>*The Play Booster box prize is available while supplies last. In the unlikely event supplies run out, Wizards of the Coast, in its sole discretion, may replace this with a $250 cash prize.
MSRP is back! /s
Because information is power, by obfuscating information makes it harder to know what a fair price would be and who is the one in the chain that is contributing the price.
Without an MSRP it just obscures if the price increase is coming from WOTC, the distributor (or for players also the LGS).
Best of one sealed MH3 with two losses and you're out, so it's even worse. I'm intrigued by the concept, but the event design is a complete non-starter for me. Hopefully they do it with Bo3 draft at some point.
Important note missing from the main page but in the terms and conditions: It is 6 wins before **2** losses (instead of 3 like the Arena Open is).
Maybe it's my hubris talking, but I think I could pretty consistently get to 6 wins at least once out of 10 tries (A box is like $265 right now, and entry is $25).
Yeah, that does make it harder. Getting 6 wins before your second loss is much more difficult than winning 6 out of 8 games. I might try a run or two to see how I do. Not sure I want to devote a ton of resources though for something that I'd just try to flip.
I actually did the math cause I'm curious. Assuming a 50% win rate, the chances of winning a box are about 6.2%, and the chances of winning with 10 entries is just under 50%.
The fact that you only have two losses to work with really hurts the odds here. It doesn't matter how skilled you are, you still need to get lucky to get this.
Also, the higher the variance, the closer to 50% your chances are. And Sealed with Play Boosters, best-of-one, is *very* high-variance.
That said, if the results are top-heavy, the variance will tend to extend through games, so even if a good player's win chance is closer to 50% than it usually would be, an insane pool will more easily rocket you to 6 wins, even if a terrible pool will cause you to lose extra hard; but the penalty of losing a little and losing a lot are the same, whereas winning a little and winning a lot are *really* different.
This is one of those things that I think would be really interesting to try to model, but I wouldn't trust the results of it without some sort of real world dataset to compare to. Trying to model in how variance in sealed pool affects winrates would require adding a bunch of assumptions, which can make the data basically useless if any of those assumptions are even slightly wrong.
Also it's something that might be completely irrelevant depending on how the matchmaking works. If the matchmaker tries to pair you against people with a similar W/L record, then as you win more games you'll on average go against better decks so the win probability would converge towards 50% anyway. But, if the matchmaking is totally random, then win probability goes up as the number of wins goes up.
Interesting, thanks! Did you factor in that 5 wins gives you a full refund and 4 wins gives you 2000 gems? Those both should be significant helps. And I expect a strong player could probably have a 60ish% win rate.
No, this is strictly the chances of winning if you enter 10 times. This was just quick math I did on my phone calculator. Although I can say that your odds of getting 5 wins is actually *less* than getting 6 wins, so this really isn't going to help you as much as you would think.
I went with a 50% winrate because the total winrate on average has to be 50%, and because it makes the math way easier. I will say that getting a winrate substantially higher than 50% will likely be exceptionally difficult, both because the competition is likely going to be strong and due to the inherent variance of sealed as a format. Unless you are consistently getting 7 wins in Arena BO1 sealed events, I would *strongly* advise against paying money for this event.
(Of course if you have spare gems sitting around and you want to give it a shot, go for it, just keep your expectations realistic)
I played around in Excel to try to solve the equation because it's a fun problem, but it's been a while since I've had to use combinations so I might be off!
Going with a 50% win rate, I yielded a 1.56% chance for 6-0, 4.69% for 6-1, 4.69% for 5-2, and 7.81% for 4-2. That yields a 6.25% chance of an outright win. But factoring in the Gem prizes/refunds (counting them towards a full or fraction of a new try), I got a 6.73% chance of winning.
At 55% win rate, there was 10.2% outright win chance, but adding in the gem wins it becomes 11.2%
At 60% win rate, there was 15.9% outright win, 17.7% chance with gems.
If a play booster box is worth $250, you need to win more than 10% of the time to save money. That line is at a 53.8% win rate
Edit: Actually this prediction is a little low because I didn't factor in that the "free runs" could yield more "Free runs" (I treated them as a binary W/L on redo). Wouldn't be a big difference, but it should be just a little bit higher.
