Should i play mtgo

And 2 What is your budget? A word of caution about playing in these areas: like all things on the internet, the anonymity people have online causes you to run into very rude people frequently — anything from people who will concede a match the instant they see an island played, to people complaining about every play you make or worse.

The best approach to playing free matches on MTGO is to find like-minded individuals you can duel with; admittedly, MTGO does not make this easy, and so it can take a lot of effort.

However, if you are on a very tight budget, it is an extremely worthwhile use of your time for your long-term enjoyment of the game. PREs are an excellent opportunity for those on very tight budgets to play in competitive events and win prizes. The best bet to find them is via Gatherling. Most formats have a wide array of top tier decks that can satisfy many play styles. However, sometimes a sacrifice needs to be made in either fun or competitiveness.

This is up to each individual to decide which is more important, but as competitiveness decreases, so should the amount of money spent on tournaments. However, the budget available is the most important factor as it is likely the hardest to change. First, narrow down a selection of decks in your desired format that fit your budget.

Then pick either the most fun or competitive from that pool depending on what is decided to be most important. Deck selection doesn't need to be made in a vacuum though. Since so many formats are supported on Magic Online, one can simply switch to a cheaper format. That way, it is possible to satisfy the other two factors competitiveness and entertainment value with a smaller investment, then work up to the more expensive formats as more money in your budget is available, or you manage to earn prizes.

What if there was a way to build a tier 1 deck of any playstyle that is cheap? The common answer to these questions is building a budget version of popular decks. Often, switching out a few of the more expensive cards can massively bring down the cost of a deck. The issue with this approach is that it significantly affects the competitiveness of the deck, as well as potentially the amount of enjoyment with the deck since the expensive cards are often key pieces to the viability of the archetype.

Building budget versions of existing decks is perfectly acceptable, you just need to be wary of the potential hype of purely budget decks and be sure to make informed decisions, especially before joining tournaments with entry fees.

While you still need to understand the competitiveness of the deck and be wary of joining events with entry fees , this approach can avoid some of the same issues you face when trying to make existing archetypes budget decks; namely, removing key pieces of a deck that make it do what it is supposed to do. Other content creators who have made playing Magic on a budget their focus include, but are not limited to:. Strictly Better MtG : The team behind this YouTube channel has a combined 30 years of experience playing Magic, and covers news, and set reviews, along with deck techs highlighting their budget brews.

Tolarian Community College : While the Professor is widely known for his product reviews, he has also made a number of videos featuring affordable decks that can be played in all formats, from Standard, to Modern, and even Legacy. There is one final trick you can use to satisfy your budget, competitiveness and enjoyment: simply change your perspective.

In this sense, it is like renting Magic Online product contingent on buying and selling properly. Some people even do this for profit, but that is significantly more difficult and can require speculation.

This approach to budget is outside the scope of this article, and as noted above in the establishing your budget section, the best approach for most players is to use the residual value of your collection as a bonus rather than something factored into your budget.

Any discussion pertaining to "drafting" and "budget" has to start with a frank discussion about how expensive drafting can be. The long-term average of the cards you select in drafts will not be close to enough to cover the cost, and at best will curtail the cost to some degree. So, unless you can win enough against some of the best players in the world, a budget discussion of drafting has to center around how to make each draft as cheap as possible.

Further, most players on MTGO that play in drafts enjoy the format; that is, there is some amount of entertainment value. After all, despite its cost, drafting can be one of the best ways to enjoy Magic Online. As noted above in the discussion of New Player Points , each new account comes with enough New Player Points to draft 5 times.

Of course, the regular drafts give you the opportunity to win back your entry fee and more — but this requires that you are very good at draft. The biggest downside to this approach is that the new player drafts are 4-player pods, not 8-player. Further, the new player drafts are only available for the most recent set — so the variety available to you drafting in this manner is very limited.

There are currently 2 ways to draft the recent formats in pods of 8 players, and they are distinguished by their prize structure, and format: Leagues, and Each of these queues serves a purpose, and selecting the correct structure can be important in minimizing the overall cost of each draft. Limited Leagues are a recent addition to Magic Online, and offer a unique experience, compared to Drafts you might be used to.

For starters, you are most likely to face opponents who were not in your initial Draft pod. So, you might take a card in the hopes that someone else in your pod won't use it also known as 'hate drafting' only to see that same card suddenly staring at you from across the battlefield. You also have no time limit when it comes to deckbuilding. You can take as much as time as you need, and even bring in a friend to help you put the pieces together.

Magic and its younger card game cousins spice up gameplay with added sound effects, visual cues, matchmaking algorithms and more to create an entertaining and rewarding online experience. Here's what players downloading and launching MTGO are in for.

By now, there is more than one way to play Magic: The Gathering online, with Arena being another strong option. But MTGO came first, and players looking for a particularly deep and comprehensive representation of the game should try it.

To get started, players can visit the website and download the client, then pay a small fee to begin. Once the game is downloaded and fully patched, the player may create an account, including a username, and then choose their in-game avatar. The MTGO client is organized into several sections, and the user's collection is a good place to start. Here, players can view their entire collection of cards. These are usually sorted by color, but they can be sorted by other means too.

Once a player builds a deck, they may name that deck, specify which format it's for and even choose an illustrated deck box to make it easier to find. Players can also set up trade binders, which include all cards that are available for trade with other players and this keeps all non-trade cards secret.

A player looking for some solid deals can put their most valuable but non-essential cards in that binder and trade them to obtain what they need for a new deck. Practically all formats can be played in MTGO , and some are more competitive than others. This issue is also rooted in how Magic as a game operates and how it was designed long before Arena was a thing.

HS and LOR have smaller deck sizes, and a tighter limit on the amount of cards you can run in any list: thirty cards with a max of two duplicates excluding legendries and forty cards with a max of three duplicates respectively.

Standard Magic decks often require a playset of four cards for most cards in a given list, so you end up needing to craft more cards at high rarities more often in a game with comparably far less generous rewards.

It also hurts more when your cards rotate out of standard. HS offers a kind of buy-back option in the form of disenchanting your cards for half their value in dust, dust which you can then spend on getting any of the new cards you want. Arena, on the other hand, has no such feature. Woof, tough luck buddy.