'Free to play' games have evolved over time to have more and more obscure monetization schemes. Humans are bad at making many decisions on a row and the developers have figured this out, so they tend to make things take more effort to figure out. The less clear it is what you're doing, the more likely you are to make a purchase that you wouldn't actually make with a clear head and perfect information.
You'll never find an actual price tag on a thing you want to buy. In League of Legends, for example, the new champion costs 7800 blue essence or 975 riot points. What does that even mean? Blue essence you get over time for playing the game, riot points you can buy with cash. 490 points for $5, with 'bonuses' if you buy in bulk. So Senna is priced at $9.95, but you can't spend exactly that amount. In this case the next highest amount you can actually spend is $10, so really close, but often that is not the case. They make you buy extra points and then you're committed to the platform by having more currency to spend later. But not too much more! You'll need to top up if you want to buy something else. The idea is you spend more now, so if you don't come back they get more than they would have with an actual price. And if you do come back you're hooked and more likely to spend more. And by having to look at all this math your brain gets a little overwhelmed, and if you have money to spare it's easy to just spend rather than work it out. They've also worked anchoring in there by giving you a base price for points but then giving you even more if you buy in bulk. Lots of marketing trickery going on.
MTG Arena has lots of this happening. Not necessarily maliciously evil, but it's certainly using things that worked in the past for other people and those things work by taking advantage of people. MTG Arena also seems to have extra systems making it more convoluted but I suspect this was more no one had an actual vision for how to do things so more people tacked things on that they thought was needed. It certainly has kept me from really figuring out what I should be doing to build a collection properly. But I've qualified for some sort of tournament so I need to play a wider variety of decks. So I need more cards. So I need to work this all out.
MTG Arena doesn't use a disenchanting system like Hearthstone does, so you never need to make a decision about keeping cards you've opened. You always keep them, you can't destroy them, and if you get more than the max amount you get a very minor boost elsewhere in your collection. I think this is an actively good decision. I've hated that I've had to blow up Hearthstone cards to build decks in the past because it actively hurts my collection to make short term progress and that's a bad feeling no matter which side you're on.
There are a bunch of different currencies going on. You've got gold, which you earn by doing daily quests and as tournament prizes. You've got gems, which you buy with money and earn as tournament prizes. You've got XP, which you earn by doing daily quests. You've got wildcards, which you earn by opening packs. You've got packs, which you can buy with gold, or gems, or cash, or earn as prizes, or earn from XP. And you have the individual cards that you can get by drafting, or playing sealed, or opening packs, or doing dailies, or as prizes, or from earning XP. They all switch back and forth in different ratios depending on different tournament formats!
But for now, all I really care about is getting more cards. How do I make best use of the different currencies in order to get more cards? Gold and gems are the two hard ones to look at, so I'll do the rest first and hope that makes it easier to look at those.
XP - There's a cap on how much XP you can earn and not really anything to spend it on. You can get at most 750 XP per day (first 10 wins and the daily quest) and every 1000 XP gets you a level on their mastery system. You do also get 3750 XP per week (first 15 wins) for a max of 9000 XP per week. There are 110 levels with rewards and 112 days in the season for a max of 144k xp. So you do have some extra to spare, but you really need to go hard to get all the rewards. (For every 1000 XP above the cap you get an extra uncommon for whatever that is worth.) You need to spend gems to get access to all the rewards, with the following being available.
everyone - 42 packs
old players - 6 packs, 10 uncommons
3400 gems - 20 packs, 2000 gems, 10k gold, 10 mythics, 3 rares
wildcards - These are how you actually make specific cards that you want. There are wildcards for each of the different types of cards (common, uncommon, rare, mythic) and nothing to do with them except trade them for cards. You earn more wildcards in one of three ways. You can open them in packs as a replacement for an actual card (1:3 packs for commons, 1:5 for uncommon, 1:24 for rare/mythic). For every 6 packs you open you get an uncommon wildcard and a rare wildcard. (Every 5 rare wildcards in this way are mythic instead.) And you can get wildcards out of 'the vault' which turns extra commons and uncommons into 3 uncommon, 2 rare, and 1 mythic wildcard. It takes 1000 extra commons to get this reward, with extra uncommons counting as 3 commons. You get these extras by opening packs and doing drafts/sealed events.
packs - Opening a pack gets you 5 commons, 2 uncommons, and a rare. (1 in 8 rares will be mythics instead) Getting your 5th copy of a common or uncommon gets you vault progress. A 5th copy of a rare gets converted into a different rare from the same set. If you own every rare you get 20 gems. Same with mythics except you get 40 gems when full. You also get 1/6th of an uncommon wildcard and 4/30ths of a rare wildcard and 1/30th of a mythic wildcard each time you open a pack.
