This isn’t the dumbest content idea I’ve ever had, but it’s probably up there. After Wizards announced that they would be adding the Mastery system to Magic: the Gathering Arena, the community had one question on their mind, “Is it worth it?” Although plenty of people have done some valuable analysis to answer that question, I decided the only way to find out was to dive in and give it a go myself.
I did this once before, with a little product called the Modern Event Deck. The question then was similar to the question now. Wizards created this “thing” and claimed the “thing” had value and that we should all take their word for it. The verdict then was that, yes, in fact the Modern Event Deck was fun and modestly competitive. I piloted it to roughly a 50% win rate and finished 5-3-1 at Grand Prix Worcester back in the dark ages when we still had Pro Tours.
So I fired up MTG Arena, got some errors because of ongoing maintenance, and went to have dinner. See you tomorrow for my day two report!
Just kidding, after dinner and some Netflix I started up the game, coughed up $20 for the premium track, and started trying to figure out what the hell was going on. After plugging in the PLAYM20 and LevelUp codes I had five packs of M20 in my account, a sweet new Chandra avatar, some Chandra sleeves I can put on every deck, and of course the cat pet avatar (which as we all know is the real reason we’re here).
I’m going to save the deeper analysis of the Mastery system for later in this series (look at me being all optimistic that this series is actually going to continue regularly). For now I’ll say that it seemed important to finish at least one daily quest so that it would load a new one tomorrow, and win three games so that I picked up the 200 mastery xp they were offering for it.
I managed to accomplish that by playing six games in total, including two ranked best-of-one constructed matches and then four ranked Ravnica Allegiance draft matches. So for day one at least I had a 66% win rate, so that’s nice. But what did I actually get? Here’s a quick run-down:
Free Stuff:
- 3 Packs of M20 (Promo Code)
- 2 Pack of M20 (Set Mastery)
Premium Stuff (3400 Crystals)
- 1 Pack of M20 (Mastery Pass)
- 1,000 Coins (Master Pass)
- Chandra Avatar (Master Pass)
- Elemental Cat Pet (Master Pass)
- Chandra Art Sleeves (Master Pass)
So that’s four levels down, 96 to go, right? Archery comes out on October 4th which means it likely comes to MTG Arena on September 24th which gives us 84 days to cover 96 levels, an average of 1.14 levels each day. Well I was able to get three tonight, let’s see if I can keep up the pace.
I hope to update this log every day, and plan to keep it short and sweet. See you tomorrow (you bring the fireworks).
P.S. Here’s my RNA draft deck. Don’t ask how I ended up winning with this.
