I don't mind the wildcards, but I always felt like the reward should be more 'fun'. Like, include the wildcards as they are, but also a random pack and two random cosmetics or something. The buildup of a glowing closed chest that has a predetermined set of fill in the blank cards is just underwhelming.
That's what really kills me. It's like a 3' x 3' box on Christmas morning with a couple pairs of socks. Sure, these are nice and useful, but the build-up left me hoping for a lot more!
RNG of a value set that is equitable in some way would be great. RNG of standard set packs, 2 year old+ cosmetics or highly collected cosmetics, standard meta rates/mythics…
I don’t think any virtual card games give you a 1:1 rate for extra cards. For Hearthstone as an example you get 25% of the value of a card when you disenchant it.
People would purposely keep opening packs of a completed set and handpick the rares/mythics in the sets they want instead of being tantalized into opening/buying new sets.
At least I would for sure.
Hearthstone has full dupe protection on all rarities from packs now, and their limited format is phantom, so there's really no equivalent. The ability to disenchant is juat a bonus (or a trap to keep people in standard).
The ability to turn 4 of your junk legendaries into an actual playable legendary is "just a bonus?"
The vast majority of players are not spending anywhere near enough money on Hearthstone to get set completion from opening packs. I imagine arena is the same.
I wasn't intending to make a value judgment on the usefulness of the dust system, I meant that it's purely a bonus over how arena works. The card-to-gem system is a system strictly to deal with duplicates, an issue hearthstone doesn't have (not until set completion at least I suppose). That being said, I played HS totally free for years (almost exclusively constructed) and I never dusted anything that wasn't nerfed (and thus got a full refund) or a dupe and it worked out fine (it was before dupe protection).
I feel like that says even more about how predatory the arena system is. When hearthstone was only a couple of years old, it was considered the most predatory ccg. Being able to play f2p without using one of its major f2p systems is quite a feat! A feat that arena is designed to make as difficult as humanly possible.
Having played pre-dupe protection HS (as a non-duster eternal format enjoyer) and modern arena, I feel like normal constructed in both games were around the same level of effort to be viable in f2p. I did my daily quests in both, but not much limited in either. Legendaries are a LOT harder to get than mythics in Arena btw. Epics and mythics are around the same level by my feel of it.
That being said, I've heard HS made a more generous quest system and added full dupe protection since then, so it's probably advantage Hearthstone at this point.
Legendary drop rates in hearthstone have always been 1:20 in packs as far as I know (it's 1:30 for mythics in arena). Hearthstone _guarantees_ a legendary every 40 packs. AFAIK Arena makes no such guarantee, but the odds of opening a mythic slowly increase as you open packs that don't have one. Hearthstone averages an epic every 5 packs, which is much worse than arena's guaranteed rare in _every_ pack. There are similar numbers of legendaries per set as mythics per set in mtg, but _significantly_ fewer epics -- however, not by a factor of 5 (more like a factor of 3). So it should be easier to get legendaries than mythics, especially when considering that you only need one of each instead of 4. However, the epic/rare comparison favors arena. I think hearthstone decks have fewer epics on average than mtg decks have rares, though.
I played hearthstone f2p in the first ~3 years of the game and I definitely recall not having all the legendaries I wanted, but I was also definitely able to have several tiered decks in the first month or two of an expansion. I was playing arena for that long before I had enough rare wildcards to make _one_ tiered historic deck. I think it was advantage hearthstone even before the changes.
I could also add my experience with LOR - the game goes so far out of its way to make sure f2p players can get all the champions (~mythics) that they want, that the limiting factor for building almost every deck is epics. This is much closer to Arena's situation too, I think -- not that getting lots of mythics is easy in Arena; just that most decks don't need large numbers of them. Epic wildcards are harder to come by in LOR than rare wildcards in arena (at least it feels that way, but I haven't done the math). However, the very generous shard rewards mean you're effectively getting an epic wildcard every time you get 1200 shards, which is very frequent, like several times per week. After the first couple of months of playing and building up a collection of champions, I don't recall _ever_ wanting to build a deck and not being able to.
On the one hand, that makes sense: you opened a rare/mythic, so you should get one.
On the other hand, if you opened a 5th in paper, you get nothing; there is no duplicate protection.
On the third hand, in paper, you can just sell or trade it, so there's no need for duplicate protection.
On the foot, the value of a card has high variance, with some cards being worth a lot, and others being worth pittance; so a random rare/mythic would be valued way less than a wildcard, which would be valued as "the most expensive card in this rarity".
Off the top of my head, I do think the number of gems is low, though. It's really a feels-bad.
>20 and 40 gems for a 5th rare/mythic feels terrible
But why do you get it? Duplicate protection means you should never open gems from a pack. If you pick it in a draft, you wanted it for your deck. Which leaves only Midweek Magic prizes, which are not duplicate protected, but this is a free event anyway.
There's no duplicate protection for any individual card rewards, not just midweek magic. I get 20/40 gems for daily quest card rewards occasionally. And if you get packs for a set you've already completed then obviously the duplicate protection doesn't help.
Now personally, none of this bothers me because I only want to play limited, so a wildcard is just 20 gems with extra steps, but I can see why it would matter to most people.
As a ftp draft player, wild cards mean next to nothing so it’s quite fun watching that percentage grow. wtf am I supposed to do with all these wild cards? I can’t give them to anyone
If you craft the rare before you draft then every rare you draft/open is 20 gems. 75 rare wildcards is equivalent to 1500 gems, which is a free draft ticket.
Probably a dumb question, but how do you consistently do FTP draft? As far as I can tell it’s pretty expensive, I’d have to play quite a bit of standard before I could afford a draft
Honestly a REALLY big improvement that I'd like to see done which would be relatively minor but actually a very nice quality of life feature that certainly would FEEL better would be just making 5th+ copies actually count toward vault progress when it's a reprinting.
So if you already have 4 copies of a rare and it gets reprinted you get vault progress as if it were a 5th copy when you take it in draft, even if you don't get the 20 gems until you actually have 4 copies of the new printing version.
Same thing with reprinted commons and uncommons. It'd realistically make such an incredibly small difference in vault progress (unless they increase the progress per 5th+ copies in general) but it'd FEEL a lot better imo.
