Magic: The Gathering Arena - Another MtG video game

I only got back into Magic Arena a couple of weeks ago, and had a good enough time to preorder one of the Strixhaven packs. 50 booster packs OR the mastery pass, 3 draft tokens, and 1 sealed token. I am so glad that I chose the latter, I haven’t played limited much before but I am having a blast. Deck building becomes much more interesting when you’re so limited by cards (or at least less overwhelming than standard constructed), and I have found that the matches are much more varied than in constructed. You see cards you’d never see in constructed, you see suboptimal cards, and you don’t get the really annoying control/mill decks.

My first sealed went pretty well:

Yeah man! Limited is the jam.

This. I only play constructed around the table with my friends, and we all build the craziest/most inefficient decks packed full of crazy shit. It’s like the roguelike of games - you just never know what someone’s going to pull out (but it’s probably going to synergize well, even if by accident).

For fun, and as an example, here is one of my normal decks.

But a few times a year we love getting together and drafting a new set - and this is an itch that is easily scratched on Arena (my son drafts several times on Arena each set, and never pays a dime for it). Drafting is the bomb.

My first Arena sealed was a success. 7-2 with this baby:

Most games were won on the backs of pests.

Nicely done! I’ve tried Witherbloom in a couple of drafts and it hasn’t gone well, never seem to have enough pest generation. But sealed is a different beast.

Thus far the best draft decks seem to be mostly either red/blue (my best run so far was Prismari) or blue/green. Not particularly surprising with all the magecraft triggers running around. Occasionally you get run over by a black/white aggro draw, and once a guy stomped me with that black/green 11/10 guy, but those are the exceptions. Mainly it’s about tempo or making big fractals. Have yet to see a red/white deck do anything of note.

It’s crazy how vastly different our experiences have been. My first draft was Prismari and it went SO horribly. It was so slow that I just got completely run over by basically everyone.

Lorehold seems like a trap almost. It has a very clear mechanical identity, and you would think the recursion would give it a lot of inevitability. But I’m finding it really challenging to put the pieces together. In fact, I would say that about the draft format as a whole. If you aren’t smart about your selections and your synergies, you’re going to get blown out by someone who was. It’s a little unforgiving.

I say that as a Bad Drafter, though.

Oh, I agree. I’m a mediocre drafter at best. I do pretty well when it’s very clear which colors (or in this set, school pairs) are open, but if it’s not extremely obvious what’s being drafted by my neighbors, I end up with really bad decks. Still, I enjoy doing it every once in a while, especially since it’s basically free to draft occasionally on Arena by using your daily quest gold.

PSA: Free stuff.

Apparently this is in apology for the bug that kept you from seeing your daily quests for the last few days.

Good choice, Wizards. Introducing new bugs every update is pretty aggravating.

D & D expansion is up. ‘PlayDND’ is the code.

I haven’t really been paying attention to spoilers this time. Boy there’s some weird mechanics here.

I tried this, because I am interested in D&D. Granted, its been some years since I played Magic the gathering, but I had absolutely no idea what do to do, and how to do it. The whole gameclient itself is a marvel of complexity, with 7 billion different ways to do stuff, that mostly cost various kinds of currency I don’t have.

After fiddling around with this in about 15 minutes and not figuring it out, I gave up, exited and uinstalled.

Huh. I’ll admit that it’s been awhile since I went through the new player experience, but I don’t remember it being all that difficult to figure out.

Anyway, it’s a F2P game, so you either pay or you play to get currency.

I’ve been reading through the spoiler for AFR and I’m pretty impressed with the way they managed to get the D&D flavor into the Magic mechanics. It’s not perfect, of course, but there are lots of places where the card abilities reflect what you’d expect as a D&D player. All the class enchantments, for example, give you a basic ability that matches the class theme (cleric lifegain, ranger creature summoning, etc) with the opportunity to level up twice to get better abilities along the same theme. There’s also a cycle of “encounter” cards that give you a choice of effects which reflect some common D&D encounter types, like “You’re Ambushed on the Road” or “You Hear Something on Watch”. And of course there’s lots of dragons, goblins, elves, dwarves, etc to play around with, including some very iconic Forgotten Realms characters.

The LEGO Magic: The Gathering: Forgotten Realms: Drizzt set is gonna slap.

Also, the story guys are writing D&D adventures as the story articles for this set, which is pretty darn cool. The first two are up now on the MTG story page.

I’m pretty luke warm on the two mechanics (Dungeon exploration; this is boring and sure to never return again, like certain mechanics before it (remember Energy?) and as such I’m not wasting my time on it. Dice Rolling - this is neat and implemented in a fun way with a d20 (and d12’s at the least from some Commander product leaks) but the chaotic nature of a dice landing on a 10-19 or a nat 20 is so impossible to build around I’m out).

I do like quite a few of the cards and legendary creatures though, so I’m planning on picking some of these up after a week or two of letting the market settle a bit.

Working on a Bard Class/legendaries deck (Drizzt, of course), and I have to immediately try out the new mill cards with Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.

Haven’t messed with the dungeon stuff yet…seems fun, but awful slow.

Got in a couple of Forgotten Realms sealed over the weekend. 4-3 with black-green in a fairly weak pool, and 7-2 with black-red with much better card choices. In both cases the clear MVP was Reaper’s Talisman - that’s the front-runner for mythic uncommon in this format in my book. I think I only lost one game in which I got that thing out and equipped it. Other general sealed impressions - the fixing in the format is terrible, stick to two colors if at all possible unless you’re making a whole lot of treasure. Dragons are crazy strong, almost any one of them is a bomb. Venturing into the dungeon is only a significant factor if you can reliably repeat it (mostly white cards). There’s a lot of good artifacts and enchantments out there with very little removal available, maindeck anything along those lines in your colors. And of course, D20 rolling is going to annoy you by giving your opponent crits while sticking you with the under-10 rolls. :)

I have only played alot of sealed/draft in Magic Arena with Strixhaven and now Forgotten Realms. It’s interesting, I thought Sealed in Strixhaven was 10x more fun. There was alot of interesting combos, multi-coloured cards, and so on that made each deck feel interesting. Forgotten Realms seems much more vanilla.

On the other hand, I am seeing more variety playing Draft in Forgotten Realms as there isn’t clearly superior colour options like there was in Strixhaven (at least that’s my impression).

Yeah, there was only support in Strixhaven for five color combinations: white/black, red/white, red/blue, blue/green and green/black. Not the case in Forgotten Realms.