I can't tell if I've been tricked by these multi-million dollar companies or if the MTGA community is just far too vitriolic about anything that isn't straight up free shit. Because I always feel like every change they make to Arena the subreddit and official forums are just blowing up. At the moment I quite like the idea of the mastery pass but everyone is losing their shit. What's the thought here?
Basically the premium (3400 gems) mastery pass seems to require you to play every day if you want to have any hope of completing it without buying more levels with gems. From what we know so far, you effectively get 1000xp/1 level per day (800 for completing any quest, 100 for your first win, then 50 for wins 2 and 3). Even then, you're only getting up to ~85-90% total completion based on the average length of time between set releases, so you're also going to need to play, or possibly grind, the special events that will give the balance of the xp. Note that we don't know anything about the xp rewards from these special events yet, so it's possible that they're going to be very generous and make it easy to finish the pass ahead of time.
I'm not especially happy with the idea that you almost need to play every day to complete the pass, but I'm also not acting like the world is ending over it. I mean, I already get at least my 4 wins 5+ days of each week and complete all of my quests so I'm pretty well invested in the game, if not as much as the truly hardcore, pros, and streamers. If that's not enough to finish the pass on time though, who is it really for? It gets worse if you only find time to play once or twice a week, even if you would normally do 15+ wins in those sessions. At that point, even the free pass (gives you a pack every other level up to ~level 70) replacing the 15 wins/week starts to look bad for you, since you may be getting less than the 3 packs/week you normally would. So I can get where people are coming from, even if the reaction is pretty overblown.
Personally, I was probably going to get the pass day 1 when they first announced it (fire cat 2 cute), but now I'm waiting until we either see what the special event xp rewards are or there's some kind of update from WotC. They said all the rewards are retroactive at least, so you can wait until the last day to buy it and see if it's worth it that way, which is pretty solid.