This post is meant to help me (and you, be welcome) vent some frustration, as well as help this community grow.
To make it interesting, try to explain at least a little bit why something bothers you.
- Noisy pets. I hate them.
I'm talking about the cackling goblin, the obnoxious horses, the dumb dogs, the intrusive mice and whatever repeatedly makes any sound.
I mean, it's a fun addition at first, but it gets old quickly. And whenever Someone gets some damage, or something else of minor importance happens, it gets commented by not more than 3 (?) sound reactions. I think I heard all of them a few thousand times by now. It's just annoying.
Sadly, the only way to mute them for good is to mute all opponent's text and image emotes, basically shutting off communication. Which has it's own merit, but it's a different thing. Why combine both in one control?
So sometimes I cruise on everything off to have more peace of mind. When I feel more open, I enable reactions again, but manually mute every opponent who has a pet which cannot behave. Sorry bros. If you want to be heard, make this useless thing shut up.
- Decks which require you to react on dozens of triggers per round. Like 0-cost artifact spam, lifegain frenzy, foodcat sacrificers.
It's just so tedious. And some people seem to do it just for the fun of it, without any impact on the game.
Like when the Scurry Oak starts growing, I have a Ritual of Soot in Hand, but still want to use my remaining mana in their end step. I may have to click through hundreds of triggers just to wipe it all away whenever they feel they spammed enough.
- One trick shows.
Talking about Dualcaster Mage, Minion of the Mighty, some decks around Colossal Hammer. I mean, it's nice you can make these decks which can kill you on round 2 or so (but fall apart instantly when they don't), just in principle. But in common play, it's just a boring waste of time. I know these decks exist, cool. I'm pretty sure you just copied it from someone else or the internet, wow. Okay, you won and the only thing good about it is that I don't have to shuffle physical cards afterwards. Now get lost.
- Fast decks in general.
I'm aware they are necessary to keep the lategame horrors in check, but meh. Why do I put 60 cards together if I only get to see 10, and to play 2?
To me, it smells like bad game design that some strategies revolve around making your opponent unable to play (also looking at discard, counter and other locks). Again, in principle it is amazing that MTG has this flexibility and variety. But does it make for interesting and fun matches for both sides? I much prefer games which have some back and forth, not one steamrolling the other.
- Uncreative decks.
Such wow, 4 copies of each elf/goblin/whatever, which everyone else plays too. Generic UR wizards, or Boros cats with Goblin Bombardment. Seen them a hundred times, mostly losing to them. I guess there's the crux; they are so strong you can hardly play anything else. Which ironically makes the aforementioned flexibility and variety of this originally amazing game self defeating, resulting in stale repetition.
- Overpowered / too cheap cards
Did the reanimators really need an upgrade in the form of a 2-mana Persist? Or lifegain the Ocelot Pride? Both were already strong and popular before these were added. I also consider Sheoldred's Edict one such culprit. Just a few years ago, I (and many others) were playing Fleshbag Marauder, a creature which has "on enter: each player sacrifices a creature" or something. Now it's a 2-mana instant with more flexibility and precision. I think it just leads to a race to the bottom, where games are decided by whoever drew their winning solution first (we give you 3 turns to make that happen). Again, I very much like that something like this is possible, but it should not be so common that it displaces other strategies, which could make for more interesting and more fun games, for both sides.
This got longer than I anticipated. Feel free to add your own thoughts independent from mine, or cheese to my whine.
Other than the pets and to some extent the triggers, this mostly just seems like complaints about Magic itself. It also strikes me as odd to complain about decks that are too fast and decks that are too slow simultaneously...
At any rate, my main problems with Arena are the horrifically slow wildcard economy and the lack of multiplayer Brawl.
You're right, I strayed from the title. Arena is where I experience MTG, I guess that's how both got mashed together from my view.
