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Magic The Gathering Arena

Meat Grinder

Meat Grinder

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I'm an old school MTG player from the early 1990s, and I still have hundreds of cards in my basement. Other than the occasional game with my wife, I haven't played in years. I did dabble in the old, probably soon to be defunct, MTG Online, but it had some problems. Wizards of the Coast has now released their newest attempt at an online MTG game, and it is called Arena. My nephew told me about it last week, and I've been playing it for a few days now. The UI and game engine are far and away superior to the old MTG Online, and, in Arena, you can play completely for free. You can also purchase cards, if that is your wish, and no doubt the top players will have to make purchases to climb to the top of the ladder. But if you just want to play casual games, and dabble with ladder play, you don't ever have to spend a dime.


So far, I'm really enjoying it. It definitely brings back the Magic (yuk, yuk).
 
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It's a lot of fun. I've been playing with the pre-made decks against the AI, and winning free cards doing so. Yesterday I finally built my own red/green deck and played some actual human players in non ranked games. I won several games, until my nephew challenged me with his blue/black "bounce" deck....

I have yet to spend a penny on it, and have accumulated 2500 "gold", which I think I can use to buy packs.
 
Just an FYI, right now, you cannot trade (or sell) cards to other players. You also cannot buy individual cards. You can only buy sealed packs, using the game interface. You can buy the packs using "gold", which you accumulate in game just by playing (you accumulate more from winning, but you still get some from losing), or "gems", which you purchase with real money.
 
Ok, I've been playing a lot of this. I now have three decks that I think I have tuned well enough to start playing some ladder games, which I did yesterday, winning about half the time. The first is a red/green "stompy" deck with burn for creature removal. The second is a mono white deck. Third is a blue/white deck in which every creature has flying.

I did finally spend $5 to buy the "welcome bundle", which was a great deal, IMO.

In the future I hope they introduce some of the cards from older expansions and have some different formats that allow such cards. I would also like to see them include the "Pauper" format, which only allows common cards, and a "Singleton" format in which you can only have one copy of a card in your deck.
 
After a lot more play, and some reading, I have learned a few things. There are actually two ladders, one for constructed play and one for limited play. Constructed play is where you build however many decks you want to with all the cards you own (which are legal in the Standard format, which all of the cards available in Arena are at this time). 60 cards minimum for each deck. Limited play is "sealed deck" and "draft", where your card pool is much smaller and the decks only have to be minimum 40 cards. Limited play tourneys are typically over when you win seven or lose three games. It costs gems or gold to join limited tourneys, but you can win it back if you win enough games, and you keep the cards you picked, win or lose.

So the ladder ranks consist of, from lowest to highest: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Mythic. There are four tiers in each rank (Silver 4, Silver 3, Silver 2, etc). You climb the tiers by winning, and you drop tiers by losing. You can drop all the way from tier 1 (the highest) down to tier 4 (the lowest), but you cannot drop a rank, so you would never drop from, say, Silver 4 back down to Bronze. I believe, but have yet to completely confirm this, that when you play ladder games you only play against players in your rank (silver plays silver, diamond plays diamond, etc).

I am currently Gold rank in constructed. I've been as low as Gold 4 (of course, as that's where you start) and I've never been higher than Gold 2. I'm currently Gold 3 or 4 (can't remember). I "ROFLStomped" my way through all 4 tiers of Bronze, losing maybe one game. Silver started giving me some trouble, but I made it through. Gold is tough. I'm going to have to build a better deck, or tune my current decks, as I don't think I'm getting out of Gold by continuing to do what I have been doing. Fun stuff though. And just think, there are players far better than I am waiting in the higher ranks. :)
 
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Well, I found out that the ladder resets every so often, not sure why, but you get rewards (gold and packs) depending on your ladder rank at the time of the reset. I was gold rank at the last reset and it put me back to the highest tier of bronze. I'm now working my way through the tiers of silver again.

Anyway, I thought some of you might like to see some actual games, so I recorded two consecutive games that I played today with my "Airborne" deck. This is a blue/white deck with all flying creatures. I think the first opponent either ragequit or lost connection, because I won via timeout. The second game was very close.

 
I am trying to get a feel for these kind of games. Are there any variants that dont have the high magic theme?
 
Badger73 said:
I never played Magic. I have no idea what was happening. Still, fascinating to watch. Thank you.
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You're welcome. I don't want to get into any kind of MTG tutorial. There are plenty of those. Just trust me when I say it requires both strategy and tactics to be successful. I would rate myself as a mediocre player, at best.
 
olaf said:
I am trying to get a feel for these kind of games. Are there any variants that dont have the high magic theme?
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MTG came out in 1993, and was the first collectible trading card game, where players build their own decks from a large and ever changing card pool. It was an instant success, and started a craze of collectible card games with many different themes. I remember a Star Wars CCG, a Star Trek CCG, and a D&D CCG. I'm sure there were others. Most of them are now defunct. There is a cyberpunk CCG called Netrunner that seems to be quite popular now. My nephew loves it. Blizzard has it's own CCG called Hearthstone, but I think it's online only (no actual paper cards). It's fantasy themed though, I believe.
 
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