cards directly like in Magic Online, it’s much jankier but in my opinion better predecessor, but you can’t.
Probably the best part of the game is just the digital implementation of the game mechanics, but even there are some seriously annoying issues which come up not infrequently and can lose you games (like the autotapper for some reason valuing 1 life over keeping an extra colour of mana open for responses).
Overall it just feels like 95% of the time it’s just me grinding playing games with fast aggro decks I don’t even enjoy (I’m into control but it takes way longer to get your rewards that way). It’s just so so much worse than the paper game I love and I don’t think I would ever play it if it weren’t for the fact playing in paper is stupidly expensive for pretty much any 1v1 competitive format (commander is great and all and I have a couple decks, but it’s not my preferred format).
"Why do they play unlicensed simulations of our card games?" Said right before making it impossible to function in licensed online card game.
I agree 100%. - the Magic Arena economy is crap. And grinding is almost unavoidable, because even if you are willing to spend real money on the game to speed up the card aquisition process the value you get from most store purchases is also crap.
This would not be so bad if the grinding itself was fun, but it's designed to require you to not only play but also win games, which brings a lot of bad incentives - most people will just stick to the same meta decks, favor decks that kill quickly so you can get more games in a short amount of time, concede on the first sign of disadvantage, and so on.
Yeah, I played arena from alpha to release and a little while after that, and then off and on for a few years but the fact that it’s basically impossible to hop into playing at a decently competitive level is the exact same reason why I hated paper standard, but some how even worse because I can’t even buy the singles, I’m stuck playing the rng game with digital packs, to cards that I don’t really own, I’m just borrowing until WOTC decides to kill arena.
arena on low setting brings my i7 integrated GPU to it's knees, my laptop fans run on full blast and my room gets hot, if I get matched with an opponent that has a pet with particle effects it dips into single digit fps. meanwhile I get 45fps pretty consistently in wow