Magic Arena Economy Stream: Recap and Thoughts
On Thursday, we got the long-awaited Magic Arena economy stream. Players' expectations were surprisingly high—perhaps too high, considering the history of the Arena economy. In the end, they spent an hour listening to Wizards hand out mostly disappointing news along with some mostly unsatisfactory explanations for why the Arena economy is in its current, semi-functional state. If you have the time, you can check out the full stream below; if not, I'll be going over the highlights (or perhaps lowlights?) and share some thoughts on what it means for Arena players.
Change 1: Mythic Packs
The first big announcement was that Wizards will be adding "mythic packs"—booster packs that guarantee a mythic rare or a mythic or rare wildcard—in the store for 1,300 gold (1.3 times the cost of a normal booster, which offers a rare or a mythic, or a rare or a mythic wildcard).
Opinion: As with most of the changes we'll talk about today, mythic packs do improve the economy but primarily for whales. For free-to-play players, the bottleneck on cards is mostly rares and rare wildcards, in part because building optimal multi-colored mana bases typically requires a lot of rares. On the other hand, for players who spend a lot of money on the game, the bottleneck is mostly on mythics because if you buy a bunch of packs, you'll get all of the rares from the set long before you get all of the mythics. It's for these whales that mythic packs primarily offer value. Once you complete a rare set, rather than opening mostly dead packs, where the rare / mythic slot typically will be 20 gems, you can switch over to opening mythic packs, thus decreasing the number of packs you need to open to finish a set.
The other place mythic packs could be helpful is when you are searching for a specific mythic from a set to complete a deck. When opening normal packs, the odds that you'll open the specific mythic you want is pretty small, considering that mythics typically show up in around one in eight packs and there are 20 different mythics in most sets, meaning it can take more than 100 packs to open the specific mythic you're looking for (although you will get a mythic wildcard way sooner). On the other hand, if you know you're getting a mythic from your pack, your odds of opening the one you need increase significantly. While we'll have to wait and see the exact drop rates, my assumption is that if you are looking for one specific mythic and don't care about anything else, you'll get that card quicker by opening mythic packs rather than normal packs, although this is still a fairly fringe situation. Basically, mythic packs help players fully complete a set at a lower cost, which is great if you are a big spender or manage to grind your way to near set completion, although it's fair to wonder how many non-whales get to the point where they have all the rares in a set and would benefit from the change.
Change #2: Selling Wildcards
Wizards also announced that it would be selling wildcards in the store, with a bundle of 12 rares and four mythics costing $50.
Opinion: Selling wildcards is something players have been asking about for a while now, and it's finally happening, although the specifics limit their value. First off, you can only buy wildcards in bundles that cost $50, which likely will price many people out of the bundle altogether, especially since it sounded as if you'd have to pay with actual dollars rather than gold or gems, which can be earned in-game. People have mathed out how buying the $50 wildcard bundle compares to buying $50 of packs, and it seems to be that you'll end up with slightly more wildcards from the bundle. The problem is that if you open $50 worth of packs, you'll also end up with nearly 50 random rares and mythics, while you only get the wildcards with the bundle. This means that the bundle is essentially useless for the average Magic Arena player.
On the other hand, the wildcard bundle might be able to offer whales value in the narrowest of circumstances. Let's say you spend a few hundred dollars for each set. (I generally spend around $300.) You'll get all of the rares from the set but end up lacking mythics. If you need one of those mythics for a deck, then being able to buy a wildcard rather than open packs (which will mostly contain 20 gems thanks to duplicate protection) is appealing, especially if you have rare-completed all of the other sets as well. (If you have other sets that you have yet to complete, you're probably better off just opening those instead since you'll get almost as many wildcards and all of the random cards to help complete the set.)
However, it seems like the addition of mythic packs might make the wildcard bundle less useful even in the very narrow, specific situation where it could offer value. If you have all of the rares from a set, it seems that opening mythic packs will be the easiest way to full set completion, especially if mythic packs have the same type of duplicate protection as normal packs do.
When you add all this together, the only thing that the wildcard bundle really does at its current price point is offer some level of convenience. If you are too lazy to open boosters and you're looking for a handful of cards to complete a deck and you already have a nearly full collection and you are out of wildcards, then perhaps it could be an option, but for 99% of players and situations, just buying some form of booster is likely going to offer better value.
While the current iteration of selling wildcards directly isn't all that useful, the idea is a good one and could easily be fixed in a couple of different ways. The most obvious would be dropping the price. If the bundle cost somewhere in the $30 or $35 range, it would offer value to a much larger group of players. Another possibility would be selling wildcards individually. While paying $50 for a bunch of wildcards likely prices a lot of players out of the bundle altogether, if you could pay something like $3 for an individual wildcard, it would be a pretty appealing option for snagging the last couple of rares and / or mythics you need for your deck.
