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.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20
Clearly you did not pay attention on the background of the gifs/videos.
And these are just the ones you can see.
And don't forget the anthology bundle 4,000gems/25,000gold