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Magic the Gathering: Arena |OT| Tapped Out of Witty Titles
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Yeah Arena is already super generous at the FTP level. Maybe too generous - they're desperately trying to pull back a bit right now.
Competitive players will have access to whichever cards they want. In general, standard decks are composed of prolly 2/3 rares and mythics (number courtesy of my butt). Archetypes can skew that ratio in either direction, but very few commons have the power level to justify playing them in constructed if you have other options.
Don't be discouraged by it. Cheaper decks are often as viable as a 20-mythic 'Walkers list. Just make sure as you're starting out that you back a reliable horse when it comes to wildcards. Eventually you will be one of those people with every card and a supply of gems and coins you don't know what to do with.
Thanks for the info. I'll keep going for sure. At the very least, completing the daily quests is super newbie friendly.
BO1, you're pretty much screwed if you hit a sacrifice deck, particularly if they get an early Mayhem Devil. There's not much you can do it about it, unfortunately. For what it's worth, I went on a tear with this deck back in December:
3 Castle Embereth (ELD) 239
4 Fervent Champion (ELD) 124
18 Mountain (ELD) 265
4 Footlight Fiend (RNA) 216
4 Scorch Spitter (M20) 159
4 Tin Street Dodger (RNA) 120
4 Chandra, Acolyte of Flame (M20) 126
4 Chandra's Spitfire (M20) 132
2 Shock (M20) 160
4 Light Up the Stage (RNA) 107
2 Heartfire (WAR) 131
4 Cavalcade of Calamity (RNA) 95
3 Torbran, Thane of Red Fell (ELD) 147
4 Fervent Champion (ELD) 124
18 Mountain (ELD) 265
4 Footlight Fiend (RNA) 216
4 Scorch Spitter (M20) 159
4 Tin Street Dodger (RNA) 120
4 Chandra, Acolyte of Flame (M20) 126
4 Chandra's Spitfire (M20) 132
2 Shock (M20) 160
4 Light Up the Stage (RNA) 107
2 Heartfire (WAR) 131
4 Cavalcade of Calamity (RNA) 95
3 Torbran, Thane of Red Fell (ELD) 147
- I just happen to get enough early 1/1 creatures out to beat them down to where they can't recover in time.
- Using as much synergy as possible with Chandra's Spitfire. The Cavalcades are generally a guaranteed win, but you don't need them if you've got a couple of Scorch Spitters, and/or you can use a Heartfire + Footlight Fiend (that alone is 5 dmg to player plus the double +3 bonus to Spitfire), and/or a Shock against the opposing player.
- Torbran's +2 dmg adds up very heavily with all of your 1/1 creatures and that goes up dramatically with one or more Cavalcades.
i'd say i started a month ago ish. after the beginner quests ended i could build up a decent cavalcade deck. a few days ago i was able to craft a nice white aggro deck with 8 rare, 8 mythic and a number of uncommon / common wild cards. you definitely can't build up a large library to experiment with but you can get enough in a decent amount of time to put together one specific deck stacked with them
This game needs a progression for losing, otherwise it will forever be a tryhard matchmaking regardless of mode.
If the only good way to progress through the game is to win, then everybody is going to build the decks with the primary goal of winning instead having a fun game. And I know I am generalizing, but I bet we would see much less strong-annoying decks if winning wasn't mandatory to progress.
I admit that I had little fun playing red burn deck, it was simply efficient and fast at winning. Brain could be off, and I would still win a lot of games.
If the only good way to progress through the game is to win, then everybody is going to build the decks with the primary goal of winning instead having a fun game. And I know I am generalizing, but I bet we would see much less strong-annoying decks if winning wasn't mandatory to progress.
I admit that I had little fun playing red burn deck, it was simply efficient and fast at winning. Brain could be off, and I would still win a lot of games.
No matter how hard I wished for, I don't think I've seen a single digital f2p card game deal with this extreme try-hardness that plagues the digital tcg's,
Artifact tried to get rid of ladder(among other things) to counter this, but it backfired hard. (not having to win will mean the games will be surrender city)
I think one suggestion I liked was for the game to class cards just like competitive Pokemon does, as "OverUsed (cards common in the meta)" and "UnderUsed (not common in the meta)" , then the matchmaking will check your deck, if it has a lot of OU cards, you will be matched with other mostly OU cards decks,
That way jank and beginner decks can play with each other, while Cats, Simic flash , and mono red can play with each other.
Isn't this broadly how the casual queue is supposed to work?
I don't know, I think it is more of the color + rarity ranking. Starter decks get matched with starters, but. I don't want to play mirror matches, people will find some hobo deck that is still good at winning and will eventually just game the system.
