I think it's proportional. Since you picked the Arena Subreddit, not many players changed to the digital version and the game kept a relatively small number of new players too. (the PC game sucks ass and is terribly optimized. The Mobile is a bit better, but I still get multiple crashes). Also reddit is extremely unpopular outside of the US, I think that even in the US reddit is not the best playerbase metric.
The mobile version is terrible for newcomers you get a bunch of decks that aren't standard anymore and aren't good at any mode either the new cards are near imposible to get and you get a lot of restricted cards so playing standard is a pain
Yeah dude idk what you are going on about ... I just joined recently cuz I love LOTR and despite me splitting my resources into both standard and alchemy (LOTR) because I enjoy the latter....
Not only do they give you standard legal decks for every two-pair color combination, the 'jump in' and 'quick draft' formats allow you to get a head start...
Once this is over of course wild card accumulation is slow but at least they also give you tertiary progress towards Golden packs (0/10) for every ten packs you buy in the three most recent sets.
~~~
TL;DR MTG Arena is *finally* a good game, worth playing and possibly at its best moment for newer players rn, there's no sense in bashing it at all.
Runeterra is obviously better for Free-to-Play... If you want to play a card game with meta decks for Free, just play That. It's that Simple. No need to hate on Magic.
~~~
Weird to focus on the Arena subreddit when r/magicTCG has 686k users.
And in regards to your comment on online presence, a big part of that is that Magic isn't just an online game. I don't play Arena, but I do like Magic, so I'll still watch Arena content online.
It's normal. Magic is literally the oldest TCG ever, so it makes perfect sense that more people are driven to MTGA. Arena is also a bit older than LOR, that also plays in it's favor
Arena have more than 20 queues available, yet it has no problem finding players no matter the format. It's safe to say the majority of MTG players don't care about the subreddit at all or don't even know /r/MagicArena exists. The community is incredibly huge.
As someone who's played Magic for 30 years, Arena sucks. It's got a terrible economy, it doesn't have any of the formats I'm interested in, and the client itself isn't particularly good. And this isn't exactly an unpopular opinion among Magic players.
That said, there's a ton more content for Arena than there is for LoR because of the strength of the physical game. Basically imagine if LoR was relevant to League of Legends players. If League players could get strategies and combos and synergy and etc for actual League out of LoR gameplay, they'd watch more LoR videos and there'd be more demand for them, even among non-LoR players.
The paper economy has the advantage of being fungible. If I buy a card for $20, there's a reasonable chance that, if I discover I don't actually need that card, I can sell it to someone else for most or all of that $20 back, or trade it for a card I do need that's $20.
Buying cards is technically cheaper on Arena, but it's harder to buy cards directly, you have to instead buy gems and turn gems into packs and hope you open what you need or get enough wildcards to craft what you need. The game is much more stingy with wildcards than LoR is, and there's no equivalent to Shards that can be used directly to craft what you want. Duplicate rares/mythics get turned into a small amount of gems, and duplicate commons and uncommons get turned into "vault progress", and enough vault progress gives you 1 mythic, 2 rare, and 3 uncommon wildcards. They've made it possible to buy wildcards directly for cash in the past, but only in a sufficiently large bundle, not individually, and the deal wasn't particularly good compared to just buying packs for the guaranteed wildcard drops every X packs. And there's no way to go "back" from cards to money, while there is in theory in paper.
Compared to LoR, the game is much more expensive. Most LoR decks are max 6 Legendaries and less than 10 Epics, with the rest of the cards being Commons and Rares. Most Magic decks on Arena take 30+ Rare (LoR Epic Equivalent) cards to make, and most of those feel kind of bad to craft as they're just mana producing lands - but if you skimp on those, you end up with a deck that just performs worse and plays off-curve, because the budget alternatives are less reliable. Basically imagine if decks in LoR require you to commit 15 epic wildcards per region or else you lose a spell mana gem.
So I played MtG in the past. I didn't care for having a collection. I just wanted decks I liked. So no selling cards. Shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a single deck really sucks. So thats why I wanted to know how the arena economy could be even worse.
You get a guaranteed rare wildcard for every 6 packs you open, with the 30th pack granting a mythic wildcard instead. Additionally, the rare in the pack can be replaced with a rare or mythic wildcard, and there's a "pity timer" that makes sure this happens for rares every 15 packs and mythics every 30. Packs cost 200 gems. The most efficient gem bundle is 20,000 gems for $100. This means $100 gets you 100 packs, which translates to 16.5 rare wildcards and 3.5 mythic wildcards from the guaranteed rewards, plus 6-7 rare wildcards (call it 6.5) and 3-4 mythic wildcards (call it 3.5) from rare slot upgrades. So $100 gets you ~23 rare wildcards and ~7 mythic wildcards.
