MTG Arena Part 3: Best ROI for Free Cards
Part 3: Best ROI for Free
Cards
War of the Spark Update:
Ranked Draft packs now contain 14 cards, instead of 15. I will need to re-calculate some of the numbers to reflect fewer cards per Ranked Draft.
If you have not yet read the first two parts of this
article, feel free to check them out before continuing with this series:
In Part 2 of the article, we broke down your total daily and
weekly potential earnings. With this knowledge, we will get even more in depth
to find the best ROI (Return on Investment) for time spent playing in order to
obtain free cards.
This article will explain the best way to spend your hard-earned gold for obtaining the most cards you can each week.
Part of the fun of any CCG (Collectible Card Game) is
acquiring all the cards. More cards means better options for building decks.
Better decks means more winning. More winning means less time per day spent
trying to get more free stuff.
Keep in mind that all of this is a waste of time if you do
not actually enjoy playing MTG. I say this because you will be playing a lot,
and I mean a lot, of MTGA if you want to get into card farming.
We can now focus on the best methods for acquiring the most
cards for the least amount of work.
In the previous article we went over what you can earn per
week. Completing 100% of all daily quests and win bonuses, you can earn between
7,350-10,500 gold, which averages out to 9,025 gold per week.
Let us round this down to 9,000 gold per week for a nice
even number to work with to use with the various methods that cost gold.
Methods of Obtaining
Free Cards
We start by looking at the various methods of obtaining
free cards. Some are absolutely free as promotional items, others you will need
to put in some work for. I will go over each of these points in order in this
article.
·
Promotional codes
·
Daily win bonus
·
Weekly win bonus
·
Booster packs purchased via free gold earned
·
Drafting via free gold earned
·
Ranked Season Rewards
·
Special events via free gold earned
If I am missing any, please let me know in the comments below.
Promotional Codes
Keep a look out for emails from Wizards of the Coast. Before
each pre-release, they send out codes for three free packs of the latest set. Codes
are also given out for promoting new updates in MTGA, such as when the new
cosmetic cards and sleeves were released. Another source of free codes is that
local game stores that are part of the WPN (Wizards Play Network) will be
giving out codes for three free packs of the current sets for attending FNM (Friday
Night Magic) at their stores. One final source is any new physical Planeswalker
deck that you purchase should come with a code inside to obtain the exact same
deck within MTGA.
There are other codes given out during some of the larger
events as well, but those are harder to come by, very limited use, or are for
participants only. You can bookmark this site for all of the latest codes: MTGA Codes
As mentioned in Part 1 of this article, you can redeem you promo codes on the store tab. On top right of the main store screen will be a "Redeem Code" field. Simply type the code in exactly as it is (it's case sensitive) and hit enter. You will be instantly rewarded with whatever the code was good for.
Daily and Weekly Win Bonuses
We have already talked about getting free cards from the
daily and weekly bonuses.
To reiterate, here is part of the chart from the previous
article:
These cards cost you nothing but time. You get these by playing and winning matches. At the bare minimum, you will want to complete
the weekly win bonus, which is 15 wins in one week. You will earn 3 booster
packs of the current set, totaling 24 cards, for your effort.
If you play through all of the daily win bonuses each day of
the week, you can add that to your weekly win bonus for a total of 66 cards per
week earned.
Purchasing Booster Packs using Free Gold Earned
As you can see from the MTG Arena Store screen above, 1
booster pack of your choice costs 1,000 gold, ignoring the booster packs that
cost gems.
1 booster pack contains 8 cards, consisting of 5 commons, 2
uncommons and 1 rare/mythic.
At the previously mentioned 9,000 gold weekly average, this
equates to roughly 9 booster packs per week. You will open 45 commons, 18 uncommons
and 8 rares/mythics, totaling 72 cards per week.
When purchasing booster packs, you may pick from any MTG set
available in the store. You may mix and match packs as you may want the chance
to get certain cards from different sets depending
what you are trying to
collect to build decks with.
While the cards you open are completely random, it is
important to note they are all from the specific sets you purchased. You will often
end up with many cards you do not need or want.
·
9,000 gold = 72 cards per week
Draft Events
Drafting
Drafting is a very different game play style than what you
may be used to, thus far, playing through the training rounds and doing quick
play.
The basics of drafting, in paper, are as follows: you, and 8 other
players, each get three 15-card booster packs. All players are sitting around a table. At the same time, each player opens their first booster pack and
looks through all of the cards, not showing them to anyone else at the table.
