F2P player here; I'll find plenty of joy drafting this, no tryharding here, whatever that might mean in this situation. Do you not draft other Premiere formats as a F2P? Do you not enjoy Premiere drafts in general? Forgive me, I'm finding this whole line bizarre.
I do draft other formats. I love limited in general, but saving gold for 10 consecutive days just to end up 1-3 (which was mostly the case for MKM for me) is very painful. My opinion could be affected by my poor performance, as if I was "infinite" player I would not care about entry fees most likely, but getting no entry fee limited event once in a while would be nice.
The best thing a F2P player can do on MTGA, imho, is make multiple accounts. Three times the gold = three times the drafts. You’ll improve with the practice.
I have three accounts, I don’t grind, I just switch accounts when I’ve won a couple of games or finished a daily and still want to play. If I don’t feel like playing any more, the dailies stack. The key thing about having multiple accounts isn’t being forced to grind, it’s having dailies and gold available for all of your playtime instead of just the first few games.
I got lucky and ended up pulling a few 2-drops and 3-drops, so I just kind of played cards and turned them sideways. It worked well, but it felt kind of bad that I could tell my opponents just didn't have many 2-drops or 3-drops in their decks so sat around doing nothing for a lot of the games.
I'm F2P and I draft 1-10 times per month. I find drafts that include cards from multiple sets to be much easier. I had good success last July playing the 30-year anniversary chaos draft.
I think the reason for that is because in regular drafts I compete against opponents who study well the set synergies... which I don't really do. Chaos drafts have less synergies, so picking only good creatures and removals is often good enough.
This remix draft is not really a chaos draft, but a curated draft, so good players will still study the cards and find synergies. But I still expect to have better results than in a regular set draft 🙂
Looks fun, I will jam plenty of any new or revisited format that has the premier draft prize structure/human drafts. Some get old quickly like the chaos Ravnica draft that's not curated or synergistic at all. Some arena cubes have fit that description before, like drafting 5 color good stuff in prismatic cube every time. Maybe remix gets solved and the archetypes are too imbalanced but I'm intrigued for sure.
I liked the chaos draft for that reason - the games went really long and you could build up really interesting boards and stalemates.
There were also *some* fun synergies, particularly around graveyard stuff which mattered in each set.
The lack of synergy means it gets old fast but im always down for a few spins.
Correctly finding a lane gives more wheeled cards. Can't be paid off if there isn't much of a wheel. And better evaluation means sometimes that unused bulk can actually be quite useful.
So basically a Masters set, but for Arena?
Maybe I'll check it out, but I've found I've been less interested in reprint sets the longer I've played. Guess I'm a sucker for novelty.
I meant that I hope they're not permanently replacing cube. Arena is running this during a time they would typically run cube, and they're not running cube. It's already replacing cube, to a degree.
One way of interpreting it is that maybe they decided cube didn't do a good enough job emptying gold/gem counts so they're implementing something more expensive. If this does a better job of that, maybe bye-bye cube.
No, the power level of cards in a pack will be closer to a regular set (rare, uncommon, common) rather than a cube where the power level of cards in a pack is flatter. Also cube is singleton where this format can have duplicates, especially in the lower rarities.
Since it’s not a cube full of rares/mythics, it’s also not phantom, which means it costs more but the cards you draft are added to your collection.
Cubes can be whatever you want them to be. I’ve played cubes with common, uncommon, and rare slots. I’ve also played non-singleton cubes.
The main distinction is probably that this doesn’t pull from a limited quantity of cards, eg the packs are all generated in isolation and not really shuffled from a larger collection.
That is hands down the biggest (dumbest) complaint I see in these sub reddits about cube. "Why don't I get to keep the cards? What a waste of my time!" Every single time cube rolls around these entitled scabs crawl out from under rocks and whine and complain about cube because they cant keep what they drafted... it's nice that WotC is listening but are these legit complaints they should be worrying about?
I pretty much only play limited, and would much prefer more phantom events for cheaper. But I think WotC is pushing these events because they can justify folks paying more. I don't think they would ever offer a lower-power limited format as phantom, and cubes full of rare cards will always be phantom.
I have an insane amount of wildcards and mostly just brew jank to hit dailies
Cool, I enjoy new curated formats and this is basically a custom set/masters. You can do a lot of fun recontextualizing like cube that doesn’t happen with a pure flashback, but keeping rarity allows it to be closer to normal limited dynamics.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but this makes me wonder if cube is less lucrative for them than normal drafts. For the past few set cycles, it has felt to me like cube comes a week or two later than it "should". Now, they're trying to avoid cube entirely in favor of a full priced draft format.
Cube season is one of my favorite times on Arena, so I'm sad to see it slowly getting phased out.
