MtGO: The First Five Days

When you start dreaming of adding counters to your thallids to create saprolings, thereby triggering the pumps in your Herd-Gnarrs, it might mean that you’re hooked. It might. Or perhaps you’re really just into thallids right now, like you were into Pokemon some years ago. Either way, I can’t sleep. It’s a combination of thallids and scheduler design patterns, as weird as that may sound. Before I move on to research about the latter so I’ll get sleepy again, I might as well talk a little about the former.

The first five days on MtGO have been more of an exploration on both the game itself, and the online version. I mentioned that I have never played MtG meaningfully before, so I did start practically with NIL experience. The only advantage I do have is I know how to play the basic no-frills game, which is basically akin to knowing the hand rankings and the rules of no-limit hold’em. You can play, but you won’t get far.

After getting past the absolute basics, you’ll know that deck building is probably the most important part of the game. This is actually the reason why I thought I might enjoy MtG, because I love the strategic decision making process in the planning part. As a casual player, I have the additional challenge of making a reasonable deck with limited investment. Unfortunately, given the nature of the game economics, I was pretty sure I’d waste some cash before I learn the proper ways of getting value for my money. I just hope I can keep this cost at the minimum.

I already chose a pre-constructed deck based on how I thought my personal game play was on what I’ve read. After playing with this deck a couple of times, I was slowly able to notice which cards I wanted more of and which cards didn’t help much. Given this, it was time to learn how to get the cards you need without repeatedly purchasing booster packs and crossing your fingers.

It seems expected that MtGO allows trading of cards, but finding someone who wants cards you have AND has cards you want is difficult. Fortunately, in a scheme that further allows Wizards of the Coast (WotC) to create more profit, WotC created a ticket system. Each ticket costs a dollar (US$1) and they are primarily used to enter tournaments, making them a common consumable commodity. Tickets are also tradable, meaning you can trade cards for tickets and vice versa. Given this, tickets are the de-facto currency in MtGO.

MtGO has provided an in-game means for advertising trading, selling, and buying. It’s crude, it’s basically a chat channel, but it does get the job done in hooking people up for trading.

Like any other market, it’s up to you to check out the prices of the cards you need, seeing how much people are willing to sell them and at what price. Perhaps you can surf the net a bit to get a pricing idea, but eventually, the card prices are basically market driven.

One thing to keep in mind is that tickets are integral, they have no fractional components. Some of the cards you want may be cheap and won’t even cost you a whole ticket, but they may not have the other cards you want at the price you want them. If you decide to purchase (trade) the cards, you’re essentially giving the seller a profit. The good news is that some sellers keep tabs on you, remembering the ticket fraction you weren’t able to consume with them, thereby allowing you to have “credit” with them. You can use this “credit” to reduce the costs of your next purchase. This does make things a little more reasonable, particularly if you intend on having more transactions with the person in the future.

As for my experience, my first transaction was trading 3 tickets to a person for 30 cards of my choice. I got several rare and uncommon cards, and I even got some that I did need for my deck. It may not have been a very efficient use of money, but it wasn’t a total waste either.

My next stop was what I have dubbed as “the marketplace”, which is basically the various trading chat channels. I’m not sure of WotC intended it to be this way, but there are quite a few “automated” people around. Given this, you can basically start a trade with them, browse, and decide if you want to make the purchase/trade. After doing this several times, I was able to figure out who offered the best costs for the cards I needed. Based on this, I selected one, choose the cards I deemed properly priced, and traded the corresponding number of tickets. I had “chance” of 0.01 tickets, which I intended so that I can verify if they would remember me. I tried it again with the same user, and it did remember me. I was able to purchase several rares and some uncommons with just 4 tickets (cost of one booster pack) through this, all of which were very useful for the customizations I had in mind. Now that was very good use of my money.

Now, the other decks I’d like to try out would require me to get cards which are a bit more expensive, so I have to thread more carefully. So far, though, with my recent “purchase”, I was able to customize my deck sufficiently enough that I am winning more than losing, and I’m actually having more fun playing the deck. I may still be playing in the newbie area, but I’ll enjoy this for a while before I try to spend for higher level games.