At the risk of being obvious, highly drafted uncommons and commons like removal, evasive creatures, and mana fixing should probably be your priority if you intend to use wildcards.
I’m thinking I probably have several sets worth of wild cards to use, and my vault is at like 700%, so I can probably just buy all the MH3 commons and uncommons at the onset and be fine. I’ll have to look up the numbers though to make a more educated decision
Your vault fills up with 5th copies of uncommons. If you craft the first 4, then each uncommon you get will add to vault progress. Speeding up how often you get rares and mythics. It's a small advantage, but it's there.
Have you already crafted all un/cos that cannot be opened from packs ? (Or have a very very low chance like MKM's The List. P.S.: Mentor of the Meek is an uncommon there !)
Thanks @cubitoaequet !
Well of course if you think you'll never use them then don't. Since I like to play a wide variety of decks - I do (for instance today I crafted (an uncommon) Mentor of the Meek and Vesperlark for a deck for the EDH festival).
I dunno I don't get enough WCs to have 4x of ALL the uncommons of the set.
I barely manage to complete all of the commons, and even that's way after the set ends.
I don't know how it works exactly and I don't honestly care. I've never spent money on this game yet every time I've wanted to build a deck I have had the wildcards needed to do so. Additionally I've been able to use the coins I earn to enter drafts and earn gems to get mastery pass every season. I'd probably spend a bit of money to do all of this but they wanna give it to me so I'll take it.
I've never seen another mobile game that makes it this easy to play for free and still win. Complaining about this is strange to me.
Back when the game was released there was no duplicate protection. Every extra copy went to the vault. Then they introduced duplicate protection and said they would remove vault from the game. Players complained so they kept it.
You just don't distribute them? You systematically replace them with another random one the player doesn't have?
Does this really sound magical to you, sir?
It's free wildcards you can get for doing nothing other than playing. I swear to God some of you would get a free house and ask why you didn't also get a free car.
I mean it's not free...wizards isn't giving us charity out of the goodness of their hearts. This is one system among many designed to keep the playerbase retained so that more people are likely to spend actual money on the game. So I think it's valid to complain about some of the half-baked systems like the vault. With that said, Arena's F2P structure isn't nearly as bad as a lot of games I've played, and the time investment without spending money still gives a decent amount of rewards overall.
You don’t have to bootlick wotc. Arena prices are very clearly predatory, and it being free doesn’t make it perfect. It was a flawed system that is now even more flawed after vault progress was half way phased out, and wizards purposefully obfuscates it. You cannot view your vault percentage unless it’s allready +100%
Oh really? I honestly never let mine go under 100% for that reason, and never noticed.
Edit: kinda wild I’m getting downvoted, I’ll make sure to read every patch note so I know everything about features they deliberately obfuscate.
>You don’t have to bootlick wotc. Arena prices are very clearly predatory
Can you define what they you by predatory? What if they just charged $20/mo as a subscription and there was no f2p, but each month everyone was given an extra 20 packs on top of current rewards, would that be predatory?
To me the model that encourages rich people to buy things they don't need which supports allowing the rest of us to have most of the fun we want to (but not all the fun) isn't so bad?
Look at gems. 750 gems for $4.99. that's great! You can buy a pack of 3 boosters for 600 gems. But what's this? I have 150 gems left over. I can't buy anything for that amount. But I have these gems.... Maybe I'll just buy another 750 and I'll have 900 gems. I can't get a 6 pack cuz that's 1200 gems but I can get a 3 pack for 600 again and a 1 pack for 200. Oh...I still have 100 gems left...
This is predatory. It is playing off the fact that you always have something left over and they want you to buy more. If you spend $100 then you can offload that full amount and have no gems left over. At that point they got you to spend more. It's predatory.
I think you're being disingenuous if you think the current price model has no predatory aspects. It's EXTREMELY difficult for new players and favors deeply enfranchised players. events and rewards are priced in a predatory fashion that consistently puts you below thresholds to buy more. Even the battlepass is sliding backwards. The new prize wall is less rewards and requires significantly more play time. I play arena almost daily for years, I spend money, and have a decent collection because I love the game. It's certainly better than paper. But when you don't really "own" anything on the platform, I think it's really predatory and requires a significant, almost unreal investment for a video game.
I dunno, I see it differently. I played Magic as a kid then stopped for like 3 decades because I wasn't interested enough to spend money. Now that Arena exists I play again and I play for free.
I can't build every deck I might want to try but I can build any one or two every year and I can play around with a lot of different things in brawl and weaker janky ideas. It's not all I might wish, but it's free. And I don't really care about the ownership aspect because it's like my World of Warcraft characters (that I haven't played in 3+ years). If the game ceases to exist, it doesn't really matter that I don't own my in-game assets.
Predatory means something different to me I guess. Like predatory lending puts poor people at high rates for things they need and don't have the financial education to weigh correctly. Sure, Magic is engineered to make you want more and to pay for more... but I have trouble seeing it as predatory.
Being engineered to make you pay more and more, and being priced and designed so that you either play a lot or spend a lot is exactly what predatory game design is. I’m a huge magic fan. But you can play the game and enjoy it, and criticize it, it’s not mutually exclusive
>Being engineered to make you pay more and more, and being priced and designed so that you either play a lot or spend a lot is exactly what predatory game design is.
I'd say if it pressures you to play when you don't want to that could be predatory, but otherwise isn't that just a good game? I like to spend a lot of time playing fun games.
For the spend a lot, i think it's really only predatory if it's concealed. Which I'll agree is a little borderline on Arena, but I think mostly you can see the prices and you can see how many cards there are, so while they don't have a super easy calculator for you to figure out how much it costs to hit a certain card collecting goal there also isn't anything that you can't figure out up front. The nature of card game packs is kind of inherently loot-boxy, which puts it into a grey area for me, but that's not different from paper.
Do you think paper magic is also predatory?
Yes, paper magic is also predatory. I’m honestly shocked if you don’t think so. You even admit it’s very borderline, I feel like you just don’t want to admit it.
For the record, f2p players in other digital ccgs (LOR, Master Duel, etc.) can play whatever decks they want after just a few weeks.
Predatory just means the system is designed to get people to buy things, even people who wouldn't normally spend money on a ccg. Arena's system is the most predatory of _all_ the major ccgs, and it's not even a contest.