individual card rewards - Daily reward uncommons have a 9/80 chance to become a rare and a 1/80 chance to become a mythic. If you already have 4 of the assigned card you get vault progress, 20 gems, or 40 gems.
gold - 1000 gold gets you a pack
gems - 200 gems gets you a pack
Ranked draft events cost 750 gems or 5000 gold. You draft 3 packs and keep the cards, with 5+ copies replaced by vault progress or 20/40 gems. You do not get wildcards from the packs. You do not get wildcard progress for opening packs. You do get 14 cards per pack instead of 8. You also earn prizes based on how well you do in the event, which are packs and gems. If you have a 30% win rate then you rate to get 1.23 packs and 153 gems. A 50% win rate is worth 1.33 packs and 347 gems. A 70% win rate is worth 1.62 packs and 672 gems.
Traditional draft costs 1500 gems with the same cards drafted. It's best of 3 instead of best of 1, and the prizes are spikier. A 30% match win rate is worth 1.85 packs and 244 gems. 50% gets you 4.4 packs and 1350 gems. 70% match win rate is 6.9 packs and 2361 gems.
Sealed aren't up right now, but the info for the last sealed shows it was 2000 gems to join and you got the cards from 6 packs. You don't get to rare draft them. You always won 3 packs and then scaling gems based on your wins. 30%-524, 50%-1002, 70%-1672
Standard events cost 95 gems or 500 gold. The rewards are gold and three uncommon cards. The cards have upgrade chances based on how many wins you get. The gold return is 230 for 30%, 410 for 50%, and 715 for 70%. As for card upgrades, you have a 7% chance of an upgrade with 4 or fewer wins,. A guaranteed upgrade (and 6% more) at 5 wins. And another guaranteed upgrade (and 5% more) at 6 or 7 wins.
Traditional standard is 190 gems or 1000 gold, with a best of 3 format. Prizes again are 3 uncommons and some gold. Gold returns are again spikier, with only 415 for 30%, 1470 for 50%, and 2396 for 70%. The card upgrades are better here, but not twice as good so you definitely lose out here compared to the best of 1 event.
Ok, so, let's assume I'll hit the 70% win rates for everything except ranked draft, where 50% is more reasonable. (The problem with ranked draft is it pairs by rating, not by record in the draft, so I expect to only play good players the whole time. The other events aren't on the ranking system so I expect to get a decent mix of everyone interested in playing events. Constructed I'd need an actual good deck to hit that, unfortunately, but let's pretend we get one.) For building a collection the main thing that matters is rares. Rare wildcards, in fact, since there are a lot of junk rares out there, but any rare is decent. For now I'm going to assert I get enough mythics, uncommons, and commons. I'm going to count a random rare as half as good as a rare wild card. Well, mythic wildcards I'll count as rare wildcards even though they're worse because if they're worth nothing I won't have enough and it makes things a little easier for my spreadsheet.
An opened pack is worth .7385 rares. Constructed uncommon rewards are actually worth .64 rares if you win 70% of the time. The best of 3 constructed uncommons are worth 1.16 rares. A limited pack is worth .557 rares, but you do get some selection in a draft and can choose to rare draft the shock lands and not the garbage rares. And if you do end up with most of the rares you can get small gem rebates.
So a ranked draft is 5000 gold or 750 gems for 2.65 rares and 347 gems. This is a better use of gems than buying packs (you spend the gems that would buy 2 packs to get 2.65 rares). It's actually a bad use of gold compared to buying packs.
A traditional draft is 1500 gems for 6.77 rares and 2361 gems. If you could actually win 70% of your matches this would be an absurd rate of return. I feel like this can't actually be a fair potential win rate. Looking at a 50% win rate is 4.94 rares and 1350 gems which is still really, really good.
Sealed is 5.56 rares and 1672 of your 2000 gems back. Or 1002 of your 2000 gems back at 50% win rate. So just worse than the traditional draft, but also probably an easier place to get a high win rate.
Standard events are both essentially infinite ways to grind up small amounts of value. They don't actually make wildcards is the big problem, so while you can still use the random rares they both seem good. They do also let you build up gold to spend on something else. That something else could be packs, but probably it should be drafts so that you can launder the gold into gems in order to do more drafts.
It's really not much clearer now than it was before, but I think what I've learned going forward is that sealed events are actually a pretty good deal. They only show up right after a set is released so saving up some gems to do some for the next set makes sense. Beyond that if you have a good constructed deck you should grind cards in constructed tournaments. Drafting should be used to convert gold into gems, and then the gems should be spent drafting or sealeding.
New cards likely get banned tomorrow, so it seems like I need to see what happens there, then build a new deck and play tournaments for uncommon upgrades. I should also spend most of my uncommon wild cards to make it more likely I get vault progress out of drafting.