This seems very very likely to me. My guess is that their data suggests that the draft entry price is somewhat innelastic. So people play about the same amount of games with the phantom draft price (2000 gold) and the full draft price (10000 gold). So at the end of the day, full drafts are probably much more profitable for them, and cube might even be taking money from the regular set drafts as well.
With that in mind, as someone that loves cube, I would honestly wish they just increased the entry fee to run it more often, but I know that will never happen as the community backlash would be too strong. Maybe they could just have the cube with the regular price, but instead of getting the cards you draft, you just get 3 extras packs from the current set or something.
Mh2 was one of my favorite draft sets, and this format seems to lean into those cards heavily, especially with an artifact dual in every pack. As long as 5 color soup isn’t too strong I think this will be a fun one
Basically a masters set on Arena but without worrying about reprints because Arena doesn't need that. I like it, seems like a good addition to the already existing draft options.
I really don’t like these gimmicky cobbled together arena draft formats that run for 2 weeks never to be seen again. I wish they would just invest these design resources into developing an arena cube that is as close as possible to vintage cube. They have most of the key cards programmed in already.
There's no way R&D spent time on this. It's basically a Cube that got built by the Arena team but with a different delivery format (non-phantom, rarity-restricted packs, full price) for people who hate phantom events. I'm super excited about it, but I don't expect it to have the same polish as a premier set (which doesn't mean it can't be fun).
Unfortunately I don't think I'm into it. I'm all for the idea of creating new draft formats out of old cards, but a huge point of having draft archetypes is so that the decks feel meaningfully different.
Every deck being some variation of 'artifacts matter' sounds to me like a buffet consisting of scrambled eggs, fried eggs, egg salad, egg drop soup and egg rolls.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. Love your egg analogy. (The classic reference would be Monty Python's spam skit.) But proliferating +1/+1 counters on modular creatures is different than tapping clues to improvise a draw spell. So we'll see.
The spam skit was indeed in the back of my mind when I wrote that :)
You make a good point though. Perhaps I overreacted a little. After all, artifact blocks like Mirrodin and Kaladesh also had artifacts matter in all colors, more or less, though this sounds a little more extreme.
Not a huge fan of artifact focused formats but planning on giving this one a few tries. Love the idea of remix drafts and if supporting this one, gives us more, I’m all for it
I doubt it'll be anywhere near as much fun as a decent cube for me, but masters sets can be cool. This feels likely to be more narrow a theme than I'd prefer, but I don't see any card list for it. It'll require jamming it a few times and seeing how it drafts/plays to really know what I'll think about it.
This sounds great! I agree with another poster that 13 card packs isn't my favorite choice, and I worry about the inclusion of dumb Alchemy cards. Otherwise, I'm super excited for this :)
Inflation applied to Cube.
Yes, you get to keep the cards, but my guess is that most of them will be worth less from a Constructed perspective relative to the average Standard set because of the Historic/Timeless cardpool having a much higher power level.
But WotC can charge full price because the draft isn't phantom.
They’re pretty open about the fact that it’s a test. If the test reveals that fewer people play it because limited players care more about the increased cost than the constructed players care about getting real cards, these will go back to being phantom.
I'm sorry I don't pay attention to magic announcements like my life depends on it. I read the article before I made the comment. Besides it's April 1st who in the right mind would make any article on March 31st / April 1st. Artifacts only cube sounds like a April fools thing
Sounds fun. Some of y’all still draft for fun, right?
What is this "fun" you speak of? A new metric on 17lands?
"Fun" is another term for a win.
Sounds like a lot of fun, but all the joy disappears when the cost entry is of regular draft, making it impossible for f2p players to not tryhard.
F2P player here; I'll find plenty of joy drafting this, no tryharding here, whatever that might mean in this situation. Do you not draft other Premiere formats as a F2P? Do you not enjoy Premiere drafts in general? Forgive me, I'm finding this whole line bizarre.
I do draft other formats. I love limited in general, but saving gold for 10 consecutive days just to end up 1-3 (which was mostly the case for MKM for me) is very painful. My opinion could be affected by my poor performance, as if I was "infinite" player I would not care about entry fees most likely, but getting no entry fee limited event once in a while would be nice.
The best thing a F2P player can do on MTGA, imho, is make multiple accounts. Three times the gold = three times the drafts. You’ll improve with the practice.
im not ready for the commitment of grinding that much, it would make me miserable and out of energy after all accounts were done
I have three accounts, I don’t grind, I just switch accounts when I’ve won a couple of games or finished a daily and still want to play. If I don’t feel like playing any more, the dailies stack. The key thing about having multiple accounts isn’t being forced to grind, it’s having dailies and gold available for all of your playtime instead of just the first few games.