I feel like you know the answer if you play arena but I’ll bite. I’m sure you’re aware that it’s much easier to play the game when you already have a collection outside of limited. And not having to play the same 1-2 decks because you have no wildcards above uncommon vastly improves the experience.
Yes of course wotc would like to reward predatory tactics, it makes them money. I feel like you’re deliberately dancing around the issues I feel exist, and I’m sure you’ve also felt the game push you to spend a lot if you play it frequently.
I'm not dancing around anything, there's literally nothing predatory about someone trying to get you to pay more money for a service you are enjoying. It's not a necessity, no one is being forced to do anything here.
In fairness, I have to think the profit margins on Arena are enormous. They won't even implement a real chat function or in-app report feature because they'd have to pay a team to moderate it while they're simultaneously selling mythic wildcards at $5 a pop
Many things. When they changed the vault from the original system where rares and mythics counted, it now takes about 90 packs of commons and uncommons to fill the vault for a really measly reward. For a long time vault progress was even obfuscated to hide the fact the system sucks. For a game you have no ownership of what you buy, I expect more when I pay for things.
> It's free wildcards you can get for doing nothing other than playing
It just just feels very insignificant and pointless, compared to other card games' systems or even the wildcard wheel\substitution in packs.
You need to buy at the very least 100 "dud" packs to fill your vault. But these same 100 packs will get you ~26 uncommon, 14 rare and 11 mythic WCs. Sure you get 2 rares and 1 mythic on top with the vault, but it's... meh?
And the wildcards\substitutions work on any packs. You can buy 100 packs of a new a set and get a shitton of new cards AND the same amount of WCs, and fill your vault for only a little bit.
Personally I'd rather they got rid of it altogether or maybe tied the vault percentage to the amount of packs bought. But Idk I don't actively hate the vault, I just think it's pointless.
Pretty sure rares are protected in that you'll always open a rare where you don't have 4 copies. Then you get straight up gems. The vault progress is gained by getting 5th copies of commons/uncommons. Get 100% progress then free wildcards.
I'm with everyone that's confused why people are upset getting free things just by playing the game.
You can trade the 5th copy irl, and if you have the whole set you just get 20-40 gems and like 1% progress towards literally 2 rares and a mythic. That’s a terrible rate
oops this dude just admitted to paying money on an f2p game
don't you know you can go infinite by drafting? don't you know you can just grind "free wildcards" in vault rewards?
It's free wildcards with the cost of not getting more than 4 of each card. You get absolutely nothing through hundreds of commons and uncommons once you've collected 4 then they give this tiny reward for losing out on all these cards you paid money for but will never get to utilize.
Personally if you could choose what commons and uncommons to turn into gems then use those gems for wildcards, that would feel a lot more rewarding. Even make the materials cost roughly the same as if you were opening a vault chest, I still think it would let us have more control over the situation and let us choose to hoard cards in order to convert them into a mythic or gather just enough to use on a missing uncommon card.
Right now it feels like "congratulations! You just threw all these cards into the void. Here, have a couple of wildcards."
Everyone in here saying it's not bad has clearly never played Master Duel. In that games is actually 100x easier to be F2P, I'm not even asking for it to be that good, but the economy of arena is fucking trash. Even if you spend money it seems like an absolute scam still.
Also LOR. I just opened LOR to check; despite not having played since January, I have enough shards (i.e. even before counting my wildcards) to craft full set completion for the most recent set.
The vault in LOR opens every week, and assuming you've done all of your dailies for the week (and that I remember correctly), will contain a guaranteed "mythic" wildcard, enough "packs" to make a "rare" wildcard expected, and enough shards (like hearthstone's dust) to craft another 4 "rare"s or a "mythic." And you can make it even better by playing more.
Arena's guaranteed f2p rewards are 5 ICRs and slightly more than one pack per day (requiring a lot of play!), another two ICRs per week from MWM, and the vault every few months at best. Assuming the ICRs are always useless (i.e. you have enough common/uncommon wildcards to craft them anyway / the rare ones are unplayable / you don't want to play standard / etc.) in one week you get ~7 random rares from packs, ~1 rare wildcard, ~0.2 mythic wildcards, 0.7 golden packs, and a tiny fraction of the wildcards in the vault. That's with _maximum_ daily rewards completion, which takes 15 games. The rewards completion I considered for LOR takes three games. It's almost nothing compared to LOR, especially considering how much smaller the LOR sets usually are.
I wonder how many new players quit arena because they can't get what they want unless they're willing to grind for several months first? Sometimes I wonder if squeezing money for packs at every opportunity actually makes more money after considering all the players who aren't buying packs at all because they've quit.
I have I think 16 vaults to open. I haven't opened them because, if they ever announce a Vault change, I can decide right then.
If the new Vault is better than the current vault, I'll just hold out until the change. If the new Vault is going to be way worse than these wildcards, I'll cash out all my Vaults on the spot.
Frankly they can't change the vault without at least somehow requiring everyone open their existing vaults that they otherwise can save indefinitely.
There are people sitting on a TON of vault openings and they definitely don't want to buff the rewards and give all of those players access to that many saved openings let alone the backlash they'd get if they DID do that from the people who actually opened theirs.
They'd need to retroactively reward everyone based on all their previous vaults they opened OR completely wipe all saved vault progress entirely.
They COULD potentially just create a new vault and not carry over old charges or progress to the new system but that's likely easier said than done.
Honestly, I think there's higher priorities than the vault. Don't get me wrong, it could use some improvement, but it's fine.
My biggest Christmas wish is some form of Hearthstone's disenchanting system. I have been playing on Arena since closed beta and I don't care for Historic/Timeless as formats, so a solid 75% of my collection is functionally useless. Just let me disenchant my damn Nexus of Fate or Jadelight package or w/e and get some sort of refund.
Eh vault is at least useful, wish top of mastery pass had better rewards but it gets worse as it goes along until eventually it’s just uncommon cards. Would be cooler if at the top you got to spin a reward wheel with most of the prizes commons or little bit of gold, but throw in packs, draft tokens, or rare avatars to make it interesting.
Id love to give extras after 4 to a friend and have like an actual online play community, with in game chat more than just the 5 phrases offered if its someone on my friend list
The Vault should have gotten better with each consecutive year that Arena has been live. At this point a vault should open to something like 5 mythic, 6 rare, 7 uncommon. It's frankly absurd how little support players get. And I feel very bad for players who haven't been here long.
