Hey Peter,

Thanks for writing. I think that if there are enough people like you (and from the article you know that I think most people who play Paper/MTGO are like you), then Arena will have a difficult time replacing MTGO as the place to draft and play limited. Most paper and MTGO players are not extremely wealthy, and much of the player base doesn’t have multiple hours each day to spend grinding. I think Arena will do a better job at targeting the younger audience of Hearthstone and getting new players interested and invested into Magic.

I’ve done no research on Duels of the Planeswalkers. I’m not sure what the goal of that platform was.

Regarding your final point, it is my hope that Wizards will shift their goals with Arena. I hope they are bad at knowing what their goals are because then those goals are more subject to change!

This is an extremely well researched and written article, just wanted to say thank you for writing this.

I checked out the podcast that you referred to. The big take away is that in the short term, Arena will not support Modern and older. I don’t think wizards is willing to give up that portion of the market, so I think MTGO is safe for now. But if Arena launches successfully I am sure they will make plans for modern legacy comamander etc.

Heres a question I was pondering to myself yesterday after reading this. And this is a question that only wotc knows. What was the true purpose of Duels of the Planeswalkers? I cant imagine that they went through all of the effort to develop a completely new platform to have just watered down standard basically. My hypothesis is that Duels was supposed to be the new platform, but something about it wasn’t working for the entire magic experience. In my opinion, that’s the only reason that you would develop Arena on a new engine. I spent 5 minutes looking into the Unity engine. Its the same engine that hearthstone uses, and from everything Ive seen its extremely powerful and their shouldn’t be any technical limitations. Also since it seems to be a widely used it should be easy for them to find experienced developers.

Honestly, I wish they would just keep the same economy as MTGO and give me the new interface. I know it wont happen, and maybe that’s the crusty old enfranchised player in me, but I don’t have time to grind a million games or spend $1000 to get the cards I want. In my opinion I don’t think its the economy that’s driving people away from MTGO, its the interface. However, I suppose that its probably intimidating to new players. Right now I don’t have to actually spend anything on MTGO, I just use my earnings to buy the cards I want…I would love to keep that.

One final point. You talk about the stated goals of Arena. I think its no secret that Wotc is bad about knowing what their goals are, knowing if their goals will produce the desired outcome, and communicating what those goals are. I can point to many instances of them falling short on one those.

Anyway great article. I am sure this will be an ongoing discussion over the years as we learn more.

Hi Biron,

I didn’t discuss codes because that is very much up in the air. The Arena developer who went on LR was asked about that possibility, and, with a hesitant voice, noted that “they are looking into the possibility of that”, and he is unsure which way it would go – either Arena codes inside paper/MTGO packs or paper/MTGO codes inside of Arena packs.

Which way it would go depends a lot on the issues discussed in this article. Does the Hasbro CEO want Magic to be predominantly a digital game or a tabletop game? Does he view Arena as a stepping stone to traditional Magic, or does he believe that Arena is the superior way to make money? He would never say in public, and I can’t really tell myself. I suspect Wizards/Hasbro is taking a wait-and-see approach.

I will say that I think the value of the codes would be significantly less than what you seem to be hoping for. If there are Arena codes in paper packs, they will be geared toward getting a paper player (or a prospective player who goes to a pre-release) to check out Arena and give them just enough money to nudge them toward emotional investment. I don’t think the purpose of codes will be to help paper Magic players play both paper and digital.

You are right to suggest that if every paper Magic booster pack contained a code that gave you enough virtual Arena currency for, say, 10 hours of grinding, then I do believe that paper booster prices would increase. By how much it’s too difficult to predict. We’ll have to wait and see what the numbers are, and I’ll inevitably write an article about it once I have enough data and information to make good predictions.

I would prefer to see the reverse. I’d prefer the mid and top tiers of Arena give codes for various rewards in MTGO and Paper, or for a future stage of Arena/MTGO in which there was a secondary market and in which you actually did own your cards (like Hex).

You didn’t mention anything about “codes” so when buying booster packs you also get the cards in arena. Do you imagine a world where people don’t have to grind to get the cards if they are buying packs/singles to add to their arena collection? If so it would open a new finance market for cards to be sold just for the code creating a secondary market that I can’t imagine, what would happen to card prices with an unused code vs one with a used code. Do you have any thoughts to “codes” from paper to arena?