First some background... Magic has LONG been my favorite game! I have been playing since circa 1995. I love Lord of the Rings. I have spent over $4,000 to complete a full foil and non-foil set...

However, recent Magic related issues have me rather frustrated with Wizards and Hasbro.

The first is the longest and is related to Arena... I will begin with it, since it's already typed out...

I have long considered your mastery pass to be broken and overpriced. Still, I was seriously considering buying it this season. But then I actually looked at it and my play history this season.

Since LTR came out, I have played 52 drafts, including 286 games. At roughly 10 minutes per game, that's an estimated 2,860 minutes, or 47.7 hours, or just under 2 days of playtime! Yet somehow, I am only at mastery pass level 52!!!

Are you kidding me? Even if with this completely unreasonable amount of play this season, I am only 5/8ths of the way through the mastery pass. At this pace, if I were to buy it, I would likely miss out on 7 card skins (orbs), 1 companion, 300 gems, 4 mythics, 5 boosters, 1 card sleeve, 1000 coins, and 7 more card skins!!! And that's with me earning an estimated 5 more levels these last 18 days.

How is that even possible?!?!

Well, let me tell you...

First, you place some sort of limit on the mastery pass XP I can earn in a day, which makes absolutely no sense! I have a wife, a job, and 3 kids. There are some days I can play more than others and some day's I cannot play at all. Over the last 3 months (since my first LTR draft on 6/1, I have played on Arena 30 days. Some days I only played a couple games, while others I played up to 30 games!!! Yet I am punished by your rewards system for not pacing my games out to play every day.

Next issue:

Like I said, I love LOTR. I got two of the map lands through an in-store event tie-in to Arena. Yet there is no way for me to get the other map lands. They were only available as a bundle - why would I pay for something I already have?!?

Which brings me to cosmetics... The pricing on cosmetics is absolutely out of wack with the digital-only worth of the items. The full map lands bundle is currently in the store for 5,000 gems. Based on gem prices ($50 for 9,200), that's $27.17 in real-world currency to make my lands LOOK DIFFERENT in a digital game! If I wanted to make my real-world deck look different in the same way, it would only cost me apx. $5.25 ($0.21*25 lands). There is a severe disconnect between the price of Arena cosmetics and any semblance of a fair value to the player.

Next, the pricing for the Commander Masters (and other Masters sets for that matter) is getting out of hand! I can understand the higher price for the LTR set, given Wizards need to pay for the IP. But the CM set is roughly double the LTR packs! I have a real job and make real money. Yet I still cannot afford to keep up with the astronomical pricing for what you see as 'premium' sets. Like I said, I spent $4k on LTR... I have spent exactly $0 on Commander Masters.

Finally, a customer service related gripe. My son played in the LTR prerelease and did not get a die in his prerelease pack. I submitted a request to Wizards and did not hear back for almost two months. By then, any cards, packaging, etc. my son had opened was gone and/or mixed into our collection. Yet customer service denied my request because my 15-year-old hadn't taken photos of his stuff when the opened them. I wouldn't expect a child, who is simply excited to be playing a game, to know they should take a picture because something was missing. Had it been my daughter, who also played - she could not have taken a picture because we don't want her to have a phone yet.

Oh... and one last thing... stop making cards that pringle! I've even had non-foils that get warped in the middle and 'pop' back and forth when pressed in the center.

All in all, the quality and value of Magic products and support has been increasingly disappointing!

Thank you,
Mike