comparison to MTG Arena

[Zero]

so im sick of Arena's matchmaking pitting me against teched out decks, does this game have a better matchmaking than arena? and is it any similar in terms of gameplay?

[Caldyrvan]

Should be pretty similar in the constructed vs modes.
In Casual you can be matched against anything and in ranked you also encounter teched out decks even in the lower ranks.
Someone who has all the cards but didn't play ranked seriously will be at a low rank even though those have no business to be there, they just ruin the game for player who are new or who have very limited time and/or resources.

It's the same bad system as in many other card games and I doubt it will change because it's marketing, it encourages players to spend money to get to the good cards. But I am not sure it's worth it and if they lose more players due to bad experiences.

On the upside you can build decent decks without a ton of legends or rare cards (mostly aggro decks though) and still climb the ladder. Also the variety of decks is a bit better than in other games I think for example as in HS where have 4 top meta deck for four months you encounter all the time.

[Dysmetria]

Originally posted by Zero:

so im sick of Arena's matchmaking pitting me against teched out decks, does this game have a better matchmaking than arena? and is it any similar in terms of gameplay?

Nope. The matchmaking is very similar in all of these games.

As is the people that try to use teched out decks or matchmaking or a dozen other things for excuses for why you lose.

[arejang]

MTGA matches you per eck strength in free play. In everything else, they match you according to your win rate. So in QC, at the very start, you can be matched against anyone with a 0-0 record (which is basically everyone), and right now, most beginners (myself included) are hesitant to enter QC with our starter decks. So you enter that game mode with a mostly net-deck pool of players, hence the skewed experience.

[Zero]

Originally posted by arejang:

MTGA matches you per eck strength in free play. In everything else, they match you according to your win rate. So in QC, at the very start, you can be matched against anyone with a 0-0 record (which is basically everyone), and right now, most beginners (myself included) are hesitant to enter QC with our starter decks. So you enter that game mode with a mostly net-deck pool of players, hence the skewed experience.

im using a starter deck and i kept getting placed against teched out decks. was placed in a match just now against a fully setup psychic corrosion deck. according to the whole power level thing i think they modified it after closed beta.

[arejang]

well, as others have said, this is a difficult problem to solve. You need patience when playing card games like these. You aim for quests that have you perform simple actions like "play a spell" or "play red cards" instead of "win with a red deck". For the first week or so, it's going to be rough.

This is why I learned the limited format very early on when I first started playing games like these, from my very first digital card game hearthstone. It was very apparent from the beginning that whales would make the free player's life miserable. So when you're forced to play with a limited pool of cards, the quality of deck is less of an issue and how you play the game becomes the deciding factor. Lots of people prefer constructed and complain they aren't well enough equipped to enjoy the game from the start, and well...something has to give. You learn a format where the deck quality is more even across the board and get your cards that way, or you do the very slow grind of daily quests and buy packs to get you there, or you pay money.

The first few days is the same for everyone. You slog through dailies and once you save up enough for your first pack, the paths diverge. You either buy that pack, or keep saving for drafts. I prefer the latter personally.

[Dr.maniac]

Arena only gives new players 5 of the 10 starter decks (at random) and from what I've played only 2 of those starter decks are actually decent enough to consistantly win with.

[Der Rabattrammler]

Of the three digital card games I have played - Hearthstone, Eternal & Shadowverse - it seems so far that Eternal has the least worse matchmaking, but only by a small margin.

At least in the unranked casual game mode I was able to complete the dailies and get the free daily card pack pretty easily with only the starter decks and basic theme decks.
But ranked and drafting, yeah well, as it has been said, that's pro territory and without a top tier deck from ze internets and/or knowledge about the meta game and advanced deck building you won't get far there. Same as in the other card games.

If only one gaming company would be decent enough to offer its players / customers a fun mode for self-built decks and fun theme decks, I would happily spend my time and money there.
No pros and netdecks allowed, just pure balanced card game fun... I have a dream

[meglobob1]

Yeah, I started Arena this open weekend but Eternals still way, way better.

The matchmaking in Arena sucks, you just get farmed by people who put together meta decks.

Hopefully, Arena will improve...after all its still in open beta but till then I will mainly play Eternal.

None of the 5 mono colour decks or 5 duo colour staring decks you get given for free are viable, by viable I mean your win rate will be considerlay lower then 50%. Everyone knows whats in those 15 decks, so your at even more of a disadvantage vs someone who has put even a half decent deck together and most players have put 1 or 2 early meta decks together now in Arena. So you after meta up or enjoy losing...

