MTG: Arena Part 2 - Best beginning Strategies for Free Play
Part 2: Best Beginning Strategies
for Free Play
If you are just tuning in, this article is a continuation of the previous article:
You should already be playing Magic: The Gathering
Arena (MTGA), before reading rest of this series. If you are new to MTGA, I
would encourage you to read the previous article first before continuing with
this series. If you are already playing MTGA and want to now learn the basic
strategies daily and weekly gold and free card farming, then continue on.
As I was writing this article, it became large enoguh that I
decided to split it into two separate articles. This first half of this article will
explain the basics of gold farming and obtaining as many free daily and weekly
cards as you can. The next half will explain what to do with all of the gold
you will be earning in the coming days and weeks, and how to best spend it for
the greatest ROI (Return on Investment) of time.
Continuing from the previous article…
How do I start getting more free stuff?
The short answer is, do all of your daily quests, and start
winning matches.
I will explain the best way to daily grind for free stuff
with both a casual and a hardcore approach.
Each day, you are presented with quests and win bonuses at
the bottom of your screen.
The quests range from casting certain types of spells, to
destroying a certain amount of opposing creatures.
There are also daily and weekly win bonuses. Each game you
win, you will receive additional gold, free cards and booster packs.
Note: You must be playing against another person. You will
not receive any bonuses for playing a practice match against Sparky. However,
playing the training rounds and working through the Mastery Tree with Sparky
will count towards your overall daily quest goal when you are first starting
out, but not the daily/weekly win bonuses. Once you have completed all
training, any practice matches against Sparky will not count towards any goals.
Deck Choices to Earn
With
While you are still learning how to play and getting used to
Magic the Gathering in general, you will probably start out using many of your
pre-constructed decks you received during training and from completing the
Mastery Tree. As you progress, receive free cards through opening booster packs
and from rewards, you will start building a card collection to modify these
decks with.
My personal daily grind deck building strategy will be
explained in a future article. I play only Quick Play matches until I have 15
wins, which is the maximum amount of Daily Win rewards you can receive. Once I
have hit 15 wins, I stop playing for the day. My win ratio with my particular daily
grind deck is roughly 70%. That is, I win roughly 2 out of every 3 games I
play. This is a pretty good return on time invested. As I win new cards each
day, I am sometime able to upgrade my deck to make it stronger, which lessens
the time needed to reach those 15 daily wins.
Don’t let this sound like it’s all work. I do enjoy playing
MTG, and I play just for fun quite often, and sometimes even join my real life
friends with the Direct Challenge mode. Directly playing your friends also does
not count towards any of the quest or win rewards.
While building the right deck for the best winning strategy
is important for efficient free stuff farming, it is another in depth subject
that is outside of the scope of this particular series of articles.
I will write a future article on how to build a deck from
scratch using very easy method that takes all of the time and guesswork away,
making it a much less daunting task for the first timer and saves even skilled
players time.
Quick Play
After you choose your favorite deck, you are ready to play!
To easiest way get started farming for free stuff is to do Quick
Play matches.
To start a Quick Play match:
1.
Click on the big orange Play button in the bottom right
corner of the home screen.
2.
Click on the deck box, above the Play button, to select
your deck.
3.
Make sure that “Play” is selected under the Find Match
options.
4.
Click the big orange Play button once more.
This will pair you up with another random player that has a
deck with cards of similar rarity levels, allegedly. This is not always the
case, and I am not fully sure how the match making works for Quick Play, as
information is vague at best. From what I have found, and confirmed with light
testing, is that the more rares you have in your deck over a certain amount, it
will try to pair you with a similar strength deck.
The key word here is “try”. The match making system is
questionable. You may get someone that has an overpowered deck that pummels you
quickly or you may get someone with a bad deck that you have no problem easily
beating. Typically, I find myself playing decks of a similar level to mine the
majority of the time. Every now and then, an over powered deck slips through,
and I just take my losses knowing the next game will probably be easier.
Now that we are playing Quick Play matches, let us find out
what our rewards are!
Daily Quests
Each day you will receive one new daily quest, with a
maximum of 3 total daily quests at a time in your queue. Your daily quests do
not require you to win any matches to complete their objectives. You just need
to play until you have met their requirements.
In the screenshots above, you can see a mixture of quest
types and their rewards.