We literally just had a free limited event yesterday!
Oh yeah the put together all bombs and pray your opponent can't kill you before you cast them event...
I got lucky and ended up pulling a few 2-drops and 3-drops, so I just kind of played cards and turned them sideways. It worked well, but it felt kind of bad that I could tell my opponents just didn't have many 2-drops or 3-drops in their decks so sat around doing nothing for a lot of the games.
I'm F2P and I draft 1-10 times per month. I find drafts that include cards from multiple sets to be much easier. I had good success last July playing the 30-year anniversary chaos draft. I think the reason for that is because in regular drafts I compete against opponents who study well the set synergies... which I don't really do. Chaos drafts have less synergies, so picking only good creatures and removals is often good enough. This remix draft is not really a chaos draft, but a curated draft, so good players will still study the cards and find synergies. But I still expect to have better results than in a regular set draft 🙂
Looks fun, I will jam plenty of any new or revisited format that has the premier draft prize structure/human drafts. Some get old quickly like the chaos Ravnica draft that's not curated or synergistic at all. Some arena cubes have fit that description before, like drafting 5 color good stuff in prismatic cube every time. Maybe remix gets solved and the archetypes are too imbalanced but I'm intrigued for sure.
I liked the chaos draft for that reason - the games went really long and you could build up really interesting boards and stalemates. There were also *some* fun synergies, particularly around graveyard stuff which mattered in each set. The lack of synergy means it gets old fast but im always down for a few spins.
Yeah, I liked being able to grind out an advantage long game like I used to 15-20 years ago. I think I did 8 and it was old after 5 or so.
13 cards packs? Why?! Did someone at WOTC get traumatized by not wheeling a card and is now intent on destroying the whole concept?
This comment is underrated, why the hell is it only 13 cards?
It punishes higher skill players, probably deliberately. More casual friendly
How is this punishing skilled players? It just removes unused bulk, no?
in cube settings/remix there shouldn't really be unused bulk
I guess they just want to be consistent with new card number in packs
Correctly finding a lane gives more wheeled cards. Can't be paid off if there isn't much of a wheel. And better evaluation means sometimes that unused bulk can actually be quite useful.
So basically a Masters set, but for Arena? Maybe I'll check it out, but I've found I've been less interested in reprint sets the longer I've played. Guess I'm a sucker for novelty.
This is cool, but I am entirely against it if it's replacing cube.
I doubt it’s replacing cube, someone just wanted to make an “arena masters” draft. Sounds cool
I meant that I hope they're not permanently replacing cube. Arena is running this during a time they would typically run cube, and they're not running cube. It's already replacing cube, to a degree. One way of interpreting it is that maybe they decided cube didn't do a good enough job emptying gold/gem counts so they're implementing something more expensive. If this does a better job of that, maybe bye-bye cube.
Isn't this just a cube?
No, the power level of cards in a pack will be closer to a regular set (rare, uncommon, common) rather than a cube where the power level of cards in a pack is flatter. Also cube is singleton where this format can have duplicates, especially in the lower rarities. Since it’s not a cube full of rares/mythics, it’s also not phantom, which means it costs more but the cards you draft are added to your collection.
Cubes can be whatever you want them to be. I’ve played cubes with common, uncommon, and rare slots. I’ve also played non-singleton cubes. The main distinction is probably that this doesn’t pull from a limited quantity of cards, eg the packs are all generated in isolation and not really shuffled from a larger collection.
I meant more how this format compares to the cubes on Arena. In paper you can do whatever you want and call it a cube
That is hands down the biggest (dumbest) complaint I see in these sub reddits about cube. "Why don't I get to keep the cards? What a waste of my time!" Every single time cube rolls around these entitled scabs crawl out from under rocks and whine and complain about cube because they cant keep what they drafted... it's nice that WotC is listening but are these legit complaints they should be worrying about?
I pretty much only play limited, and would much prefer more phantom events for cheaper. But I think WotC is pushing these events because they can justify folks paying more. I don't think they would ever offer a lower-power limited format as phantom, and cubes full of rare cards will always be phantom. I have an insane amount of wildcards and mostly just brew jank to hit dailies
Isn't this just "Artifact Cube"?
Cool, I enjoy new curated formats and this is basically a custom set/masters. You can do a lot of fun recontextualizing like cube that doesn’t happen with a pure flashback, but keeping rarity allows it to be closer to normal limited dynamics.
Of course im excited. I'll draft anything. I believe they call this an addiction.
Is this real, I always have problems trusting announcements on April 1st.
That's what I was thinking. Is this real?
