MTG Salvation

It's been about a week now. In bronze rank nearly every deck I face is now a meta deck. Apparently I'm the only person still playing with a janky version of the starter deck. Pretty sure I'm tapping out of the beta. Dont really have the energy to grind against U/B control decks or mono green stompy over and over so I can buy a ePack every other day and hope for a decent card.

Quote from WizardMN »

I was involved in the Closed Beta so I got the 3 planeswalkers. I also redeemed the code for a free Sealed event on Arena which grants 9 packs guaranteed. I want to mention these things as they are advantages that I may have over a brand new player that didn't do either one (though, there are some places to get free or cheap redemption codes for the sealed event).

9 free packs is a lot though. That's 9,000 coins. I've done all my quests since wipe and am currently at 4,225 coins (bought one pack, so would be 5,225). So about halfway to what you got for free. I don't have a lot to strip from with the free decks neither. I mean, they're "fine" but since each deck represents a different color, I can play the R/B deck they gave me, or I can kinda mix it up with the mono red deck? It's not a huge pool of cards to play with. I mean, all in all it's all just "fine." But not enough to compete with the guys who dropped money already and have 4 copies of all the mythics they want. I have 3 to 4 pages for each color if I flip through my collection. Starting closed beta I was able to construct decks, and right now I feel like I can't construct anything and am forced to grind with their decks, and that's not very fun. I just feel like the F2P experience took a big nose dive between the two betas, and it wasn't winning any awards before. Not too mention, once the meta establishes itself and you're back to facing only tier 1 meta decks, as a F2P player, it's going to get worse.

What I actually find more amazing than the endless rat colonies, is the huge number of people in Singleton all playing the same expensive decks. I've run into this deck at least 8 times - https://aetherhub.com/Deck/Public/23722 and there's a green/white deck that everyone is playing as well that has a large number of rare/mythic cards in it. Rat colony is a cheap deck to make, but I can't get over how many people are dumping real cash money into this game already in order to play huge netdecks in things like 'free singleton weekend'

Quote from goblin_chef »

Come on, people. Rat Colony deck is possibly the easiest thing to win against. It has simplistic and obvious game plan, people usually don't run proper answers or card draw and the card itself doesn't increase its toughness, having to trade with basically everything, including (but not limited to) saproling tokens, soldier tokens, vampire tokens and even Reassembling Skeleton. And you can wipe them with basically anything, including Golden Demise, Radiating Lightning, Shake the Foundations and Plague Mare. Heck, Dual Shot takes out two at once. If you face the deck regularly, just adapt a bit.

Yeah duh, just draw your one Golden Demise before turn 5 in a Singleton game. So easy people.

Quote from Colt47 »

Out of curiousity, what deck were you stuck with?

There's a mono deck for each color to start. (red dragon, black zombie, white weenies, blue artifact, and green creature. The black one is the only halfway decent one, but I've also had ok success with blue.) Each day there's been a quest to unlock a new duo color deck. The first day I got a W/G deck based on creature enchantments and it is, how you say, not good. Today I just got a R/B deck that actually looks somewhat viable, so I guess this will be the one I run until I can grind out enough cards on my own. (unfortunately my current quest is play White or Green spells so I'm stuck with the W/G one until I clear that.) I can post decklists if you like. So far though economy stinks and new player experience a massive grind.

The closed beta just wiped, so now we're in open beta. I played closed and had some pretty decent decks and plenty of fun janky stuff. For some reason they felt much more generous during the closed beta. As a FTP player I was able to make a lot. Starting over from the wipe with nothing, and seeing the "new player" experience. I can't imagine anyone putting up with FTP in this game and sticking around. The starting decks are such garbage, just the crappiest commons and most useless sorceries you wouldnt even pick in a draft, and you're up against all the dorks who dump $300 in a beta game on open beta day 1, that I see no conceivable reason for anyone to play this FTP. It's just game after game of getting spanked by people playing Turbo Fog and decks like this. Luckily you can still get paired with other FTP players using the crappy free decks, so you can get some incremental progress toward your quests, but once those players finally plop down cash, grind enough, or leave, new players are not even going to get that luxury. I've played each day since open beta and still cant make a deck of my own or even afford a draft yet. It's a pretty awful experience. 2/10.

I've been trying to make an infinite combo Bezenlock deck work in Arena. Unfortunately it's usually more frustrating than it's worth, but I've pulled it off a few times. Singleton was fun with it half the time, and the 40 life event was fun 10% of the time, but in those events where everyone plays RDW or control decks it's hard to get off. In quick play, because their matchmaking system is idiotic, it matches up with Saproling decks 9 out of 10 times so, i dont know if that's fun for you but this is the deck - it has a lot of combo synergy and the main one is get out Bontu's Monument and Pitiless Plunderer, get Oathsworn Vampire on board and one of your creatures that lets you sacrifice a creature, then start sacrificing Oathsworn and recast him with the treasure Plunderer generates over and over until Bontu's Monument drains your opponents life :

I think Arena is just boring as hell. I dont have a huge problem with the UI - it takes some getting used to and they could certainly use more tutorial modes like how to work the stack and some of the more complicated interactions but it's much better than MTGO. The economy is pretty crappy, especially since they somehow made rare cards just as hard to get as epic-rare ones which is mindboggling stupid. Mostly though the game is just extremely boring to play. A lot of that is the fault of the standard meta - everyone and their mother playing one of the two types of decks, U/W control or R/B aggro. But even in the other game modes they offer (which, it's absurd they charge gold for something like "players have 40 health" when it should just be another free alternative mode) all you see is the same thing over and over. I can only stomach playing against blue control so may times before I start to question why I'm wasting so much of my free time watching some guy play with his solitaire netdeck. They need WAY more modes of play to mitigate the stagnant standard meta that permeates everything and those modes need to be free, not pay to play tournament structured events.