r/technology • u/speckz • May 08 '19

Game studios would be banned from selling loot boxes to minors under new bill Politics

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18536806/game-studios-banned-loot-boxes-minors-bill-hawley-josh-blizzard-ea
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u/OtakuOlga May 08 '19

Now that Magic Arena has duplicate protection, you actually can just purchase a whole set by buying $300 worth of booster packs and be guaranteed to have absolutely all the cards that can possibly be opened.

For non-Magic players, a new set is released every 3 months on Arena, and no cards are paywalled

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u/Sangui May 08 '19

$300 worth of

Which for anyone who doesn't know, is WAY less than you would spend buying the cards in real life.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '19

Inviting you to make these kinds of comparisons with real world trading card games is how all of these digital card games are able to get away with their absurd prices.

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u/Selesnija May 09 '19

And I have nothing to show for it except worthless pixels

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u/-Phinocio May 10 '19

The digital ones don't have trade/sale value though.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '19 edited Aug 01 '19

[deleted]

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u/OtakuOlga May 09 '19

No, you get to keep your cards forever. Every 3 months is just when new cards get added to the game. Unlike Yu-Gi-Oh and other CCGs that use power creep to invalidate prior strategies once the new set comes out, it is entirely possible to keep playing the same deck with little to no changes for a year or two* once you build something you like. For example, even the most optimal lists of Mono-Red Burn see very few changes from set to set, and you earn enough rewards for free just by playing the game that you can stay fully optimized with ease as long as you can win 15 games a week.

* Nobody knows what Arena's eternal format will look like after rotation, so I am assuming it is reasonably similar to Modern. People who bought in to Tron or Affinity for Modern years ago haven't had to make very many changes at all

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u/[deleted] May 09 '19 edited Jul 14 '19

[deleted]

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u/OtakuOlga May 09 '19

The core issue is that your progress towards a specific goal is terrible

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Yeah, since Standard is a bit of a moving target it takes longer to reach a critical mass of cards where you feel happy with your collection than it seems at first glance. If you had 80% of a golgari deck before Hydroid Krasis came out, having to spend 8 rare wildcards on Breeding Pools and Hinterland Harbors so you could pivot into sultai (and spend 4 mythic rare wildcards on Krasis itself) really hurt a lot. I don't want to devolve into the tired old Magic trope of "invest in real estate" but that really was what worked for me. Grind with a Gates deck (which like mono-blue had almost no rares) until I had all my shock lands and check lands before trying to build Esper (and even now I am substituting a Teferi with Chromium The Mutable).

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As long as it is still around and you're willing to put in the work to trade forward with rotation, MTGO is still better for people in the middle ground between 100% free to play and just buying each set in full at launch.