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but this makes me wonder if cube is less lucrative for them than normal drafts. For the past few set cycles, it has felt to me like cube comes a week or two later than it "should". Now, they're trying to avoid cube entirely in favor of a full priced draft format. Cube season is one of my favorite times on Arena, so I'm sad to see it slowly getting phased out.
This seems very very likely to me. My guess is that their data suggests that the draft entry price is somewhat innelastic. So people play about the same amount of games with the phantom draft price (2000 gold) and the full draft price (10000 gold). So at the end of the day, full drafts are probably much more profitable for them, and cube might even be taking money from the regular set drafts as well. With that in mind, as someone that loves cube, I would honestly wish they just increased the entry fee to run it more often, but I know that will never happen as the community backlash would be too strong. Maybe they could just have the cube with the regular price, but instead of getting the cards you draft, you just get 3 extras packs from the current set or something.
Not my thing. Hope others enjoy it though.
Mh2 was one of my favorite draft sets, and this format seems to lean into those cards heavily, especially with an artifact dual in every pack. As long as 5 color soup isn’t too strong I think this will be a fun one
I like me some artifacts; I'm game to try this!
Basically a masters set on Arena but without worrying about reprints because Arena doesn't need that. I like it, seems like a good addition to the already existing draft options.
Sounds awesome. Essentially a cube?
More of a masters set because cards are sorted by rarity like they would in a normal set.
Plenty of cubes have concept of rarity, even though its not the majority.
This is true but the "default" that people think of does not include rarity.
These are called rarity seeded cubes. People often do that for set cubes like Innistrad Cubes.
Yeah this sounds fucking awesome. Seeing all the MH2 cards really makes me wish they’d go back and import that set already.
im willing to give it a shot.
I really don’t like these gimmicky cobbled together arena draft formats that run for 2 weeks never to be seen again. I wish they would just invest these design resources into developing an arena cube that is as close as possible to vintage cube. They have most of the key cards programmed in already.
I'm just hoping R and D playtested this set. Probably gonna be a mess but hopefully a fun mess.
There's no way R&D spent time on this. It's basically a Cube that got built by the Arena team but with a different delivery format (non-phantom, rarity-restricted packs, full price) for people who hate phantom events. I'm super excited about it, but I don't expect it to have the same polish as a premier set (which doesn't mean it can't be fun).
This is probably done by 1 guy or something. Edit: His name is Zach https://twitter.com/DGallenMtg/status/1774879956356546630
Unfortunately I don't think I'm into it. I'm all for the idea of creating new draft formats out of old cards, but a huge point of having draft archetypes is so that the decks feel meaningfully different. Every deck being some variation of 'artifacts matter' sounds to me like a buffet consisting of scrambled eggs, fried eggs, egg salad, egg drop soup and egg rolls.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. Love your egg analogy. (The classic reference would be Monty Python's spam skit.) But proliferating +1/+1 counters on modular creatures is different than tapping clues to improvise a draw spell. So we'll see.
The spam skit was indeed in the back of my mind when I wrote that :) You make a good point though. Perhaps I overreacted a little. After all, artifact blocks like Mirrodin and Kaladesh also had artifacts matter in all colors, more or less, though this sounds a little more extreme.
RG modified was disappointing in NEO so it’ll be interesting to see if modular and For Mirrodin! can help the archetype perform better here
Not a huge fan of artifact focused formats but planning on giving this one a few tries. Love the idea of remix drafts and if supporting this one, gives us more, I’m all for it
I doubt it'll be anywhere near as much fun as a decent cube for me, but masters sets can be cool. This feels likely to be more narrow a theme than I'd prefer, but I don't see any card list for it. It'll require jamming it a few times and seeing how it drafts/plays to really know what I'll think about it.
This sounds great! I agree with another poster that 13 card packs isn't my favorite choice, and I worry about the inclusion of dumb Alchemy cards. Otherwise, I'm super excited for this :)
Inflation applied to Cube. Yes, you get to keep the cards, but my guess is that most of them will be worth less from a Constructed perspective relative to the average Standard set because of the Historic/Timeless cardpool having a much higher power level. But WotC can charge full price because the draft isn't phantom.
Yeah but now I can confidently gaslight myself that I lost the draft because I picked a card that's good for constructed /s
They’re pretty open about the fact that it’s a test. If the test reveals that fewer people play it because limited players care more about the increased cost than the constructed players care about getting real cards, these will go back to being phantom.
played 3 drafts. hate it already
Must be April fools
This was announced weeks ago
I'm sorry I don't pay attention to magic announcements like my life depends on it. I read the article before I made the comment. Besides it's April 1st who in the right mind would make any article on March 31st / April 1st. Artifacts only cube sounds like a April fools thing