Evaluating the State of the MTGA Economy

Magic: The Gathering is not a cheap hobby. On paper, it is not uncommon to spend hundreds of dollars to have access to a single Tier 1 deck. Considering how the meta changes, it is typically necessary to have access to most of the card pool in order to stay competitive. One of my earliest articles was on answering the question: can you make money playingMTG? In that article, I argued that this is not possible in paper unless you are participating (and doing very well) in high-level events like PTQs or GPs. It is very possible on MTGO; I have done this myself. On MTGA, the number of cash paying tournaments is increasing, but unlike MTGO, there isn’t a convenient way to grind events and generate a little side income. However, the point of grinding MTGA games is not really to make money. Rather, the point is to complete one’s collection as efficiently as possible. Both on paper and MTGO, completing sets for use is not actually advisable because of fluctuations in the secondary market that can quickly decimate the value of one’s collection. Regardless of how good you are at playing the game, keeping playsets of all the cards in your collection can end up costing you dearly, wiping any gains you may have generated from playing. However, on MTGA, the economy is set up to make completing sets the most efficient way to continuously have access to Tier 1 decks. In this article, I report on how with the introduction of the new draft events in Ikoria, I believe that the MTGA economy has finally reached its optimal state; a state that is good for beginners, and scales well based on both how often you play and how good you are at the game.

Components of the Economy

The main components that are relevant to the economy are as follows: The Mastery Pass, the Limited Events, and the Metagame Challenge. The Mastery Pass is most relevant to beginners in the game, while the other two components are relevant in quickly completing the rare cards of every set. I discuss each of these as follows.

The Mastery pass is awesome value for beginners due to the extra packs that it gives. A new player who buys the pass and plays to complete it will have a collection that is much larger than another new player who puts in the same effort but does not buy the pass. The value of the mastery pass diminishes as one’s collection becomes larger. If a player completes all the rare cards in a set, then the value of extra packs from that set decreases immensely as it will likely only give out 20 gems. Nonetheless, the current mastery pass is still well worth the gems spent to buy it even for someone who has a complete collection.

The new premier and the revamped traditional draft events are the game changers. Previously, the limited events at the beginning of release are only accessible thru gems, and their prize structures left much to be desired. People using mostly gold for events needed to wait several weeks to access the quick draft event. The quick draft event is a low risk event for completing a collection, but required one to play at least 24 pods in order to efficiently complete the rares of a set by the release of the set. The new draft events are available at the start of a set’s release and has a prize structure that enables competent players to gain many more packs than they would have if they used their gold to just buy packs from the store. The following plot shows a comparison of the three available draft events.

As shown from the plot, players who have a 30% to 54% win rate are still best served by the quick draft, but those who have a win rate that is over 54% should choose the new traditional draft in order to maximize the use of their gold. At a win rate of 55%, a player playing traditional draft will average a net gain of 400 gems per pod, and it gets much better for players with even higher win rates. Another factor is that these events are human drafts, which leads to many more rares being passed than in quick drafts. The average number of rares that I drafted in IKO was about 5.5, compared to less than 4 in THB.
Thirdly, I already talked about the Metagame Challenge in a previous article, but the introduction of the new draft events that are accessible upon release of the set has made the Metagame Challenge much better. Previously, if a player cannot access the early limited events, then he or she will need to use wild cards to make use of new decks for the Metagame Challenge. Now, with the new events, it is possible to do all the drafts that one wants to do before the Metagame Challenge, open the prize packs before the challenge, and then hopefully have some of the necessary cards to compete in the challenge, drastically decreasing the need to use wild cards.
Thus, putting all of these together, a player with an above average drafting and constructed ability can do drafts as soon as the set is released, collect as many cards as he or she wants to during the draft, and then join the Metagame Challenge with solid tier decks in order to win enough packs to complete the rares of a set not before the next set’s release, but even before the end of the first season of the current set. More importantly, with a high enough win rate, this entire process would hardly cost any resources, as the succeeding anecdote shows.
My IKO Experience
During THB, I used the Metagame Challenge to gather as many cards as I can. I ended up collecting 79 packs at a net cost of 2000 gold. This was not enough to complete rares for this set, and I still had to do about 8 quick drafts. I was not able to track my quick draft performance for this set but if past performance is used as a basis, it likely cost me about 24k gold, putting the total cost of my expedition to completing the rares of THB to 26k gold.
For IKO, I did 14 drafts. Four of those were traditional draft and the rest were premier (I did this before making the computations and therefore did not know that traditional draft was better than premier). From these drafts, I was able to accumulate 78 rare/mythic card pulls and 48 prize packs, with a net cost of 1000 gems (since the first draft was free). This is at a 56.52% win rate, just a little above the cutoff of based on the graph.

Afterwards, I played 11 pods of the Metagame Challenge mostly with a stock Macrosage Fires list. That yielded 116 packs (two 7 wins, 76.9% win rate). This ended up costing me nothing, even netting 4000 gold when all was said and done. Thus, the combination of drafting and metagame challenge was more than enough for me to complete IKO rares by this time, with still more than two weeks before the end of the season. Overall, the total cost was 1000 gold or 200 gems.
Conclusion
From the perspective of competitive players, I think MTGA is in a very good place. The economy is finally setup in a way that let’s people with enough skill complete sets both quickly and at negligible cost. Hopefully, this stays the status quo for sets to come.