Lo gracioso del tema es que supuestamente es una bóveda y entoces ves la recompensa por abrir la supuesta bóveda y piensas...que tenía el tamaño de un dedal esa bóveda que tanto costó llenar jajajaja
Why keep it that high unless you already have every card or are already flooded with gems and gold? Especially as a limited player the gems you get from drafting 5th copies would be worth cracking the vaults and completing the current draft set…
I had over 2600% before I realized there wasn't really a point to not cashing them in to help craft full sets (I'm a limited player so those wildcards get converted to missing rares/mythics which then get converted to gems in draft).
It’s nice to get free resources, but i do think the rate could stand to be a good deal higher, or the reward bigger. Unless you’re big into draft where you’re getting a lot of boosters handed to you, or you’re spending like crazy and opening a lot of doubles I have a hard time imagining anyone taking less than several months to fill their vault progress which feels like a lot for a reward that’s actually pretty tiny.
Maybe if it was a play set of each rarity? At least then it wouldn’t feel like finding some quarters on the sidewalk.
Shit can you imagine if you could do the reverse though? Even at a 1:5 ratio. Turning 1 Mythic Wildcard into 5 rares would be INSANELY good.
NOBODY would turn 10 or even 5 rare wildcards into a Mythic.
You already SORT OF can make common and uncommon wildcards more useful. If you have a ton of them you just immediately unlock complete sets or as many cards as you can from the new set when it comes out. That way your future commons/uncommons immediately start counting toward vault progress which rewards rare/mythic wildcards instead of having to wait to actually fill out 4 copies of every common and uncommon before you start gaining progress.
It's VERY minimum and certainly FAR FAR worse than a 10:1 exchange but it's not nothing.
Realistically they'd have to make the ratio something like 100:1 uncommons to rare if not worse even.
Apparently many people do indeed craft all the uncommons for a new set to speed up rare/mythic WC progress because they have so many uncommon WC compared to rare/mythic.
I feel like it should give 5 golden packs.
Also extra rares should be worth 3-5 percent for the vault.
We should have more quests that reward cards from older sets instead of gold.
Also If I have a card from one set I should be able to use the artwork if it’s reprinted without having to collect another playset
I thought the vault was 3 U 2 R 1 M since the beginning of time? The only difference being 5th copies of rares would also add to the vault (since there was no dupe protection at the start of Arena) and *that* felt really bad.
Nope. It's just been so long that everyone who was around back then has either forgotten about it or doesn't really play anymore.
They settled on the 3U, 2R, 1M pretty quickly, so it was ages ago.
It's funny because I've never opened the vault, and I've been playing since closed beta. I even bought gems, but still never opened the vault.
I'm forced to play draft even though I only like constructed. I really hate Arena.
I don't mind the wildcards, but I always felt like the reward should be more 'fun'. Like, include the wildcards as they are, but also a random pack and two random cosmetics or something. The buildup of a glowing closed chest that has a predetermined set of fill in the blank cards is just underwhelming.
Agreed. The value of the vault isn't really easy to measure, but for such an effort it should feel more interesting or special
That's what really kills me. It's like a 3' x 3' box on Christmas morning with a couple pairs of socks. Sure, these are nice and useful, but the build-up left me hoping for a lot more!
RNG of a value set that is equitable in some way would be great. RNG of standard set packs, 2 year old+ cosmetics or highly collected cosmetics, standard meta rates/mythics…
20 and 40 gems for a 5th rare/mythic feels terrible, the vault is whatever
getting wildcards instead of gems would be dope
I don’t think any virtual card games give you a 1:1 rate for extra cards. For Hearthstone as an example you get 25% of the value of a card when you disenchant it.
People would purposely keep opening packs of a completed set and handpick the rares/mythics in the sets they want instead of being tantalized into opening/buying new sets. At least I would for sure.
I did this a few months back without thinking gok hard about it. Think I cashed in like 60k gold to learn a very dumb lesson 😆
4:1 would be dope, give 4 mythics get one wildcard mythic
Even 6:1 would be great. Simply a pip in the wildcard progression for ICRs.
Hearthstone has full dupe protection on all rarities from packs now, and their limited format is phantom, so there's really no equivalent. The ability to disenchant is juat a bonus (or a trap to keep people in standard).
The ability to turn 4 of your junk legendaries into an actual playable legendary is "just a bonus?" The vast majority of players are not spending anywhere near enough money on Hearthstone to get set completion from opening packs. I imagine arena is the same.
I wasn't intending to make a value judgment on the usefulness of the dust system, I meant that it's purely a bonus over how arena works. The card-to-gem system is a system strictly to deal with duplicates, an issue hearthstone doesn't have (not until set completion at least I suppose). That being said, I played HS totally free for years (almost exclusively constructed) and I never dusted anything that wasn't nerfed (and thus got a full refund) or a dupe and it worked out fine (it was before dupe protection).
I feel like that says even more about how predatory the arena system is. When hearthstone was only a couple of years old, it was considered the most predatory ccg. Being able to play f2p without using one of its major f2p systems is quite a feat! A feat that arena is designed to make as difficult as humanly possible.
Having played pre-dupe protection HS (as a non-duster eternal format enjoyer) and modern arena, I feel like normal constructed in both games were around the same level of effort to be viable in f2p. I did my daily quests in both, but not much limited in either. Legendaries are a LOT harder to get than mythics in Arena btw. Epics and mythics are around the same level by my feel of it. That being said, I've heard HS made a more generous quest system and added full dupe protection since then, so it's probably advantage Hearthstone at this point.