For an analysis like this your best bet is finding the expected value of an entry given a winrate. So if we say that one box is worth 10 entries, the simplified of each outcome, would be:
10 for 6 wins
1 for 5 wins
0.4 for 4 wins
0 for everything else
Then, you multiply the odds of each outcome by the value of each outcome to get the expected value. If the expected value is greater than 1, then it is a good deal*. If it's less than 1, you're better off sitting out.
*By this I mean a good deal statistically, not financially. Because that's a whole nother can of worms.
I used Combinations to predict the frequency of winning outcomes: 6-0, 6-1, 5-2, 4-2. It's made a little more complex because for 6-1, the last game must be a win. For 5-2 or 4-2, the last game must be a loss.
So for 6-1, I used: "COMBIN(6,5)*(Win Prob)^5 * (1-Win Prob) * Win Prob
Basically, the combinations of winning 5 out your first 6 games, multiplied by the probability for each of the 5 wins times and one loss, then guaranteeing the last game was a win, so multiplying by the win probability.
After doing formulas like that for each of the 4 winning outcomes, I added together the 6-0 and 6-1 conditions. For the 5-2 scenario, I multiplied by the sum of the win conditions (basically probability of winning on the free run), then added that product to the win condition odds. Finally for 4-2, I did the same thing but added in a factor of 0.4 because it is only worth 40% of a run.
Once you’ve calculated the probabilities of all the 2 loss combinations, you can just subtract that figure from 1 to get the probability of 6 wins. You don’t need to separately calculate the probability of 6-0 and 6-1
It was faster just calculating the win conditions. There are 2 six win conditions and six possible 2-loss outcomes. Either way, once I had figured out the equation to use, it was a negligible amount of work to tweak it for the other outcomes.
Presumably you need to add some gem value to the cards you open in your pool as well. But this 53.8 percent is probably close enough without it . Thanks
To me this is the real kicker. It's best of one and 2 losses ends your run. But the real issue is that players typically going 7-1 or 7-2 will look at this and just see an opportunity to make money. If you can't compete at that level, whatever your normal winrate is will be dramatically better than your win rate in this event.
Your hunch is pretty accurate here. A typical 128-player 7-round swiss distribution (assuming they pair based on record this should be an accurate representation) will have 12 players go 6-1 and one undefeated player for a total of 13 "winning" so you're looking at a rate of 13/128 aka just over 1/10. That's with coin flips too so if your winrate is higher then you're possibly at better odds- BUT since these events bring out even more competition than typical play, you could be looking at worse odds. Still, the EV seems fair based on your valuations.
Idk arena limited is ridiculous and the top players are all gonna be farming this. It was much easier to win this stuff on mtgo when they did the events like IRL.
if youre lsv thats true. I still think its at rate if you can baet 10 tries or get hosed by variance and if 60 packs on arena is owrth the risk over just buying a box. still at rate its like a 250$ bundle that gives a box and 60 mtga packs which is pretty solid. I see the math is a lot worse for only 2 wins thoguh lmao.
A risk, but hey if you think you are good enough at sealed you can get a Booster Box for only 30ish bucks, that's certainly a deal, if you are willing to gamble.
Yeah, it being sealed is such a strange choice.
I’d accept premier draft instead of traditional for some streamlining reasons. But sealed is certainly a head scratcher.
Pods not playing against each other might as well be sealed. I dislike draft in arena when it is played for anything that matters. I say this as someone who drafts every time i get enough coins to que.
At least with sealed the pool of cards is at least the only variable. with arena drafts its the entire pod’s overall pool and skill.
Theres better skill expression in draft. I’m not denying that, but in terms of fairness of matchmaking its worse.
Im fine with losing to a better sealed pool. but some pods are just more free than others on the human drafts because the matchmaking is literally just the first 8 to show up, unless theres something more to it that its doing.
How well the other 7 people in your pod decided to draft or just rarepick for their constructed affects the rest of your matches which will very likely not include any of those people
Love some high stakes Magic. Wish it was draft, but it’s roughly 40 dollars worth of gems to participate which is what an in person MH3 draft costs. Pretty cool option.
Yeah, and you can play 4 times, or save your gems.