If the daily quest is not to your liking, or you would like
a chance to receive one with a higher payout then once per day you may click on
one of your daily quests and request a new one. Sometimes you get one with a
higher payout, sometimes you get one that may take you longer to complete. It
is completely random.
In the examples above, on the previous day I received a
quest for 500 gold to cast 20 blue or green spells. My deck is blue and green,
so I could easily complete this quest and receive my reward in only a few
games. I decided instead to see if I could flip this quest to one of a higher
reward. In the next image below it, you can see that I did get a higher paying
reward, but with the downside of more work to be done. My deck relies on
attacking my opponent without killing many of their creatures. The creatures I
do kill are only 2-3 per game, so this quest, while it pays much more, will
take me many more games to complete it.
For maximum reward, it is usually worth it to click on any
500 gold quests to see if you can turn them into the higher rewarding 750 gold
quest. You may need to work a little harder to receive the higher rewards, but
you should easily get that while working towards the wins you need each day.
Since you can only have 3 of these quests queued up at any
given time, you will want to make sure you complete at least one per day to
keep a fresh new one coming in each day to fill the empty slot. If you end up
completing all 3 quests, having none left, you will still continue to receive
one new quest each day.
·
You can earn a guaranteed 500-750 gold per day
from the Daily Quest.
Daily Win Bonus
Each time you win a match, you receive a win bonus. You can
win up to 15 games before the daily win bonus payout is empty. These wins do
not need to be consecutive. The daily
win bonus resets each morning at 5AM Eastern.
The first win nets you 250 gold, the next 3 wins nets you
100 gold each, and thereafter you will receive either a free card (of random
rarity) or smaller and smaller increment of gold.
As of this writing, the daily rewards are as follows:
Win #
|
Gold Reward
|
Individual Card Reward (ICR)
|
1
|
250
|
|
2
|
100
|
|
3
|
100
|
|
4
|
100
|
|
5
|
0
|
1
|
6
|
50
|
|
7
|
0
|
1
|
8
|
50
|
|
9
|
0
|
1
|
10
|
50
|
|
11
|
0
|
1
|
12
|
25
|
|
13
|
0
|
1
|
14
|
25
|
|
15
|
0
|
1
|
TOTAL
|
750 Gold
|
6 Free Cards
|
If you just want experience, really enjoy the game or have a
winning deck, I would encourage you to complete all of the bonuses each day for
maximum payout.
It is worth it to get in at least 4 wins minimum for the
first several larger gold payouts. You can stop after this if you do not want
to get burned out from the daily grind. You can also just focus on completing
your daily quest each day, in which you will most likely have at least 4 wins
by then anyway.
·
You can earn a guaranteed 750 gold and 6 cards
per day from the Daily Win Bonus.
Weekly Win Bonus
There is also a weekly bonus that resets each Sunday. It
consists of a free booster pack that you receive with every 5th, 10th
and 15th win. You can spread these wins out over the course of a
week, but you will usually complete it the same day you complete one of your
daily win bonus sessions if you are going for all 15 wins each day.
·
You can win a guaranteed 24 cards per week from
the Weekly Win Bonus
Total Free Earnings
per day/week
Here is what you came to see! I will try to break it down in
multiple ways and as simply as I can.
Based on only one new daily quest being available per day,
you have the daily chance to win:
·
1,050- 1,500 Gold
·
Up to 6 free cards
Weekly earnings will net you:
·
7,350 – 10,500 Gold
·
Up to 66 Free Cards (42 from all daily bonuses +
24 from the 3 free weekly booster pack bonuses)
Below I will break this down into two categories. For those
that want to do the bare minimum yet still reap some decent rewards, you will
be looking at 4 wins per day. For those going all the way for maximum rewards
possible, you will be shooting for 15 wins per day.
As you can see, you will still earn roughly the same amount of gold per week, but you will receive 2.75x more free cards. Keep in mind, that a bare minimum for wanting free cards, each 1000 gold is another booster pack, equaling another 8 cards, so money not earned is equal to cards not collected.
For maximum earning potential of free cards, you will want
to work towards the maximum amount of gold you can receive per day.
That is it for today!
In the next article, I will go over a few of the strategies
for spending your gold to maximize free card farming.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. Please let me know if you
have any questions or comments in the comments field below and let me know what
other content you would like to see in the future.
If you're ready to spend your gold, continue on to the next article here:
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