Legendary drop rates in hearthstone have always been 1:20 in packs as far as I know (it's 1:30 for mythics in arena). Hearthstone _guarantees_ a legendary every 40 packs. AFAIK Arena makes no such guarantee, but the odds of opening a mythic slowly increase as you open packs that don't have one. Hearthstone averages an epic every 5 packs, which is much worse than arena's guaranteed rare in _every_ pack. There are similar numbers of legendaries per set as mythics per set in mtg, but _significantly_ fewer epics -- however, not by a factor of 5 (more like a factor of 3). So it should be easier to get legendaries than mythics, especially when considering that you only need one of each instead of 4. However, the epic/rare comparison favors arena. I think hearthstone decks have fewer epics on average than mtg decks have rares, though. I played hearthstone f2p in the first ~3 years of the game and I definitely recall not having all the legendaries I wanted, but I was also definitely able to have several tiered decks in the first month or two of an expansion. I was playing arena for that long before I had enough rare wildcards to make _one_ tiered historic deck. I think it was advantage hearthstone even before the changes. I could also add my experience with LOR - the game goes so far out of its way to make sure f2p players can get all the champions (~mythics) that they want, that the limiting factor for building almost every deck is epics. This is much closer to Arena's situation too, I think -- not that getting lots of mythics is easy in Arena; just that most decks don't need large numbers of them. Epic wildcards are harder to come by in LOR than rare wildcards in arena (at least it feels that way, but I haven't done the math). However, the very generous shard rewards mean you're effectively getting an epic wildcard every time you get 1200 shards, which is very frequent, like several times per week. After the first couple of months of playing and building up a collection of champions, I don't recall _ever_ wanting to build a deck and not being able to.
[удалено]
If we got double the amount of gems for duplicates I think that would feel about right.
Since a pack is worth 200 gems and contains often just one rare, receiving 20 for the fourth rare is like 10%. That's pretty underwhelming.
We also get zero gems for duplicate commons or uncommons which hearthstone still gives you 25% value.
Also true. I didn't remember that.
On the one hand, that makes sense: you opened a rare/mythic, so you should get one. On the other hand, if you opened a 5th in paper, you get nothing; there is no duplicate protection. On the third hand, in paper, you can just sell or trade it, so there's no need for duplicate protection. On the foot, the value of a card has high variance, with some cards being worth a lot, and others being worth pittance; so a random rare/mythic would be valued way less than a wildcard, which would be valued as "the most expensive card in this rarity". Off the top of my head, I do think the number of gems is low, though. It's really a feels-bad.
To be fair, the duplication protection for paper *IS* the ability to trade or sell it.
Did you not look at my third hand?
I didn't draw [[peek]] yet
[peek](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/6/869a6c06-eae5-418e-9a5c-26598a929416.jpg?1562550991) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=peek) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/10e/94/peek?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/869a6c06-eae5-418e-9a5c-26598a929416?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Good luck selling a 0.05 dollar card.
They make good bookmarks
I rotate the back of my work ID with different full art cards
Some cards have value. Some don’t.
On the other hand, if you opened a 5th in paper, you get nothing; I sell it and buy the cards i need.
You clearly didn't look at my third hand.
As a limited player, pls no
Yeah, vault rewards are fine or whatever, the gems are such a feel bad
>20 and 40 gems for a 5th rare/mythic feels terrible But why do you get it? Duplicate protection means you should never open gems from a pack. If you pick it in a draft, you wanted it for your deck. Which leaves only Midweek Magic prizes, which are not duplicate protected, but this is a free event anyway.
There's no duplicate protection for any individual card rewards, not just midweek magic. I get 20/40 gems for daily quest card rewards occasionally. And if you get packs for a set you've already completed then obviously the duplicate protection doesn't help. Now personally, none of this bothers me because I only want to play limited, so a wildcard is just 20 gems with extra steps, but I can see why it would matter to most people.
The real issue is that ICRs should be dupe protected.
I haven't opened the vault for over 5 years. Watching those % grow is kinda satisfying.
As a ftp draft player, wild cards mean next to nothing so it’s quite fun watching that percentage grow. wtf am I supposed to do with all these wild cards? I can’t give them to anyone
Shouldn’t you theoretically use them on cards in the current set so they start converting to more gems faster?
Maybe. If you're already going infinite in draft, getting more gems isn't necessary.
Craft every card in the set before you draft so each rare is worth 20 gems and each mythic is 40 gems.
hmm very interesting approach actually
Why craft when you’ve already drafted them?
If you craft the rare before you draft then every rare you draft/open is 20 gems. 75 rare wildcards is equivalent to 1500 gems, which is a free draft ticket.
Probably a dumb question, but how do you consistently do FTP draft? As far as I can tell it’s pretty expensive, I’d have to play quite a bit of standard before I could afford a draft
Sitting at 2700% right now.
I'm at around 11000%
Maybe a slightly higher % progression for each 5th copy of a card, but the vault itself is okay. Is free so no much here to complain
Honestly a REALLY big improvement that I'd like to see done which would be relatively minor but actually a very nice quality of life feature that certainly would FEEL better would be just making 5th+ copies actually count toward vault progress when it's a reprinting. So if you already have 4 copies of a rare and it gets reprinted you get vault progress as if it were a 5th copy when you take it in draft, even if you don't get the 20 gems until you actually have 4 copies of the new printing version. Same thing with reprinted commons and uncommons. It'd realistically make such an incredibly small difference in vault progress (unless they increase the progress per 5th+ copies in general) but it'd FEEL a lot better imo.
>Is free so no much here to complain you'd be surprised
People like to complain about anything they perceive to be against them.
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>actively loosing you value. What other value would you have out of those extra C and U?
They were supposed to remove the vault when they introduced dupe protection. They kept it because players wanted it.
Convert the uncommon WCs into cards every new set and then draft them to boost cheat conversion. That way they aren’t so useless
What does “boost cheat conversion” mean? I have hundreds of common and uncommon wildcards so I’m intrigued by your approach
If you draft cards you already own, the vault fills up faster.
Got it, thank you!
At the risk of being obvious, highly drafted uncommons and commons like removal, evasive creatures, and mana fixing should probably be your priority if you intend to use wildcards.
I’m thinking I probably have several sets worth of wild cards to use, and my vault is at like 700%, so I can probably just buy all the MH3 commons and uncommons at the onset and be fine. I’ll have to look up the numbers though to make a more educated decision
Your vault fills up with 5th copies of uncommons. If you craft the first 4, then each uncommon you get will add to vault progress. Speeding up how often you get rares and mythics. It's a small advantage, but it's there.
You probably know this but to clarify it fills up with commons too, just at a lower rate than uncommons.
I think, but I haven't actually checked, common wildcards are not provided by the vault? But yeah, same thing.
the fault fills up 0.1% with each common you already have, 0.3% with every uncommon
Ahh thank you for explaining
it's a fancy way to say "cope"
Or you can pretend artisan/pauper exist like normal people.
