[Arena Suggestion] Prevention of exaggerated outcomes

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I’m coming from an Arena player’s perspective, these are issues that I often face when playing Arena, they all either have something to do with bypassing mana costs or just having exaggerated outcomes. I’ll only make a few general points that all have the same general idea that can be applied to similar cards/mechanics.

  1. Bloodsail Recruiter - in Arena, discovering Marin is most of the times just an auto win. I’d like to suggest making it “Discover another pirate that cost 4 or less”.

  2. Conniving Conman - This can get redicilous in Arena aswell with dual class cards, like replaying Tsunami / Drakefire Amulet or any high cost & high value card from any class. Change it to something like “Replay another card from a non-rogue class that cost 4 or less”.

  3. Swiftscale Trickster - In dual class Arena, for example Rogue/Mage, you can cast Tsunami/ Drakefire Amulet / Survival of the Fittest at turn 4 for 0 mana which is ridiculous. Make it “Your next spell this turn cost 4 less”.

  4. Huddle up - This is somewhat controversial but it feels very imbalanced in Arena. It is almost an auto win if played when both players are somewhat even, or you’re slightly behind and the opponent has no efficient board clear, and it gets even more ridiculous when casted with a mana cost discount (Like for 5 mana on turn 5). Make it read either “Summon a random Naga for each naga you played this game” or “Summon a random Naga for each different spell school you casted this game”.

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Arena has a bad design for two main reasons. One you can’t even play it without paying Blizzard in most cases; you quickly run out of tickets and gold and then you can do nothing; the most die-hard fans of it will be often absolutely forced to literally keep paying since various players play for literally 8 hours a day (half the forum regulars here taking Constructed seriously say they play for that long).

Two: the card selection itself and ultimately the entire format design is just absolutely dumb; it incentivizes either avoiding synergy cards because you may not get the other parts of the combo or trying to high roll with unreasonable chances or pray that you will get some cards that are too powerful on their own in most cases; the format should be semi-random: e.g. start with 15 synergy cards.

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You are wrong because, if for some reason a player is running out of gold to play Arena, they can always play on other servers. Multiple accounts with access to more quests allows non-infinite players to go infinite in Arena.

What point are you trying to make here ^ ?

Like any format that includes skill factors, if a player want ms to learn how to succeed at it, they will likely have to invest a lot of time to get better, but Arena can be played very casually. I often jump from account to account as I play Arena to get quests done, while leaving unfinished runs going until I get back to that account.

No, no, no it should not! You just proved that you do not even understand the most basic concept, which draws most players to Arena, and that is the fun and skill of making their own draft picks and choices.

Well, it takes skill to know best whether to just pick the high-value cards or to pursue some synergistic picks to draft a strong deck.

If a player needs to crutch by requiring the Arena mode itself to provide them a guaranteed 15-card package of synergistic cards, then they should probably be playing a different format or game altogether. Your suggestion is one of the worse ideas that I have ever read for improving Arena.

My draft style in MtG was often to focus on removal and synergy. Synergy drafting is a skill onto itself.

I was just playing an unfinished run that is 9-2 so far. My first pick for that draft was Hagatha the Fabled ( Battlecry: Draw 2 spells that cost (5) or more. Transform them into Slimes that cast the spell.), which meant that I was going to want to draft some big spells to get value from Hagatha, which I did: 2x Drakefire Amulet, 2x Firelands Portal, 2x Frosty Decor, and Command of Neptulon.

I also drafted an early Azsharan Sweeper (Battlecry: Put a ‘Sunken Sweeper’ on the bottom of your deck.), which meant I wanted to pick up some dredge, which I did: Tuskarrr Trawler & Excavation Specialist.

Here is final the deck list:

https://imgur.com/a/fq0leaW

Here is what a match looked like at 8-1:

https://imgur.com/a/ykToBak

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They aren’t going to change cards for Arena when they are fine in Standard. None of these changes will ever happen. They will never do Arena only changes to cards and have 2 version of the exact same card existing at the same time.

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Well, they do not seem to consider Arena when designing cards for Standard, but they do have the ability to remove a card from the Arena card pool if it’s to impactful for that format, which they do sometimes—seldomly.

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But you could still discover those cards with one of the 1000000000 discovers cards that exist even if they get removed from the draft and being able to discover those cards is what made them too broken in the first place because people could handle 1 or 2 drafted copy but they couldn’t handle the 10th discovered copy.

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That’s such a dumb counter to my argument. You can’t seriously advertise to go multiple accounts since Arena is usually tied to the progress of people on their one account (e.g. they often progress their Constructed together with Arena rewards to say the least).

I accept your rest arguments related to the randomness of the draft since it’s subjective but I find it obnoxious that you have very little control if you will even get a CHANCE on additional synergy cards drafted so various games are just lost on the draft stage.

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Not happy then don’t play it cause majority of arena player don’t care…

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There are Arena players who play Ranked, and there are (LOTS of) Arena players who never play Ranked. You’re the one with the dumb counter, assuming that because you care about Ranked that everyone does.

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I know you’d think that, because you were telling me about the nonsense of spending thousands in MTG to get drafts for just 1 game,

but are you really a majority here?

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Who cares who the majority is? Stop trying to control people with the tyranny of “democracy.”

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But you MAY be a majority here. Or at least you may be the majority of money; if what you said about thousands of dollars being spend just for 1 silly draft is true then we’re talking about mountains of money from just a few people; it may be THE driving factor of the Arena design being so obnoxiously limited for F2P frequent gaming.

But even if that’s true it reminds me that short term profit often hurts the long term; e.g. yes selling gameplay benefits with microtransactions may be a short term benefit; but did you really make more money for the next 10 years if that meant you just lost all the players who absolutely hate manipulation of gameplay with money?