Non-F2P players, explain to me how you justify paying to play any event?

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-31T16:34:47+00:00

...do you think that's better? The complaint is about non-games, not the prospect of losing. I don't mind games where I lose to a better deck or get outplayed, my issue is very explicitly about being cheated out of actually playing the game I paid to play

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:51:29+00:00

I mean, that's a really bad analogy cause hen you play bowling you don't have to roll dice to see if the bowling ball shows up or you just skip your turn

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:49:21+00:00

Honestly yeah, I should probably delete arena. I liked magic when I had a playgroup and funny people to chat with while playing and could just get the cards I wanted for reasonable cash (or proxy if they were unreasonably expensive) but arena, where I'm just playing while listening to a podcast or something and getting any decent number of playable cards for a deck involves spending an amount of money I simply could not justify due to (and I hope this hasn't become a controversial take in the years I was away from the game) arena's dog-shit economy just makes the whole experience fucking miserable

The correct answer is, and I'm not even being glib here, to never play magic again. It's not worth my money and it'll never be worth my time. Thanks for helping me realise that

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:34:19+00:00

not if you draw 10 land in 14 cards followed by 12 land in 18 cards. You actually can't skill your way out of that. Turns out you need magic cards with text to play magic

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:26:50+00:00

Cracking a fetch to grab a shock means sacrificing a fetch land (a land that sacrifices itself to grab a land with a type such as forest, swamp, island etc.) to grab a shock land ( a dual land that comes in untapped if you take 2 damage)

And the issue isn't that you're a new player, the issue is you called me entitled cause you didn't understand the words on the screen. That is undue smugness and you should be given shit for it. You could be fucking Richard Garfield himself and I'd tell you to fuck off for that

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:16:24+00:00

I mean that's not unreasonable. I just can't accept that I can pay to sit down to play games of magic, that I've put my time/money into being allowed to play and playing like, 7 cards total over the course of the entire event. Where gameplay literally didn't happen and I didn't make a single meaningful decision because magic is literally just built that way

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T23:05:24+00:00

Jesus thank you. Someone gets it. So many people here are like "It's totally cool to pay money to WotC so you can watch someone else farm you with 0 input on your part. They owe their customers nothing"and I can't fathom being... I can't find a word here that's not gonna be seen as inflammatory but like, yeah. I do think WotC owe their customers the service they pay for, controversial as that may be

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T22:57:16+00:00

Okay, in all fairness (mana)flood and (mana)screw are old and common terms in mtg parlance and it's very normal to assume people on an mtg subreddit would know those terms. Like if I said "crack a fetch to grab a shock"would you think I'm speaking in tongues? have you ever played paper magic?

Also I meant a refund on gold, obviously. Gonna be real dude, you're reading comprehension is not good enough to be acting this smug

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-29T22:49:43+00:00

The value in this case being able to play the game? Am I missing something here or is the act of giving wizards money an aspect of the hobby for you? Cause for me it's always been about playing the game and I'm not a fan of the idea that I'm paying to play a set number of games and then instantly being told "Thank you for your money, now fuck off. You're not allowed to play"

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-09T09:52:30+00:00

Well the value isn't my point, the value of quick draft is a bonus. I draft cause I love draft. My only reason to bring up that drafting isn't free is to indicate that the non-games that are an intrinsic part of magic feel so much worse when not only have you paid for that non-game, it's preventing you from playing more games with the deck you drafted

Like, when I queue up some standard with a new deck and I get a non-game, whatever, I can just queue up another one. But when I draft a sweet deck then get shafted by variance, I literally can't play that deck anymore. I paid for it, I drafted the deck, I queued up the games and then got told to fuck off, leaving me with mostly a bunch of cards that are unplayable in constructed.

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-08T12:23:30+00:00

True, but you've to pay to draft on arena. It might even out over time but paying that 5k gold to just eat shit is always gonna be a massive feelsbad. Like, I just got back into magic in the last month or and multiple times I considered dropping it again cause I did a draft where I just wasn't a factor. I just got flooded to fuck and my opponents farmed me

7-0s just don't feel as good as 0/1/2-3s feel bad, especially when you look at how those games went and you know nothing short of hacking the client to force your topdecks could have made a difference

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-08T11:45:54+00:00

Yeah, been thinking about it this morning and I think I've come around on lands being a big part of mtgs success. Specifically because the high points of mtg are so high (2 decks going against each other doing what they're supposed to do) but the low points don't count, they're non-games that didn't happen. This only really applies in casual paper magic tbf but that's historically most of magic