Each player then picks and removes one card from the pack. Once everyone has
made their choice and everyone is ready, you will all pass the remaining cards
in the pack to the player your their left. This process repeats until there are
no more cards left in the first pack. The second packs is opened, and players
pass to their right this time. The third pack is passed back to the left.
Once all the cards have been drafted, each player will have
45 hand picked cards in front of them. Using as many basic lands as needed,
each player will now construct a 40-card deck using these cards that they picked
out. When everyone has completed building their deck, you all will then play
each other.
The variation that MTG Arena puts on this is that there are
no other human players drafting with you, they are all computer-controlled
players. Think of drafting against seven other Sparkies. Once the draft process is complete, you will then play against real humans. For the 5,000 gold entry fee drafts, MTGA uses best-of-1 matches. You keep playing until you have seven wins or three losses, whichever comes
first.
Drafting game play is fun all by itself. You and the other
players all have decks that were just built and put together using the cards
from the same set. While you will
not know who has what cards, you will have at least some idea of what may be
in store for you. Since everyone is on the same level playing field with
equally janky decks, you usually have just as good a chance at winning matches as
anyone else.
An important thing to mention in your drafting strategy is
this: You get to keep every card you drafted. Many players in game stores will
join a draft just to pick out all of the good cards that come along, or cards
they need for their collections, and then will often drop from the event. They
get to keep all the cards they drafted, even if they don't stay to play. If you
stay to play, you will have the opportunity to win some rewards,
depending how far you get with your wins.
Now that Drafting has been explained, I will show you what
this means for MTG Arena, and how to obtain free cards via this method.
Ranked Draft Play
Certain draft events cost 5,000 gold, while others cost gems
only. You will be joining the Draft events that let you pay with 5,000 gold.
To play a ranked draft event, click on the "Play" button on
the home screen and select "Ranked Draft" at the top. You will see the set name and graphics that represent
the set that is being drafted for this particular event. Click the "Draft" button to proceed. You will be taken to a Ranked Draft
welcome screen where you will pay your entry fee before starting. Again,
make sure you are paying only the free gold you earned.
Drafting will net you more cards overall for the same amount
of gold per week than opening packs will. The thing to note with drafting is that the
cards you get are only for the specific set that the particular draft event is
using. In the example screen above, you can see that all cards will be coming
from the Guilds of Ravnica set. This is important to note in case you don’t
need or want any cards from that particular set. You can wait for the next
draft event that may use cards from a different set that interests you more.
If you are wondering what sets will be drafted and on what
days, you can check the Wizards of the Coast official event calendar for MTG Arena
found here: MTGA Event
Calendar
Aside from the booster packs being set-specific, something
else to note is that while opening booster packs is fun, you are not guaranteed
to get the cards you need. With drafting, while you are still at the mercy of
the cards opened in each pack, and what the bots don't pick out of them, you at least do get to hand pick every single
card. This greatly increases your chances of getting cards you want and need.
A major note to make when drafting is that you will draft no wild cards, which are hands down worth more in the game than any other card. The booster pack you receive as part of your winnings will of course have the chance for wilds, and count towards the vault wilds, but not the draft packs themselves while drafting.
One strategy to maximize your ROI will be to obviously pick
out all of the rares and mythics, followed by other important cards that you
need. This is called rare drafting. While it
is frowned on in the physical game as it can disrupt good deck building
strategies for a group of real humans, it is perfectly acceptable to do in
MTGA. The bots you are playing against have no feelings and won’t care
if they have a good time or not. The main purpose is for you to get the best
cards you need for your collection in order to build better decks to play with. If you plan to play a lot of magic, pick out all of the standard playable cards currently showing up in the meta. This will give you the best chances to build competitive decks to play with on a daily basis.
After you draft, if you are wanting to stick around to play, you may want
to consider making sure that the cards you picked can still build a working deck to
win a few games, at the very least. Regardless of what you decide to do, you
will keep all 45 hand picked cards
Have in mind the cards you are looking for, this will save
valuable time when determining what cards you need.
Drafting for wild cards or gems is a bit different than just opening booster packs. In Draft events, you will get to play the cards you pick regardless if you have four copies of them already in your collection. What happens is that at the end of the draft, once you claim your rewards, the fifth copies of commons/uncommons turn into vault points (more on the Vault later). Fifth copies of rares and mythics turn into gems.
A tip to figure out what you need or have four copies of
already is to run an MTG Arena tracker, such as MTGArena.Pro.
Since it imports your entire collection to your account on its website, you can
have the website open to search and browse your collection while you draft.
This sounds
complicated, why do I want to do this?
Well, quite simply, it has the best payout for the same
amount of gold. You do not even need to play any games to obtain the minimum
payout.
