How do you solve Magic The Gathering Arena's economy? It's been a huge source of anger in the MTG community for many months, as players were expected to buy more and more booster packs for the precious card-crafting currency, wildcards, to keep up with the constantly-changing metagame.

Things hit an all-time low with the introduction of Alchemy, which can digitally rewrite the cards you bought at a moment's notice. The backlash was so strong that senior communications manager Blake Rasmussen promised a livestream to hash out all the problems with Arena's economy with Arena's executive producer Chris Kiritz. That stream finally happened last night (followed by a blog post summing it all up), and it may have only made things worse.

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First, a quick explanation on MTG Arena's economy: you can purchase booster packs using in-game gold or the gem microtransaction currency, and each of those packs has a chance of including a 'wildcard'. These wildcards can then be used to craft individual cards you want, whether it be to tune a deck you own or finish off a collection. Wildcards are the only way to craft cards, as there's no 'dusting' mechanic to break down cards you don't want to make new ones, as seen in games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel.

Wildcards in MTG Arena

The problem with this system is that it takes a lot of booster packs to make a competitively viable deck. For example, one of the Standard format's best decks right now is Mono-white Aggro, which needs three Mythic Rare wildcards and 42 Rare wildcards to craft. Considering rare and mythic rare wildcards only appear in 4.2 percent of boosters, and only a few more added in between one-in-15 and one-in-30 packs as a pity reward, that is a lot of boosters needed to make just one deck, for one format. Players can't keep up unless they drop hundreds of dollars with each set.

Wizards Doesn’t Know The Problem

According to Rasmussen and Kiritz, the problem isn't that wildcards are so rare, it's that players aren't 'meant' to be building multiple viable decks. According to Kiritz, Arena's target audience are those who may make one or two decks over a period of months, and will refine them with the cards they find in booster packs that they open just for the fun of it. You're not meant to be collecting full playsets of all the cards, and giving people too many wildcards causes the problem of them facing decision paralysis and not knowing what to craft.

Except this model of a Magic player doesn't tally up with how Arena is actually used. It may have been when the game was first being developed as a successor to the standalone Duels of the Planeswalkers games, but now a whole pandemic later, it just isn't true. Arena is faster than tabletop by a massive margin: players are playing more games, more frequently in Arena than they ever could physically, and it means the metagames of each new set are being solved in a matter of days rather than the weeks or months it used to be.

ArenaGameplay

This became such a problem that Wizards introduced both the Alchemy format, which rebalances cards every few weeks to keep things fresh, and also pushed the Arena release of Streets of New Capenna to a week after its tabletop release. The idea behind the latter was to give players the chance to enjoy the cards before they'd been 'figured out'.

And what about the numerous competitive events that have been held on Arena? Everything from small qualifiers to international championships have been held through Arena, where players with those hundreds-of-dollars, meta-defining decks duked it out for an audience of tens of thousands. If Arena was meant to be a digital replacement of casual, 'kitchen table Magic' at one point, it certainly isn't anymore.

Greed by Izzy Medrano
Greed by Izzy Medrano

Speaking of that 'decision paralysis', Kiritz also mentioned why Magic doesn't do any form of dusting, which has been the community's most widely-suggested fix for the economy. Kiritz argued that dusting works against the constantly-evolving metagame of Magic: you could destroy a card that feels useless now, but might become a format-defining staple six months later, and that would "feel bad".

The problem with this argument is that Wizards is already introducing buyer's remorse with the Alchemy format. Players are buying all those booster packs for the wildcards to craft what they think will be a key part of the format, only for it to be rebalanced and nerfed into obscurity. And with no sort of compensation being given to those who crafted the cards, I don't see how that's not worse than dusting a card that might be useful and you can recraft later on.

After hearing all of the “pain points” detailed by Wizards, it seems as though it has either forgotten or is willfully ignoring the actual problem: Arena is way too expensive. It’s asking too much of a financial commitment from its players for them to stay playing at a decent level, and it’s asking them to reinvest in it with each new set.

And It Doesn’t Know The Solution

Smothering Tithe by Mark Behm
Smothering Tithe by Mark Behm

After all the philosophical arguments about design intent, Wizards did propose a few concrete ways to resolve the problems. The first was that it will be introducing a guaranteed-Mythic booster pack. Costing 1,300 gold (compared to a normal pack's 1,000 cost), this will guarantee either a rare or mythic rare wildcard, or a mythic rare card from the set. The idea here is to make it easier to fill in those gaps in your collection that buying a billion packs wouldn't solve thanks to how Arena calculated card rarities against the cards you already own.

This isn't a bad idea when taken in a vacuum. These could become what set boosters are in tabletop – spicier alternatives to the normal draft packs that cost a bit more, but come with more interesting cards. But in terms of fixing the Arena economy, it won't even make a dent. If anything, it only exacerbates the problem. One of the most tone-deaf statements made during the stream was that Wizards didn't want to introduce dusting as part of Arena's fun was "opening booster packs". I'm a fiend for cracking packs, but when players tell you they're being expected to buy too many boosters, your answer probably shouldn't be "here's another booster you can pay even more for".

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It's the second 'solution' that made players especially angry. With Streets of New Capenna, Wizards will be introducing "Wildcard Bundles" to Arena. These will include 12 rare and four mythic rare wildcards. Now, keeping in mind a competitive Standard deck can require upwards of four times as many rare wildcards as this bundle, how much would you expect that to cost? $20? Maybe $30? Try $49.99. And you can't even use in-game gold or gems to pay for it.

You can get a quarter of the wildcards you need to craft a decent deck for Standard for fifty smackeroos. That's almost the same as just buying the booster packs and doing it manually, and you don't get the incidental commons and uncommons you also need to make a deck work. If you want to make that mono-white aggro deck, you'd have to spend $200 to get the Rare wildcards and scrape together enough common and uncommon cards to build the rest.

ArenaGameplay-1

At its root, these two solutions fall back to the same fallacy Wizards has based Arena's entire economy on: that Arena cards should be worth the same amount as their paper counterparts. In paper cards, that mono-white aggro deck is valued at about $155, according to MTGGoldfish, and you can take that deck apart, trade it, sell it, or do whatever else you want to it once you've finished playing. Meanwhile, Wizards wants you to spend more than that to not even get a full deck's worth of digital cards that are tightly locked to your account and can't be traded, sold, dusted, or anything else.

No Wildcards

If Arena's economy is going to be fixed, Wizards needs to move past thinking about booster packs. They may be what sells, but they won't be for long if everybody gets sick of it and moves on to more generous games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel or Pokemon TCG: Live (the latter of which has zero real-world transactions). At the bare minimum it could introduce dusting, or allow you to trade in more common wildcards for the rarer ones. It could even take a page out of MTG Online's playbook and introduce trading between players or card rental.

But Wizards, this isn't something you can solve by giving us more shit to buy.

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