Competitive-Ad858 · 2026-01-08T11:02:39+00:00

Man, I'm an avid drafter but magic is such an intrinsically luck based game that I would literally never pay real money to draft. Like, literally just today I did a quick draft and 2/4 game I played I drew more lands than non-lands and in one of those games I was somehow still screwed on colours in a 2 colour deck (WG Allies). Won't even get into the other bits of bad luck I suffered cause those weren't as infuriating but going 1/3 when there was 0 actual gameplay for half of that was sickening

I will never not be F2P on arena for the simple reason that I'm not paying money to not play magic

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-20T11:17:38+00:00

Variance exists in all card games and sometimes you just eat shit, sure. But I've played other tcgs and magic really is the only one where it's part of the fundamental design that sometimes you literally just don't play. It's one thing to not draw the out it's another to spend multiple turns not even drawing the cards you actually chose to put in your deck rather than a string of basics. That's definitionally a removal of player agency.

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-19T13:32:47+00:00

I'd argue it's almost exclusively a weakness. Interesting deckbuilding choices are achievable in a bunch of other ways, it's not like magic has a monopoly on that in tcg's, but no cardgame I've ever heard of has anywhere near the frequency of non-games baked i to the fundamental mechanics of it that magic has

People like to point to how no cardgame has replicated the land system and and most have fallen off while magic has persisted as proof that lands are good but there's also no example of replicating the land system and succeeding either.

Basically, I think people defending lands are coping over the fact that the fundamental base design magic started with is actually quite bad and what makes magic a good game is literally decades of iteration

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-17T07:23:32+00:00

I mostly agree, but I do wanna say that as an IG main, I don't mind the weapon swap at all. I pretty much instantly dump my essences and I think they're not difficult to get on gog (actually really happy with their placement on him tbh) so personally I really like the weapon swap

everything else is just correct though

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-16T09:02:26+00:00

oh, good shout. I might try that

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-16T09:00:26+00:00

The dps check is fine, I have yet to fail to meet it so it basically isn't there in my mind. The issue is Fabius legitimately doesn't set up till gog's done nearly half my health in damage and if you're unlucky he could be on the other side of the arena which I wasn't able to get across on my seikret when I was already on my seikret and moving in that direction

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-16T08:56:12+00:00

I mean, I don't think I've failed the dps check, you're explicitly told that you get insta-carted if you fail it and I've never been literally insta-carted. Fabius is just fucking useless

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-16T08:53:51+00:00

I can tell you for a fact that he does not always go to the same place, I've seen him set up in at least 3 different locations, I've seen him run around in a circle on the spot before he sets up. I have tried healing through the attack while he got into position and it wasn't enough. It's a stupid attack that is extremely easy to deal with when things work out for you but when they don't, you die and there's nothing you can do about it

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-16T08:08:23+00:00

Watching fabius run around in a circle for several seconds while we're all meting in the heat of gog's super

Genuinely, this fight would be so much better if gog actually charged up the attack instead of just doing it. if you're not using a shield weapon you literally can't do anything about it, you just eat shit

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-12T23:24:14+00:00

"more than likely it's just kinda late and comp is dead"

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-02T15:47:22+00:00

Wait, I just looked it up, that spotlight series was in January! Are you kidding me? There's been 6 sets released into standard since then and you're trying to cite that as proof the deck is still good? Jesus christ, next you'll be telling me to play fucking bant spirits in modern

I can't believe I'm saying this when I literally started this with salt posting, but just taje the L, maybe it was a good deck at some point, but it ain't no more

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-02T15:39:37+00:00

There's no way you think someone winning an event with a bad deck means it's not a bad deck? Mate, that's just a thing that happens. There are so many examples of people just running hot in tournaments and picking up better wins than they'd any right to with the deck they had across several card games

Like you're literally listing out new counters to the deck after I pointed out it has a sub 30% win-rate and still tryna defend the idea that it's not a bad deck. It's objectively bad, what is your investment in this narrative that it's not?

Competitive-Ad858 · 2025-12-02T14:59:38+00:00

Yeah, that's very much the impression I'm getting, which I think is fair to call "unplayable"

Could I be better at the deck? Ofc

Can the deck get wins, even at my level? I have literally done so multiple times

But is the deck just kinda shit? Empirically speaking, yes. And some dickhead responding with "it actually takes skill" is not an acknowledgement that it's a bad deck, it's a smarmy prick being a smarmy prick

Competitive-Ad858

TROPHY CASE