For 5,000 gold, you are guaranteed 45 hand-picked cards, 1
extra 8-card booster pack and 50 gems. This totals 53 cards. That’s without
even playing any games!
If you stick around to play, the more games you win, the
more gems you are rewarded with. The ROI curves up quite a bit with
more wins for gems only.
In addition, wins 0-6 also have an increasing chance to get
a bonus extra booster pack. We should not calculate this into our totals though
as it is not guaranteed.
Joining the 5,000 gold
draft is is currently the only method of turning gold into gems for free.
More on gems in the next article.
Payouts are as follows, each game is Best-of-1 (BO1):
Wins
|
Cards
|
Gems
|
0
|
53
|
50
|
1
|
53
|
100
|
2
|
53
|
200
|
3
|
53
|
300
|
4
|
53
|
450
|
5
|
53
|
650
|
6
|
53
|
850
|
7
|
61
|
950
|
After paying for one draft a week, you will have 4,000 gold
left over. Should you buy booster packs or save it for an additional draft
every 2-3 weeks?
The answer depends if you are looking for a short or long
term investment opportunity.
ROI Comparisons for the Dedicated Player (15 wins per day)
So, how does your ROI compare between purchasing booster
packs vs. playing in the ranked draft events?
Again, using the average rounded down gold winnings per
week, we have 9,000 gold to spend each week.
Weekly Gold ROI Comparison (Based on 9,000 weekly gold earned)
Looking at this from a weekly perspective, it appears that
the payout is better to just spend the leftover money on booster packs. Let’s
widen the scope to a month and see what happens.
Monthly Gold ROI
Comparison (Based on 36,000 monthly gold earned)
Now, instead of spending the left over money each week on
booster packs, what if we saved it for extra drafts per month?
Saving the extra 4,000 gold each week for an entire month
lets you do 3 additional drafts. That’s 7 total drafts instead of 4.
Those additional 3 drafts will net you 159 cards and 150
gems. Here’s what this looks like:
Note that you will still have 1,000 gold left over each
month, which you can either save, or just blow it on a booster pack. Keep in
mind that every five months you can do one additional draft event with this left
over gold to maximize every last piece of gold.
As you can see, patience in saving your extra gold each week to use for additional drafts each month has a much higher payout.
Individual Card Costs (Based on 36,000 monthly gold earned)
There are plenty of articles on expected value, actual monetary values of cards and so forth. But since we want to play MTG Arena completely free ,we will only be looking at what they are worth in gold.
You can see that patience of saving your extra gold each week and playing extra drafts lowers the total cost per card.
ROI Comparisons for the Casual Player (Daily Quest + 4 wins per day)
What if you are a more casual player or just lack the time to play that many games a day. Don't worth, you can still amass quite a nice collection of cards.
The casual player needs to do the bare minimum of completing
the Daily Quest (let us say it is a 500 gold daily quest), as well as
the first four big gold Daily Win bonuses.
For gold earned, this comes out to 7,350. Since this will be
an exact known number and not an average, we will use the full amount.
Weekly Gold ROI
Comparison (based on 7,350 weekly gold earned):
Monthly Gold ROI
Comparison (Based on 29,400 monthly gold earned)
As in the previous section, if we saved the left over gold
between drafts, we can do more drafts per month. With less gold, we don’t have
as much left over each week, so we get fewer extra drafts per
month.
You will have 4,400 gold left over at the end of the month
at a minimum. You can blow this on four extra booster packs, or I would strongly
encourage you to add that to next month’s left overs to get yet another draft
in. Since this is so close to 5,000 for another draft, we should be able to
safely say we can get at least that much in if we get a few 750 gold daily
quests in during the month. This is easily achievable, so we can pretty much
guarantee six Drafts per month. You only need one of those per week to get the
extra 600 needed for the sixth draft each month. Or go a little further in the Daily Win bonus each day to make up that extra amount.
Individual Card Costs
(Based on 29,400 monthly gold earned)
What does this equate to if we look at the individual cost
of each card?
Looking at it this way, you can see that again, patience
pays off.
Interestingly enough, it’s a better ROI to do the bare minimum
each month. Starting the second month you will be able to get in the
extra sixth draft each month, which makes the gold per card drop to
below the cost of doing all 15 wins per day. You will obviously be missing out
on all the daily ICRs, which is 168 cards by itself. That’s a lot of extra
cards, but also a lot more work involved.
Constructed Ranked Play Rewards
(TL;DR - Win 1 game in Ranked play, and in a
couple of weeks you will get one more free booster pack when the season ends.)
