Magic the Gathering Arena has recently added a long waited option to purchase wildcards for the first time in the game. Twelve rare and 4 mythic rare wildcards bundle for $49.99. Is it worth the price? Majority of the online sites says “No”, but is it really that bad deal? Is there a situation you want to consider it? Let’s take a look.
Assumption
- $1/booster pack
Of note the above assumption is correct if you purchase $99.99 for 20,000 gems i.e. 200gems/$1. However, if you purchase a cheaper/smaller gem bundle gem/$ value is lower; hence, you end up paying a bit higher than $1/pack. For example, $49.99 gem pack gives 9200 gems. This gives only 46 booster packs rather than 50 packs for $50 value.
What’s a wildcard?
Wildcards redeem for any card you choose of the same rarity.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena/drop-rates
Unlike in the physical format or Magic the Gathering Online, Arena does not offer card trading between players nor individual card purchase platform. Unlike other digital card game, Magic the Gathering Arena does not provide dusting system i.e. replacing unwanted cards with another card.
Therefore, wildcard is the crafting system for Arena. If you have a wildcard of a specific rarity, it can be crafted into any card of the same rarity.
How do you acquire wildcard?
Prior to Wildcard Bundle, there were 4 ways to acquire high rarity (rare or mythic rare) wildcards.
- Booster Pack
- Wheel system
- Vault system
- Set Mastery Pass rewards
The first method is as an actual card in a booster pack content. So instead of opening a specific rare card, you may get lucky and get wildcard rare in its place. The rate of wildcard replacing is shown below.
| # | Rarity | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Common | 1:3 |
| 2 | Uncommon | 1:5 |
| 3 | Rare | 1:30* |
| 4 | Mythic | 1:30* |
Wheel
The second, most predictable and consistent way of getting is via Wheel system.
Whenever you open a booster pack, you add a counter. After 6 counters you get 1 uncommon and 1 rare wildcards. On every 5th rare wildcard, it becomes mythic rare wildcard i.e. you get rare and mythic rare wild cards at 5/30 and 1/30 rate, respectively.
Vault
Whenever you open a duplicate i.e. fifth copy vault points will be added. For every 1000 points, you can open a vault, which contains 1 mythic rare and 2 rare wildcards.
Vault progression seems fairly slow process with common providing only 1 point and uncommon 3 points (ref).
As a forth method, if you purchase set Mastery pass ($19.99), as you progress the in game level of the given season (3 months), you can receive high rarity wild card at certain level. However, this is also very limited in number and fairly time consuming.
Wildcard bundle vs. Booster Packs
Whether widlcard bundle is worth the price or not depends on how it compares to the other ways of getting wildcards. Vault and Mastery pass are rather slow and in many cases does not contribute in typical given price point. So I would ignore them for our calculation.
For $49.99, let’s take a look how many high rarity wildcards we can get. Each booster pack costs $1. So you get 50 packs. These are calculated based on Wheel System + Booster Pull rates.
Rare Wildcards = 50 x 5/30 + 50 x 1/30 = 10
Mythic Wildcards = 50 x 1/30 + 50 x 1/30 = 3.33
At this point, you can already see Wildcard bundle is giving 2 more rare wildcards in place of 1 less mythic wildcard. The value does not seem that great.
The difference is more significant because wildcard bundle has nothing else beyond those wildcard while booster pack option provide tons of booster pack contents. These include uncommon wildcards, average 40-41 rares and 5-6 mythic.
| Bundle | 50 Booster Packs | |
| Mythic Wildcard | 2 | 3.33 |
| Rare Wildcard | 12 | 10 |
| Mythic | 5-6 | |
| Rare Card | 40-41 | |
| Price | $49.99 | $50 |
Who should be getting Wildcard bundle?
The value wise, 50 booster packs is way to go. However, there is a very specific situation wildcard bundle can be preferable approach. First, those people who wants to get wildcards immediately are ones looking to make a specific construct deck. So you would know how many rare and mythic wildcards you need for a given deck.
Since wildcard bundle only comes in one form, there are times bundle is cheaper and other times more expensive than booster approach. To illustrate this point, I have created table below.
| Rares | Wildcard bundle | Booster Pack |
| 10 | $49.99 | $50.00 |
| 15 | $99.98 | $75.00 |
| 20 | $99.98 | $100.00 |
| 25 | $149.97 | $125.00 |
| 30 | $149.97 | $150.00 |
| 35 | $149.97 | $175.00 |
| 40 | $199.96 | $200.00 |
| 45 | $199.96 | $225.00 |
| Mythic | Wildcard bundle | Booster Pack |
| 2 | $49.99 | $30.03 |
| 4 | $99.98 | $60.06 |
| 8 | $199.96 | $120.12 |
| 12 | $299.94 | $180.18 |
| 16 | $399.92 | $240.24 |
Let’s take a look at some specific examples.
Example 1:
Currently listed tier 1 explorer deck Naya Winota has 4 mythic and 44 rare. Getting 44 rares is the key here as 4 mythic will come automatically by the time you get 44 rares. With Wildcard bundle, you need 4 of them i.e. $200. However, booster pack approach will be closer to $225 (the actual price slightly cheaper as you need 1 less rare than 45 as in the table). So if this is the only thing one cares, Wildcard bundle is cheaper approach here.
Example 2:
Current standard tier 1 Rakes Anvil deck has 8 mythic and 17 rares. In this case, 8 mythic is the bottleneck. With wildcard bundle, you need 4 of them and that’s $200. With a booster pack approach, you just need average 120 packs i.e. $120. That’s $80 saving with booster packs.
Conclusion
For $50, Wildcard bundle gives 2 more rare wildcard in place of average 1 less mythic wildcard when compared to purchasing 50 booster packs for $50 and opening them. The booster pack route gives additional 5-6 mythic and 40-41 rare cards. Furthermore, tons of commons and uncommon, as well as some uncommon wildcards. However, there may be a very specific number of rare and mythic wildcard requirement that could potentially provide some saving. So if you are looking in need for high number of rare wildcard, take a look at comparison table section.