[arejang]

Going to play the devil's advocate here... kinda. I'm still going to criticize WOTC in the end, lol. I think MTGA has a long way to go before people can consider their work to be friendly toward players. I still recommend Eternal to anyone looking for a generous MTG experience over MTGA. That said, of the 10 precons available in MTGA, a few of them actually do provide a large number of usable cards, namely Dimir and Boros. None of them are that good out of the box, but a few of them make it very easy to build a serviceable deck without too much investment. The problem isn't that they only gave 5 precons, but that which 5 you get upon account creation is completely random, and this fact they kept hidden from players until days into open beta when people had already begun paying for premium currency. The lack of transparency into this decision has the entire playing community in an uproar, and that has been 2 days now since players were made aware of it. It's a huge mess, and while I do expect them to address this in some capacity, the longer they wait to announce anything official regarding this, the worse the problem will become and the harder it will be to rectify.

[Spooky]

simple.
MTGA is so Good. Eternal is bore.

[arejang]

Originally posted by Spooky:

simple.
MTGA is so Good. Eternal is bore.

lol, think what you will. Dire Wolf hasn't yet done anything controversial enough to cause literally thousands of players to rise up in protest. MTGA team? They've done this at least thrice now to my memory. They're testing the waters how much they can push the boundaries between free to play and pay to progress.

They've more than made it clear now they want to give players as little as possible and see how little they can give and still maintain a game before people pick up pitchforks and torches. This entire game is an experiment to them, and if they keep it up, it'll blow up in their faces. I'd be wary of that game for the immediate future, but support them if you like.

[Zero]

Originally posted by arejang:

Originally posted by Spooky:

simple.
MTGA is so Good. Eternal is bore.

lol, think what you will. Dire Wolf hasn't yet done anything controversial enough to cause literally thousands of players to rise up in protest. MTGA team? They've done this at least thrice now to my memory. They're testing the waters how much they can push the boundaries between free to play and pay to progress.

They've more than made it clear now they want to give players as little as possible and see how little they can give and still maintain a game before people pick up pitchforks and torches. This entire game is an experiment to them, and if they keep it up, it'll blow up in their faces. I'd be wary of that game for the immediate future, but support them if you like.

Actually WoTC didnt used to be like this, back in 2002 or so, they made a good article as to why not all rares were super great.. its because they put as an example they split the "good cards" between rare, uncommon and commons, otherwise it'd be a huge barrier to entry, but since then they don't seem to care =\

[Dysmetria]

Originally posted by arejang:

Originally posted by Spooky:

simple.
MTGA is so Good. Eternal is bore.

lol, think what you will. Dire Wolf hasn't yet done anything controversial enough to cause literally thousands of players to rise up in protest. MTGA team? They've done this at least thrice now to my memory. They're testing the waters how much they can push the boundaries between free to play and pay to progress.

They've more than made it clear now they want to give players as little as possible and see how little they can give and still maintain a game before people pick up pitchforks and torches. This entire game is an experiment to them, and if they keep it up, it'll blow up in their faces. I'd be wary of that game for the immediate future, but support them if you like.

That's some conspiracy theory. Thing is if they wanted to give players as little as possible they could have done so. No special animations for speific cards, no voices for cards, hell no mtga. After all mtgo is still going strong 17 years later.

They certainly didn't have to give us 5 out of the 10 starter packs, or daily quests for more gold and packs. They could have made us pay for every single card. They did so in MTGO. They did so in RL too.

But it is hilarious to see how upset the #menow generation gets over the silliest of things.

[arejang]

Originally posted by Dysmetria:

Originally posted by arejang:

lol, think what you will. Dire Wolf hasn't yet done anything controversial enough to cause literally thousands of players to rise up in protest. MTGA team? They've done this at least thrice now to my memory. They're testing the waters how much they can push the boundaries between free to play and pay to progress.

They've more than made it clear now they want to give players as little as possible and see how little they can give and still maintain a game before people pick up pitchforks and torches. This entire game is an experiment to them, and if they keep it up, it'll blow up in their faces. I'd be wary of that game for the immediate future, but support them if you like.

That's some conspiracy theory. Thing is if they wanted to give players as little as possible they could have done so. No special animations for speific cards, no voices for cards, hell no mtga. After all mtgo is still going strong 17 years later.

They certainly didn't have to give us 5 out of the 10 starter packs, or daily quests for more gold and packs. They could have made us pay for every single card. They did so in MTGO. They did so in RL too.

But it is hilarious to see how upset the #menow generation gets over the silliest of things.

I'm talking about the economy of the game, and they can't do so, simply put. What you see in game right now is the bare minimum result of players making a huge fuss over things. I am not throwing out a random conspiracy theory, but an observation of what already happened whenever devs try to experiment with what they can do in game. So far none of their experiments have been in the players' favor. They have all been to see if they could do with rewarding players with less without disturbing the overall population into an outright revolt.

