It's Time To Fix Magic The Gathering Arena! | Dies To Removal 43

Does Magic: The Gathering Have A Treasure Problem? - WotC Plz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MurpLheNc6k

The goal of Arena was never to bring the MTG experience to a digital market, it was to capitalize on Hearthstone's success.

My Top 3 Magic villains: 1. Hassans Bro, the Tithe-taker 2. The Wizards of the Cost 3. Micro, the flowing Transaction

I love when Spice8Rack writes the intro bits, he's got such a subtle touch.

From what I was told, the reason they didn't plan for Commander on Arena was because WotC mostly thought Arena was a farce and a waste of time, before it was actually "finished" for a Beta release. There was no company-wide cohesive vision to make it a legitimate platform that catered to what people were playing at the time (= Commander), but rather it was intended to be a Standard-focused platform. Of course, anyone with five brain cells could've told them the idea of a Standard-focused platform was doomed to fail given the nature of rotation, unless the economy supported a platform focused on Standard, which of course it didn't. It was one of those projects they let people work on, but pinned absolutely none of their success on. I can only assume they would've made space for Commander in earlier stages of development if they had had any faith in Arena. They'll probably figure out some patchy workaround to let you "play with 4 other people", where it's really a 1v1 screen, but your opponent's avatar/board changes each turn to show a different opponent's board state, etc.

As a programmer, there's no reason WotC would struggle to separate Historic from Alchemy. Each card likely already has atrributes to tell them which set it comes from, there's no reason why they can't just make another attribute (if they haven't already) that says if a card is an Alchemy card. Separate the alchemy cards from Historic/Pioneer/Modern and make Alchemy versions of those. Keep Alchemy out of my games. I want my deck lists to work both in paper and if I transfer it over to digital.

The Budweiser commercial with the Iguana saying "Wazzup!" was actually the third evolution of the commercial. First were 3 frogs in a swamp croaking "Bud", "Weis", and "Er". Then, the "Weis" frog was missing so the frogs added an iguana that kept trying to spice up its line "Weis" by adding syllables and such, ending on "Wazzah!". Then the iguana started calling people and just yelling "Wazzaaaaaaaaaaaa" as the people on the phone also yelled "Wazzaaaaaaaa". It was a weird story arc.....

I fixed it by getting some friends together and playing paper commander with them, abandoning Arena.

Reasonable fixes to arena's economy? They had the economy stream, they had questions asking for reasonable fixes from the audience. The response was: sigh*...technology. The thing about a game's economy is that it has dials, switches, knobs, and sliders that can be changed, adjusted, added and/or removed to meet any criteria that wotc needs. Game engines, whether they're made in-house or licensed from another company are made with monetization systems so that games made using those engines can have any aspect of it easily monetized. That's a standard feature in game engines now. They can fix the economy, tomorrow, they don't want to.

I liked the subtle product placement with the two deck boxes. I can’t wait to get mine next year!!

I just want to point out that the editing (especially visually) on this episode is amazing, especially for a podcast where you don't need to go above and beyond like that. Love the production quality on this channel.

How about this? : Put a “Rare Wildcard” token in the token or foil slot of packs in set/draft/collectors boosters. It has a code on the back for 1 rare wildcard to redeem on Arena. Put it at 10 - 25% to appear in a paper pack, more in collectors and less in draft boosters. This hits the paper-arena connection, relieves some burden of rare wildcards on arena for F2P players, and supports your players who want to spend time/money on both editions of the game. Plus you can even sell these like singles back to your LGS or trade to others if you’re a paper-only person

I dislike the massive push for alchemy, and whenever I'm building a new deck it's very annoying to see alchemy cards recommend even though I have the Standard filter set. Also whenever I get free alchemy cards from packs I've grinded out it annoys the hell out of me

Duels ended with Amonkhet indeed. Crazy thing is, Duels HAD multiplayer. It also had its own deck construction tied to rarity (1 mythic, 2 rare, 3 uncommon etc of each card per deck). Even after discontinuing it I would sometimes play with friends just to play 2v2. Honestly I played Duels a lot more than Arena overall.

If only one of this occurs I would love a story mode. They would be so much fun and make arena much more connected.

For the chat function: Being able to make presets, that go through a filter, that you can replace the basic presets with. "Hello!" And "Nice!" work but the other presets are boring or unusable. Being able to say something like "That was awesome!" or something makes it feel more real.

I had such low expectations of Arena and its laughably short list of features, that when I booted up Legends of Runeterra I was stunlocked. I starting playing when they just had a simple single player mode that went through a handful of enemies in the "Lab of Legends." Only a few short months later, suddenly this mode blossomed into a "Path of Champions" singleplayer option with vastly more starting Champion characters, more unlockable powers, expanded card pool, greater array of enemies with unique abilities...and the cherry on top is that it is a fun alternative to grinding the ladder that nevertheless showers me in resources to make competitive decks. Even more, the developers of Legends of Runeterra have said they want to do MORE with the single player mode, with expanded features and more overhauls. How sad is it that I am jumping for joy when developers actually care and provide amazing free content without kicking and screaming "Oh no, the technology isn't there" "Oh, you wouldn't want to destroy your precious collection that doesn't exist!" and other false explanations.

Explorer coming with the SNC update and Pioneer being officially on its way is maybe the best announcement they've made for Arena in a long time.

Having worked in a few software companies as a dev, it's very possible that the teams behind arena just have poor leadership and direction. I've seen companies make decisions to stagnate the system because of it being more financially beneficial to do so and I've seen companies spend years to try and build their next platform and never make it. Poor decisions early on and poor direction and focus after that can lead to a lot of bloat and bad code which slows everything in future development down.

Let me just say, even during the time I took a break from playing magic (ixilan all the way to kamigawa) I still very often listened to this podcast. And it's not just because I wanted to stay up to date on Magic and that I genuinely enjoyed your guys's content, it's mostly that I absolutely adore the banter between you two. I would pay for a podcast that you guys do not even talking about Magic, I would love just like an hour and a half long thing unscripted of you guys just talking because you guys have such great comedic timing and such awesome banter with each other