MTGO Economy Updates
Hello everyone! I am coming to you live from the Atlanta airport where I am waiting on my flight back from the Grand Prix. I managed to finish 53rd after a run of opponents that included Steve Nagy, Pete Ingram, Ben Stark, and Shuhei Nakamura. It was nice to have a good finish but if there is one thing I learned about this standard format is that the format is very unforgiving there were times when both myself and my opponents made mistakes and were punished for it.
However, that is not what this week is going to be about. This week I am going to talk about the changes to the MTGO economy, and specifically Play Points and what you can win in treasure chests. For the first time ever, you can buy Play Points in the store in various amounts. Additionally, the value of the Treasure Chests has gone up due to complete sets being offered in them.
Play Points are available in lots of 240, 480, or 1200 for either $24, $45, or $100. You save $3 or $20 depending on how much you are looking to spend. We finally have a hard number on what play points are worth. We could get a rough estimate before by comparing tournament buy-ins with tickets to the play point cost but now we know for sure that 10 points = 1 tix. This has had a dramatic effect on tix values with them crashing from around $0.96 per ticket the whole way down to $0.83 before rebounding a bit to $0.83 each. While these will only be available through the holidays, that is a long time when you think about it, nearly 2 full months of having the points available.
Treasure chests are also getting an updated list of cards available in them. For the first time, Commander 2017 will be available. To top that, complete sets of Standard legal sets will also be in some number of chests. It is funny, some of the sets are worth less than certain individual cards you can open up. I really like the addition of treasure chests into the chest economy. It helps raise the value of each chest, meaning players are going to win more for each league they are in. If it were up to me, I would do something crazy like have a Pro Tour invite in 1 treasure chest per quarter and you would really see the value of chests sky rocket!
There are some pretty big long term ramifications because of these changes going forward. Tix will have a suppressed value for a while since buying the 1200 lot of play points saves you over $20 which is a decent amount. This is also a push towards a system I could see them implementing for MTG Arena where you buy play points, similar to what is already set up for Hearthstone players. I have no idea what that will mean for tournament players going forward on both platforms. Right now it is super easy to get the cards you want and to play a match with while in Hearthstone you grind a lot to get what you need and sometimes even that is not enough. I hope that WoTC will go along with a subscription plan much like Mana Traders and make everything available at the start.
Regardless of how this finally gets implemented, it will be an exciting time for Magic’s digital arm and by extension Magic as a whole!
Thanks for reading!
Stu Somers
@ssomers on Twitter
