Yeah, that’s the bit I was remembering. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of looking at the deck you want to build and seeing which set the commons/uncommons come from, since those are what you’re likely to pull from packs.
Every set available in Arena is currently in Standard and will remain so until the fall 2019 set comes out in roughly September 2019. At that point, the cards in Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, Dominaria, and Core Set 2019 will rotate out of Standard, leaving Guilds of Ravnica, the upcoming Ravnica Allegiance, the spring set codenamed “Milk,” Core Set 2020, and said fall set. Rotating cards will remain in your collection and will still be usable in other formats the developers plan to support, but if you want to play in Standard queues and tournaments, you’ll have to stick to what’s legal there.
With all that said: the best decks in the format currently include cards from every Standard-legal set, and rotation is so far away that you’re better off going for stuff from the sets you need cards from for the deck you want to build than focusing just on the newest set. Rather than just opening packs and praying, though, you may want to watch for rotating Limited events for those sets, as a 5000-gold draft (three 15-card packs) or 2000-gem sealed event (six 14-card packs, since basic lands are dropped for sealed) will give you better value than buying packs outright, with potential to win additional gold, gems, and packs as you win matches in those events. I’m planning on doing the 5000-gold Dominaria draft that entered the event rotation this week, and I expect I’ll get a lot more out of it than I would if I just bought packs with that gold.
For pack buying, focus on Guilds of Ravnica. For one, the guilds concept leads to some pretty powerful combinations of colors and GRN has a bunch of really awesome cards. For the other more practical reason, it’s not rotating until 2020, so they’ll be useful in Standard for much longer.
(The current color combinations for the record are: Selasnya (white-green), Golgari (black-green), Boros (red-white), Izzet (blue-red), and Dimir (blue-black), so focusing on building decks in those colors is probably your best bet at the moment. The other 5 combinations will be highlighted in the next set.)
They absolutely will be doing that. There will, for sure, be some sort of Arena Legacy mode once the first sets rotate, but don’t be misled…the current sets will definitely rotate out of Standard play in the digital game.
Thanks for the info on the ‘rotation’ guys, although I am assuming they will never rotate back into standard play?
Does ‘standard’ include the ladder casual constructed mode the game has, or is it just constructed tournaments/events?
It really boggles my mind that people would spend say $100 on booster packs for a card set that they will only get to play in their digital game for 9 months. And people think the monetisation scheme for Artifact and Hearthstone are bad!
Yeah limited drafts seem much better value, I am doing the Dominaria one at the moment and got to pick about 6 rares from the three draft packs.
Yes, ladder follows Standard rules.
Every card game rotates. Hearthstone rotates. Artifact will rotate if it lives long enough to get multiple expansions, which is looking increasingly more iffy by the day. That’s how you keep the meta changing and correct mistakes in relative power levels.
Cards can and do rotate back into Standard if they are reprinted in a new set that is Standard legal. Then you can even use your old copies again (i.e., no need to rebuy / craft ones from the new set, you’re allowed to use the version from the non-standard set as it’s considered to be functionally the same). This happened recently with Llanowar Elves, for example.
That’s interesting, I only played Hearthstone between launch and its first expansion, I didn’t even know it was rotating sets now. I can see why it may be needed in paper card games, but in digital ones they can balance existing cards easily to keep the meta fresh and correct mistakes in relative power.
Good to know, thanks.
Then you turn into an MMO, constantly having to patch and adjust cards as the inevitable unintended consequences come back from the last patch. And Arena, of course, has the added problem that their goal is to recreate the paper Magic experience with a nice digital wrapper, so patching cards isn’t going to work for them.
Eternal hasn’t announced a rotation yet, opting to adjust cards occasionally. But they still have a pretty small cardpool considering that game’s been out two years already. It’s been a few months since I played, but the meta was getting a bit stale over the summer…I suspect there’s an announcement of rotation coming soon.
Along with what charmtrap said above, the more CCG-specific problem is, if you want to sell players on new expansions, it gets much harder if the existing cards are already good enough and are strong enough to keep playing as-is. We already have a real-world example of a non-rotating card game with Yu-Gi-Oh!, which has some of the worst power creep in any CCG ever, and “fixes” unbalanced cards by banning them or printing direct answers to them in the following set. A non-rotating digital CCG doesn’t even have to do either of those - they can just nerf existing cards into oblivion to force you to buy into new sets to stay competitive.
Hidden at the bottom of the December update: they’re removing the individual card rewards from Constructed Events. The new rewards:
Constructed Event/Traditional Constructed Event
Entry: 600 gold, or 120 gems
Match Structure: Constructed Event is best-of-one, Traditional Constructed Event is best-of-three
Event Ends: 6 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first
Rewards:
6 wins: 1300 gold 5 wins: 1000 gold 4 wins: 800 gold 3 wins: 600 gold 2 wins: 400 gold 1 win: 300 gold 0 wins: 100 gold
Not gonna lie, that kills off a lot of my interest in Arena. I’ll probably still play a bit of drafting, but my main casual play interest was in seeing how far I could get in CE and what cards I could roll.
But don’t you still get cards for daily win rewards? And that entry/payout model seems a lot more generous that the current one, so you could buy packs…
Er, no? You never did.
Unless you mean the weekly rewards, which yeah, those are still there, but that’s just running dailies. Those are the daily chores…not much fun in it.
Well, you have to get to 3 wins to break even. A perfect run nets you 7/10 of a pack, so for people who want to sit on their leather ass and grind out wins, I guess?
For average and below players, Constructed Event became less than useless. Part of the fun of CE was you still got cards even when you lost…and now and then you’d roll an Arcades the Strategist or some good random rare for your efforts. Oh well, easy come, easy go.
You get individual cards interspersed with your gold for daily wins in any mode, plus the weekly boosters.
Oh right, I forgot about those. I rarely grind that far down because ladder play mostly sucks. I just get the first 4 wins.
You can also buy packs with the in game gold currency that you get from the daily/weekly quests.
Also these two public codes will work for some free cards currently:
GameAwards
PlayRavnica (check spelling)
Why does ladder play mostly suck? Do you mean you don’t feel enough ‘incentive’ to compete, or the players they match you with are bad, or what?
Obviously there’s incentive to compete. The more wins, the more gold.
It’s mostly the difference between best-of-1 vs best-of-3. Ladder is what you do to finish your quests and gather your gold to go play best-of-3.
Well I agreed it’s a shame they’ve taken the card prizes off the events. I wonder, did they explain why?
Why is best of 3 much better? I don’t know Magic very well, and the card games I have played are all bo1 so am curious.