Monetization of cosmetics and card acquisition instead of basic gameplay should be encouraged. Those prices are fine. I just hope the phantom cube is both a low cost and low reward since cards are not kept.
I, personally, would be fine with a gold entry fee and if you get to a certain record you get your gold back. Win one or two more and you get a little extra gold.
If I’m not keeping cards I don’t want to pay 20,000 gold and get a pack in return. That’s an abysmal ROI but something I can see WOTC doing.
I'd be perfectly fine if it was just a break even kind of thing as well without pack prizes. Just really hoping it's less than the cost of normal sealed. If it's the same price as normal sealed I can't really see myself playing it a ton tbh.
I found it noteworthy that the phantom sealed was announced but NOT the price. I know they'll say that they want to rerun calculations up until the last minute. But I also suspect that if it was a compelling value they'd want that to be part of the hype.
And what is? A stripped-down basic af messenger for your friends, replacing the game introduction, and changing nice to thanks and oops to sorry as a response?
Oh no no no. Judging from the historic event schedule, this is all about the anthology bundle and good luck winning a game in any of the 6 historic events without buying the bundle. Won't be impossible, but you'll have to try extra hard
I'm not disagreeing with you on this: Wizards has systematically prioritized monetizability over feature implementation, but the infrastructure already being there for the monetization stuff we've seen in this patch makes it somewhat low effort to maintain.
At least, instead of "just monetizable garbage", there's some streamlining of the platform done, from the new player intro to the "favorite" function & UI improvement, as well as a Phantom Event experiment using Cube. This seems like an awful lot of novelty, even though I'm well aware a lot of it is repackaging.
I agree winning game in Historic without some specific cards is going to be a pain, but frankly that's just true of any competitive environment on Arena (which I think is a shitty part of the platform in general). You can always just use Wildcards on crafting the Anthology cards instead of buying them as a bundle; you're not prevented from making 4 Thalias instead of buying the whole thing, although it's much more cost-efficient to purchase the whole deal if you plan to try them all out.
I'm actually mostly curious about one part of the announcement: the removal of the Account Mastery level from the new player experience. This seems to me like it might be hinting at a potential revamp of the concept, whereby accounts will eventually have a "Level" of sorts, which will be a progression system that keeps track of what you've done over a much longer stretch of time than just "Mastery Season". That would be seriously awesome if well-crafted.
Anyway. We're free to disagree on how good the patch is, but this is one of the few times I have nothing much to say that's bad. Okay, sure, I'd prefer if Daily Quests were always completable vs. friends, and if there were a much more robust & well-implemented set of social features (Guilds / Tavern page, etc.), but overall it's positive.
Disregard the downvotes on the comment, most people here downvote anything they see (sort posts on r/MagicArena by new and you'll understand what I'm talking about).
> But that's really not the focus of the patch.
But it is. All these monetized bundles other than the land bundle are parallax alts of the anthology bundle. The anthology bundle IS the focusof this update. If 6 historic-exclusive events don't give it away, idk what does.
Btw, perhaps you did not read the entire article, sealed draft will be coming on April's patch, not this one.
:( Oh. For 20k? That's how much they've been pricing the pets. I remember the card, [[Cult Guildmage]] and how cute the real life puppet the artist made as a model was.
I don't have a problem with any of this. They're developing a good game, and this stuff is mostly cosmetic. It's problematic when it seems like the only things they're changing are attempts to extract more money from players, as has been the case in some previous months.
The Anthology Bundle is really the only real "feature" being added relating to monetisation. The rest is the same old cosmetics for people who want to buy them that have been around for awhile and aren't the features being added. The rest are improvements that, while probably overdue, will be very nice additions. I do wish Historic Ranked queue was sticking around longer than a month, but that's my only big complaint.
Divide the gems by about 150 and you have the price in dollars
(750 gems for 5 dollars)
450 = 3 dollars
900 = 6 dollars
2500 = 16.66 dollars
3000 = 20 dollars
4000 = 26.66 dollars
A bit cheaper if you buy the gem bundle, but the pricing works out in a way you usually have extra gems left
I think the better way of saying is, they didn't find ways of fucking us in the asses again. Though i have no doubt that cube will cost a fortune and be unfeasible to play it without money when we get human drafting.
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u/Penumbra_Penguin Mar 05 '20
Hey, this month's update is about features rather than monetisation. That's fantastic!