If you're putting money, actual money, into this game, NEVER buy small amounts. Always buy gems at the CHEAPEST rate there can be.
This is not always true.
Sure, if you are planning on buying that many gems over the next few months anyway, do it with cheaper rate. But if you only wanted to buy this many gems, why would you spend an extra $75 to get a better rate on gems you dont need?
If you don't have $100 dollars to spend on this game, you shouldn't be spending any money period. That's not gatekeeping, that's financial sense; the only people who should be buying gems are those with excess amounts of income!
That's an inane take. If you can afford 30 bucks to play digitally, one shot, but not 100, you shouldn't be playing Arena for money. Period.
It's not gatekeeping. It's common budget sense.
Don't be dumb with money. It's offering you a discount, straight up, and if you're going to use the gems, buy them the cheapest you can.
It's not privilege, it's called not being a dumb fuck. People like to cry about money all the time but literally all of you waste your money, and no one wants to admit it.
The value proposition is actually pretty good. If you call a booster box as worth $250, which is what they say they’ll pay out in cash in the event they run out of boxes, you’d need to be able to 6-1 or 6-0 only 1/10 times to break even, not counting that you get 2000 gems on a 4-2 and 5000 (the whole buyin) back on a 5-2.
If you’re a strong player you can probably farm this. The only reason it’s not a slam dunk is the buyin is prohibitively high at a time other MH3 limited events will also be available, so you’re going to play against higher quality opponents on average.
Yeah, I literally went to check the terms and conditions if there was a limit on how many times a person can win, and could not find one. The two loss limit makes it harder, but I feel like a strong player could probably get to 6-1 like 15-20% of the time. And if they run out of boxes, the backup prize is $250. This does seem like something people will try to farm.
I guess WotC probably doesn't mind that though, I'm sure they've done the math so that it makes sense for them. Why do they care if the boxes mostly go to the same power players instead of distributed to more people if they make the same amount? A wins a win.
Thinking about it, for someone to win 6 times, they had to knock 3 people out (in aggregate) . so 4 people buying in at 30 dollars to win a box of value 250.
Im sure a play booster box doesnt cost 250 dollars to print for them, but it
doesnt seem to break even to me? Maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way.
because the wins and losses wont be distributed like that. Imagine this scenario: 64 players, they all start 1-1. next round 32 get eliminated. Then 16, leaving 16 at 3-1. 8 get to 4-1, 4 to to 5-1, then 2 to 6-1. 2/64 players win the prize, so they took in $1920 to pay out $500 using a $30 buyin.
Ran the numbers. In a pool of 128 people, 2 people go 6-0, 1 person goes 6-1, 1 person go 5-2 and 2 people go 4-2.
So assigning value of 250 to 6 wins and 25 to 5 wins and 15 to 4 wins.
And 25 dollars entry value.
It’s roughly $3200 entry price vs $800 pay out.
It depends on your risk tolerance. Even if it’s positive EV, your “bankroll” matters and there’s a pretty significant chance of going bust even with a high winrate if you’re not willing to put up a significant investment and grind it out.
>WHO CAN PLAY IN THIS EVENT?
>MTG Arena players must be 18 years or older to participate. To start, we will be able to ship to the following locations:
>Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Cyprus, Colombia, Czechia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Guatemala, Estonia, Honduras, Finland, France, Japan, Germany, Macao, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, New Zealand, Iceland, Panama, Ireland, Paraguay, Italy, Peru, Latvia, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, United States, Malta, Uruguay, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Feeling kinda left out here in the middle east, but I guess it's more or less in line with the rest of WotC's policies e.g. WPN stores.
southeast asia being left out here too.. but only because of the stupid Tencent arrangement. that being said i wonder if i could still win but ship to one of the countries listed instead
Last time they did this is was Us only right? (or maybe US + Canada), and a ton of people somehow missed the big red text saying that and got caught spending money on something they couldn't actually win? Nice to see the list of eligible countries is **MUCH** bigger this time.
Theoretically, you are supposed to pay taxes on prize winnings, but there is an exception for "de minimis" winnings - winnings that are such a small fraction of your total income that they do not need to be reported.
Obviously wotc does the right move by hand-waving "its your problem" at it - what else could they do?