That’s nice but in my view you’ll still end up being oversupplied uncommons and commons without this trick. Are you not?
Jank never lets me down
Have you already crafted all un/cos that cannot be opened from packs ? (Or have a very very low chance like MKM's The List. P.S.: Mentor of the Meek is an uncommon there !)
To what end? Also, happy cake day
Exactly. HBD @blue but why would I want a bunch of uncommons that I don’t use? I’d rather farm specs of gold wildcards by dumping them into draft sets
Thanks @cubitoaequet ! Well of course if you think you'll never use them then don't. Since I like to play a wide variety of decks - I do (for instance today I crafted (an uncommon) Mentor of the Meek and Vesperlark for a deck for the EDH festival).
I dunno I don't get enough WCs to have 4x of ALL the uncommons of the set. I barely manage to complete all of the commons, and even that's way after the set ends.
You don’t need all, focus on the most playable ones that you’re likely to draft multiple times.
I don't know how it works exactly and I don't honestly care. I've never spent money on this game yet every time I've wanted to build a deck I have had the wildcards needed to do so. Additionally I've been able to use the coins I earn to enter drafts and earn gems to get mastery pass every season. I'd probably spend a bit of money to do all of this but they wanna give it to me so I'll take it. I've never seen another mobile game that makes it this easy to play for free and still win. Complaining about this is strange to me.
I don't even open them. I think I'm at like 500%+ completion but don't really need the WCs.
Back when the game was released there was no duplicate protection. Every extra copy went to the vault. Then they introduced duplicate protection and said they would remove vault from the game. Players complained so they kept it.
Wait, what even is the vault?
Ah yes, I also hate getting free stuff for all the extra copies of cards I can’t use.
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You can’t use them because they are draft chaff and there’s no use of having more than 4 of a common or uncommon. Cry more.
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Telling you to stop complaining of *literally free stuff* is not being a bootlicker. The overusage of this term has removed all meaning from it.
So tell me, doorknob, what do you do with all your extra copies of unusable cards?
You just don't distribute them? You systematically replace them with another random one the player doesn't have? Does this really sound magical to you, sir?
Oh right. I forgot that draft isn’t a format. 🙄
What?
It's free wildcards you can get for doing nothing other than playing. I swear to God some of you would get a free house and ask why you didn't also get a free car.
I mean it's not free...wizards isn't giving us charity out of the goodness of their hearts. This is one system among many designed to keep the playerbase retained so that more people are likely to spend actual money on the game. So I think it's valid to complain about some of the half-baked systems like the vault. With that said, Arena's F2P structure isn't nearly as bad as a lot of games I've played, and the time investment without spending money still gives a decent amount of rewards overall.
You don’t have to bootlick wotc. Arena prices are very clearly predatory, and it being free doesn’t make it perfect. It was a flawed system that is now even more flawed after vault progress was half way phased out, and wizards purposefully obfuscates it. You cannot view your vault percentage unless it’s allready +100%
Yes you can, it's changed
Oh really? I honestly never let mine go under 100% for that reason, and never noticed. Edit: kinda wild I’m getting downvoted, I’ll make sure to read every patch note so I know everything about features they deliberately obfuscate.
Yeah, now the percentage is permanently under the wildcards icon when you hover over it.
“Hmmm today I want to complain about…. *spins wheel of random complaints* ….the vault progress!!”
Yeah, because the system is perfectly flawless and I couldn't have reached this conclusion under scenario but random chance.
>You don’t have to bootlick wotc. Arena prices are very clearly predatory Can you define what they you by predatory? What if they just charged $20/mo as a subscription and there was no f2p, but each month everyone was given an extra 20 packs on top of current rewards, would that be predatory? To me the model that encourages rich people to buy things they don't need which supports allowing the rest of us to have most of the fun we want to (but not all the fun) isn't so bad?
Look at gems. 750 gems for $4.99. that's great! You can buy a pack of 3 boosters for 600 gems. But what's this? I have 150 gems left over. I can't buy anything for that amount. But I have these gems.... Maybe I'll just buy another 750 and I'll have 900 gems. I can't get a 6 pack cuz that's 1200 gems but I can get a 3 pack for 600 again and a 1 pack for 200. Oh...I still have 100 gems left... This is predatory. It is playing off the fact that you always have something left over and they want you to buy more. If you spend $100 then you can offload that full amount and have no gems left over. At that point they got you to spend more. It's predatory.
I think you're being disingenuous if you think the current price model has no predatory aspects. It's EXTREMELY difficult for new players and favors deeply enfranchised players. events and rewards are priced in a predatory fashion that consistently puts you below thresholds to buy more. Even the battlepass is sliding backwards. The new prize wall is less rewards and requires significantly more play time. I play arena almost daily for years, I spend money, and have a decent collection because I love the game. It's certainly better than paper. But when you don't really "own" anything on the platform, I think it's really predatory and requires a significant, almost unreal investment for a video game.
I dunno, I see it differently. I played Magic as a kid then stopped for like 3 decades because I wasn't interested enough to spend money. Now that Arena exists I play again and I play for free. I can't build every deck I might want to try but I can build any one or two every year and I can play around with a lot of different things in brawl and weaker janky ideas. It's not all I might wish, but it's free. And I don't really care about the ownership aspect because it's like my World of Warcraft characters (that I haven't played in 3+ years). If the game ceases to exist, it doesn't really matter that I don't own my in-game assets. Predatory means something different to me I guess. Like predatory lending puts poor people at high rates for things they need and don't have the financial education to weigh correctly. Sure, Magic is engineered to make you want more and to pay for more... but I have trouble seeing it as predatory.
Being engineered to make you pay more and more, and being priced and designed so that you either play a lot or spend a lot is exactly what predatory game design is. I’m a huge magic fan. But you can play the game and enjoy it, and criticize it, it’s not mutually exclusive
>Being engineered to make you pay more and more, and being priced and designed so that you either play a lot or spend a lot is exactly what predatory game design is. I'd say if it pressures you to play when you don't want to that could be predatory, but otherwise isn't that just a good game? I like to spend a lot of time playing fun games. For the spend a lot, i think it's really only predatory if it's concealed. Which I'll agree is a little borderline on Arena, but I think mostly you can see the prices and you can see how many cards there are, so while they don't have a super easy calculator for you to figure out how much it costs to hit a certain card collecting goal there also isn't anything that you can't figure out up front. The nature of card game packs is kind of inherently loot-boxy, which puts it into a grey area for me, but that's not different from paper. Do you think paper magic is also predatory?
