woooo! Yay Prim!
Join us! Joooooooiiiinnn ussssssssss
*edit* and, to the surprise of nobody, MiJ's response to this is massively over-long. Sorry. can't seem to help myself
In my role as arch-proselytiser for MtGA, I have some responses to Prim's (very valid) points. I say this simply through dint of having played the game a frickin frackin lot, rather than through any inherent skill or owt (cos believe me, I aint got none). I am, however, the kind of person who likes to use his time/resources as efficiently as possible, so I have done a fair bit of reading about how to maximise the results when playing MtGA.
Collecting a full set does indeed take a very long time. This is helped out a little by the presence of Wild Cards. These show up randomly in packs, and the (more desirable) rare and mythic rare types are also regularly (every 6 packs opened) awarded to you. So, in theory you can simultaneously open packs, collect the cards in them, and after a while use your wild cards to fill in any gaps in your collection. But, it's very much worth noting that even if you dont own a card, you can still view it in your deck builder, so in fact what people tend to do is build "theory" decks, then spend wild cards on the stuff they dont have in their collection, rather than try to collect whole sets. To be totally honest, there's little to no purpose to collecting full sets of cards. I do it in real life, and even that has limited use, but in Arena, I honestly can't see a single reason to do so.
There is a thing called The Vault. It's actually not visible in game, but it's in the code and there are 3rd party apps that allow you to view it. Basically, any duplicate common or uncommon card you get (past 4) goes towards the vault. Each is a tiny percentage, but once the vault is filled to 100% it opens and you get awarded 3 uncommon, 2 rare and 1 mythic wildcard. In the normal course of play it takes aaaaaaages to open, but if you draft you pick up stupid numbers of duplicate cards, so I have actually opened the vault 2 or 3 times this way.
From a technical perspective, sticking to one Set (eg Guilds of Ravnica) does increase your odds of getting all the cards from that set. Each pack contains a random rare or mythic rare card. You can be randomly allocated a duplicate of a rare or mythic you already own, but only up to a maximum of 4 (a playset). After that you absolutely will not be given a duplicate. So in theory the more rares you have from a given set, the better the odds are of you getting one you need. The numbers are pretty astronomical, though, so again, deck building then using wildcards to fill in the gaps is the way forward.
Entry to other types of game (Draft, Sealed, etc) does cost Gold or Gems. Gold, tbh, is pretty easy to come by. It's reasonable to collect 5000 per week, which is enough for a draft.
There was an article by one of the devs for the game which discussed how to maximise your gold. Essentially it boiled down to: Always do your daily quests (at the very least the win-one-game for 250gold one), and always click on the 500gold quests in the hope that they change to a 750gold quest.
Drafting is by far the best way to increase your collection for a free-to-play player. It's simple numbers. 5k = 5 packs of 8 cards in the store, or 5K = 1 draft (which equals 45 cards plus 1 pack at the end). Critically, you get to choose the cards you keep (from within the draft pool.) That's assuming you don't get a single win. If you do win, even a few, you get gems, which can be saved up and used for sealed events, which are fantastico for getting more cards (2000 gems = 10 packs of 8 cards in the store, or 1 Sealed event, which is 6 x 15 card packs, plus 3 8 card packs at the end, again, assuming no wins.)
The downside of drafting/sealed play is that it doesn't move your rare/mythic wildcard bar forward (altho the packs you open at the end do), so if you're desperate for wildcards, it's not the best way forward. In its favour, the format is inherently fair - everybody starts with the same pool of resources, so it comes down to player skill, rather than how many awesome cards youve collected. @Prim: if you're interested in these formats, I'd be happy to chat more about it. If you'd rather just open packs and save up wildcards, thats cool too
by the way, the current special event (Ravnica At War) is a limited time thing. If you want to get the fancy schmancy stained glass planeswalkers you gotta do the event this week. Next week it'll move on to part 3 with different walkers. The rewards are all cosmetic, by the way, so it won't affect your future gameplay in any way.
There's a schedule for all the upcoming events here:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena/game
Be aware that all the cards from Ixalan up to M19 will rotate out in the Autumn, meaning any cards from those sets will no longer be useable in Standard in Arena. At the moment, Arena ONLY has Standard, but after the autumn rotation they have confirmed they will introduce a new format which will allow for usage of older cards (and will, over time, grow to be an evil bloat-monster, just like Modern is in real life. I believe they will add older sets to this format, too, all the way back to Shadows over Innistrad.)
There's a new set coming out in July called M20, and it's the basic set for the year. Nowt fancy, no storylines or stuff, lots of reprints of staple cards.
All of the above is more kinda factual based stuff. The next bit is just my opinion.
be very cautious about spending rare and mythic wildcards. they're pretty hard to accumulate, and some of the higher tier decks use a LOT of dual coloured lands. Stuff like esper control or Four-colour-dreadhorde have a mana base of 24 rare lands, even before you get into the actual rare/mythic spells in the deck, so can be very, very arsey to build for free players. By all means build whatever decks you like for fun, but at some point you may find yourself actually wanting to use a "pro" deck, and then you 'll kick yourself for spending all your rare/mythics on "fun-but-actually-kinda-useless" cards. I know I did
Netdecking is much more fun than I thought. It's all very well having a decklist, but playing it well is a whole 'nother thing. I was a bit surprised by this, tbh, as I abhor netlisting in wargaming, but hey ho, apples and oranges, I guess.