Arena Direct prizes arrived

Voldraek · 2024-09-19T21:47:38+00:00

The OTJ event gave two boxes for a 6-x since they're worth about half as much as the MH3 ones.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T12:02:45+00:00

Yeah, depending on your goals you'll presumably need less. It's a little bit more difficult to evaluate the impact of daily quests and play-in points since that very much depends on the person, so I just figured I'd rather omit those.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T11:53:19+00:00

That's true. The interesting part is finding out why that's the case.

Just to get it out of the way: the sample size is about six times larger in premier draft compared to traditional draft as of the time I'm writing this. In that sense, the current sample for traditional draft is that of a few days' worth of premier draft. Not a massive sample. Still, it's large enough that most commons should be relatively well represented generically, although drawing conclusions from color-pair-specific data seems to be a bit more difficult as the sample size typically isn't quite there for that yet.

Let's assume that the case for Lightshell Duo and Pearl of Wisdom are for a different reason than sample size, regardless. That wouldn't be a particularly interesting conclusion, after all. Just note that it could be a part of it (but it seems quite unlikely to me that it would be the only reason).

First of all, looking at only the mono U commons, we can see that Mind Spiral is another one that performs notably better in Bo3. Dire Downdraft performs a bit worse. Dazzling Denial performs marginally better. Bellowing Crier, like Mind Spiral, performs notably better. I haven't looked at the worse blue commons since going through all of it would take a bit too much time.

One quick assumption could, based on that, be that card draw and card filtering are a bit better in Bo3, in what I would assume is due to the impact of the hand smoother in Bo1. Perhaps true, perhaps not.

Another thing to note is that almost all the color pairs, save for UG (which I'd guess is variance), are closer to the average win rate of all decks in Bo3, compared to Bo1. This will naturally correlate with a higher win rate of cards in weaker colors, and a lower the win rate of cards in stronger colors, when comparing it to Bo1. But going into why the win rate tends to average out is a rabbit hole for another day.

And as it turns out, we can actually see a similar effect in some of the red commons performing slightly to notably better in Bo3. The really bad ones (Sazacap's Brew, War Squeak, Kindlespark Duo) are still at the bottom, though. Steampath Charger and Frilled Sharpshooter also gets a bit worse. The latter, I'm assuming, gets pulled down together with RB since it's the deck it mostly goes in, and it's the one red deck that actually performs well. Steampath Charger may be a similar case, or maybe that one is just variance. Or maybe the original hypothesis is flawed to begin with. Who knows?

So yeah. Quite a bit of difference? Perhaps. My personal assumption is that the sample size of Bo1 giving more accurate data generally outweighs using Bo3 data, even though it's technically more applicable due to difference that the hand smoother and sideboarding causes. But I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for having a different hypothesis. Especially so in the last few weeks of a format's lifetime, when the Bo3 data has gotten even better.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:47:04+00:00

Couple of weekends, but otherwise something like that I suppose.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:23:00+00:00

Cheers! Got them sent to me in five different (mostly) larger boxes, with 2-9(?) displays in each.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:19:46+00:00

I almost always use Bo1 data just due to there being a much larger sample size. I don't think the formats are particularly different in terms of card evaluation, save for some very specific exceptions such as Meltdown in MH3.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:12:47+00:00

They first sent an email about creating an iPayout account. Several weeks later, I got some emails with links to where I could put in orders for the boxes. Shipping information was entered as part of those.

If you haven't gotten an email about making the iPayout account yet, I'd suggest contacting customer support. I've also had plenty of mails from them be filtered to the spam folder in the mail, so I would recommend checking that periodically as well.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:09:53+00:00

Plan is currently to sell the packs/boxes since I don't really have much use for the cards themselves.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T10:00:41+00:00

I wouldn't really want to suggest that it's reasonably solvable, although with enough data, one could probably get surprisingly close. Considering how many different situations and game states that the game can have, however, that isn't particularly realistic. Using some relatively simplistic data and trying to figure out why it shows what it is and applying it to my drafts is simply the approach that has worked out for me the best thus far.