I'm really surprised they said anything. Knowledge of the law is assumed, they didn't have to bring it up.
They probably pull an asshole move like the Canadian government does when they charge me duty on cards I bought from CardKingdom.
They won’t deliver my $150 of cards until I go on the website and pay $40 in fees beforehand
Question: it says I have to have an active i-Payout account, but there doesnt seem to be a way to get one on their site. Do I understand it correctly that if you win you'll be sent a link to activate an account? Because as it is written it sounds like your prize is void if you dont already have an existing account.
I'm sure this is not news to anyone that plays Arena regularly, but the EV on this event is atrocious. At the best rate of $25 per entry, the value is about 1 box per $370 spent.
Huh? This is about winning physical prizes while playing on Arena? It's definitely something Arena players have asked for, along with expanded prizes for playing on it.
Its not even that. They could just give out gems for packs purchased. It's just fucked up its not something they have tried. They are so fucking greedy they want people to purchase shit on arena for a chance to win paper product.
It’s a prize for doing well. I could maybe see your argument if it was a “spend X amount on Arena during this time period and also get a box” but it’s literally just a reward for getting enough wins.
Sure it’d be great if they put Arena codes in packs but this is honestly pretty different, so complaining about that here is pretty unrelated.
exactly. Arena, if played as FTP is pretty generous by comparison to any other TCG. If you're an engaged player whose sole MTG focus is Arena you basically can maintain a Tier1 standard deck all season for free while drafting each week for free just by playing your favorite TCG. It's not multiple decks or drafts every night but for free it's a damn good price.
>*The Play Booster box prize is available while supplies last. In the unlikely event supplies run out, Wizards of the Coast, in its sole discretion, may replace this with a $250 cash prize. MSRP is back! /s
That's significantly closer to distributor cost for stores.
That's because distributors are fucking stores since they aren't beholden to MSRP to set their price.
What do you mean ? And why would anybody be "beholden to MSRP", as the 'S' is for 'suggested' (and any mandate would likely be illegal anyway).
Because information is power, by obfuscating information makes it harder to know what a fair price would be and who is the one in the chain that is contributing the price. Without an MSRP it just obscures if the price increase is coming from WOTC, the distributor (or for players also the LGS).
I love this on paper, but why does it have to be Best of One? I mean, we all know why, but still.
Best of one sealed MH3 with two losses and you're out, so it's even worse. I'm intrigued by the concept, but the event design is a complete non-starter for me. Hopefully they do it with Bo3 draft at some point.
Important note missing from the main page but in the terms and conditions: It is 6 wins before **2** losses (instead of 3 like the Arena Open is). Maybe it's my hubris talking, but I think I could pretty consistently get to 6 wins at least once out of 10 tries (A box is like $265 right now, and entry is $25).
Yeah, that does make it harder. Getting 6 wins before your second loss is much more difficult than winning 6 out of 8 games. I might try a run or two to see how I do. Not sure I want to devote a ton of resources though for something that I'd just try to flip.
Yeah the gem cost just doesn't feel worth it to me. You're just gambling.
Two runs to me at least feels like the amount where it's worth it to try before I start feeling like I should just be saving up for a box.
I actually did the math cause I'm curious. Assuming a 50% win rate, the chances of winning a box are about 6.2%, and the chances of winning with 10 entries is just under 50%. The fact that you only have two losses to work with really hurts the odds here. It doesn't matter how skilled you are, you still need to get lucky to get this.
Also, the higher the variance, the closer to 50% your chances are. And Sealed with Play Boosters, best-of-one, is *very* high-variance. That said, if the results are top-heavy, the variance will tend to extend through games, so even if a good player's win chance is closer to 50% than it usually would be, an insane pool will more easily rocket you to 6 wins, even if a terrible pool will cause you to lose extra hard; but the penalty of losing a little and losing a lot are the same, whereas winning a little and winning a lot are *really* different.
This is one of those things that I think would be really interesting to try to model, but I wouldn't trust the results of it without some sort of real world dataset to compare to. Trying to model in how variance in sealed pool affects winrates would require adding a bunch of assumptions, which can make the data basically useless if any of those assumptions are even slightly wrong. Also it's something that might be completely irrelevant depending on how the matchmaking works. If the matchmaker tries to pair you against people with a similar W/L record, then as you win more games you'll on average go against better decks so the win probability would converge towards 50% anyway. But, if the matchmaking is totally random, then win probability goes up as the number of wins goes up.