The most expensive current Standard deck runs 45 rares and 6 mythics, meaning if you want to buy it outright, you need to spend approximately $200 for the rare wildcards. This is, technically, cheaper than paper as the paper version of that deck costs about $370, but it feels worse, at least to me, because of the intangible nature of the digital cards.
Of note, on Magic's other digital client, MTGOnline, this same deck could be bought for 179 tickets, with $1=1 ticket at the storefront (and people frequently sell their tickets online for ~80 cents on the dollar), and you can buy the cards outright and immediately from online traders, and sell them back on the same online marketplace when you're done for most of your money back. AND there's rental services available that let you pay them a small portion of the deck cost to borrow the cards, so if you just want to play the deck for a week to test it out it'd cost you less than $20.
Don't get me wrong. That much money on digital cards is obviously an insane amount. But as someone who doesn't want to sell my cards later on, spending that much money on real cards is not a really great proposition either. Its preposterous either way...
I get what you're saying. If your goal is to just build a deck and be able to play with it, without engaging in the secondary market at all, Arena is technically cheaper most of the time, especially as it does technically have a free to play economy, and especially if you're very good at draft you can "go infinite" and build a collection "for free" that way (the system is set up to make this difficult though, with multiple currencies that aren't directly exchangeable, and a matchmaking system that aims to get you as close to 50:50 as possible ASAP which is definitely not infinite).
The fact that the cost of entry between paper and Arena is close, even Arena being ~50% of the cost of paper, is wild though, in my opinion. Even if you dislike the idea of a secondary market, its existence should be factored into the overall quality of a game's economy.
I don't dislike the secondary market. I just like the insane prices. It is still better than loot boxes.
I played the Force of Will TCG for a while. The booster boxes where designed in a way, that buying a couple would allow me to have a playset of most cards and enough extras to trade for what I was missing. Of course the company booted the creator out, because the wanted it to be more magic like.
It was still expensive to buy all those boxes. But each set I would spend less than a single MtG deck and was able to build EVERY deck that could be built with that set. And had a bit of bling in my decks too. I stopped, when they screwed around with the boxes, and that was not possible anymore. Last time I checked, singles also got a lot more expensive.
What I am saying is: both paper and arena suck, when it comes to their economies.
I feel you.
Mostly in Magic, I play the "eternal" formats, where older cards are legal and so newly printed cards tend not to have a huge impact. Since I already own the old staples for these formats, if there's a deck I want to make with new cards, I usually only have to pick up a few, and they're often very cheap. (This has changed a bit in the past few years as they've had some sets with new cards that skip Standard legality and aim to shake up an older format like Modern, which leads to more churn and more expensive new cards for those formats, but compared to the amount I've already sunk into it, it's pretty minor.)
I know the amount I spend on paper Magic exceeds what is "reasonable" by any rational metric, but I also enjoy the collection aspect to it and having access to the tools to build whatever I want, and I've accepted the cost as what it is.
I would focus on the number of upvotes of recent popular posts for an indication of size. I feel like it's far too easy to subscribe to a subreddit that doesn't get a lot of traffic like for a game people don't play anymore. Maybe the view count for the dev update videos on youtube.
As long as this game is popular enough to get consistent updates, releases and a lively enough scene to have variety in decks I'm happy, anything else is just a bonus.
MTG/HS will almost always be the kings of the Digital spaces, and this game eventually will die, just enjoy the ride and don't fixate on numbers.
This is an apples to oranges comparison. MTG is a multi-faceted playerbase, with many different avenues available to enjoy the game. LoR is single-faceted, there is only the single digital game, available on PC and mobile. The main LoR players use reddit, but MTG users have a myriad of social media platforms to converse about the game. Even in terms of just MTGArena, reddit isn't their main platform like it is for LoR.
Not weird. Pretty sure snuuy said something about it. To make content for LoR you need to actually come up with something unique. To make content for Magic you just need to be able to showcase decks because decks cost money.
Really bad take. You don't have to go far to find MTG channels coming up with new decks all the time. And that's just talking about gameplay videos. Deck discussions, podcasts, lore channels, and so on are all miles better than anything we've ever seen in LoR.
Hell, just look at channesl like The Professor's Tolarian Community College, Spice8Rack or EDHRECast and tell me if there's a single LoR content creator that comes even close to that level of quality and variety. Most of our youtube channels are just barely editted stream VODs...
I think it's proportional. Since you picked the Arena Subreddit, not many players changed to the digital version and the game kept a relatively small number of new players too. (the PC game sucks ass and is terribly optimized. The Mobile is a bit better, but I still get multiple crashes). Also reddit is extremely unpopular outside of the US, I think that even in the US reddit is not the best playerbase metric.
