In previous articles here and here, I talked about completing MTGA sets through limited events. This article is the culminating work that ties together all the information I have been able to gather since I began this endeavor.
The Objective
Simple really, we want to minimize spending on the game while maximizing our ability to make any deck.
Parameters
My entire experience is based on having the equivalent of 200k gold. In my case, I got 100k gold from playing to at least 4 wins a day for two months before WAR was released and then the other 100k gold is the equivalent of 20k gems that I had purchased months before.
Results
The following table summarizes the strategy and outcomes of my limited runs from WAR, CORE2020, and ELD.
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Draft Performance
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Strategy
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Average # of wins
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Win Rate
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Total Cost (converted in gold)
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Net Card Gain
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Net WC loss
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Gain based WC value
(in Cards per WC)
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WAR
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38 Ranked Drafts;
Used 8k gems then used gold
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3.03
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50.58%
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76850
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99
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4
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24.75
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CORE20
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9 Sealed using gems
and 17 drafts using gold
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3.6*
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55%
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56650
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132
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3
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44
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ELD
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22 Ranked Drafts
using gold
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3.23
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51.84%
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66250
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32
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6
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5.33
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* this is just draft performance, sealed performance was 4.4
average wins (59% win rate)
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The most important thing to unpack from the table is the information from the columns of Net Card Gain and Net WC loss. Net Card Gain is the number of additional cards (rares/mythics) that I collected by using limited instead of just spending the gold I would have used for limited (under the Total Cost column) on packs. On the other hand, Net WC loss is the value that I lost from not having opened Wild Cards from the wheel (with some rounding up provided to account for the probability of opening WCs from packs at random). So essentially, Net Card Gain/Net WC loss is a good measure of how much value I was able to get from doing limited in terms of many cards each WC I lost ended up being worth. For example, in WAR, it’s like I exchanged each wild card I lost for 24.75 random rares/mythics, while in ELD, the exchange rate was 5.33 random rares/mythics. It is good to primarily compare WAR and ELD here because CORE20 is an unfair comparison since I did both sealed and draft there instead of just draft and had a very good sealed run.
Comparing WAR and ELD, it is clear that while I did a little better in ELD in terms of win rate, I ended up with far less value in ELD than in WAR. In WAR, it can easily be strongly argued that getting 24.75 random rares/mythics is well worth losing out on a wild card, as there is a very high chance that more than a few of those random rares/mythics are useful cards for constructed. This argument is much weaker in ELD since I was only able to get 5.33 cards for each WC I missed out on. The main difference between the two is that I primarily used gems to fund my run in WAR while I used entirely gold to fund my run in ELD. There is a large disparity here because a ranked draft in gold costs 750 gems, equivalent to 3750 gold whereas if you pay in gold, it will cost 5000 gold. So using gems here gives a huge discount. However, unless you’re a limited god, it is unsustainable to use gems all the time. Also, using the gold to just open packs (foregoing limited altogether) can work once every few sets, but if you do this every set you will eventually run out and be stuck in a set with not enough cards and WCs to craft decks with. Thus, I think that using gold for drafts is still correct. In addition, after my ELD run, I was left with a cache of 80k gold and 30k gems. With a season and a half remaining before the next set, this is more than enough time to generate enough gold for drafting the next set. I don’t even have to spend my gems. The advantage of this is that if I so chose, I can, for a specific set, opt to do entirely sealed runs instead of drafts, thus finishing my limited run within the 1st week of set release instead of within the 1st month.
The Takeaway
To reiterate, completing entire sets within a reasonable amount of time is very doable in MTGA. This is something that, at least for the moment, its major competitors including the “leading brand” in terms of player base size do not have. I feel that the argument that WotC is too greedy with monetizing MTGA is very dissonant with this aspect of the game. Of course, their end goal is still to make MTGA profitable to them and their stakeholders, but I believe that they have sufficiently tempered their financial appetite for the sake of getting more people to play the game. Also, I suffer no delusions that WotC is our benevolent benefactor. At some point, once the game has become sufficiently successful, there will likely be attempts from the higher-ups to cut back on these affordances. I guess, as someone who does want to see the game succeed, this is an unavoidable double-edged situation that will need attending to when it presents itself.
Future Work
I realized a few days ago that limited may not be the only way to complete a collection within the first month of a set’s release. Another way is through the Metagame Challenge. This is a special constructed event held every season where the top prize is 30 packs but you are only allowed one loss per run. The paradox here is that you need a good deck to succeed in this event, but how would you have a good deck if you do not have the new cards yet? I think that when the set is weak, as is likely for the next set (similar to how RNA was weaker than GRN), it is possible to use only a few wild cards to build the best deck in that season and use this for the Metagame Challenge. The objective being to accumulate about 150 packs form the event.
Bonus Video
Here is a video of me taking stock of my standard card pool so far, presented as further evidence of it being very possible to have a sufficiently sized collection in the game that grants the ability to make any deck one wants. In the video, I talked about postponing building Jeskai Fires. However, I actually did it already since it turned out I was just missing one copy each of Fires of Invention and Fae of Wishes (I was very bad at playing it though, but that's a story for another time).
May the shuffler be with you
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