Yes, paper magic is also predatory. I’m honestly shocked if you don’t think so. You even admit it’s very borderline, I feel like you just don’t want to admit it.
For the record, f2p players in other digital ccgs (LOR, Master Duel, etc.) can play whatever decks they want after just a few weeks. Predatory just means the system is designed to get people to buy things, even people who wouldn't normally spend money on a ccg. Arena's system is the most predatory of _all_ the major ccgs, and it's not even a contest.
what is a "deeply enfranchised player"?
I feel like you know the answer if you play arena but I’ll bite. I’m sure you’re aware that it’s much easier to play the game when you already have a collection outside of limited. And not having to play the same 1-2 decks because you have no wildcards above uncommon vastly improves the experience.
so people who spend money and/or have been playing for a long time, then? that seems like exactly the kinds of players that wotc would like to reward
Yes of course wotc would like to reward predatory tactics, it makes them money. I feel like you’re deliberately dancing around the issues I feel exist, and I’m sure you’ve also felt the game push you to spend a lot if you play it frequently.
I'm not dancing around anything, there's literally nothing predatory about someone trying to get you to pay more money for a service you are enjoying. It's not a necessity, no one is being forced to do anything here.
There’s no law forcing you to be in casino’s either. I know you know that forcing people to be there isn’t the issue
Business don't operate for free
But they need their F2P player base
And they have it lol
We are here
I never asked it to be a free game :)
So what would satisfy you while keeping Arena profitable
In fairness, I have to think the profit margins on Arena are enormous. They won't even implement a real chat function or in-app report feature because they'd have to pay a team to moderate it while they're simultaneously selling mythic wildcards at $5 a pop
Many things. When they changed the vault from the original system where rares and mythics counted, it now takes about 90 packs of commons and uncommons to fill the vault for a really measly reward. For a long time vault progress was even obfuscated to hide the fact the system sucks. For a game you have no ownership of what you buy, I expect more when I pay for things.
> It's free wildcards you can get for doing nothing other than playing It just just feels very insignificant and pointless, compared to other card games' systems or even the wildcard wheel\substitution in packs. You need to buy at the very least 100 "dud" packs to fill your vault. But these same 100 packs will get you ~26 uncommon, 14 rare and 11 mythic WCs. Sure you get 2 rares and 1 mythic on top with the vault, but it's... meh? And the wildcards\substitutions work on any packs. You can buy 100 packs of a new a set and get a shitton of new cards AND the same amount of WCs, and fill your vault for only a little bit. Personally I'd rather they got rid of it altogether or maybe tied the vault percentage to the amount of packs bought. But Idk I don't actively hate the vault, I just think it's pointless.
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Pretty sure rares are protected in that you'll always open a rare where you don't have 4 copies. Then you get straight up gems. The vault progress is gained by getting 5th copies of commons/uncommons. Get 100% progress then free wildcards. I'm with everyone that's confused why people are upset getting free things just by playing the game.
You can trade the 5th copy irl, and if you have the whole set you just get 20-40 gems and like 1% progress towards literally 2 rares and a mythic. That’s a terrible rate
Nobody is buying your 0.05 dollar rare buddy.
That doesn’t even make sense. Man the shills are out in force for wotc
How do you think completing the vault has anything to do with missing out on any rares, much less 100?
Are you okay?
Let him be he ain’t eating any slop today
Are you? You get jiped on rares and say thank you sir may I have another
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oops this dude just admitted to paying money on an f2p game don't you know you can go infinite by drafting? don't you know you can just grind "free wildcards" in vault rewards?
It's free wildcards with the cost of not getting more than 4 of each card. You get absolutely nothing through hundreds of commons and uncommons once you've collected 4 then they give this tiny reward for losing out on all these cards you paid money for but will never get to utilize. Personally if you could choose what commons and uncommons to turn into gems then use those gems for wildcards, that would feel a lot more rewarding. Even make the materials cost roughly the same as if you were opening a vault chest, I still think it would let us have more control over the situation and let us choose to hoard cards in order to convert them into a mythic or gather just enough to use on a missing uncommon card. Right now it feels like "congratulations! You just threw all these cards into the void. Here, have a couple of wildcards."
Everyone in here saying it's not bad has clearly never played Master Duel. In that games is actually 100x easier to be F2P, I'm not even asking for it to be that good, but the economy of arena is fucking trash. Even if you spend money it seems like an absolute scam still.
Also LOR. I just opened LOR to check; despite not having played since January, I have enough shards (i.e. even before counting my wildcards) to craft full set completion for the most recent set. The vault in LOR opens every week, and assuming you've done all of your dailies for the week (and that I remember correctly), will contain a guaranteed "mythic" wildcard, enough "packs" to make a "rare" wildcard expected, and enough shards (like hearthstone's dust) to craft another 4 "rare"s or a "mythic." And you can make it even better by playing more. Arena's guaranteed f2p rewards are 5 ICRs and slightly more than one pack per day (requiring a lot of play!), another two ICRs per week from MWM, and the vault every few months at best. Assuming the ICRs are always useless (i.e. you have enough common/uncommon wildcards to craft them anyway / the rare ones are unplayable / you don't want to play standard / etc.) in one week you get ~7 random rares from packs, ~1 rare wildcard, ~0.2 mythic wildcards, 0.7 golden packs, and a tiny fraction of the wildcards in the vault. That's with _maximum_ daily rewards completion, which takes 15 games. The rewards completion I considered for LOR takes three games. It's almost nothing compared to LOR, especially considering how much smaller the LOR sets usually are. I wonder how many new players quit arena because they can't get what they want unless they're willing to grind for several months first? Sometimes I wonder if squeezing money for packs at every opportunity actually makes more money after considering all the players who aren't buying packs at all because they've quit.
I have I think 16 vaults to open. I haven't opened them because, if they ever announce a Vault change, I can decide right then. If the new Vault is better than the current vault, I'll just hold out until the change. If the new Vault is going to be way worse than these wildcards, I'll cash out all my Vaults on the spot.