Change 3: Improved Rewards for Constructed Events
Wizards announced that it would be changing the rewards for constructed events to offer packs / gems, rather than individual card rewards and gold.
Opinion: There isn't much to say about this change...yet. While gems are strictly better than gold and packs might be better than individual card rewards, we don't really have any details about what the new reward structure will look like. Traditionally, on Arena, changes to the economy don't actually make the economy more generous; they just shift around how or what rewards are offered. It's a safe bet that the overall prize support for constructed events will be the same or *gulp* might even decrease because Wizards knows gems are better than gold. But we'll have to wait and see the details.
Change 4: Being able to test cards / decks before buying
Wizards announced that in the not-super-distant future, we'd be able to test cards before buying them to help players overcome their fear of spending their precious, limited wildcards unwisely. While the details weren't clear, it sounded like the testing would most likely take place against Sparky.
Opinion: I know people who use Magic Online card-rental programs to test decks on MTGO before buying them on Arena because the Arena economy is so unforgiving, which is absurd. In paper, being able to test a deck before you buy it helps solve this problem, although if it ends up being that you can only play against Sparky, I'm not sure the competition will be good enough for players to take it seriously. Some sort of event against real players (perhaps other players also testing decks with cards they don't own) would be much better, although that might also cost Wizards money because it would technically allow players to free-to-play any cards they want in that event. Maybe limiting the number of cards / decks you can test each week or month could work?
Basically, the idea of allowing players to try before they buy is great, but once again, we'll have to withhold judgment until after we see the finer details.
Change #5: A new non-rotating format without digital-only cards.
Wizards announced that a new non-rotating format would be coming to Arena within the next couple of months that would feature only cards legal for tabletop play, although the name and exact structure of the format haven't been decided (or, at least, announced).
Opinion: The question here is whether the format Wizards adds will be Pioneer or will be a placeholder format as Wizards has promised to work quickly toward adding full Pioneer to the client. A random format based on the sets currently on Arena but without digital-only cards isn't especially appealing to me personally, unless we know that the format is building toward Pioneer in the near future. That said, having any additional formats on Arena is a positive as they give players more options, and given the current pushback against Alchemy and digital-only cards, offering an eternal format without the Hearthstone cards is certainly necessary. All in all, this is a positive, although just how much of a positive will depend on Wizards getting Pioneer on the client. A new eternal format that is Ixalan forward (for example) is still a positive because it offers players another way to play the game, but it's hard to imagine that format being all that heavily played. Pioneer, on the other hand, would allow players to use Arena as a testing tool for paper play at their local game stores, and its addition to Arena would be huge news. But considering the disappointing results of the economy-focused announcement, it likely will still suffer from players simply being priced out of the format.
Thoughts
In general, it's hard to come away from the Arena economy stream without feeling sad. I expected little from the announcement and more or less got what I expected. While some of the changes announced are technically improvements (with mythic packs likely being the most impactful), pretty much all of the benefits will be reaped by whales rather than by average Arena players.
I'm clearly a whale and spend $200 or $300 a set to get all of the cards I need to make content, and while it's nice that these changes make Arena slightly cheaper and more convenient for me, I'm also the type of person who needs the help the least because Wizards is going to get my money whether I need to spend $300 or complete a set or $250 to complete a set with the help of the mythic packs. What would be even more beneficial—both for me as a whale-y content producer and for the entire Arena community—is if the overall cost of the game were lower so that more people could play in general and more specifically play the decks and cards that they enjoy.
To make matters even worse, some of the answers from the stream were bordering on the absurd, which makes me wonder whether Wizards actually believes what it is saying or if it is just trying to avoid saying the truth, which is that the current economy makes Wizards a lot of money. For example, when asked about Arena codes in paper packs, the response was that not all paper players play Arena. Why getting a code that offers free value would be a problem to paper-only players isn't clear. The best case is that some paper-only players might start playing Arena because of the code. Worst case, they throw the code away (or sell it to someone who will use it), and their experience is unchanged. Does Wizards actually believe that paper-only players would somehow be offended by an Arena code in their booster, or is Wizards just trying to avoid saying the truth—that giving away cards through paper boosters would make Arena less profitable? The first option is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine anyone really believes it, but we can't really say for sure.
Sadly, based on Wizards' comments and the overall tone of the stream, it doesn't seem like Wizards plans on making Arena meaningfully cheaper in general. Whenever a question came up about changes that would make the game less expensive for the average player (like trading lower-rarity wildcards for higher-rarity wildcards, codes in paper packs that give away Arena cards, or increasing the drop rate of wildcards), the answer was always some version of "This is possible but not something we're considering." Add in another release of Alchemy that is primarily made of rares and mythics, and the message is clear: Wizards is happy with the current cost of playing Arena. While Wizards might shift things around within the current economy, there seems to be very little hope of big changes that would actually make the game more accessible to players.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. What did you think of the Arena economy stream? Is there anything important I missed? Let me know in the comments! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
