By Rob Bockman
The perfect venue for Magic: The Gathering Arena, as it turns out, is the gym. You’re a captive audience who wants to make the time go by quickly while paying 80% attention to something diverting but ephemeral, and so Arena is ideal. If anything, it’s made me a sloppier and more impatient player, but grinding a Quick Draft on the stationary bike makes 45 minutes speed by and often nets me a few gems.
Entire doctoral theses have been written on freemium game economies, and I recognize the limitations of this form, so I’ll just say this: the abstraction of commerce through a multi-layered system of currencies, like Arena’s gems and coins, is designed to decouple value from cost and make microtransactions appear reasonable. It’s entirely possible to play Arena for free, even if you like drafting: simply sign in at least every three days and complete every quest for 500 or 750 coins until you have the 5,000 or 10,000 necessary for a single draft. If you get at least five wins, you can then enter another draft with your 1,600 gems (or six wins for 850 gems, if you opted for the Quick Draft option). If you can’t hit that threshold, wait until enough daily quests are lined up in the queue to earn the remaining coins you need to hit 750 or 1,500 for another draft. Alternately–and this is what Wizards counts on–when you get frustrated, pay the $4.99 or $9.99 and jump right back in. It’s only a few dollars, after all.
If you’re impecunious or uniquely principled, you can stick to the quests. They’re generally “play XX Blue or White spells” or “attack with 30 creatures” or something similarly attainable through simply playing the game of Magic. You can reroll one quest per day if it’s a color pairing you don’t enjoy playing, but otherwise, you’re stuck with playing the way Arena wants you to if you want to maximize your free-to-play time and attention. This means that you’ll end up min-maxxing, building decks that you don’t enjoy just because they enable you playing a flurry of spells to qualify towards the quest du jour. To build these quest decks, of course, takes wild cards, which means you have to enter the Arena economy to earn enough digital currency to reenter the second layer of the Arena economy. You’ve turned your limited time and money into company scrip.