Winning tied to progression is what is causing the problem. If more rewards were play-based, and less rewards were win-based, you would not have as many people trying to win all the time. And one step further, I think the system should avoid matching you against the same color decks all the time, ensuring more diverse games and strategies I face.
People will always find a way to "game" the system to maximize rewards. Right now, winning is probably 60-70% of my total gold/XP.
I would prefer winning being 20% of the gold and the normal playtime being the rest 80%. You would still have an incentive to win, but it wouldn't feel like wasting time when I lose. I could probably get back to red rush and simply concede whenever my hand isn't optimal. High win chance with the right draw + 4-5 turn wins.
I think it's based on rarity but can't tell for sure.
At the end of the day, I would love to see someone tackle a more chill vibe type of digital card game with maybe more of a kitchen table vibe to it.
Let see how Runeterra do tomorrow.
Nice! I'm mostly recommending fun decks rather than super-powerful ones.
Are you mostly going for Theros cards? If you don't mind going for older packs, the gates deck is a nice change from the usual aggro decks (since control decks usually take a lot of rares).
Its a little slow nowadays, but still pretty fun, and most of the cards are common and uncommon. Nice thing is that the basic shell of Gate lands + Guild Summit + Gates Ablaze + Circuitous Route can be reused in many other decks, so you can swap in your favourite way to win the game. The old way was with Gatebreaker Ram and Gate Collosus. I also like Wilderness Reclamation + Electrodominance/Explosion, and also Invade the City + Fling
Other budget builds include Izzet Drakes, Selesnya Adventures, Simic Flash (it can be built on a budget, but the full power one is expensive)and Elementals
This new control meta is a ball fondling joy. I can't tell you how much fun it is to sit and watch the opponents ponder all the possibilities on what land they should drop being monoblue. I mean, I too need to rope on turn one and then turn two to decide to drop island, then island.
The game lags like crazy sometimes. I know I've played a land and watched nothing happen for twenty seconds.
Okay so I have a possibly dumb question.
I am currently bouncing in between two decks that i made. One Mono red and a modified Cult of Rakdos deck. Each have 80 cards in them and the number of lands adjusted accordingly to compensate. These two decks have now carried me all the way to Platinum 3. But I know that decks generally at supposed to have 60.
So should I be trying to change it to fit into the 60 card archetype or is this a case of "if it's not broke don't fix it" seeing as how I am getting good performance and consistent wins?
I am currently bouncing in between two decks that i made. One Mono red and a modified Cult of Rakdos deck. Each have 80 cards in them and the number of lands adjusted accordingly to compensate. These two decks have now carried me all the way to Platinum 3. But I know that decks generally at supposed to have 60.
So should I be trying to change it to fit into the 60 card archetype or is this a case of "if it's not broke don't fix it" seeing as how I am getting good performance and consistent wins?
Thank you. Gonna take a peek at all of this next chance I get.
So even though it's gotten me this far I should still change it?
The meta is still adjusting, once the dust settles, you will fight all these super optimized decks and you will need every bit of consistency your deck can have.
Whenever you start a new card game, there's one thing you can always be sure about from the start, which is to use the minimum number of cards the deck can have.
Unless mill inexplicably takes over the entire meta, in which case feel free to keep the big deck.
The witches oven and cauldron familiar strategy is the single most toxic strategy I have ever come across in any PVP game in my entire life and for the love of God I do not understand why it is even allowed.
It is straight weapons grade bullshit.
It is straight weapons grade bullshit.
It's much more of a pain in Arena than it is in paper. It has it's counters, but the way its controller has to interact with the combo pieces makes it a slog. It's easier to deal with than some other stuff earlier this year (Oko, Field of the Dead and Nexus of Fate in particular) which ended up banned as a result.
And that right there is my main problem with it. This strategy itself is annoying and cheap as all hell but 90% of the people who I have come across who use the strategy intentionally drag out the process as a long as they possibly can in what I can only assume is an effort to get the opposing player to quit because of the tedium more than anything else.
And it's not just that strategy that I have seen that kind of behavior with. I am brand new to the game but on a large number of occasions now I have come across people who intentionally drag out the process of their moves and take as long as they possibly can without absorbing a timeout in order to frustrate the opponents and that is just cheap.
Play it for yourself and you learn it's shortcoming pretty quickly. Doesn't do shit against trample, flying, instant speed exile, and I'd you don't draw one of the 2 pieces of the combo, your deck doesn't function well at all.
We were told before Worlds will be played on Arena. And now we're told there will be draft. Very curious to see how soon pod drafting might be available.
I was going to reply that this almost never happens to me, and in the very next game I had a player stall on every move. Ended up quitting as it was the casual queue, but people will go to great lengths to get their daily wins, I guess.
Also, there was no way this was a new player contemplating their moves as many of these times they had only one thing they could do.
