What are /r/MTGO's favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Vertical resolution greater than 768 is a great quality of life consideration that is often overlooked. Have fun and good luck and getting a great deal!

Comes back June 13 and will be around for three weeks: https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/schedule-magic-online-products-game-info

Entry cost is 12 tickets, check here:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/flashback-favorites-and-throwback-standard-gauntlets-2016-12-15

And for the total EV check here:

https://www.goatbots.com/ev_calculator

It's a little bit of that, although maybe even hiring wouldn't solve much. In software development, we have a concept which is "The Mythical Man-Month", that says you can't just blindingly hire more people to speed up software production. Because software is a concerted effort, sometimes having more people on a team will slow down the others. The way to balance this is, instead of just hiring, to restructure and build a lot of new teams, each dedicated to different aspects of the software. It's the way huge platforms deal with their products, so that each decision can be made on a lesser scale.

I think they've restructured at least part of the MTGO ecosystem recently, but I'm not sure if it was done to accommodate more people or not. It also takes some time for the new structures to get into full speed, because even then there's a lot of work to be done in the transition.

It's a tough problem to fix, but one they should be looking at for a long time now. If they just started to address this recently, I wouldn't count on the improvement showing very soon, specially as there's a lot they have to catch up with. Most likely, it will look like they're even getting worse for the time being.

I believe the Hapatra avatar is untradable, so I don't think you can buy it. The prestige avatars differ in difficulty to obtain. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/ixalan-comes-magic-online-september-25 This is where you can see the current prestige avatar requirements.

Leagues are different than they used to be. Each league (except for sealed) is 5 matches long, and you can play them at your leisure until the league ends. You always get to play the full 5 rounds, and you get prizes based on your record. The sealed leagues are 9 matches long. After 3 matches you can add a 7th pack, and you can add an 8th after 6 matches.

They got rid of a lot of the queues they used to have so the leagues would have enough people to fire. For a little while they had both queues and leagues, but the leagues were much more popular and the queues had long wait times, so they removed queues. That is the only way to draft Ixalan and do non-phantom sealed right now.

I also don't know what the deal is with these cards. Same with Aspect of Wolf. Usually when cards aren't played anywhere they aren't worth anything on MTGO. Now their supply is really low since their frequency is 1 on the exclusives list (https://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-online/treasure-chest-card-list-info). Still people can't possibly believe they are a good investment and I can't imagine anyone putting a playset in their deck. Other than bots trying to get these cards in stock, there should be no demand.

The decks simply aren't worth the MSRP even when they did have them.

The 2017 Commander cards should be available in the November 15 treasure chest update.

Your greatest problem is definitely bad mana curve. You have way too many cards costing 4+ and it is clearly deliberate as you left good cards like Valduk (he is better than vanilla 3/2 even if you have no way of triggering it, because your opponent does not know you cannot trigger it) in the sideboard.

6 cards with CMC 2 or less and just 3 with 3 is very low in its own right and you have to consider that Vicious Offering is not a 2-drop (you cannot rely on having the Swamp early enough) and neither is Ancient Animus. Not to mention that Saproling Migration is much better when kicked and Grow does not affect the board as 3-drop.

Now consider that you play 7 cards with casting cost 5+. However, you have 2x Saproling Migaration (6 with kicker), 1x Territorial Allosaurus (7) and 2x Baloth Gorger (8) so you have many strong playes once you get to a lot of mana that don't have the downside of doing nothing until you have 5+ lands (not to mention that Fire Elemental is not a very good card).

There are lots and lots of articles about the mana curve, I think this one is a good starting point: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/beyond-basics/how-build-mana-curve-2017-05-18

PS: Do not be sad if you lose to flyers. In limited, and especially in sealed, sometimes you just have very little interaction against flyers and you just lose to them. You shall definitely try to have a plan against them, but sometimes there is just no way to do that :)

Here is the info: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/play-dominaria-starting-april-20-magic-online-2018-04-11

"For Dominaria on Magic Online, we're starting Sealed Leagues on Friday, April 20, at 10 a.m. PT. You can get in a quick Sealed League before heading to your local game store and playing in a weekend Prerelease event there! Or you can play at home all weekend if you like. These will be normal Sealed Leagues, both the Competitive and Friendly options. You can see the full details at the bottom of this article.