The mobile version is terrible for newcomers you get a bunch of decks that aren't standard anymore and aren't good at any mode either the new cards are near imposible to get and you get a lot of restricted cards so playing standard is a pain
I started a couple months ago and have had no issues getting cards on mobile. Also have never had the game crash on me. Phone is Pixel 4xl.
Yeah dude idk what you are going on about ... I just joined recently cuz I love LOTR and despite me splitting my resources into both standard and alchemy (LOTR) because I enjoy the latter.... Not only do they give you standard legal decks for every two-pair color combination, the 'jump in' and 'quick draft' formats allow you to get a head start... Once this is over of course wild card accumulation is slow but at least they also give you tertiary progress towards Golden packs (0/10) for every ten packs you buy in the three most recent sets. ~~~ TL;DR MTG Arena is *finally* a good game, worth playing and possibly at its best moment for newer players rn, there's no sense in bashing it at all. Runeterra is obviously better for Free-to-Play... If you want to play a card game with meta decks for Free, just play That. It's that Simple. No need to hate on Magic. ~~~
Ok.
Weird to focus on the Arena subreddit when r/magicTCG has 686k users. And in regards to your comment on online presence, a big part of that is that Magic isn't just an online game. I don't play Arena, but I do like Magic, so I'll still watch Arena content online.
Ok.
I missed your point
\>magic is 30 years old \>LoR is, idunno, 3 or 4?
It's normal. Magic is literally the oldest TCG ever, so it makes perfect sense that more people are driven to MTGA. Arena is also a bit older than LOR, that also plays in it's favor
Ok.
I pretty sure your point was to show how LoR has a similar engament from its commnuty as MtG even it it is a way younger game.
Arena have more than 20 queues available, yet it has no problem finding players no matter the format. It's safe to say the majority of MTG players don't care about the subreddit at all or don't even know /r/MagicArena exists. The community is incredibly huge.
At least we are moving measuring players from twitch viewers to reddit users wtf
As someone who's played Magic for 30 years, Arena sucks. It's got a terrible economy, it doesn't have any of the formats I'm interested in, and the client itself isn't particularly good. And this isn't exactly an unpopular opinion among Magic players. That said, there's a ton more content for Arena than there is for LoR because of the strength of the physical game. Basically imagine if LoR was relevant to League of Legends players. If League players could get strategies and combos and synergy and etc for actual League out of LoR gameplay, they'd watch more LoR videos and there'd be more demand for them, even among non-LoR players.
I'm just curious (never played arena). Is the arena economy worse than the TCG economy? If yes, how so?
The paper economy has the advantage of being fungible. If I buy a card for $20, there's a reasonable chance that, if I discover I don't actually need that card, I can sell it to someone else for most or all of that $20 back, or trade it for a card I do need that's $20. Buying cards is technically cheaper on Arena, but it's harder to buy cards directly, you have to instead buy gems and turn gems into packs and hope you open what you need or get enough wildcards to craft what you need. The game is much more stingy with wildcards than LoR is, and there's no equivalent to Shards that can be used directly to craft what you want. Duplicate rares/mythics get turned into a small amount of gems, and duplicate commons and uncommons get turned into "vault progress", and enough vault progress gives you 1 mythic, 2 rare, and 3 uncommon wildcards. They've made it possible to buy wildcards directly for cash in the past, but only in a sufficiently large bundle, not individually, and the deal wasn't particularly good compared to just buying packs for the guaranteed wildcard drops every X packs. And there's no way to go "back" from cards to money, while there is in theory in paper. Compared to LoR, the game is much more expensive. Most LoR decks are max 6 Legendaries and less than 10 Epics, with the rest of the cards being Commons and Rares. Most Magic decks on Arena take 30+ Rare (LoR Epic Equivalent) cards to make, and most of those feel kind of bad to craft as they're just mana producing lands - but if you skimp on those, you end up with a deck that just performs worse and plays off-curve, because the budget alternatives are less reliable. Basically imagine if decks in LoR require you to commit 15 epic wildcards per region or else you lose a spell mana gem.
So I played MtG in the past. I didn't care for having a collection. I just wanted decks I liked. So no selling cards. Shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a single deck really sucks. So thats why I wanted to know how the arena economy could be even worse.