What I still could have mentioned: Ropers, and generally unsportsmanlike behaviour. Like being a dick with emotes, being quick when you win but sluggish when you lose, abusing 'Your Go', spamming 'Good Game' when I still have or might draw a solution. I've also done all that, so I try not to judge too hard. Sometimes I think the whole experience is an exercise in emotion regulation.
What I meant with fast: Decks which can kill in the first few rounds (regardless of how much time has passed
What I meant with slow: Players who physically take a long time to play (like roping on every step)
It can be both, which is the worst. Like a player scaling up his Scurry Oak in one of the first few turns to 100+ counters, while frequently taking breaks to clown around with emotes or whatever. I can't really leave my desk, but also don't want to surrender since I might draw a solution. Though this could be in 5 seconds or 10 minutes, who knows. Sometimes I feel this just isn't worth my nerves and surrender anyway, even with a solution in hand.
I heard about the slow wildcard economy, so I guess you're right. I have the opposite experience, but seen this point numerous times before; seems legit. I've been playing this game for many years (10?), sometimes almost all day. After some start phase, I could make whatever I needed from wildcards, without ever spending any real money. Currently, I have around 15 rare/mythic wildcards, which is a low count for me, since I just made another deck (with an accompanying post in this community). I guess it helps that I usually only play one deck, which rarely sees changes once it's settled. Only vaguely I remember grinding for missing cards, an adventure which I did occasionally miss since then.
I can kinda see the "too fast" complaint with stuff like Brawl or other unranked modes, but in any ranked modes, winning is the point, so I feel like there isn't really any room to complain about fast and efficient decks in ranked play. Idk which modes you tend to play, so that may or may not be relevant. At the very least, fast decks let you get on to the next match sooner.
Agreed on ropers, of course, though I don't see a whole lot of intentional roping that often. However, I usually play Brawl, and otherwise have only have one janky ranked Historic deck that usually hangs out in silver, so I don't know if it's worse in higher rank tiers. More often I see people who just seem to have trouble making decisions quickly, or don't seem to notice that they have priority until the rope starts. It's mildly frustrating, but it usually doesn't appear to be intentional so I try not to get too mad about it.
On wilds, I actually got into the Arena alpha test back in the day, but I've taken a few multi-year breaks from it since release. I've found that if you play consistently across the lifetime of a set, you can end up filling out a lot of it, but actually catching up on sets that you've missed, especially if there are years' worth of them, is a nightmare. I'm probably going to have to wait for another rotation before I can really think about trying to get into Standard. I can't imagine how bad it is for brand-new players...
I slightly disagree. I mean, mostly you're obviously right; playing to win is foremost at home in ranked. But I think other legit points exist simultaneously.
I want interesting matches. I want the matchmaking to give me an opponent which is neither too hard nor too easy. That's my main reason for playing ranked historic.
I want to test the deck I built, see how it fares against mature decks. I play unranked to check if I got the basics right (like land composition), and ranked to find out how viable certain ideas actually are in the current meta.
But sure, it is perfectly fine to play ranked to win (lol), and I don't blame those who do. I just feel we can and should expect more challenge required and less luck. I lose so often with only having played 1 land, that's just ridiculous. My deck has answers to all these threats, but asking wether I have the fitting solution against an unknown opponent in my first 8 cards puts a lot more weight on luck than on skill.
There's another thought, not sure how to put it. Maybe it's less about the individual match and more about different strategies competing in a shared environment. From that perspective, it's perfectly fine to have deck A which wins versus B, but loses against C and D. Then, player skill sits at the judgement how much B we currently have, and what exactly A is. However, the current client heavily emphasizes looking at individual matches (that's where you see that big VICTORY / DEFEATED), and I think you need 3rd party tools to get any information how good you're doing against certain types of opponents.
I think that your last though is right on the money.
The client should show you match histories against what sorts of decks, so it's more overall and long term than just the one match.
Bo3 works well for this too and I find I enjoy playing it more. But don't always have the time during my commutes to bosh it out each time.