Since way back when roping was more prevalent, I ended up just switching it to windowed mode and doing something else if my opponent kept burning down the timer. Once they updated it so the icon in the taskbar flashes when it's your turn to do something, it made it much easier to just leave them to waste their own time while I watch videos or read Era, coming back to click a button or two. Got a lot more concessions that way.
The Internet will tell you that drafting is the most efficient.
In my experience it's a good way to spend a lot of time blowing 5000 gold on a single pack of cards and a bunch of uncommons and commons. Recommended reading if you want to go down the hell hole that is drafting:
Quadrant Theory | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
Quadrant Theory is a card-evaluation technique to help you come to a conclusion.
CABS Theory | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
Marshall reveals his secret for success in Limited: Draft cards that affect the board!
Alternatively, you can just rare-draft (which means just picking rares instead of caring about building a good deck). I really should just be doing this, but I'm a glutton for punishment.
i dont really wanna complain more but since i feel more compelled to quest now that i am back to level 10 i am pretty pissed off that they decided to charge you for the brawl queue
fuckin why dude thats the least stress way to do things for me
fuckin why dude thats the least stress way to do things for me
Never played other games where most of the progress came from winning. Even League of Legends, CSGO or fighting games have never stacked so many rewards for winning and nothing for losers. It is no fun getting nothing for the 20 minutes game if you have a limited time to play the game.
I am one of those suckers who complains, yet buys, mastery passes because the value is still too great to miss. The owl is so much worse than the Cerberus. The pets are on completely different planes of quality... I would feed my cat, fox and owl to all three heads of Cerberus to adopt it.
Yeah, I played ECG for a while and really disliked playing Draft. I don't have any experience with the MTG equivalent, but I'm guessing it won't hold much interest with me.
If you have been spamming games (and especially after getting out of the beginner's pool), you may have noticed that Standard Ranked can get kind of samey after a while, where you can identify the opponent's whole deck after a single land-drop or the first card they play.
If you are playing on Wednesday, I recommend the Brawl Queue for a change of pace. There are a number of try-hards who run NivMizzet Reborn / Golos decks, but the other commanders make for very interesting decks
Are there newbie friendly brawl decks that can compete on wednesdays?
At this point, I'm mostly limited to Standard Ranked and Play queue (ranked draft soon). I tried the 500 gold standard event a couple of times, but went 1-6, and basically got 6 ICR's for 700 gold (reward isn't terrible, but not exactly fun to get smoked constantly).
Brawl decks can only have 1 copy of a given card, so need fewer rares/mythics to be workable.
If you are new, don't do the 500 gold standard event. Its more for people with meta-decks who want to farm more after maxing out the daily rewards. You get plenty of uncommons from drafting and wildcards from cracking packs.
As for newbie friendly decks, I'll try to find some, but mostly its about cracking open a cool legendary (rare or mythic) and building around it. Its in some ways lower power than Standard (since you can only have one of any card, and they must match your commander colours), and in some ways more consistent (since you always have access the commander). So if you play say Prime Speaker Vannifar (one of my favourite cards), you can always cast him turn 4 if you didn't miss your land drop. Of course, your opponent knows your deck takes advantage of Prime Speaker Vannifar, and can ready a removal spell / counter for that turn.
Basically if you got a cool legendary but can't build around it in Standard cos you can't afford 4 copies, Brawl is often the way to go. Maybe you can suggest some commanders you think are cool (i'm sure you opened a few) and we can suggest budget builds for them.
World Championship is coming up, you can win some Arena stuff if you can guess who will be the winner: https://magic.gg/events/magic-world-championship-xxvi
Yeah I've noticed. I rushed all the way to Plat 3 and have hit a wall.
Plat is my living nitemare. My fault for not playing metadecks. I refuse to play ponderous ball fondling simic or bant or esper dimir control which has been every other deck i've faced. Midrange is basically suicide right now
2 different four mana wraths and blue having an instant draw three is nuts especially with simic ramp doing disgusting things with 2 x draw spells at their disposal.
I don't just want to luck out with a monored god hand. I may as well roll dice
I know this going to get a lot of hate but damn I wish veil of summer was back
yeah I'm having trouble with it right now myself too it's just win one lose one win one lose one
I'm afraid the decks that would want it most would be most of the decks you're frustrated with.
They could use it. But its that damn agent thassa combo thats fucking my shit up. A one mana answer to the oops I win combo is worth the chance they can hexproof something of their own.
Do I really need to start maindecking lazotep plating? :P
Depends what other colour(s) you're running. I quite like Alseid of Life's Bounty and Gods Willing in White.
Interesting, thanks for the info!
I think I can get close to building at least the Daxos deck from here:
Or Anax from here:
Will give it a go tonight.