Free limited
Please open up a mode for free play limited.
Here's the deal - I know I suck. I don't have time to play enough to practice, and thus there's really no way I could develop adequate skills. I have a job, and I have a family and they prioritize my time. When I do have an opportunity to play, I do like to play (in theory) virtually. As it turns out, I only truly enjoy the limited format because it best represents the magic I loved as a child - you built a deck based on the limited pool of cards available to you, and you didn't care if you won or lost because the joy was in playing the game. And it's not that I just don't like constructed as much - constructed is basically a cesspool of netdeck garbage; it might as well be playing bots with preconstructed decks (that just happen to be optimized due to the availability of readily available power rankings). If I was competitive I could see how this would be enjoyable - but I'm not. I prefer to have fun just playing the game. And.. yea I have a hard time understanding how someone can derive fulfilling joy in a game by going out on the web and copying a statistically optimal deck. Which brings me back to limited, and more specifically the COST I incur to play limited.
Because I am not competitive, and prefer to enjoy playing the game as opposed to only winning the game, the end result is that I WILL pay more to play limited on Arena than most players. To whit, the reality is SOMEONE has to pay that premium; it is not lost to me that due to my skill level the person paying more is me. I pay a premium in limited because my joy is only derived from playing the game and not competitively mastering the game.
Why? Why must I pay more? I don't care about the constructed card "rewards"; they are nothing to me. Unfortunately this premium I have to pay has become prohibitive - I can't be expected to shoulder a higher price per game because I just want to play for fun. There has to be some kind of happy median, right? Could we consider maybe opening free-play limited drafts to those on the paid mastery track? Something fair with an even cost for all participants.
Something / Anything to make the game about just having fun again, where I can enjoy the game for the game and not have to deal with the very real knowledge that I'm the ****** that has to pay more than my opponents due to my inherently non-competitive nature. Truth is - I just can't bear that unjust weight anymore. So we're done; and that makes me sad.
Anyway... thanks for coming to my M:tG talk.