Draft Leagues will begin Monday, April 23, at 10 a.m. PT. Exciting news on this front as well! We're replacing the existing Friendly Draft League structure with an old standby: Pack-Per-Win. You can play three matches, and you'll be awarded a booster for each match you win. All matches will be best-of-three games. For those who prefer the Competitive or Intermediate structures, those are still available and aren't changing. Have fun!"

Arena was built on Unity, so there's a good reason to believe it will be compatible with mac OS. Wotc employees even said that they plan on making it available to non-pc users (source: https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena/faq).

For me:

Server status claims that MTGO is up
Can't connect to MTGO at all right now despite connection to other websites and games working fine.
Last night I was able to technically connect, but it took forever and once I was in the game wouldn't load anything, took 30+ seconds just to load text onto the screen, collection and decks never loaded.
Support website is extremely slow
Attempting to report an issue on the support website drops the connection on user login page before I've entered any credentials.

Entry for competitive leagues (with that prize structure) is 120 PP/12 tickets. There are also friendly leagues that are 80PP/8 tickets, I’m not sure the prizes of the prizes off the top of my head but they are usually a bit easier and have less chests up top.

Challenges are profitable if you have a reasonable winrate but they are Swiss + top8 events so they can be long. If I remember correctly t32 gets entry back, t16 is like 10 chests + 300pp and then t8 are piles of chests all the way up.

Quick google search gave me this link which should have most of the info you need: https://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/content/magic-online-constructed-events

Full details - including card lists/frequencies

Each one has three slots that can be:
* a curated card (all sorts of stuff on that list)
* a Modern-legal rare/mythic
* a card only available (in MTGO) through chests (some old cards, some from Conspiracy sets, etc.)
* some play points (slot 1 only - can be as few as 10 or as many as 1000)
* a Standard-legal common/uncommon (slots 2 & 3 only)

On average you'll get over 2 tix worth of cards/play points per chest, but it's highly variable. A chest might be worth a tiny fraction of a tix or it might be worth a couple of hundred tix.

The following on-demand Standard events are currently available:

2 player queue 5 match friendly league 5 match competitive league

Friendly league has the best expected value currently, check here.

And the following scheduled events:

Pro tour qualifier MOCS

No daily events anymore. Check the calendar for scheduled events here.

> what is “the current EV”?

EV = expected value. It's the average worth.

If you pay 20 Play Points to enter a Two Man Queue and you have a 60% chance of winning that match, you have a 60% chance of winning 30 PP and a 40% chance of winning 5 PP.
That's a 60% chance of being up 10 PP (30 for winning, but minus 20 to enter), and a 40% chance of being down 15 PP (5 for losing, minus 20 for entering). Which is an EV of zero.
If your chance of winning was 65%, then your EV would be 1.25 PP.

>What and where in the lobby are format challanges?

They only run every non and then see here for schedule.
Basically you play until either you lose a match, or you win six matches. The better you do, the bigger the prizes. You only need to win your first match to break even, but you're knocked out as soon as you lose a match.

> Does your answer apply to both constructed and limites?

Yeah, it's much the same for limited, though the break-even point is more like winning 60%-65% of your matches.

Not sure where you are seeing that it's a Monthly event, but it's not, it's a Playoff event.

You'll want to use your QPs in either the October 8 event (Ixalan sealed) or the October 21 event (Standard). Six or more match wins in either of those events qualify you for the MOCS Playoff event on November 11.

You can read more details here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/2017-magic-online-championship-series

#WotCStaff

The official MTGO announcement is the only place I know of that lists the weekly challenge events: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-announcements-may-29-2018-2018-05-29#_Magic_Online_Format

Other than that it's just the ongoing friendly and/or competitive leagues for each of the formats.

While the EV for the weekly format challenges are reputedly higher than the leagues, I haven't done any of them myself due to timezone issues as well.

From Hasbro's 2014 Q2 Earnings Report:

"Q: we are starting to see some competition from Activision's Hearthstone game and wondered just what type of overlap there is among the customer base and is that having any impact as well?"