Ranked play is another free play variation. Instead of being
paired up with another random person with a similar deck power, you will be
playing in a ranked ladder system against other players that have made it as
far as you. Obviously with this play mode, the higher you progress, the harder
your opponents will be, both in skill and deck strength.
Constructed ranked play plays the same as quick play. Just
select your favorite or best deck and go for it. Limited ranked play, the bottom tier rank marker in the above image, is based
on the drafts that were explained in the above sections.
For constructed ranked play, you will start out playing on
the low end of the totem pole. It will feel just like quick play matches. Your
wins and activity will still count towards your daily quests as well as the
daily and weekly win bonuses.
Once you start winning games and progressing up the ladder,
the pool of opponents will start to get harder and harder. Ranked play is a
ladder system, meaning as you beat people, you move up the ladder, and as you lose
games, you slowly move back down the ladder. Reaching the top is something only
the most dedicated of players that have the top decks can achieve.
For daily grinding, and us non-professionals just looking to
maximize profit on free cards, we will be hanging out at the bottom of the
ladder.
It is well worth your while to get at least one win in Ranked
play. The seasons last for a couple of weeks each before the ladder resets, so
you have plenty of time to get that one win in. Once the season is over, you
will be rewarded with wherever you landed on the ladder. For one win, you will be in
the bronze Tier. Any of the bronze tiers reward you with a booster pack!
I managed to make it to Silver, and was going to attempt to
go for gold, but after much losing, I determined this was a bad use of my time
and went back to quick play games. I managed to make it to silver tier 4 before
I quit playing ranked. For my efforts I will still receive the one booster pack
reward, but also an additional 500 gold. I don’t think this was worth the
effort and amount of losses and lost time for the 500 gold though and in the
next seasons, unless I have a much improved upon deck, I will be sticking to
just a single win to get ranked in bronze tier 4 only.
It is estimated, with tier 1 decks of course, that you will
need to play roughly 358 games to reach the mythic tier. As you progress you
cannot fall back to the previous rank, so if you play enough to progress from
bronze to silver, you are safe for the rest of the season. Even if you lose you
can’t fall back to bronze. A good player with a good deck is looking at about
45-50 hours of game play minimum to reach the mythic tier. Since we're just out to make as much gold as we can to amass as many cards as we can, we won't be doing very much ranked play. Later on (months from now) once your collection grows to where you can build a top tier deck, and you're confident in your playing ability, you may be able to reach higher ranked tiers.
Here is a good article on the breakdown of all the tiers,
how many games and how much time spent between tiers: How
Many Games Do You Need to Play to Hit Mythic in MTG Arena?
Constructed Ranked Play Rewards (Best-of-1)
Unless you are highly competitive, there is very little
reward for trying to compete at higher levels when you can easily win more than
that each week from your daily quests and win bonuses. The card styles are the
only extras here, but you need to get into the gold rank to even win one. Keep
in mind, card styles can be any card in MTG Arena, and not necessarily,
something you have in your collection. So you may be rewarded with a card style
for a card you do not have or even want.
So, long story short, win one game in ranked play, and in a
couple of weeks you will get one more free booster pack when the season ends.
If you are doing well enough, try for silver or gold while doing your daily win
rewards. If you are not winning much, it is a better ROI for time to go back to
regular quick play if all you are doing is trying to farm gold for cards.
·
At a minimum, you can get 1 free pack, or 8
cards per month for winning one single ranked play game.
Special Events
Some events you will wan to play
just for fun, as the rewards are minimal. I’ve played in a couple of these
events and had a lot of fun doing so. You can rest assured knowing that even if
you don’t win any games, your cost per card still comes out almost the same as
saving for seven drafts a month. Don’t be afraid to spend a little of that hard
earned gold for a break in the daily grind and try something exciting, fun and
new.
I tried the Singleton event shown above. It was pretty fun. The deck was really janky, but I had a good time. I ended up getting in a couple of wins. What I won was two rares, so that was pretty nice! I also won over half my gold back from the entry fee cost.
Keep in mind that entering these events will slow down your weekly/monthly earnings if you don't make your money back.
Entry Fee: 250
Gold
Total Cards/Gems Earned per Month
Here is what you came to see, a complete comparison of what you can earn per month playing for free.
I hope this article was
informative and useful. I certainly learned a lot while researching and doing
all the math. This greatly helped me in figuring out what the best ROI for
time is. If you can withstand the daily grind, it is worth it to build your
card collection. Even for a casual player, it is a very rewarding system, and worth the time to play each day.
Let me know if there's anything else you would like to see in a future article.
Thanks!
Joe
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