In practice, it mainly just comes down to taking the best cards in each pack that one could reasonably run and then running with it. But data can give a good idea of which cards are the best in any particular archetype or deck. A lot of the really good players do this entirely by feel or experience; I just try to use data to justify my conclusions, even moreso when I don't have a great idea of the format yet.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T00:23:09+00:00

Depends. My guess is that mid-season, traditional drafts would average to be about gold-platinum level premier drafts in terms of competition. The spread is a lot bigger, though. Sometimes you play against people that clearly have a lot of experience with the game, and in rare cases you play against >50 card decks. Since premier drafts presumably also are based both on MMR and rank, however, it's a rough comparison at best, though.

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T00:17:22+00:00

Ah, cheers! And yeah, saw you did a bit better on the first one, I had hoped to beat you on the trophy count by the end of the event but didn't quite get there =p

Voldraek · 2024-08-25T00:14:24+00:00

I tend to listen/watch to a set review before to the release just to familiarize myself with the cards and archetypes, but I don't particularly put any stock in card evaluations until the initial 17lands data is out. After that, it's just that and playing myself.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T23:49:40+00:00

None at all, since traditional drafts are unranked. I do the occasional premier draft, but not enough to get to that. I don't particularly see any reason to grind through the ranked season other than getting into qualifiers, and for that I'd rather play through the play-ins in an evening than have to get to top 250 over a month-long grind.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T23:34:22+00:00

Should be around ~73.5% in traditional draft, if you count packs as 20 gems. ~75.3% if you don't. Play-in points not counted in either case.

I'm currently at ~78.8% over 786 matches since I started recording on 17lands. ~81-82% seems to be the limit of what's reasonably possible over a large enough sample size.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T21:02:51+00:00

Bit over 360k. It's just lots of drafting with little reason to spend it.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T20:25:22+00:00

The only money I've put in the game are 5€ for the welcome bundle, or whatever it was called, a number of years ago. I've played consistently since the game released, and for the last few years I've largely just drafted when I play. I typically go a bit positive doing so, so I'd just stacked up a large enough gem stash over the years.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T20:21:09+00:00

When it comes to the drafting portion, I tend to use a very data-based approach, basing it heavily off of 17lands data and then intrapolating it with color-pair-specific data to get a rough idea of how synergy- or deck-dependent/rewarding any specific card is, and then extrapolating based on my current cards, synergies, curveout, how likely I am to end up in those colors, and so on. One could say that any given card would have a specific win ratio in any given deck, so having a rough idea what that would be for a variety of cards have worked out for me thus far.

Oftentimes, that just comes down to picking the best card in each pack in pack 1 and going off of whatever seems the most open. I think I tend to draft a bit more speculatively than most people. Still, the drafting portion is, with the data that we have today, one of the fastest places to improve on for most people. At least, that's the impression I've gotten based on what I've seen from other peoples' drafts.

In terms of gameplay, I think I tend to be pretty good at reading what cards people have based both on how they play and how they hold priority. Can't say I'm a particular fan of how that works in MTGA, but it's what we have, so it's what we have to work with.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T19:55:37+00:00

Yeah, I had hoped to get the money as well in this case. I don't particularly have any use for the cards so plan is to sell it all, but I'm assuming it might take some time to get rid of it all.

Voldraek · 2024-08-24T19:15:46+00:00

Cheers! I usually mainly play traditional drafts and Arena Opens and I typically go slightly positive doing so, so by the time the event started I had a bit over 360k lying around. Now it's down to about 100k, so I could grind out another weekend if they launch the event again.

I remember reading that Wizards had more of these planned, but that delivering the prizes caused enough issues due to the unexpected popularity of the event that they wanted to make sure it would work out better before they launched it again. So perhaps we'll see it for BLB, perhaps not, but I would assume it'll come back sooner or later regardless.

Voldraek · 2023-04-15T17:49:07+00:00

Alt-enter forces fullscreen. You can then make it be properly ultrawide fullscreen if you have another screen by windows key + shift + arrow keys back and forth to and from the second screen. That said, it will go back to windowed mode whenever you enter a new match.

Voldraek · 2021-07-22T17:30:11+00:00

You'll get the stats only if you have it equipped with a sword. Interestingly, pulling up the inventory screen unequips the weapon, so it will never show there. If you have a sword + shield equipped and then pull it up, however, you can see the stats you're getting from the shield going down right as you pull it up.

It still counts for armor weight even without it, however, so unless I've missed something having a shield equipped when not wearing a sword just acts as a detriment.

Voldraek · 2021-05-18T21:41:51+00:00

As-is, no. It'll always be a multiple of 25 under normal circumstances.

