MTG Arena Economy Guide: Strategies, Tips, and Best Practices.

Today I'm going to share with you everything you need to know to get the most value out of Arena. In this article, you'll learn how to manage your gold, gems, and wildcards better without spending real money – and the best part, while having fun.

What resources are available to you, and how can you obtain them to enhance your collection in Arena? We have: Gold, Gems, Card Rewards, Boosters, and Wildcards.

All these resources can be acquired through Missions, Event Rewards, Daily and Weekly Wins, Mastery, Seasonal Rank, and through Monetary Transactions – though the last option is not the focus of this article.

It's important to note that in this article, I won't provide analyses of the difficulty of obtaining the best rewards from each Event, but I will provide the necessary information for you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions about this difficulty, along with analyses of their costs and rewards, and what's more worthwhile to spend: Gold or Gems.

Gold and Gems

Missions and Daily/Weekly Wins:

To earn Gold, there are 3 slots called Missions, where each mission involves completing an objective to earn X Gold (500 or 750 Gold, depending on the "difficulty" of the mission) and also 500 Mastery XP. Upon completing a mission, a new slot opens to receive a new mission the next day.

The Arena allows you to exchange only one of these missions for another random one. The tip is: to maximize the reward, when you receive 3 missions each worth 500 Gold, you can refresh one of them for a new one, which could be a mission worth 750 Gold.

There's also another type of Mission that rewards Gold. This mission is called Daily Win, where with each victory, you receive a certain amount of Gold according to the table below:

Constructed Events

Currently, the fixed Constructed Events in Arena do not reward Gold. However, they provide Gems, which are extremely important in Arena. For those who are new, you'll realize that Gems are indeed the most valuable "currency."

There are two main event types in Arena, BO1 and BO3, in the following formats: Alchemy, Standard, Explorer, and Historic.

For BO1 events, the entry costs 2500 Gold or 375 Gems. You remain in the event until achieving one of the following situations: 7 wins or 3 losses. The rewards are as follows:

For BO3 events, the entry costs 5000 Gold or 750 Gems. You play 5 matches and receive rewards based on the number of wins.

Limited Events – Drafts

Playing Drafts is an excellent way to complete your card collection and be rewarded with Gems and Boosters. In a Draft event, each player opens a 15-card Booster, selects one card, and passes the remaining cards to the next player. This process repeats until the last card is chosen.

Then, a new Booster is opened, and the process is repeated until the last card of the third Booster is chosen. At the end, each player keeps the chosen cards and assembles a deck with a minimum of 40 cards to play BO1 or BO3 matches (and these cards are added to your collection).

In BO1 Drafts, the entry cost for this event is 10000 Gold or 1500 Gems, and you remain in the event until achieving 7 wins or 3 losses. The rewards are as follows:

General Analysis

Now let's analyze the economy. First, to complete the collection, we need to open Boosters. And for that, we either earn these Boosters in events or buy them from the Arena store. The second thing is that a Booster costs 1000 Gold or 200 Gems.

In this analysis, I will consider all event costs as Boosters, meaning, in an event that costs 2000 Gold, for example, it costs the price of 2 Boosters in the Arena store. This helps the visualization of what is being spent and what is being recovered as a reward.

With that in mind, let's start with Constructed Events.

Constructed Events

In BO1, the entry for the event costs 2500 Gold (price of 2.5 Boosters in the store) or 375 Gems (a little more than 1 Booster). In the vast majority of cases, everyone agrees that Gems are more valuable (and precious) and should be spent wisely. Therefore, even if you could buy 2.5 Boosters with the entry Gold, initially and in most cases, it's worth spending that amount to enter Constructed Events. After this expense, with daily and weekly quests, you can recover the used Gold.

Returning to the idea that 2500 Gold is equivalent to 2.5 Boosters, we can see that by reaching at least 4 wins, we will receive 300 Gems (1.5 Boosters) + 1 Booster. There you go! We've recovered the 2.5 Boosters that we could have bought with the 2500 Gold. From the 5th win onward, anything gained is profit.

In BO3, the entry costs 5000 Gold (price of 5 Boosters in the store) or 750 Gems (almost 4 Boosters). With the rewards of this event, if we achieve at least 3 wins, we will receive 600 Gems (equivalent to 3 Boosters) + 2 Boosters. This means we've already recovered the 5 Boosters we would have spent with the 5000 Gold. From the 4th win onward, anything gained is profit.

Drafts

One of the advantages of playing Draft is that when you get the fourth copy of a Rare or Mythic Rare card, by opening a Booster you won as a reward, you won't get a fifth copy. Therefore, it's always cost-effective to play Drafts before opening Boosters.

In Premier Draft, which is BO1, the entry for the event costs 10000 Gold (price of 10 Boosters in the store) or 1500 Gems (7.5 Boosters). It might be a bit daunting to spend this cost to enter the event, but with the reward of achieving at least 4 Wins, you've already recovered the value of the 10 Boosters you could have bought in the store, in addition to the 3 Boosters you've won and used to draft the cards.

For BO3 Draft, the entry cost is the same as BO1, and to recover what was spent, you need to achieve the 3 wins the event requires reaching the maximum prize, where you receive the equivalent of 12.5 Boosters in Gems + 6 Boosters, in addition to the 3 Boosters drafted.

Important Tip

I know the temptation to buy boosters is strong, and the inclination is to accumulate Gems and Gold to open Boosters, but there's something worth mentioning. When buying a Booster in the Arena Store, pay attention to the Golden Packs. The Golden Pack is obtained every 10 Boosters bought from one or more specific collections in Standard.

Each Golden Pack contains six cards, all rare or mythic rares from a valid collection in Standard, and they have duplicate protection. At least one of the cards will be a mythic rare. All other cards have an independent chance of being mythic rare, approximately 1 in every 8 times. At least two cards will be from the latest valid collection in Standard. If you already have four copies of all cards of that rarity from a specific valid collection in Standard, you'll receive a card from another valid collection in Standard instead. Cards will only be replaced with Gems when you have four copies of all cards of that rarity from each collection in Standard.

About Mastery

The Mastery System is essentially a track of levels where every 1000 XP you move up 1 level and receive various rewards, including Boosters, Gold, Gems, Cosmetic Cards, Orbs, and even Free Entry Tokens for Drafts. However, to obtain all rewards at each level, you need to buy a Mastery Pass that costs 3400 Gems.

Now, let's analyze the rewards of the most current collection to date – The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth:

- 53 Boosters

- 1 Player Draft token

- 4000 Gold

- 1200 Gems

Here, I've only listed the rewards that help you complete your collection. Another important factor is that all these rewards come only if you reach the maximum Mastery level of the collection – 80 levels (80000 XP) in the current collection. Therefore, the cost you would have if you were to buy 53 Boosters would be 10600 Gems or 53000 Gold.

Additionally, you recover 1200 Gems from the 3400 spent to buy the Mastery Pass (costing then 2200 Gems). With the Draft Token, you have the right to a free entry to a Draft Event, which can be quite profitable with the rewards seen earlier.

Some might say that playing Draft isn't as good when the preference is for the format. Yes, I understand that there are players who don't enjoy Draft, or who feel hesitant to spend their precious Gold and even more precious Gems to Draft – or even play a Constructed Event.

The purpose of this article is to provide information about the process that exists in Arena to progress in card collection and to improve as a player. Unfortunately, there's no way to avoid some processes, so analyze these provided information well and follow your path.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Take care!