I’m going to give a few away on my stream maybe. If not, I’ll post them here in a bit
I’ve got a few. Send me a PM from a forum account if you want one.
I have 3 more to provide as well:
qry-fnq3-e91
qst-a96a-oir
qqp-dyrk-g7y
replace the q’s with 6, 1, and n respectively.
Here’s a code after my other recruitment efforts spent the rest.
qbg-yhq7-y4j
I like Scott_Lufkin’s method, so that starting q is really a 7.
MtG Arena has a usable, modern interface. Usable things are presented to you and highlighted. Turns automatically progress when no action’s open (and you didn’t opt-in to extra control). Notable cards get extra animation or voice acting flair. For gameplay and usability, it easily bests the old Magic: the Gathering Online client. The lack of card trades (or the tickets of MTGO) means there’s no player economy, so I don’t get their pricing model yet. My main hope is they add a draft mode that’s cheaper for people who just want to draft, not accumulate untradeable cards.
In the meantime, there’s now a free mode to play games to earn the daily quest gold. I found it weird that, with no constructed rank and choosing just the starter decks, I was matched against someone with multiple rare ballistae and a Karn planeswalker. I would guess for a player new to the game in any of its form, this would a bad way of learning about their own cards and building a deck. Half of the other six games came down to mana draws on one side or the other, it seemed like, which also felt odd given their system of presenting the more-average draw of the two. Perhaps that’s a comment on the mana balance of the starter decks?
So they have a new matchmaking system for the free ladder queues that doesn’t just match MMR but also tries to judge the strength of your deck by rating cards by how often they’re created with wildcards. But I imagine that’ll work better when there are is an influx of new players.
Oooh, that’s an interesting way to do it. I’m curious how well it’ll work.
Same here. It seems like a sound method of judging cards’ relative worth…on the theory that most people aren’t going to use precious wildcards to create jank. But it also seems like a system that really needs kajillions of signals to rank stuff well.
It’d be really nice to be able to play jank vs jank, though.
It’s something that paper Magic does really well that no digital CCG seems to be able to emulate.
Like, I can throw together a pile of crappy cards and head down to my LGS and without fail find someone who also just has a pile of crappy cards and have fun doing that. I don’t always need to play FNM or any format where someone discusses “The Meta.” Sometimes I just want to play Slow Fatty Angels against Green Red Dinosaurs or whatever people come up with.
But in a digital game with a modern ladder system, you can’t really do that. Hearthstone is terrible at this – once you break out of the beginner ranks, you immediately start running into tuned meta decks and see those almost exclusively until you hit Legend. There’s no surprise and there’s very little room for non-meta decks to thrive.
Hopefully after this explosion of players, they’ll start getting really good data to feed the algorithm.
I’ve still got some beta invites. PM me if you’d like one and you’ve been a forum member for at least one year.
Thanks for all the beta code posts, folks. I grabbed this one:
One of my much-more-into-Magic friends has been playing for a few weeks now, so I’ve heard a decent amount about Arena. He’s been happy with it thus far.
Well done, everyone.
Yeah, it was terrible when I tried to log in earlier today. Stressed indeed! But I just tried it again, now that it’s after dinnertime, and things seem to be working. Also the Twitter feed says the event is extended for a couple of hours.
Thanks Ephraim for the invite. Some things are just like I remember. Draw, no mana. Mulligan. Draw, no mana. Mulligan again. Draw, all mana. Weep silently.
Kinda surprising that WOTC hasn’t gone full-on crossover before. If you own all that IP, why not capitalize?
WotC has been releasing free D&D supplements for Magic planes for a while now, and there was that D&D card in the Unstable joke set last year, but this book would be a lot bigger than any of their previous stuff there.
The upcoming new set, Guilds of Ravnica, preview week begins in an hour. My son and I are potentially very excited about this set, as Ravnica and it’s block contain some of our faovrite cards we still play with, so returning to this plane is very exciting!
There have been some previews already, specifically talking about packaging (that Mythic Edition is sexy af) and mechanics, which are worth linking here while we wait.
Card Image Gallery (revealed so far):
Mechanics:
Packaging:
Today’s preview - Split Cards!
The idea behind Split Cards (back when they first hit the scene and now) is to give a player options, of course. But this block of Split Cards is kind of extra nice because the options are very different from one another. For instance:
For two mana and an instant, you can do some quality removal, OR you can take an attacking horde and make them all the more unstoppable, and then attack again!
Split Cards allow you to play either OR effect, not both.
I am also pleased to see hybrid mana symbols return, on a related note. These are mana symbols that represent either/or so in the case of the above Response spell, if you had one white and one red, or two red, OR two white, you can still cast this.
In the “meet the design team” article we got a look at the latest incarnation for everyone’s favorite blue/red dragon archmage, Niv-Mizzet. And he’s sexy af.
That card draw. Dayum. That CMC (converted mana cost) though, means he’ll never be more than a few bucks to own but also keeps him relegated to two-color decks only. A shame, but he’s not something I’d be upset pulling from a booster, for sure.
From Twitter, Tolarian Academy shared this gem. Going to get a lot of play, I suspect.
Two mana CMC instant speed that removes a permanent!
Golgari and Boros are the two Guilds in this release that interest me, and those cards are making me drool. I really am most looking forward to Orzhov in the set after Guilds of Ravinca, though. BW Vamps forever!
If you like Golgari (and I do as well, probably my favorite guild/color combination) you’ll love the card from the set that Wedge (The Mana Source) was allowed to preview. It’s insane.
Nice. I can see that being a beast in Limited. And now I am happy that white has that Remorseful Ckeric for graveyard hate, for those times when I’m playing my usual mono-white deck on Magic Arena.
How’s Wedge doing by the way? Last I heard he was dealing with that severe back issue while attending a GP.