Interesting, thanks! Did you factor in that 5 wins gives you a full refund and 4 wins gives you 2000 gems? Those both should be significant helps. And I expect a strong player could probably have a 60ish% win rate.
No, this is strictly the chances of winning if you enter 10 times. This was just quick math I did on my phone calculator. Although I can say that your odds of getting 5 wins is actually *less* than getting 6 wins, so this really isn't going to help you as much as you would think. I went with a 50% winrate because the total winrate on average has to be 50%, and because it makes the math way easier. I will say that getting a winrate substantially higher than 50% will likely be exceptionally difficult, both because the competition is likely going to be strong and due to the inherent variance of sealed as a format. Unless you are consistently getting 7 wins in Arena BO1 sealed events, I would *strongly* advise against paying money for this event. (Of course if you have spare gems sitting around and you want to give it a shot, go for it, just keep your expectations realistic)
I played around in Excel to try to solve the equation because it's a fun problem, but it's been a while since I've had to use combinations so I might be off! Going with a 50% win rate, I yielded a 1.56% chance for 6-0, 4.69% for 6-1, 4.69% for 5-2, and 7.81% for 4-2. That yields a 6.25% chance of an outright win. But factoring in the Gem prizes/refunds (counting them towards a full or fraction of a new try), I got a 6.73% chance of winning. At 55% win rate, there was 10.2% outright win chance, but adding in the gem wins it becomes 11.2% At 60% win rate, there was 15.9% outright win, 17.7% chance with gems. If a play booster box is worth $250, you need to win more than 10% of the time to save money. That line is at a 53.8% win rate Edit: Actually this prediction is a little low because I didn't factor in that the "free runs" could yield more "Free runs" (I treated them as a binary W/L on redo). Wouldn't be a big difference, but it should be just a little bit higher.
For an analysis like this your best bet is finding the expected value of an entry given a winrate. So if we say that one box is worth 10 entries, the simplified of each outcome, would be: 10 for 6 wins 1 for 5 wins 0.4 for 4 wins 0 for everything else Then, you multiply the odds of each outcome by the value of each outcome to get the expected value. If the expected value is greater than 1, then it is a good deal*. If it's less than 1, you're better off sitting out. *By this I mean a good deal statistically, not financially. Because that's a whole nother can of worms.
I used Combinations to predict the frequency of winning outcomes: 6-0, 6-1, 5-2, 4-2. It's made a little more complex because for 6-1, the last game must be a win. For 5-2 or 4-2, the last game must be a loss. So for 6-1, I used: "COMBIN(6,5)*(Win Prob)^5 * (1-Win Prob) * Win Prob Basically, the combinations of winning 5 out your first 6 games, multiplied by the probability for each of the 5 wins times and one loss, then guaranteeing the last game was a win, so multiplying by the win probability. After doing formulas like that for each of the 4 winning outcomes, I added together the 6-0 and 6-1 conditions. For the 5-2 scenario, I multiplied by the sum of the win conditions (basically probability of winning on the free run), then added that product to the win condition odds. Finally for 4-2, I did the same thing but added in a factor of 0.4 because it is only worth 40% of a run.
Once you’ve calculated the probabilities of all the 2 loss combinations, you can just subtract that figure from 1 to get the probability of 6 wins. You don’t need to separately calculate the probability of 6-0 and 6-1
It was faster just calculating the win conditions. There are 2 six win conditions and six possible 2-loss outcomes. Either way, once I had figured out the equation to use, it was a negligible amount of work to tweak it for the other outcomes.
Presumably you need to add some gem value to the cards you open in your pool as well. But this 53.8 percent is probably close enough without it . Thanks
This hardly constitutes doing the math. You are exaggerating the degree to which you need to get lucky, since you can do multiple runs
Alright then you do the math and tell me what you get
The other poster already showed you . The break even is about 53.8 percent
I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to argue here
You don’t need to be really lucky. You barely need more than a 50 percent win rate
The best limited players will be farming these just to keep in mind.