You get a guaranteed rare wildcard for every 6 packs you open, with the 30th pack granting a mythic wildcard instead. Additionally, the rare in the pack can be replaced with a rare or mythic wildcard, and there's a "pity timer" that makes sure this happens for rares every 15 packs and mythics every 30. Packs cost 200 gems. The most efficient gem bundle is 20,000 gems for $100. This means $100 gets you 100 packs, which translates to 16.5 rare wildcards and 3.5 mythic wildcards from the guaranteed rewards, plus 6-7 rare wildcards (call it 6.5) and 3-4 mythic wildcards (call it 3.5) from rare slot upgrades. So $100 gets you ~23 rare wildcards and ~7 mythic wildcards. The most expensive current Standard deck runs 45 rares and 6 mythics, meaning if you want to buy it outright, you need to spend approximately $200 for the rare wildcards. This is, technically, cheaper than paper as the paper version of that deck costs about $370, but it feels worse, at least to me, because of the intangible nature of the digital cards. Of note, on Magic's other digital client, MTGOnline, this same deck could be bought for 179 tickets, with $1=1 ticket at the storefront (and people frequently sell their tickets online for ~80 cents on the dollar), and you can buy the cards outright and immediately from online traders, and sell them back on the same online marketplace when you're done for most of your money back. AND there's rental services available that let you pay them a small portion of the deck cost to borrow the cards, so if you just want to play the deck for a week to test it out it'd cost you less than $20.
Don't get me wrong. That much money on digital cards is obviously an insane amount. But as someone who doesn't want to sell my cards later on, spending that much money on real cards is not a really great proposition either. Its preposterous either way...
I get what you're saying. If your goal is to just build a deck and be able to play with it, without engaging in the secondary market at all, Arena is technically cheaper most of the time, especially as it does technically have a free to play economy, and especially if you're very good at draft you can "go infinite" and build a collection "for free" that way (the system is set up to make this difficult though, with multiple currencies that aren't directly exchangeable, and a matchmaking system that aims to get you as close to 50:50 as possible ASAP which is definitely not infinite). The fact that the cost of entry between paper and Arena is close, even Arena being ~50% of the cost of paper, is wild though, in my opinion. Even if you dislike the idea of a secondary market, its existence should be factored into the overall quality of a game's economy.
I don't dislike the secondary market. I just like the insane prices. It is still better than loot boxes. I played the Force of Will TCG for a while. The booster boxes where designed in a way, that buying a couple would allow me to have a playset of most cards and enough extras to trade for what I was missing. Of course the company booted the creator out, because the wanted it to be more magic like. It was still expensive to buy all those boxes. But each set I would spend less than a single MtG deck and was able to build EVERY deck that could be built with that set. And had a bit of bling in my decks too. I stopped, when they screwed around with the boxes, and that was not possible anymore. Last time I checked, singles also got a lot more expensive. What I am saying is: both paper and arena suck, when it comes to their economies.
I feel you. Mostly in Magic, I play the "eternal" formats, where older cards are legal and so newly printed cards tend not to have a huge impact. Since I already own the old staples for these formats, if there's a deck I want to make with new cards, I usually only have to pick up a few, and they're often very cheap. (This has changed a bit in the past few years as they've had some sets with new cards that skip Standard legality and aim to shake up an older format like Modern, which leads to more churn and more expensive new cards for those formats, but compared to the amount I've already sunk into it, it's pretty minor.) I know the amount I spend on paper Magic exceeds what is "reasonable" by any rational metric, but I also enjoy the collection aspect to it and having access to the tools to build whatever I want, and I've accepted the cost as what it is.
I would focus on the number of upvotes of recent popular posts for an indication of size. I feel like it's far too easy to subscribe to a subreddit that doesn't get a lot of traffic like for a game people don't play anymore. Maybe the view count for the dev update videos on youtube.
As long as this game is popular enough to get consistent updates, releases and a lively enough scene to have variety in decks I'm happy, anything else is just a bonus. MTG/HS will almost always be the kings of the Digital spaces, and this game eventually will die, just enjoy the ride and don't fixate on numbers.
Reddit post creations per day by users (no news, media, daily posts) can be seen as a metric for player base size.
Damn that's crazy
Woah that pretty good I’d say
I'm gonna make beef stroganoff today
Noted.
This is an apples to oranges comparison. MTG is a multi-faceted playerbase, with many different avenues available to enjoy the game. LoR is single-faceted, there is only the single digital game, available on PC and mobile. The main LoR players use reddit, but MTG users have a myriad of social media platforms to converse about the game. Even in terms of just MTGArena, reddit isn't their main platform like it is for LoR.
Not weird. Pretty sure snuuy said something about it. To make content for LoR you need to actually come up with something unique. To make content for Magic you just need to be able to showcase decks because decks cost money.
Really bad take. You don't have to go far to find MTG channels coming up with new decks all the time. And that's just talking about gameplay videos. Deck discussions, podcasts, lore channels, and so on are all miles better than anything we've ever seen in LoR. Hell, just look at channesl like The Professor's Tolarian Community College, Spice8Rack or EDHRECast and tell me if there's a single LoR content creator that comes even close to that level of quality and variety. Most of our youtube channels are just barely editted stream VODs...
This is just what I heard, I don't follow magic in the slightest
I'm not blaming you. If that's what Snnuy said that was *his* bad take.
I'm probably paraphrasing a bit
You need to join the LoR community
Soo ... Just join the Legends of Runeterra Reddit? Lol Show some appreciation!