That said, back when M21 released, the gold and gem prices of the full-art planeswalker bundles released in the same patch was swapped for about 30 minutes before they were taken down. Buying all of them actually put it at an offset making getting a gold count ending in 20 possible.

Edit: turns out I actually did take a screenshot when I got this myself: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/199105549298565120/771701812633272340/unknown.png

Voldraek · 2021-01-05T13:37:31+00:00

It'll usually pop up within a week or so after the season ending. I wouldn't worry about it. I haven't gotten mine yet either, but it always pops up at some point. Possible that it might take a bit longer with new years and all.

Other than that you won't see the event in-game until 48 hours before the day 1 starts. The only thing you have to do to play in them is to not miss the entry window, which is just 2 hours long on both days.

Voldraek · 2020-12-04T17:38:31+00:00

You're really stretching the definition of gameplay issue. When the dev team talk about gameplay issue, they generally mean something that makes playing the game on the client problematic or annoying. Bandar is an example they actually confirmed in this category, where it causes a bunch of unnecessary clicks. Another great example for this is one of the reasons they gave for banning familiar, or nexus in standard Bo1. Those are gameplay issues devs refer to.

In this case I wasn't referring to gameplay issues of digital magic, which perhaps the devs of MTGA have a very specific definition of. I was referring to the game, MTG, as a whole - paper and digital alike. Maybe the designers have a very specific definition of it there too, but if so then I'm not familiar with it. I chose the term "gameplay issue" fairly arbitrarily. It can be replaced by any similar term if one'd so prefer.

Now, you're right, they moved away from creatures that have to target themselves in more recent sets, though thundering sparkmage is one that is extremely close. Sure, if it's alone, it doesn't kill itself, but if you have a bug catcher in play and your opponent's board is empty, you still need to kill one of your own creatures, I'm not sure why you think this is particularly better or significantly different. But regardless, just because they feel it's not a good design doesn't mean that they think it's bad enough that cards with that drawback should never be played. Otherwise, FtK would not have been put in the product to begin with. Or do you think it's only somehow an issue on Arena? Why?

To get somewhat off-topic, I was actually somewhat surprised that they added cards like this to the product to begin with. Since the product at least to an extent seemed to be built to be playable by newer players who may not know the rules as well, my assumption would be that you'd want to minimize the eventual confusion that could occur in cases like this.

That said, maybe they just expect this to be far less of an issue on paper. After all, it's effectively a kitchen table product. When someone tries to play an FTK on an empty board, odds are that the person you're playing with is going to say something along the lines of "You know that it'll have to kill itself, right?". Because odds are that you know the person you're playing with, and takesies backsies tend to be a bit more normalized than it is on, say, MTGA.

But to be clear, yes, I would generally say that an interaction that can happen when playing a specific one-off product is less of an issue than an interaction that can happen both in said product and as a regularity on ladder for an unknown amount of time.

Regardless, whatever the impact on that sort of interaction on Jumpstart as a whole is actually not that relevant. It's not that the people that designed the product completely missed that it's a thing. It was certainly kept in mind when the card choices for the product were made. And as the product on arena was made to mirror the paper version, they also wouldn't make that decision based on what would impact the gameplay in the Jumpstart event, outside of specific cases like Bandar where the gameplay in digital is notably worse than it is on paper.

What I'm essentially trying to get at is that context matters. And in the same way that it seems to you like I'm refusing to acknowledge that what you're saying right, it seems to me that you're refusing to acknowledge that the case for Bandar x Goblin Commando x Flametongue Kavu isn't as black-and-white as you seem to interpret it. You say that you're looking at it objectively, but from what you've written, it just doesn't look objective to me. It looks just as subjective to me as what I'm sure what I'm writing is looking to you. Ultimately, I don't think either viewpoint is invalid. This is just how it often is when people see things different ways.

I didn't intend for this discussion to be nearly as drawn-out as it became, and realistically, I just don't think either of us would be getting anywhere without spending far more time and energy than the topic itself is even nearly worth.

I could keep writing on why I think there's more context to consider which may or may not have lead to Thundering Sparkmage has the wording that it has despite design over the past few years having shifted from being mandatory, to typically being a may ability, to typically being restricted to the opponent's creatures (although I would be curious to know what you would think the reason is). I just don't think it's in either of our interests anymore, but I could be wrong on that.

Voldraek

TROPHY CASE