Instead of bringing the frequency of rare wild cards up to an acceptable rate, their first solution was to remove mythic wild cards outright from the vault while keeping everything else the same, including the abysmal rare WC drop rate. Another example, people hated playing 30 matches to complete their dailies, the devs initial response to this was removing all sources of ICRs and front-loading the gold to the first 4 matches with no rewards on subsequent wins. Their knee-jerk reaction to any fix isn't to give players more (or to simply fix the problem without distrubing anything else), but to give them less and seeing if the resulting negative response isn't too bad. And now this, with the beginner decks, in addition to removing half of the dual colored decks originally awarded in closed beta, they thought to also try to randomize the remaining half so a certain fraction of players would get shafted with the worst combination of five or a combination of five they don't want to play. Who in their right mind thinks that's in the player's best interest? It only took literally over a thousand people rising up in protest across reddit, the forums and other social media platforms to enact swift reversal of that decision.

Am I throwing out wild conspiracy theories or am I just reporting the results of past events? I've already told you that the changes the developers attempted have now thrice resulted in a hugely negative response from the players. Were the first two not clear enough for you? How many more will it take for their trends to be apparent? And all these negative changes within this year.

I'm not saying you shouldn't play the game. I'm just saying to be careful where you put your money. My original post was not targeted against you, but was in hopes that the information would be helpful to you so you don't do anything stupid. A lot of thanks I got for that. You should always be cautious about spending money in any F2P game, inluding this one, eternal. I'm just warning folks to be extra cautious of spending into MTGA because the trend of changes the developer prefer to make are the ones that give players less, not more. Go ahead, slap away the helping hand and accuse me for being entitled. I'm throwing my hands up trying to convince you otherwise.

[Dysmetria]

Originally posted by arejang:

Originally posted by Dysmetria:

That's some conspiracy theory. Thing is if they wanted to give players as little as possible they could have done so. No special animations for speific cards, no voices for cards, hell no mtga. After all mtgo is still going strong 17 years later.

They certainly didn't have to give us 5 out of the 10 starter packs, or daily quests for more gold and packs. They could have made us pay for every single card. They did so in MTGO. They did so in RL too.

But it is hilarious to see how upset the #menow generation gets over the silliest of things.

I'm talking about the economy of the game, and they can't do so, simply put. What you see in game right now is the bare minimum result of players making a huge fuss over things. I am not throwing out a random conspiracy theory, but an observation of what already happened whenever devs try to experiment with what they can do in game. So far none of their experiments have been in the players' favor. They have all been to see if they could do with rewarding players with less without disturbing the overall population into an outright revolt.

Instead of bringing the frequency of rare wild cards up to an acceptable rate, their first solution was to remove mythic wild cards outright from the vault while keeping everything else the same, including the abysmal rare WC drop rate. Another example, people hated playing 30 matches to complete their dailies, the devs initial response to this was removing all sources of ICRs and front-loading the gold to the first 4 matches with no rewards on subsequent wins. Their knee-jerk reaction to any fix isn't to give players more (or to simply fix the problem without distrubing anything else), but to give them less and seeing if the resulting negative response isn't too bad. And now this, with the beginner decks, in addition to removing half of the dual colored decks originally awarded in closed beta, they thought to also try to randomize the remaining half so a certain fraction of players would get shafted with the worst combination of five or a combination of five they don't want to play. Who in their right mind thinks that's in the player's best interest? It only took literally over a thousand people rising up in protest across reddit, the forums and other social media platforms to enact swift reversal of that decision.

Am I throwing out wild conspiracy theories or am I just reporting the results of past events?

They seem pretty wild to me. I have only played for a week or so, but there was no swift reversal of their decision to give people five random starter decks. That is exactly what I got from them this week.

But while it is interesting, from a psychoogical perspective, to hear about your delusions of this great player uprising that changed the game in ways it clearly didn't, and how players somehow got shafted by getting 5 free starter decks when they did not, we're here to talk about the game, not a recap of the latest chapter of your rebel alliance larp cosplay fan fiction or to hear some entitled whining about how you only got 5 starter decks and should have gotten ten starter decks. Like I said, in both in paper mtg and mtg online I had to pay for enough cards, including lands to build even my first deck, before I could even play a single game. 5 stater decks and all the free gold and cards and boosters they give us daily is nearly as generous as this game has been. But that I could then take the deck I built, drop 1000g on a queue, win 5 games, and get over 2k gold back along with three rares? Or draft and win back more than the gems I put into it? That is where MTGA is so much more generous than even Eternal in building your collection cheaply. Were it not for the lack of draft queues for the previous block I'd have half the cards available by now and be working on the other half.

So if you could stick to facts instead of stretching the truth to try to claim what...that they are going to make bad decisions? Well duh. You obvioulsy never lost on turn one without being able to even play a card. The game has been riddled with design flaws since the alpha set.
This brand new digital release is going to have some bugs as well. That was why they got you all to bug test for them for free by letting you into the closed beta. Cheaper than actually paying people to do so.

Which makes me curious... Did they give you anything for all those months of work you put in looking for bugs and complaining and revolting? Did you keep all the cards you earned in the closed beta? Did they give you extra cards in the open beta at least?