A: "In terms of Magic and competitors, the brand you note is a very casual brand, that’s more focused on action. ... it’s a very different, much more deeply seated strategic gameplay in Magic. We take all competition seriously, but I would tell you that they are different games."

The program he’s running this on is Magic: the Gathering Online It can be found here

Technically... yes. The program itself is free. However it has an ecosystem that similarly mirrors paper Magic: Buy cards and packs, buy entry, trade cards, etc.

Friendly Constructed Leagues are available in Modern, Pauper, 1v1 Commander, and Standard formats.. Sign up and play 5 rounds before league closes, which is months long. Repeat as you desire.

Could you show us the deck? It may contain a banned card, or a card that was printed at common in paper but not online, like Blue Elemental Blast.

Here you can find the information about leagues: https://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/content/magic-online-limited-events#IntermediateDraftLeague

For the software issues, it can be a pain to learn for sure. If you watch someone experienced play MTGO via a stream or even better if you can do a share screen with a call and person talking it will show you a lot of helpful things. Auto yielding to triggers/ability's helps a lot, along with knowing most the time it's totally ok to pass until start of next turn type stuff.

As for the commander bug, that was unfortunate. But sadly with so many cards online and new stuff coming in all the time bugs will happen and it does take a while to get things fixed. MTGO's official bug blog is rarely complete and not updated daily. The penndydreadful website has more info on bugged cards. Prenny Dreadful is a MTGO only format that's all player organized and run, if you are new to MTG it's a real budget version way to play MTGO see there website for more info.

MTG is a great hobby but MTGO tends to much more competitive and unforgiving then paper magic. If you treat mistakes as a learning opportunity it'll be easier to move forward. Magic online might be a mistake for you right now, but the ability to log in, buy/trade for all cards from magic and instantly use them to create new decks, play games all together in a reasonable time frame is just something paper can't match.

It's called "Redemption" and there is a time limit, along with other rules. XLN and RIX redemption period just ended this week. dominaria will be redeemable until September/October

https://magic.wizards.com/en/gameinfo/products/magiconline/redemption

Unfortunately there have been several cases :( . I do know WOTC has conducted investigations in the past and found and banned culprits (I don't know if they restored something to the owner but other posters say they did).

Also check https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and change your other passwords. I've been hacked a few times, once on Blizzard and once on Hotmail :( . I'd definitely add 2FA if Wizards offered it but they won't.

I use something like this

Makes playing from the couch tolerable. Of course if you don’t like a track pad you can run a wireless mouse with side buttons like already suggested and keep the keyboard near by for those moments when it is needed.

Here's the grumbling, and it's about Friendly leagues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8bhibz/mtgo_dom_play_dominaria_starting_april_20_on/

"the current Prizes for the league this is replacing are more generous since they use Play Points (which don't lose value over time like packs). It's a reduction of roughly $3 in prizes per player."

A 7-3, 7-2, 7-1 or 7-0 Friendly draft league got entry fee back (and 6-4 almost did).

Also, play points don't devalue as much as boosters.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/content/magic-online-limited-events

Indeed this is a loop of this kind, I believe called "mandatory loop" :

> 421.4. If the loop contains only mandatory actions, the game ends in a draw. (See rule 102.6.)

What are /r/MTGO's favorite Products & Services? From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The most popular Products mentioned in /r/MTGO:

HP Pavilion 11-h110nr 11.6-Inch Detachable 2 in 1 Touchscreen Laptop with Beats Audio

Lenovo - IdeaPad L340 15 Gaming Laptop - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 256GB Solid State Drive - Black

Rii K22 Wireless Keyboard for Windows,Ultra Slim Silent Keyboard with Touchpad,2.4 GHz Wireless Computer Keyboard,Compatible with PC, Laptop

The most popular Services mentioned in /r/MTGO:

Magic: The Gathering

Paperspace

VirtualBox

NetWorx

OBS Studio

Player FM

Seeking Alpha

Speedtest by Ookla

SurveyGizmo

Have I been pwned?

The most popular Android Apps mentioned in /r/MTGO:

Magic 2015

The most popular reviews in /r/MTGO:

What are /r/MTGO's favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments