I’ve been playing a good bit of online CCGs in the recent
months, for obvious reasons. And in
doing so, I’ve realized something that I’ve probably known for a long time now:
the monetization model of Magic the Gathering is hot garbage.
Let me explain.
The CCG I’ve played the most of over the pandemic has
undoubtably been Legends of Runeterra, which likely jumped after they dropped
their mobile app. The game is pretty
fun, it’s got some interactivity, a bunch of compelling options, some great
art, and it’s based on a franchise I’m pretty involved in, that being League of
Legends. I got into the closed beta,
played a bunch then and thought it was good but was worried about the
monetization. Open beta comes around,
again I play a bunch, still slightly worried about how they’re going to
monetize this, but overall the game is fun.
Then the release happens, and I look into the monetization, and realize:
I can buy into this game pretty cheaply.
So I spend $50 (less than many video games) and pick up a
bunch of in game currency, and am immediately able to make the best deck. Not a good deck, not a budget approximation
of the best deck, the best deck. Then
they nerf it, and I’m able to get the next best deck. And from there I play that deck for a few
weeks, picking up new cards through their incredibly generous in game rewards,
until the new expansion comes out and I have every card that I want and enough
currency to get all the ones from the new expansion that look fun.
As of writing, I don’t have every card, though I could
easily pick up the ones I’m missing, I just don’t really want them at the
moment. But if I want to build any deck
in the game, I can do it in a heartbeat.
I indeed did that last week. And
beyond spending some of my Google Play credit on some cosmetics when they
dropped the recent Spirit Guardian event, I haven’t put in any more besides the
initial $50, and I really don’t think I’ll need to put any more money in as
long as I keep playing.
Which brings us to Magic, specifically MtG Arena, their
premier digital client (yes, I’ve played Magic Online before, no, it is not
good). MtGA gives you a completely
accurate way to play Standard Magic, with all the cards programmed with
essentially no bugs with decent visuals and pretty smooth animations. There are some issues with it on the client
side, it’ll lag out if you alt-tab, and there’s no mobile client, but overall
the experience is good. There’s just a
small issue: the monetization is nowhere near as good as LoR. I’ve put about the same amount of money into
MtGA as LoR, and even playing it for double the time I’ve played LoR, I was
able to make one of the best decks.
Which got a ton of its pieces banned.
And then again got more banned.
Part of the issue is the bans, in LoR there’s only nerfs so
you can play the same strategy just with lower power, which I’ve done, but the
bigger issue is in how you get cards. In
LoR, you can buy individual cards with premium or in game currency. In MtGA, you can’t buy cards at all, you have
to buy packs (which aren’t even the full 15 cards they are in paper). The odds you get the card you want for your
deck is really low. There are
“wildcards”, that you can exchange for a copy of any card of the rarity of the
given wildcard, but Magic’s cards are very top-heavy, with most power cards at
the rare level, so you’ll quickly run out of these wildcards. Compare that to LoR, where their commons and
uncommons have incredible power levels, and while their Mythic quality cards,
the champions, aren’t exactly easy to get, there are far fewer of them and you
can only play 6 per deck, meaning the pressure to get them is far reduced. Additionally, their rare equivalent, Epics,
barely show up in most competitive decks.
I’ve run out of all wildcards besides Epic ones at different points in
time.
One issue MtGA has is you can’t buy either individual cards
or wildcards, so you’re incredibly reliant on the RNG of packs, the cards of
which are very likely to be irrelevant to any competitive deck you want to
build. Another issue is there’s just
more cards in Magic than LoR. While this
means that Magic has way more strategic depth, it also means that acquiring the
cards for MtGA is much harder, which is amplified by the fact that you in
general need 4 of a given card, as opposed to the maximum of 3 needed for
LoR. This wouldn’t be as big an issue if
it weren’t for the fact that many MtG cards are actively bad and will never see
play in any competitive constructed deck.
LoR, on the other hand, might have cards that won’t see much play, but
they do try to balance the game and design cards so that every card has a niche
somewhere, and a lot of cards can be played in multiple different decks and
archetypes.
Part of the issue here is that Magic is quite clearly a game
driven by “whales”, individuals who spend tons of money cracking packs to get
the cards they want or who will pay retailers to crack the packs for them and
then buy singles. Trading and selling
and buying individual cards are clearly major parts of paper Magic. The issue arises when Magic has to be
translated to a digital format without these levers for players to pull. The only lever given to players is the one
Wizards provides, pull it, buy some packs, and hope you get the card you
want. It’s not helped that the cost of
this lever is pretty high compared to the rewards you get, either looked at on
its own or compared to LoR. The end
result of all these issues is that innovation isn’t encouraged for a F2P or low
income MtGA player. When you need likely
20 rare cards just to build your manabase, not to mention the cards you
actually are excited to play, you’re going to look for a cheap deck that you
can play to build your collection to build the deck you actually want to
play. Which might rotate in a year. Oh yeah, did I mention that? Magic’s standard
format removes some cards from the format every year and there’s no recompense
for that (though to be fair, LoR hasn’t been around for long enough to require
a rotation, so its possible that might happen eventually too. But combined with
the other issues that this rotation only compounds in MtGA, I felt it should be
mentioned).
Magic is a great game.
I’ve probably put more time into it than almost any other game I can
think of, with the possible exception of League of Legends, and when
calculating for fun had Magic wins easily.
But when compared to other options in the digital market, Magic is way
behind. Pay to win is a phenomenon
clearly begot by Magic as a game, and MtGA does nothing to alleviate these
issues. The game is stuck in a business
model from the 1990s, and has refused to learn from either itself or from its
competitors. The real issue is, I don’t
think they have any reason to change.
They’re making plenty of money to keep shareholders happy, and business
is apparently booming. But their
decisions on economics, along with how they’ve approached card design which has
led to the most cards ever banned in Standard has made me completely lose
interest in the game. I can’t play what
I enjoy since I don’t have the cards for it, so I don’t enjoy playing. I hope that something changes, but I’m not
very hopeful.
