Yes I completely agree about the fakes issue. No reason IMO not to have a false card back on every proxy. We shouldn’t be in the business of duping people, and conversely no one should be forced to pay more than they’re able to for a card game piece.

I don’t think there was ever going to be a doubt if Final Fantasy, Spiderman, etc would be more popular than regular MtG. I think it’s all but guaranteed to increase player count when you have something like a popular outside IP crossed over with a different game.

Steam saw 6,000 additional active users, a 50% increase, and I honestly don’t know if that’s a signal that the crossover is a big hit, but that number seems really low overall to me. Fortnite is seeing ~6M average actives for reference. Maybe Steam doesn’t account for a very high % of the installs, so assuming a 50% increase in players in Arena is a massive jump, but to the original point, if you’re a fan of FF why wouldn’t you try a FTP game that features cards from the game? How much of it will you try is the real question.

The bigger issue that the game has had to deal with since the 90s is the complexity. I remember in the late 90s hearing store owners say things like “you have to be too smart to play Magic” and even though it’s a little silly, there is a high level of state management and knowledge needed to play the game at all. It’s quick to get a rundown of the rules, but it’s not simple to play the game. These new players are interested enough to check it out, run through the tutorial, maybe do the color challenge, but then what? It has such a high onboard cost that is very different from an RPG for FPS style game. Will they still be interested after FF rotates in 8 weeks?

These are the unanswered questions that they are gambling with at the expense of the enfranchised player base. Maybe the enfranchised players will always continue to play because they just like the game mechanics. Maybe the added players from FF and Marvel sets will outpace the existing players that quit the game. I don’t know, but just like with other technical parallels like chess or computer programming, there is a finite number of people who can play the game beyond a surface level.

I think this is unfortunately all we can do :(

Card Sphere and Mana Pool were two other services I found through all of this, but I haven’t used either yet.

Some more info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7zWhqVO5AE

This is pretty insane. Ebay moving the grading to Kentucky to effectively kill off the union that the Syracuse team formed. At this point there is an effective monopoly on trading card sales, it doesn’t even seem possible to start a competitor anymore.

I totally agree, I wish they would go back to the original foiling method for new cards

Thank you for this! I have really gotten out of the habit of seeing what the deals are day to day.

Yea I love it too, for all Arena’s issues I think watching Arena gameplay is a lot better than MTGO or even paper for me. I just want them to add the rest of the cards! Come on already!

Great that Pioneer is now the official format on Arena. Just give us the rest of the cards already!

Haha, I love that. Good lesson there lol

I honestly don’t see a reason to ever unban them. These three have been proven to be unsuitable for the format, and if people really want to play them, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just be made available in Tier 4. Or some Tier that has no banned cards for the people who want to play that way.

Not to mention that these cards were the heart of the entire controversy that ended the Commander Rules Committee and caused the death threats to come out from some players. That alone would be enough to me to never bring these cards back to the format ever again.

I will secod MakePlayingCards.com as someone else mentioned. However, with the tariff situation this may end up being far too costly to do anymore. We will have to wait and see. I have used MPC a lot in the past and it’s always a great experience. The S33 is just like a Magic card.

If you just want to flat rate the cost and have the easiest experience, I would go with https://www.mtgproxy.com/. I’ve seen good youtube reviews of them and I’m about to order some PreModern proxies soon from here.

First off, I didn’t realize MaRo did this for Tempest too. This is awesome.

Tempest block is when I started but Urza’s block was my favorite. I was a little too young to go out and draft those sets but I remember following every spoiler and loving every card that came out in Saga, Legacy, Destiny. I also remember my peak excitement as a child was getting a USG booster box for Christmas and cracking a Gaea’s Cradle. Needed 4 of those for a deck and I didn’t have the $80 for a playset (lol).

Crazy that MaRo was the only designer for Urza’s Destiny. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what a designer does here, but that seems really short staffed at a time when the game was very popular.

Original Goblin General (Goblin Marshall) was very much like a Deranged Hermit and I think the tweak they made was better. I really liked the take he had on Echo + Death Triggers. I think that is just a great example of tradeoffs in the older game. It was a cool idea to staple cycling as a (2) + Sacrifice mechanic for permanents.

It would be pretty incredible if they brought Urza’s block draft to Arena for an event. I think that would definitely get be back playing regularly.

Through the Omenpath’s discussion here: https://mtgzone.com/post/1558394

Still can’t believe this is the digital plan for the Marvel set.

I think this is just insane and super confusing. Another huge indicator that the Marvel sets (and probably all of UB) should have never entered Standard. Just make them Commander-only, and you never have this problem. They could release certain UB sets to Arena and not have to push the others if there were digital licensing issues.

Now, instead, we have a huge break in paper/digital that will presumably last and repeat forever. This makes deck list sharing and importing more difficult. This makes watching the game much more difficult. This makes learning the limited environment much more difficult. This is just way confusing and way stupid imo. I guess it’s a huge win for Arena players who didn’t want Marvel in the game but that’s about the only positive I can come up with.

I think this has to be it. No way Marvel wants “Spider man card game” to turn up Arena first in search results over Marvel Snap. And this confused me when they first announced a Marvel set given that Snap was already a thing.

I think this is a win for Arena, but it will be super confusing not having the same card names/artwork across paper and digital especially for anyone who plays both. Have to learn everything twice I guess. Deck list importing just got a lot harder too.

I love that idea

Still, it’s made me much less interested in Standard given that it was nice to have a lower power format but now it feels almost as fast as other formats.

I remember heavily playing 4c Party back when it was in Standard and that was a viable deck in the format. It would not even get 1 win in the current meta by a long shot. Standard right now feels like what Modern was before Horizons and I just don’t think there exists a slow constructed format anymore. Nor do I think there will ever be one again.

Yea this is absolutely the direction they’re going. I feel like they desperately want to use AI art. They must be salivating at the cost savings from removing artists and set designers from the creative team. I can’t imagine the playerbase accepting that but who knows, they’ve/we’ve accepted everything so far.

Completely agree. I also think THB wasn’t tested outside of limited, and I think nothing was starting with WAR.

I can’t help but feel a lot of this could be fixed by creating a separate game. At first I thought UB should be the separate game, and I still do, but it’s clear Hasbro will never do that. Perhaps the best outcome could have been a game that returns to the old frame, the old release schedule, the old artwork, and the old play/card design philosophy and just sell it as Classic Magic or something. I would play the crap out of that game, and it would still even be Standard legal since all of the cards are compatible with the original game.

I know it’s just a dream at this point, but I think there is still a huge demand for something that’s basically premodern with new cards.