To me this is the real kicker. It's best of one and 2 losses ends your run. But the real issue is that players typically going 7-1 or 7-2 will look at this and just see an opportunity to make money. If you can't compete at that level, whatever your normal winrate is will be dramatically better than your win rate in this event.
This. Reminder that even the average 17Lands user has an over 55% winrate. You need to take limited pretty serious to have a chance at this
That being left out of this announcement is malpractice.
Your hunch is pretty accurate here. A typical 128-player 7-round swiss distribution (assuming they pair based on record this should be an accurate representation) will have 12 players go 6-1 and one undefeated player for a total of 13 "winning" so you're looking at a rate of 13/128 aka just over 1/10. That's with coin flips too so if your winrate is higher then you're possibly at better odds- BUT since these events bring out even more competition than typical play, you could be looking at worse odds. Still, the EV seems fair based on your valuations.
This is the follow-up to the MagicCON box event a couple of months ago. Very similar structure. (Which is expected, they said that was a test run.)
Idk arena limited is ridiculous and the top players are all gonna be farming this. It was much easier to win this stuff on mtgo when they did the events like IRL.
You mean 5. 5 is also net even.
if youre lsv thats true. I still think its at rate if you can baet 10 tries or get hosed by variance and if 60 packs on arena is owrth the risk over just buying a box. still at rate its like a 250$ bundle that gives a box and 60 mtga packs which is pretty solid. I see the math is a lot worse for only 2 wins thoguh lmao.
A risk, but hey if you think you are good enough at sealed you can get a Booster Box for only 30ish bucks, that's certainly a deal, if you are willing to gamble.
By good enough, you mean getting 10 rares in your sealed pool and having 8 of those be in the same two colors and good right?
No, by getting 3+ Chrysalis and being on the play.
Yeah, it being sealed is such a strange choice. I’d accept premier draft instead of traditional for some streamlining reasons. But sealed is certainly a head scratcher.
Pods not playing against each other might as well be sealed. I dislike draft in arena when it is played for anything that matters. I say this as someone who drafts every time i get enough coins to que. At least with sealed the pool of cards is at least the only variable. with arena drafts its the entire pod’s overall pool and skill.
Sure same pod is ideal, but I can't agree that sealed is better than draft in terms of variance and skill expression.
Theres better skill expression in draft. I’m not denying that, but in terms of fairness of matchmaking its worse. Im fine with losing to a better sealed pool. but some pods are just more free than others on the human drafts because the matchmaking is literally just the first 8 to show up, unless theres something more to it that its doing. How well the other 7 people in your pod decided to draft or just rarepick for their constructed affects the rest of your matches which will very likely not include any of those people
They picked sealed because it's the highest variance format, this is as close to gambling as it gets.
Love some high stakes Magic. Wish it was draft, but it’s roughly 40 dollars worth of gems to participate which is what an in person MH3 draft costs. Pretty cool option.
It’s $25 to enter right?
$30. You have to purchase the $10 and $20 bundles to get 5000 gems
You buy 20K gems for 100 bucks. So, that's 25 bucks for 5K in gems
Yea, but then you just spent 100 bucks....
Yeah, and you can play 4 times, or save your gems. If you're putting money, actual money, into this game, NEVER buy small amounts. Always buy gems at the CHEAPEST rate there can be.
This is not always true. Sure, if you are planning on buying that many gems over the next few months anyway, do it with cheaper rate. But if you only wanted to buy this many gems, why would you spend an extra $75 to get a better rate on gems you dont need?
Sure, but why would you ONLY buy gems for ONE Arena tournament and then never play another again? I mean, I suppose that's possible...but why?
Way to gatekeep the game for people who do not have your budget....
If you don't have $100 dollars to spend on this game, you shouldn't be spending any money period. That's not gatekeeping, that's financial sense; the only people who should be buying gems are those with excess amounts of income!
I’m gonna walk into the gas station and tell them they’re gatekeeping gas.
There is a very real difference between "nice to have hobby" and "critical requirement to function in today's age".
