If you’re new to MTG:Arena and the economy is still a bit of a head-scratcher you are probably still figuring out what to do with the wildcards.
Once you start opening packs you will start noticing that the cards have only four different values - based on rarity. This is a completely different way of obtaining cards compared to some other popular online card games where you’d have to enchant and disenchant and value of cards vary depending on playability and rarity.
You may replace a wildcard with any card what shares a rarity with it. So, if you have 10 mythic wildcards, you may as well replace them for any 10 mythic cards. The wildcard method has so far received positive critics compared to paper magic where different cards have different values so it may be different to obtain a tier 1 or tier 1.5 deck with trading and not investing.
This method will balance the game and make you not selling your family valuables to make a UW control that costs over $500 in paperback. This article will present you a brief introduction on how to obtain Wildcards and how to use them and create a deck that you will enjoy!
The ultimate maxim - You get wildcards by opening packs
You’ve probably noticed that every time you open a pack a wildcard tracker on the top right side of the screen fills up until it reaches a certain point where you unlock one wildcard.
One pack fills up 1 bar, and once you reach 6 you will get an uncommon or rare wildcard. Once you open 24 boosters, you will get a mythic wildcard. There is also a chance for a random wildcard drop while you open your packs.
So far, these are the statistics for pack-openings gathered from various MTG Arena players:
The sample is 1 rare/mythic wildcard random drop in 25 boosters.
- Vault bar gives you rare wildcard every 6 boosters
- Vault bar gives you mythic wildcard every 24 boosters
- By opening 41 packs you are certain at least 2 rares and 1 mythic wildcard
- By opening 90 packs you are guaranteed 3 rares and 3 mythics
If you are a grinder and you are not looking to invest too much of your own money in the MTG economy, there are a couple of good ways how you can earn money and open packs.
Daily and Weekly quests
- Every week you can win up to 3 packs by winning 5 matches per pack.
- Every day you get a daily quest that gets you 750 or 500 gold depending on the type of quest.
- You can reroll a quest one per day to try and get more gold value (exchange 500 to 750)
- Fifteen wins every day earns you 750 gold and 5 individual card rewards.
- Every week you will earn 8400 gold and 3 packs as rewards.
- This will earn you an equivalent of 46 packs every month just by playing regularly.
So, just by playing quests, winning and grinding regularly you are already on a roll to win enough booster packs and wildcards to significantly increase your card pool and wildcard ratio.
Events
- By investing some of the hard-earned gold, there is a big chance that you will be repaid and earn money to get more packs.
- The entry fee for a quick constructed is 500 gold, and you have to have a perfect winning score to double the investment. If you have time and belief and a deck that has a solid win-rate, you may be able to get 3-4 more booster packs by playing a couple of hours of quick constructed.
- The entry fee for a competitive constructed is 1000 gold, which s a price of one booster pack. Winning only 2 will return the investment and winning 3 will get you 500 more gold. Winning all 5 gets you 2100 so a couple of great draws, good top-decking and a lot of skill, you may be grinding those packs like crazy.
- Draft is not recommended in any form if you are looking to get wild cards, since the boosters you pay and open while drafting will not count in the wild card bar nor have the opportunity to drop wild cards.
The Vault
There is a famous and notorious “5th card problem” in MTG Arena. You probably know that you can have only 4 copies of each card in deck except if it’s a basic land or a card with an ability to have any number of the same copies of that card in your deck.
So, what happens when you draw a 5th copy? Well - it goes to “The Vault”. It’s a secret place in your account MTG database that fills after each 5th copy of a certain card.
When you draw a 5th copy of a card from a pack (or while playing limited), you get certain numbers of progress points. One you gather 900 points, the vault will trigger and you will get
- One mythic wildcard
- Two rare wildcards
- Three uncommon wildards
How does a certain 5th copy fill a progress bar considering the rarity?
- 5th copy of a mythic rare card = 10pp
- 5th copy of a rare card = 5pp
- 5th copy of an uncommon card = 3pp
- 5th copy of a common card = 1pp
By this logic, the more packs you open, the more your card pool expands, the more chance you have of filling up the vault.
So, how do you track the progress points of your vault? You can’t. It’s completely unknown until it triggers. Why? Nobody knows the answer. You can still track your vault progress by 3rd-party programs and looking at a config file.
So, what is the conclusion? As most of online games, if you don’t want to pay, you have to play, play and play. The more you play, the more gold you will earn. The more you win in events, the more gold you will earn. The more gold you have, the more packs you open and in the end the more wildcards you will have and awesome decks you will make! Have fun!
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