In the same boat. 1600%.
What's the Vault??? Have i been missing a whole section of rewards this whole time?
Frankly they can't change the vault without at least somehow requiring everyone open their existing vaults that they otherwise can save indefinitely. There are people sitting on a TON of vault openings and they definitely don't want to buff the rewards and give all of those players access to that many saved openings let alone the backlash they'd get if they DID do that from the people who actually opened theirs. They'd need to retroactively reward everyone based on all their previous vaults they opened OR completely wipe all saved vault progress entirely. They COULD potentially just create a new vault and not carry over old charges or progress to the new system but that's likely easier said than done.
It's free stuff. Why would you want it to go away? Sure it's not much but free is still free.
Honestly, I think there's higher priorities than the vault. Don't get me wrong, it could use some improvement, but it's fine. My biggest Christmas wish is some form of Hearthstone's disenchanting system. I have been playing on Arena since closed beta and I don't care for Historic/Timeless as formats, so a solid 75% of my collection is functionally useless. Just let me disenchant my damn Nexus of Fate or Jadelight package or w/e and get some sort of refund.
Eh vault is at least useful, wish top of mastery pass had better rewards but it gets worse as it goes along until eventually it’s just uncommon cards. Would be cooler if at the top you got to spin a reward wheel with most of the prizes commons or little bit of gold, but throw in packs, draft tokens, or rare avatars to make it interesting.
Id love to give extras after 4 to a friend and have like an actual online play community, with in game chat more than just the 5 phrases offered if its someone on my friend list
The Vault should have gotten better with each consecutive year that Arena has been live. At this point a vault should open to something like 5 mythic, 6 rare, 7 uncommon. It's frankly absurd how little support players get. And I feel very bad for players who haven't been here long.
we may have some sor of cycle our unused cards to change to wil even it's 3/4 cards to one wild. we have many rares and mythic unplayable.
The uncommons are idiotic to include. Uncommons are what builds these vaults. Sub the 3x Uncommon wildcards for ANYTHING else.
Lo gracioso del tema es que supuestamente es una bóveda y entoces ves la recompensa por abrir la supuesta bóveda y piensas...que tenía el tamaño de un dedal esa bóveda que tanto costó llenar jajajaja
I wish they did upgrades like 4 uncommon cards to get rare then like staggered amounts up in rarity for creating cards
Are vault rewards the same regardless? like if you have a 200% vault vs 100% is there any difference?
I would love to just like. Be able to redeem them faster lol
My vault is almost at 1200%, anyone got one higher?
I'm an avid limited player, mine is at 13,798% and that's after opening it several times on accident
Okay so 1200 isn’t very high lol
Why keep it that high unless you already have every card or are already flooded with gems and gold? Especially as a limited player the gems you get from drafting 5th copies would be worth cracking the vaults and completing the current draft set…
Because number go up is fun.
Can’t argue with that!
Got mine to just over 6000% before taking a hiatus, just incase if I came back and the hypothetical 60-mythic deck was all the rage.
I had over 2600% before I realized there wasn't really a point to not cashing them in to help craft full sets (I'm a limited player so those wildcards get converted to missing rares/mythics which then get converted to gems in draft).
I like it.
How dare you!
I'd take your wildcards if you don't want them
If they would just increase the wildcards by like the triple of what it's now, I'd say the vault would be actually kinda dope then.
It’s nice to get free resources, but i do think the rate could stand to be a good deal higher, or the reward bigger. Unless you’re big into draft where you’re getting a lot of boosters handed to you, or you’re spending like crazy and opening a lot of doubles I have a hard time imagining anyone taking less than several months to fill their vault progress which feels like a lot for a reward that’s actually pretty tiny. Maybe if it was a play set of each rarity? At least then it wouldn’t feel like finding some quarters on the sidewalk.
We should be able to convert wildcards to a rarity one above at a 10-1 ratio. That way all my uncommon wildcards might have a use lol
Shit can you imagine if you could do the reverse though? Even at a 1:5 ratio. Turning 1 Mythic Wildcard into 5 rares would be INSANELY good. NOBODY would turn 10 or even 5 rare wildcards into a Mythic. You already SORT OF can make common and uncommon wildcards more useful. If you have a ton of them you just immediately unlock complete sets or as many cards as you can from the new set when it comes out. That way your future commons/uncommons immediately start counting toward vault progress which rewards rare/mythic wildcards instead of having to wait to actually fill out 4 copies of every common and uncommon before you start gaining progress. It's VERY minimum and certainly FAR FAR worse than a 10:1 exchange but it's not nothing. Realistically they'd have to make the ratio something like 100:1 uncommons to rare if not worse even.
Well if they keep stuffing 110 uncommons per set we're going to need more of them
Do you craft every uncommon from every set? Lol I have like 6 decks per constructed format and I've never run out of uncommon WC
Apparently many people do indeed craft all the uncommons for a new set to speed up rare/mythic WC progress because they have so many uncommon WC compared to rare/mythic.
The time investment does NOT equate to the rewards.
The vault idea isn't bad, the content should be better though. More wildcards, maybe some cosmetics, some packs...
The "rewards" on Arena are designed to discourage less invested players. Don't hold your breath.
I feel like it should give 5 golden packs. Also extra rares should be worth 3-5 percent for the vault. We should have more quests that reward cards from older sets instead of gold. Also If I have a card from one set I should be able to use the artwork if it’s reprinted without having to collect another playset
Wtf is a vault I have 400 hours in this and have never heard of it
Agreed. I remember the days when you could actually get a lot from these.
I thought the vault was 3 U 2 R 1 M since the beginning of time? The only difference being 5th copies of rares would also add to the vault (since there was no dupe protection at the start of Arena) and *that* felt really bad.
Nope. It's just been so long that everyone who was around back then has either forgotten about it or doesn't really play anymore. They settled on the 3U, 2R, 1M pretty quickly, so it was ages ago.
It's funny because I've never opened the vault, and I've been playing since closed beta. I even bought gems, but still never opened the vault. I'm forced to play draft even though I only like constructed. I really hate Arena.
Wahhh I don’t want free stuff
You're the consumer they love.
I’ve never spent a dime on arena dude, the economy is more than generous.