In this casual series I'm going to be looking at Magic Arena through the lens of a completely new player who spends $0 on the game and what their experience will be like. I will go over opening the free packs they give new players, investigating the starter decks we get as new players, building our first standard deck and seeing if we can get some wins. Well, let's dive into it!

Is MTG Arena Worth It As a New Player?

I have been playing MTG Arena for a long-time. I actually started back when it was still in closed beta. I have played it for many, many years, but I recently thought

What if I was a new player? Would I have to spend money to win some ranked games?

So I figured it was my chance to check it out and test the waters. I logged out and dusted off an old email and registered a new account. As you can see from the pictures, I have a ton of free packs to open. This is going to take a minute to go through.

Let's start cracking some packs and let's talk about any good hits we get. We have a ton of packs, so we should get some good stuff that we can focus our build around.

Oh, look here. This card looks like it could be pretty fun. It has strong devotion to green so I have to keep that in mind as I think about placing this is decks, but this artifact looks interesting. The ability to play lands from the graveyard could be great for a landfall or delve deck.

This could also be really cool. Maybe I'll make a brawl deck out of this guy. Trample 2/2 for 2 mana is great but then that ability where he gets +x/+x until end of turn for equipped creatures I control. This could be a lot of fun in an aggro red/white equipment deck.

This card is just a great card in general and I got a few of em. A 3/4 for 3 mana plus ward 1 and menace. Nice! But then you add that extra sauce with his ability to cast copies of legendary or rat cards from the graveyard, it puts it over the top. Could be a fun Commander for a Rat brawl deck too.

I got a couple of these too. Idk if I'm really onboard to start companion decks or anything, plus idk I'm just not super feeling it. I could maybe work it in...

Here we go! First mythic and it's a planeswalker! This could go well in a green/black deck! Maybe combine it with the Conduit of Worlds to toss cards... Wait... It exiles instead of sending to the graveyard... Forget what I was saying, this could still be a great card!

And the hits just keep on coming! Another mythic and another planeswalker. The +1 ability could help me toss cards into the graveyard for Conduit of Worlds to help me pull back out or cast from there. The -1 is fine, but that -5 ultimate is amazing. I can make a copy of every single nonland permanent that I control. That's insane. I can use this to copy so many awesome things!

Here is another sick mythic but too bad it is an Alchemy card. That ability is super strong though. I don't know if we will be doing much if any Alchemy though.

I just love this card. It is so good. Plus, I do really love playing Black and Red together. Being able to toss +1/+1 counters on this card every time it attacks and returning creatures to the battlefield from the graveyard is huge!

This is another great card but too bad it is Alchemy. I really hate using up my mythic luck on Alchemy cards.

What Did I Pull?

Well, I showed you some of the pulls I got but in total we have the following wildcards:

• 18 common
• 25 uncommon
• 12 rare
• and 4 mythic

I have 13 Mythics that can be played in standard and 2 planeswalkers. I also have 81 rares and I'm not even about to count the uncommon or common cards lol. After looking at my cards, I think I have enough to make the start of something. I could use my wildards to fill it out. In my next post I'm going to make a few different decks. I'm first going to make a deck out of the cards I have without spending any wildcards to see how I do, then I'm going to have ChatGPT analyze screenshots of my collection and create a deck without using any wildcards. Finally, I will allow the AI to use the wildcards to make the best possible deck for us to climb rankings best, then I'm going to play 10 games with each of those decks and see which deck does the best!

That will all be in the next post of this series. Please let me know in the comments what you think so far. Do any of you play Arena? I'd love to know what you guys think of this series and how it should evolve. Anyway, thanks for reading and I'll see you on the next one!