That's an inane take. If you can afford 30 bucks to play digitally, one shot, but not 100, you shouldn't be playing Arena for money. Period. It's not gatekeeping. It's common budget sense. Don't be dumb with money. It's offering you a discount, straight up, and if you're going to use the gems, buy them the cheapest you can.
$100 can be saved with 3 or less decisions in the span of a week or less. Don't order food, don't drink, etc. Now you have $100.
Ok mister privilege.
It's not privilege, it's called not being a dumb fuck. People like to cry about money all the time but literally all of you waste your money, and no one wants to admit it.
It’s free if you do it right
Yeah, but I can be terrible at draft and still pull an Ulamog P1P1, so I don't know if it's equivalent.
How did 45 people like a comment that was completely wrong? It costs $25
Not everyone is American
And yet you wrote it in US dollars. Just take your L and move on . You got it wrong. Happens to everyone
Huh? $25 is a way to write it in Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, literally any country that uses dollars Lmfao
nuclear cope
Nice alt
Lmao. Kek even. The delusion to cope over this L. You made my day
Because the average person is bad at math or ill-informed. People react to what sounds right more often than what is correct. It's why ads work.
How many games will be played in total for each event?
Play until you hit 6 wins or lose your 2nd game.
Damn, that's brutal in best-of-one
The value proposition is actually pretty good. If you call a booster box as worth $250, which is what they say they’ll pay out in cash in the event they run out of boxes, you’d need to be able to 6-1 or 6-0 only 1/10 times to break even, not counting that you get 2000 gems on a 4-2 and 5000 (the whole buyin) back on a 5-2. If you’re a strong player you can probably farm this. The only reason it’s not a slam dunk is the buyin is prohibitively high at a time other MH3 limited events will also be available, so you’re going to play against higher quality opponents on average.
Yeah, I literally went to check the terms and conditions if there was a limit on how many times a person can win, and could not find one. The two loss limit makes it harder, but I feel like a strong player could probably get to 6-1 like 15-20% of the time. And if they run out of boxes, the backup prize is $250. This does seem like something people will try to farm. I guess WotC probably doesn't mind that though, I'm sure they've done the math so that it makes sense for them. Why do they care if the boxes mostly go to the same power players instead of distributed to more people if they make the same amount? A wins a win.
There is not a limit. Last time a streamer had 23 wins and got 23 boxes. You break even around a 55% win rate which is a very achievable number.
Thinking about it, for someone to win 6 times, they had to knock 3 people out (in aggregate) . so 4 people buying in at 30 dollars to win a box of value 250. Im sure a play booster box doesnt cost 250 dollars to print for them, but it doesnt seem to break even to me? Maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way.
because the wins and losses wont be distributed like that. Imagine this scenario: 64 players, they all start 1-1. next round 32 get eliminated. Then 16, leaving 16 at 3-1. 8 get to 4-1, 4 to to 5-1, then 2 to 6-1. 2/64 players win the prize, so they took in $1920 to pay out $500 using a $30 buyin.
Yeah, I knew something was off with my logic just couldn’t figure it out. How does that extrapolate to the actual case?
Ran the numbers. In a pool of 128 people, 2 people go 6-0, 1 person goes 6-1, 1 person go 5-2 and 2 people go 4-2. So assigning value of 250 to 6 wins and 25 to 5 wins and 15 to 4 wins. And 25 dollars entry value. It’s roughly $3200 entry price vs $800 pay out.
I wonder what win rate you'd need for it to be a positive value proposition. I think 55% is enough?
It depends on your risk tolerance. Even if it’s positive EV, your “bankroll” matters and there’s a pretty significant chance of going bust even with a high winrate if you’re not willing to put up a significant investment and grind it out.
Yeah, that's a good point.
sideboard's for the weak
True, randomness is just a skill issue 😤 SMH my head
Interesting idea, but sealed is way to swingy and pool luck dependant for such an expensive event. Would have preferred Draft.
seriously thought it said 'Pay to Win' and thought 'well yeah, now it's TRULY Magic: The Gathering'
>WHO CAN PLAY IN THIS EVENT? >MTG Arena players must be 18 years or older to participate. To start, we will be able to ship to the following locations: >Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Cyprus, Colombia, Czechia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Guatemala, Estonia, Honduras, Finland, France, Japan, Germany, Macao, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, New Zealand, Iceland, Panama, Ireland, Paraguay, Italy, Peru, Latvia, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, United States, Malta, Uruguay, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom Feeling kinda left out here in the middle east, but I guess it's more or less in line with the rest of WotC's policies e.g. WPN stores.
southeast asia being left out here too.. but only because of the stupid Tencent arrangement. that being said i wonder if i could still win but ship to one of the countries listed instead
Am I insane or is the US not on that list? Is it just assumed they can ship to the US or is this not open to US players?
I'm not sure why it's between Luxembourg and Malta, but it's there.
Looks like Malta is the lost one on the list
Good event, nearly everyone who enters would have preferred it to be draft, though.
Agreed but my unhealthy thought is this gives me a small chance to get some loaded packs and have a slight advantage over the stronger drafters.
Last time they did this is was Us only right? (or maybe US + Canada), and a ton of people somehow missed the big red text saying that and got caught spending money on something they couldn't actually win? Nice to see the list of eligible countries is **MUCH** bigger this time.
Am I going to lose 5k gems to this? Probably. Should I just save my gems for bloomburrow limited? Absolutely. Will I? Who fuckin knows
"All rewards are subject to United States taxes, even if you live outside of the US." what does that mean? Why would there be taxes on a prize?
Theoretically, you are supposed to pay taxes on prize winnings, but there is an exception for "de minimis" winnings - winnings that are such a small fraction of your total income that they do not need to be reported. Obviously wotc does the right move by hand-waving "its your problem" at it - what else could they do? I'm really surprised they said anything. Knowledge of the law is assumed, they didn't have to bring it up.
Cause the US taxes prizes lmao If you win the lottery you lose like half to taxes
so how does a box get taxed then?
They probably pull an asshole move like the Canadian government does when they charge me duty on cards I bought from CardKingdom. They won’t deliver my $150 of cards until I go on the website and pay $40 in fees beforehand
Possibly as income? Meaning if you make less than $12,000 in the US you don’t actually pay any taxes.
Question: it says I have to have an active i-Payout account, but there doesnt seem to be a way to get one on their site. Do I understand it correctly that if you win you'll be sent a link to activate an account? Because as it is written it sounds like your prize is void if you dont already have an existing account.
you'll get an email to make / activate one if you win, then you can reuse it for future product or cash prizes
I'm sure this is not news to anyone that plays Arena regularly, but the EV on this event is atrocious. At the best rate of $25 per entry, the value is about 1 box per $370 spent.
Wait no Germany??
[удалено]
Oh you are right. I saw Guatamala and it wasn't before it. Looks like the list is only partly ordered
Sealed? Yeah fuck that I’m not gonna leave it up to luck
Why they fuck do they do things so fucking ass backwards. If you want to sell product put Arena codes in the packs already.
Huh? This is about winning physical prizes while playing on Arena? It's definitely something Arena players have asked for, along with expanded prizes for playing on it.
I think wotc is mega afraid of the paper-only players giving away their codes because money
I mean they already do that with prerelease codes and starter/planeswalker decks when those were a thing.
I know, but those are absurdly limited. The context of the original comment wss to give out a whole pack per pack bought.
Its not even that. They could just give out gems for packs purchased. It's just fucked up its not something they have tried. They are so fucking greedy they want people to purchase shit on arena for a chance to win paper product.
It’s a prize for doing well. I could maybe see your argument if it was a “spend X amount on Arena during this time period and also get a box” but it’s literally just a reward for getting enough wins. Sure it’d be great if they put Arena codes in packs but this is honestly pretty different, so complaining about that here is pretty unrelated.
They don't do it because they don't have to. People shovel money into Arena already without needing freebies.
Yep. Plus it's be ridiculously easy to destroy Arena's economy if gold or gems were given away in packs in any non-trivial amount.
Fuck that economy
exactly. Arena, if played as FTP is pretty generous by comparison to any other TCG. If you're an engaged player whose sole MTG focus is Arena you basically can maintain a Tier1 standard deck all season for free while drafting each week for free just by playing your favorite TCG. It's not multiple decks or drafts every night but for free it's a damn good price.
Sounds great for those who want it. For me though, magic is no longer a paper game.